Not guilty

Brian Inglis

The Apocalyptics: Politics, Science and the Big Cancer Lie

Edith Efron

(Simon and Schuster $19.95)

This book is ar, intellectual detective story. I am the detective, and I shall not give away the plot,' Edith Efron tells us, as an appetiser. 'I shall simply say here that I discovered a cultural crime which should not be possible in a free society; a complex corruption of science and a pro- longed deception of the public.' She is as good as her word. I cannot recall any work so devastating in its ac- cumulation of evidence that a cruel crime has been perpetrated, with ugly conse- quences to society. Yet mysteriously, when she comes to name the culprit, she indicts the wrong one. It is as if Sherlock Holmes,

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having built up his case against Moriarty 's gang, had put the blame on Dr Watson. The 'big lie' of the subtitle is the Presumption that cancer is caused by 'car- cinogenic' substances. Largely because of Lee discovery of the relationship between sraoking and lung cancer, there has been a trend — more marked in the United States than here — to attribute the disease to Pollutants of various kinds, from nuclear waste to food additives. Scientists at the US National Cancer Institute have claimed that as high a proportion as 90 per cent of all cancers are of environmental origin, with the corollary that all but 10 per cent of ancers are theoretically preventible. The weakness of this theory ought long ago to have become manifest. If pollutants are the cause of cancer, its incidence would Presumably have rocketed in industrialised countries over the past half century. But no such rise has occurred, except in lung cancer. Cancer rates in general have re- Mamed almost unnervingly stable. How, then, hasby the myth arisen that the

uisease is caused intruders lurking in the ,e,nvironment? Partly, of course, because

hthey can be the cause, when the dose is eavy; but mainly because carcinogenicity as been assessed by tests on laboratory animals.

de As. Miss Efron shows in overpowering with tests of the standard type vir- _?ally anything and everything is car- c,alogenic. Feed rats with tea, or tomato soup, and they may develop tumours. There is no rational biological method of Zitrapolating from animals to man,' John Rgginson of the International Agency for i..esearch on Cancer felt compelled to admit tuiv977' subsequent 0:either in terms of carcinogenic ac- dose effects': a verdict which ab,sequent research has confirmed. nothing discovery, however, has done "utlung

to dispel the myth; and in her

preface Miss Efron indicates the reason. Of 20 experts in the field who vetted her MS and endorsed her verdict, 16 begged her not to reveal their identities. They would not merely lose face, one of them explained; their careers could be irreparably damaged.

When dogmas are threatened, scientists behave like religious sects; they close ranks against the heretic. If a scientist were known to share Miss Efron's views, his academic papers would be turned down, and his applications for research funds re- jected; he would no longer be invited to be 'visiting Prof.' or to attend agreeably situated symposia, all expenses paid. So, please would she not use his name? The scientists, then, are the villains! But no detective story writer gives the game away at the start; and Miss Efron keeps us waiting (though not for long) before nam- ing the real culprits. Scientists, in her estimation, are mere puppets, manipulated by the media and the politicians, who in turn are manipulated by the 'apocalyptics'. Astonishingly, these turn out to be the environmentalists, the ecologists, the Gaia-lovers, the 'Greens'. Worshipping Rachel Carson as their Joan the Baptist and Ralph Nader as their Messiah, they have terrified scientists into submission.

It was indeed the environmentalists who alerted the public to the cancer risks from pollution: wisely in some cases, mistakenly in others. But to suggest they are responsi-

ble for the continuance of laboratory testing of animals is ludicrous; they have been in the forefront of the campaign to check it.

There is a simpler explanation, recognis- ed in a different context by Keynes in his `Dr Melchior'. The Allies refused to lift the blockade of Germany after the 1918 Armistice not for punitive reasons, Keynes argued, but because the blockade had been perfected. 'Its authors had grown to love it for its own sake; it included some recent im- provements, which would be wasted if it came to an end; it was very complicated; and a vast organisation had established a vested interest.'

Although it has come to be realised that tests on laboratory animals, in this and other contexts, are useless — worse, often misleading — a vast vested interest in them has built up, here as in the United States. Medical scientists must be seen to be doing something, and until an alternative presents itself they will continue not merely to work along the conventional lines, but to feed the media with stories of the 'break-throughs' which appear every month or so.

The fund-raising foundations, domi- nated as they are by the medical scientists, fall in behind them. The casual reader will hardly have suspected that the massive advertising campaign launched by one of them recently, with its glowing list of 'ad- vances', disguises the unwelcome fact that no progress has been made in improving the survival rate for the main killers, cancers of the lung and the breast.

In spite of its eccentric, at times almost paranoid, insistence that the blame for what has happened must be put on the en- vironmentalists, Miss Efron has demon- strated and documented the utter futility of reductionist research, in this area, more completely than anybody has done before. It is saddening to think of the waste and the cruelty that have been the result. But the vested interest of the laboratory empire will, I fear, be too well dug in to be shaken by this remarkable book.