Dr. Michaels' book reveals the motivations and follow-up actions of many industries who strive to protect their profits regardless of the impact on the nation's health. His story tells of the various industries' scientific and technical "whores" who sell their expertise to either create doubt about, or directly challenge the legitimate science that is produced for science sake - not profit.

However, the underlying tale is far more onerous than the title expresses. It is not much of a stretch to understand that the nature of science is being seriously subverted. Science builds upon itself. All future work in the medical sciences will have to be cautious when using data produced by these charlatans. Some of that data will, in fact, be totally false.

If this is allowed to continue, science will one day acquire the reputation now currently reserved for used-car salesmen, and streetwalkers. The problem is far greater than any of us would like to think about. Bravo Dr. Michaels.

David Michaels has traveled the honorable path of scientific muckracking, peeling back the lies and distortions that have killed millions in the U.S. for the greater good of shareholder profit. The great improvement of his book, "Doubt is their Product," is that it also lines out a series of concrete solutions with proven examples of ways that agencies can retake the high ground.

This book has an important inspirational component and a get-to-work component that activists can use to make the workplace and environment safer. Michaels counsels us on practical means such as ending court sanctioned secrecy, allowing injured workers to sue their employees, develop better compensation systems, and ending pre-emption that harms public policy and public health.

The book includes a crucial chapter on concrete ways to improve the regulatory system so that it protects the majority rather than serving as a shield, flack, and apologist for corporate profits.

This is a must read for any law school course on administrative law, and for any college course on modern government. Its discussion of the asbestos industry--creator of the global mesothelioma scourge--is particularly apropos. Best of all, the book is well written, thoroughly researched, and righteous while being coolly objective.

"Doubt is their product" by David Michaelis, is one of those rare books you really try hard to convince people to read, and if they don't want to buy it - you give them the book. I'm working as an occupational hygienist in a Norwegian labor union. The book has been a tremendous help to understand how the product defence system works and how they are selling doubt. To me the book is the most important book I've read for a long time. The book should be required reading for all professionals and students within the environment, healt and safety domain.

If we believe David Michaels, industry charlatans all learned from the tobacco industry 50 years ago. The industries that rely on doubt have been blossoming ever since: beryllium (did you know that there was a beryllium industry? I did not), asbestos, and popcorn, among others.

Yes, popcorn. Were you aware that there is a condition called "popcorn lung" (officially bronchiolitis obliterans)? I was not. It's called that because one of the main ways to contract it is by working in a factory that manufactures one of the ingredients -- namely diacetyl -- for the butter flavoring in popcorn. Every time you open a steaming bag of butter-flavored microwave popcorn, you are inhaling a bit of this chemical. The more of it you eat, the more likely you are to contract a devastating lung ailment. (And this isn't the sort of disease that you'd only get by eating an implausibly large quantity of popcorn. Real popcorn consumers have actually acquired it.)

The agency responsible for protecting workers from this sort of hazard is OSHA. The one responsible for protecting food consumers is the FDA. This division of labor comes in for some well-deserved scorn in Doubt Is Their Product; it has left the government fairly impotent to respond to threats against the public health. This book could be read alongside Marion Nestle's Food Politics and What To Eat as a single thread about the assault on helpful government regulation.

In their nonstop fight against that sort of regulation, companies have pulled out all the stops to inject systematic doubt into the public discussion. The most pernicious of these, it seems to me, is the creation of sham peer-reviewed journals. Peer review is a negative process: if you can't pass peer review, your ideas are unlikely to have merit (though there are cases, says Michaels, where brilliant scientists -- future Nobelists -- have been denied peer approval). Passing peer review doesn't mean that your ideas are any good. Something similar applies to the references you give a potential employer: if you can't find anyone in the world to say something nice about you, that is a warning sign. If three people will say good things about you, that doesn't mean that you're going to be a good employee. The public doesn't understand this distinction, and doesn't know which journals have any respect within the field. So regulated industries have dutifully gone and created journals that will say whatever they're paid to say -- just as the creationists have done. The news reports then compile, say, a "list of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming" as though scientific consensus were decided by majority vote among equals.

If there's the slightest bit of doubt about, say, the cause of a disease, industry pounces and insists that more research is necessary. More research will always be necessary: science never attains the truth, only better and better approximations to the truth. The situation is complicated in public health by scientists' inability to conduct controlled experiments: it is immoral to subject patients to a potentially crippling disease. So scientists are forced to make educated guesses: this population -- of popcorn-factory workers, say -- has probably been subjected to thus-and-such a daily dosage of diacetyl for thus-and-so many years, whereas this other group of workers in the same factory has had less exposure. Meanwhile, people living near the factory but not working in it almost never experience popcorn lung. Hence we make the educated guess that the additional cases of bronchiolitis obliterans are due to diacetyl exposure within the factory.

