By Dr. Thomas R. DeGregori
Posted: Thursday, July 1, 1999
ARTICLES
Publication Date: July 1, 1999
This year, the last year of what is popularly known as "the millennium," the media have been saturating us with lists of the 20th century's "best" of this and that. The March 1, 1999, edition of The New York Times included an article titled "Journalism's Greatest Hits." The article referred to two lists that each covered 100 miscellaneous American journalistic works¬books and newspaper articles, for example¬deemed the best of the century. One of these lists did not accompany the article but was accessible through the paper's website. This list included the names of patently affirmative works on Einstein's theory of special relativity and Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin in mold.
The list that did accompany the article had been compiled "under the aegis of New York University's journalism department." The science- and technology-related works to which the NYU list refers together portray this century as one in which science and technology were detrimental to humanity. Has there been a century-long journalistic bias against science and technology? Was the NYU-list selection committee biased?
According to "Journalism's Greatest Hits," CNN media analyst Jeff Greenfield has described the NYU list as a "rough first draft of history." But one would get a very misleading impression of the 20th century from this list. At its top is a work that many such lists have included and that could reasonably be a member of any balanced list of journalistic treasures: John Hersey's 1946 series in The New Yorker, on the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath. It is noteworthy, however, that the long-term consequences of the bombing have been far less terrible in every respect than virtually everyone aware of it then feared. I do not know of anyone publicly contending, around the time of the bombing, that A-bombúrelated long-term genetic damage was unlikely. Hollywood horror films of the 1950s, some of which featured animals mutated into apparent behemoths by atomic radiation (i.e., special effects), scarcely allayed nuclear fears. But longitudinal studies initiated very shortly after the end of the war have not yielded any evidence of long-term genetic damage.
The science- and technology-related works to which the NYU list refers
together portray this century as one in which science and technology
were detrimental to humanity.
The NYU list does not refer to any work on Einstein or on any of the other scientists whose efforts led to the invention of the A-bomb. Except for Tom Wolfe's astronaut epic, The Right Stuff (1979, No. 48), works on triumphs of science and technology that stemmed from 20th-century engineering, math, physics, and managerial science are likewise nonreferents. The list also includes:
* Silent Spring (1962, No. 2), Rachel Carson's unscientific, anti-pesticide, environmental-"doomsday" classic;
* Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile1 (1965, No. 38); and
* The Fate of the Earth (1982, No. 59), Jonathan Schell's manifestation of nuclear apocalypticism.
Because other references to works concerning automobiles and manmade environmental chemicals are absent, one might infer from the three aforementioned entries that cars and "chemicals" are killers. Indeed, the NYU list does not refer to any journalistic work on science and technology other than the four books specified above¬unless one puts broadcast journalism and photojournalism in that category.
All of the six photography entries (Nos. 27, 41, 65, 68, 73, and 91), the two radio entries (4 and 83), and three (63, 88, and 92) of the six television entries concern war. The other three television entries refer to a 1954 documentary criticizing Sen. Joseph McCarthy (No. 10); the live broadcast of the ArmyúMcCarthy hearings that year (No. 55); and "Harvest of Shame," a 1960 documentary about the exploitation of migrant farm workers in the U.S. (No. 11).
Some of the photography, radio, and television referents are masterpieces¬for example, Edward R. Murrow's World War II broadcasts and Joe Rosenthal's 1945 Associated Press photograph of six Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi.
But, despite the impression these media entries may give, there have been broadcasts on, and photos of, important events that involved neither physical violence nor inhumanities. Do you suppose that, in the next millennium, any of the NYU-list images will eclipse the telecast of the first moonwalk?
. . . [I]f 20th-century technology is sinister¬killing directly, with "chemicals," and indirectly, though weaponry¬how has life expectancy increased, dramatically?
And, if 20th-century technology is sinister¬killing directly, with "chemicals," and indirectly, though weaponry¬how has life expectancy increased, dramatically? This century has seen, in the United States, a life-expectancy increase of nearly 30 years and an infant-mortality decrease of well over 90 percent. It is clear that there have been some splendid changes, that science and technology have been responsible for them, and that science and technology are being disparaged or scapegoated.
