Manipulators of public opinion and science are at work again

Jay Kuten PHOTO/FILE

Recently, Australia's Senate under Tony Abbott reversed course and eliminated the carbon tax. I was reminded of similar actions in the US under George W Bush, who withdrew from the Kyoto protocol and set the country backwards in the effort to prevent the consequences of man-made global warming.

Unfortunately the debate on global warming has fallen into the fissures of partisan politics. There are proponents who wish to persuade doubters of the need for action through providing information like the fact that that 97 per cent of climate scientists believe human activities are causing global warming.

It turns out, as a study by Yale University professor Dan Kahan finds, it's not a lack of information that determines how people view the data. It's political adherence. People on both sides of the issue may be well educated and informed. In fact, the more scientifically knowledgeable are more steadfast in their beliefs. Political adherence trumps scientific evidence as partisans choose which facts to accept and which to ignore.

That's true also about the acceptance of evolution as a theory where religious adherence influences ultimate rejection or acceptance.

It turns out science isn't value-neutral in many instances and perhaps has always been subject to use or misuse to suit purposes which are political in the largest sense.

One of these politicised concepts is the modern idea of physiologic stress. In 1936, in Montreal, Canada, a scientist began to subject rats to a variety of noxious stimuli.

He was an Hungarian-born endocrinologist named Hans Selye, and his experiments made him world renowned.

Selye subjected his rats to freezing temperatures, to hunger, thirst, over-activity - a variety of ill-treatments. Then he killed them and examined their organs.

Universally, the physical effects were the same and reflected as physical changes in the adrenal glands. This led Selye to conclude that these noxious stimuli which he described as stress would lead to physiologic changes and release of hormones which cause disease and ultimately kill the animal.

Selye had borrowed the term stress from physics. In physics, stress is defined as a force applied to a unit area of a substance. The force can be measured and the substance has a measureable breaking point.

No such quantifiable data can be found in animals.

Selye published 1700 papers and nine books on the subject and was evangelical in promoting acceptance of his theory of stress as a cause of disease, putting in 14-hour days at this work which he called, "my baby which shall outlive me".

Eventually (and somewhat ironically, as you'll see) he was joined in the field by two American cardiologists, Ray Rosenman and Meyer Friedman, who developed the concept of the Type A personality.

This is the idea that a particular constellation of personality traits were found in the overworking, driven, competitive, aggressive, ambitious people.

These folks live lives so full of stress and pressure (another borrowing from physics) that they are prone to disease, particularly heart attack. The cardiologists' papers claimed a doubling of coronary disease in type A males compared with others.

The trouble with Selye's work and that of the cardiologists is that they were funded in large part by the tobacco industry.

Tobacco industry people even rewrote some of Selye's papers to help their case that stress, not cigarettes, caused heart disease and cancer.

The current research has largely debunked Type A personality in heart disease. Stress is still important, especially as a causative agent in children's deficiencies in cognitive development. And unlike Selye's position, there is recognition of positive influences of some stress.

Unfortunately, the manipulations of the tobacco industry public relations experts have clouded this field. Interestingly, their influence lives on in modern times.

These manipulators of science and public opinion are described in the book Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes & Conway as a large part of the effort by the fossil fuels industry to try to persuade that global warming is not a serious problem for which we have responsibility and the capacity to act.