Having reached a tentative conclusion about what's making people sick, we have some options. We can mandate that factories use a different chemical. Does industry have other, safer alternatives? Presumably it does, but those alternatives are more expensive; otherwise it would already be using them. If industry were forced to use safer alternatives, would economies of scale drive the price down to the point that consumers wouldn't notice?

That approach seems ethically sterile to me. It seems better to start with the assumption that no one should get sick at work. Being ethical about this means, in many cases, taking Paul Farmer's "preferential option for the poor" seriously. You'd probably find that most people getting sick at work are not wealthy; hedge-fund managers and computer scientists aren't coming into daily contact with beryllium; even if they are, wealthier folks can insist on workplace-safety measures in a way that the poor cannot. I'd wager that workplace safety is another front in the fight for distributive justice.

Michaels is a former Department of Energy official whose work centered on the safety of nuclear plants. As such, he has a somewhat reflexive faith in the power of regulation. To me it rang hollow: one regulation will limit diacetyl, another will limit beryllium, another will prevent factory workers from acquiring repetitive-strain disorders -- but will any real problems be solved? Companies' desire and ability to game the system is virtually limitless. When they lose the regulatory war, they invent a public-relations campaign to convince Americans that tort reform is necessary. They demonize "trial lawyers" (lawyers who write briefs and stay out of the courtroom are off the hook, as are lawyers who resolve cases before they reach the court). They challenge the very epistemology of the scientific revolution. If worse comes to worst, they move production of noxious chemicals to countries with lower environmental and health standards.

What I'm getting at is that we have a much more systemic problem on our hands. I applaud regulation where it helps, but I do wonder if it's tinkering at the edges of a massive problem that lies at the heart of our society. We need regulation; we also need education to explain to Americans what science is. We need Americans to believe that we owe much to the least fortunate among us. Until that message gets through, we'll have to content ourselves with putting out little brushfires while the forest burns.

Conflicts of interest among members of EPA review panels have weakened governmental safety standards on toxic chemicals in the environment and in everyday consumer products. Outrage over long-standing reliance on "science for hire" by the chemical industry has prompted Congress to investigate EPA's procedures for reviewing toxic chemicals, including PBDE flame retardants and bisphenol A. These examples are just a small window into how great the tampering and influence of the chemical industry has been over EPA regulation of toxic chemicals. A new book by David Michaels, an epidemiologist and the director of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy at The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, documents a seemingly endless list of examples of mercenary scientists misleading the general public and the regulatory community about the true dangers of chemical exposures, starting from lead, asbestos, and tobacco, and continuing to chromium, berillium, perchlorate, benzene, plastics chemicals, and various other environmental and occupational health hazards.

The book is a must-read for anyone who cares about the best application of science in the interests of promoting public health. For a great review, readers can also go to the article by Newsweek's Sharon Begley, "Whitewashing Toxic Chemicals."

One stunning quote from the book describes the tricks of the trade that industry lobby and product defense firms use to derail the regulatory process: "They profit by helping corporations minimize public health and environmental protection and fight claims of injury and illness. In field after field, year after year, this same handful of individuals and companies comes up again and again... They have on their payrolls (or can bring in on a moment's notice) toxicologists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, risk assessors, and any other professionally trained, media-savvy experts deemed necessary. They and the larger, wealthier industries for which they work go through the motions we expect of the scientific enterprise, salting the literature with their questionable reports and studies. Nevertheless, it is all a charade. The work has one overriding motivation: advocacy for the sponsor's position in civil court, the court of public opinion, and the regulatory arena [where these studies benefit their sponsors] not because they are good work that the regulatory agencies have to take seriously but because they clog the machinery and slow down the process. Public health interests are beside the point. Follow the science wherever it leads? Not quite. This is science for hire, period, and it is extremely lucrative."

Only by discovering the facts behind the scene and by bringing to light the true motivation of profit-driven public relations campaigns can we promote and defend the health of the environment and the safety of consumer products. For a veteran in the subject who may have participated in some of the struggles described in Defending Science, or for a new member of the environmental and occupational health community, this book is a great introduction to the state of the field - and the battles ahead that still need to be fought.

Do we ever really know anything for certain? And if not, how can we move forward and protect the public health? This important book chronicles how the industry "manufactures uncertainty" about the dangers of their products, delaying or killing new regulations, and how the health of workers, the public and the environment suffer as a result. This "product defense industry" has grown very sophisticated and is well funded. Michaels offers numerous solutions in the final chapters to reset the Nation's regulatory apparatus and keep it from listing more and more towards protecting industry's profits rather then health. This book will make you angry, but it will also motivate you. The hope is that a new Administration will put us on a path towards a fairer and safer world.