The U.S. has not alone benefited from science and technology. Japan's gains over the last 50 years have been greater; and in developing countries decreases in morbidity and infant mortality over the last 40 years have been spectacular. In my estimation, based on the best data available, if 1950 death rates suddenly became current, annual worldwide child deaths would increase by more than 30 million per year, and total human deaths by well over 50 million. Although nearly two and a half times as many humans are alive today as were in 1950, the absolute number of annual human deaths has since increased only by two million. Even more remarkable is that the absolute number of worldwide deaths of children younger than five years old decreased from 21 million in 1955 to about 10 million in 1995.
The number of persons disabled, disfigured, or killed by smallpox before the advent . . . of public smallpox vaccination has been estimated at nearly 10 percent of humankind.
While the life-expectancy increases of this century have been fairly continuous, specific breakthroughs accounted for them¬achievements that should therefore have qualified as news. For example, both antibiotics and vitamins were discovered in this century. DDT's ability to kill insects was discovered in 1939. It has since been used against insect vectors (i.e., insects that transmit sources of disease) and against insects that damage our food supplies. The 20th century has seen both the development of some of the most critical vaccines and important advances in means of administering them. One could easily put together a list of a hundred 20th-century advances in science and technology that have accounted for momentous gains in human health and longevity. Indeed, consequential health-related advances in science and technology have been so ample that obvious omissions would be unavoidable.
Successes in the organized utilization of such advances against major scourges have been at least as spectacular as the advances themselves. Forty years after polio became the greatest fear of middle-class Americans, the first vaccine for it was developed. Less than a half-century later, polio was eradicated in the Western Hemisphere and in most of the rest of the world. Total eradication early in the next century is very likely.
A global ban on DDT might . . . be healthful to wildlife. But it would devastating for humans, particularly children in Africa . . . .
Smallpox may have caused more human suffering than any other disease. Victims would develop skin lesions that looked like flea bites. These spots would become pimples, which would exude a thin liquid. This would become a thick pus. The victim's eyelids would become swollen and stuck together. The itching was terrible; in many cases caregivers would apply mittens or other restraints to sufferers' hands to keep victims from bloodying and tearing off their skin by scratching. The number of persons disabled, disfigured, or killed by smallpox before the advent, at the end of the 18th century, of public smallpox vaccination has been estimated at nearly 10 percent of humankind. Over the first eight decades of the 20th century, 200ú300 million people died of smallpox. When the smallpox eradication campaign began, in January 1967, 125 of the 156 countries with endemic smallpox had been freed of it. Ten years and 10 months later, with technological innovations and refinements, the elimination of the smallpox virus, which had maimed countless persons, was, except for laboratory specimens, total. More-over, the cost of eradicating smallpox worldwide was, according to the World Bank, less than the annual cost of treating smallpox victims at the onset of the campaign.
To consider the story of the wiping out of smallpox one of the 100 most outstanding stories of the 20th century¬indeed, one of the greatest stories in human history¬would be, to say the least, eminently reasonable.
Progress against river blindness¬which, though it is not as widespread as smallpox, has effects on victims that are at least as horrible as those of smallpox¬has also been significant. Besides loss of sight, the effects of river blindness, or onchocerciasis, 2 include debilitation, intensely itchy rashes, depigmentation and wrinkling of the skin, and a condition that leads to drooping of the groin and deformity of the genitals. While this description would revolt most persons reared in societies in which infectious diseases are not a serious, everyday danger, it by no means does justice to the agonizing experience of onchocerciasis. The infecting bite of the black fly will alone induce a skin ulcer with an unbearable itchiness that can last more than weeks. As many as 100 million parasitic microfilar-iae¬the females 30ú80 centimeters long¬will forge through the victim, robbing essential nutrients. The adult worms will lodge in connective tissue, in muscle, and in fibrous nodules in the skin.
Onchocerciasis has caused economic devastation as well. It is responsible for the abandonment of some of the most agriculturally productive areas of West Africa. In other areas it affected 60 percent of the population and permanently blinded 10 percent. During the assembly of the NYU journalism list the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the "virtual eradication" of onchocerciasis in West Africa, where more than 85 percent of those with the disease lived. The media paid virtually no attention to this announcement.
