Michael Specter
Michael Specter
Michael Specteris an American journalist who has been a staff writer, focusing on science and technology, and global public health at The New Yorker since September 1998. He has also written for The Washington Post and The New York Times...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
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Many of the most eloquent people I have ever met work in lab coats every day.
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There has never been a verified scientific report that chelation therapy, a gluten-free diet, or anything else can cure autism.
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If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.
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Universal vaccination may well be the greatest success story in medical history.
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I have covered wars, before the epidemic began and since. They are all ugly and painful and unjust, but for me, nothing has matched the dread I felt while walking through the Castro, the Village, or Dupont Circle at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
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Some people will deny anything that displeases or scares them: unusual pain in their chests, unwanted lumps beneath their skin, or the fact that humans share ancestry with apes are a few examples. Another is climate change.
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We're lying ourselves into believing things are untrue, like organic food will solve all our problems, or vitamins will make us healthy, or we don't need to vaccinate our children.
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There are people who could watch a hurricane like Sandy blow out of the Atlantic every other day and blame it on anything but human activity. They are like those who, having been diagnosed with diabetes, eat donuts for breakfast. There's not much to do about them.
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Clearly, some of the reason people embrace alternatives and reject vaccines is that they are angry and mistrustful of government and of pharmaceutical conglomerates. More than that, we pay too much for health care, it's not good enough, and the system is too complex. We need alternatives.
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By themselves, genetically engineered crops will not end hunger or improve health or bolster the economies of struggling countries. They won't save the sight of millions or fortify their bones. But they will certainly help.
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The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.
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It doesn't seem to matter how often vaccines are proved safe or supplements are shown to offer nothing of value. When people don't like facts, they ignore them.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established highly specific criteria for the diagnosis of Lyme disease: an acknowledged tick bite, the appearance of a bull's-eye rash, and, for those who don't live in a region where Lyme is common, laboratory evidence of infection.
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If people want to believe that our ancestors were riding around on dinosaurs or that the protracted, increasing, and devastating warming of the Earth is just nature doing its thing - I guess I feel I have more useful battles to fight.