Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2012. This opinion piece was built on news stories of that month, including an e-cigarette study, the resveratrol scandal and the Punset bread ad. Eduard Punset died in 2019, and the bread advertising controversy dates from 2011.
There was a time when science was honest and serious: saying you were a scientist meant saying you would devote your life to improving people’s well-being. Today it would be very hard to know what science is really after and, above all, who it works for, because make no mistake, science has an owner. Of course, like any professional, every scientist has competitors.
The pharmaceutical industry, the food industry… all of these industries have their own scientists, and they fund scientific studies only if the results are “altered” in their favor. That’s why scientific studies contradict each other.
In the middle of this dirty war there is, as usual, collateral damage: the citizen who trusts what they read and hear in major media such as newspapers, television or radio. Just how stupid do they think we are?
A scientific study on the electronic cigarette concluded that the e-cigarette (which delivers nicotine while protecting us from the poisonous components of tobacco) is harmful to health and has unpredictable negative long-term consequences, since it obstructs users’ airways.
Considering that this news arrives just after a considerable drop in tobacco consumption in Spain, where according to statistics more than 600,000 people quit smoking in Spain alone, some are asking: “Who commissioned the study, the tobacco companies?”
I imagine a smoker’s airways will always be more obstructed from smoking tobacco than from using an e-cigarette. Remember that in 1965 scientists were publishing studies that found no link whatsoever between smoking and lung cancer. Let’s just say those scientists lacked honesty, professionalism and backbone. And far from improving the image of science, things have only gotten worse over time.
The benefits of wine
Since I’m not a scientist, I honestly have no idea whether wine is good, bad or harmless for your health. Still, those of us who, like me, are not scientists will always have scientific studies to advise us.
We have one group of scientists claiming that wine is good for your health (one or two glasses a day) and helps prevent cancer. But wait, because there’s another study claiming that drinking wine every day can raise the risk of cancer and multiply the chances of having a stroke. Then there’s the pharmaceutical industry, which cuts straight to the chase: it extracts the healthy substance in wine (resveratrol) and puts it into pills, claiming that it prevents cellular aging and therefore prevents cancer.
It gets more complicated, because the scientist in charge of talking up the benefits of resveratrol has been accused of lying in more than 16 articles in 11 scientific journals in order to obtain nearly $1 million from the US government.
Has a single one of these corrupt so-and-sos mentioned the small detail that the real benefit lies in red grapes, and not in wine or in pills altered with chemicals?
Which brings us to a man who has become a scientific reference on Spanish television, Mr. Punset (the science communicator Eduard Punset), who lends his image to advertise a “natural” bread. A debate has already started over whether Punset’s ad is legal, because, frankly, that bread has very little that’s natural about it.
In short: we start from the premise that there are scientists who seek the truth, and they tend to be the ones who publicly denounce the hidden interests of industry. The “good” thing about those denunciations is that most people ignore them, so nobody has to bother refuting them, unless they’re published in a major outlet. Then we’ll believe the story like sheep and feel cheated for 45 seconds, because that day’s trending topic on Twitter will be #ardillaescalando (“climbing squirrel”).
Having said that, do these scientists really sleep well at night, knowing that they are endangering the health of the planet, of the human body and of their own descendants? How I miss the days when science was honest, and what a great loss when it joined forces with the lobbies. It’s pathetic and shameful, especially when some studies are funded with public money. All I would ask is that if they’re going to play the fool, they do it with the money of the private industries they sell themselves to.
Featured image: Jacek Halicki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