Before the Onchocerciasis Control Program became operative in 1985, there had been about 120 million persons in 37 African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries at risk of river blindness; roughly 18 million persons infected with the worms that cause it; and more than a million persons whose eyesight had been impaired by the disease, a quarter of whom had been rendered permanently sightless. To control the spread of the disease, the Onchocerciasis Control Program, run by the WHO and other organizations, used a combination of pesticides. Invermectin, a potent antiparasite drug mixture, was used to treat the disease. Larvicides were applied by spray from helicopters. To prevent the vector's developing pesticide resistance, varied larvicides (largely organophosphates) were used. Data from continuous monitoring of the sprayed areas show that the pesticides used have not caused any long-term damage to the environment.
Thanks to the Onchocercia-sis Control Program, since the mid 1990s more than 30 million persons in 11 West African countries have been free of the threat of river blindness, and 1.5 million West Africans have been cured of it. The program cost 437 million 1985 dollars, or only about 53-57 cents per protected person per year. Moreover, the program has made 25 million hectares of land (about 62 million acres) cultivatable. With existing modes of cultivation this land can adequately feed 17 million persons every year. Indeed, the increase in agricultural productivity alone has been responsible for a 20-percent annual return on the expenditure. The year 2010 is the target date for the global eradication of river blindness.
Spraying with DDT was largely responsible for the eradication of onchocerciasis in Kenya, in the late 1940s, and in the Mbari forest of Uganda, in the 1960s. From the mid 1940s to the early 1970s, DDT was the insecticide of choice for fighting endemic river blindness. The cost of the Kenya program was very small, even by 1940s standards: $1.82-$3.35 per square kilometer.
Concern over journalistic biases in the selection and ranking of "top" stories is not merely academic. The belief system from which such biases stem does not only diminish human achievements but also promotes policies that threaten to undermine the gains technology has afforded and to retard the spread of these gains to the persons and communities who most need them.
Many Third Worlders have diseases that most citizens of developed countries have never heard of, and continue to die of diseases that are not dangers to First Worlders. Many environmentalists who continually tell the public that microbes are developing resistance to antibiotics and that insect vectors are developing resistance to pesticides are laboring to make unavailable some of the most effective weapons against infectious disease. A hundred national governments, with United Nations officials and nongovernmental organizations, are working to develop a legally binding treaty that would globally ban the production and use of DDT and 11 other "persistent organic pollutants" (POPs) by the year 2000.
A global ban on DDT might, as proponents claim, be healthful to wildlife. But it would be devastating for humans, particularly children in Africa, as DDT is the most effective antimalaria pesticide in many regions. Some experts consider malaria responsible for more human deaths than any other disease in all of history. By 1940, because of the widespread conversion of mosquito breeding grounds (e.g., the draining of swamps), malaria diminished or virtually disappeared in many areas. Nevertheless, in that year, just before the use of DDT as an insecticide began, malaria was the leading cause of suffering and death in the world. Even today, diagnoses of malaria number 300-500 million per year. Ninety percent of patients with malaria are African; and of the roughly 2.5 million persons who die each year of malaria, most (perhaps 90 percent) are African, most (perhaps 90 percent) are children, and most are poor or destitute. A global ban on so-called POPs would almost certainly result in a dramatic increase in the incidence of malaria.
Infectious diseases are responsible for about six percent of human deaths in developed countries, and for 34 percent of human deaths worldwide (roughly 17.25 million per year). Humankind, at least since the dawn of civilization, has never before known a time when infectious diseases were not responsible for most human deaths. Thus, there is good cause for celebration¬but by no means for complacency. Antiscience, anti-technology biases prevail. We must not permit the reversal of advances that have benefited the whole of humankind and have paved the way for future breakthroughs. To this year of lists, perhaps we should add a list of maligned technologies that prevent human illness and death and lengthen and improve human lives.
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1 Although Nader's book included some legitimate criticisms of automobile safety and some sound recommendations for improvement, its sensational title and the text's implied claim that American cars were unsafe did not jibe with the low number of deaths per mile for traveling by car relative to the per-mile death rate for traveling by horse; nor did the title and implied claim jibe with the long-term decrease in the per-mile auto death rate.
2 also called "onchocercosis"
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ACSH advisor Thomas R. DeGregori, Ph.D., is Professor of Economics at the University of Houston, in Texas.
His Web homepage is: http://www.uh.edu/~trdegreg.
(From Priorities, Vol. 11, No. 3)
