Bhavya Chowdhury Number of words: 605 Until the late fifties, Rous sarcoma virus had been shown to cause tumors only in live chickens. Temin, working closely with Harry Rubin, wanted to study how the virus converted normal cells into cancer cells. To do this, they needed a vastly simplified system—a system free of chickens and tumors, and … Read more
Number of words: 535 Papanicolaou secured a research position at Cornell that may have been just as surreal as carpet selling: he was assigned to study the menstrual cycle of guinea pigs, a species that neither bleeds visibly nor sheds tissue during menses. Using a nasal speculum and Q-tips, Papanicolaou had nonetheless learned to scrape … Read more
Number of words: 858 For centuries, gastritis had rather vaguely been attributed to stress and neuroses. (In popular use, the term dyspeptic still refers to an irritable and fragile psychological state.) By extension, then, cancer of the stomach was cancer unleashed by neurotic stress, in essence a modern variant of the theory of clogged melancholia … Read more
Number of words: 772 Edell’s case, filed in 1983, was ingeniously crafted. Previous cases against tobacco companies had followed a rather stereotypical pattern: plaintiffs had argued that they had personally been unaware of the risks of smoking. Cigarette makers had countered that the victims would have had to be “deaf, dumb and blind” not to … Read more
Number of words: 601 In the early summer of 1967, Banzhaf dashed off a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (the agency responsible for enforcing the fairness doctrine) complaining that a New York TV station was dedicating disproportional airtime to tobacco commercials with no opposing antitobacco commercials. The complaint was so unusual that Banzhaf, then … Read more
Number of words: 704 Even if the report had temporarily sharpened the scientific debate, the prohibitionists’ legislative “axes” had long been dulled. Ever since the spectacularly flawed attempts to regulate alcohol during Prohibition, Congress had conspicuously disabled the capacity of any federal agency to regulate an industry. Few agencies wielded direct control over any industry. … Read more
Number of words: 1,187 If Clarence Little had not been discovered by the tobacco lobbyists in 1954, then they might have needed to invent him: he came preformed to their precise specifications. Opinionated, forceful, and voluble, Little was a geneticist by training. He had set up a vast animal research laboratory at Bar Harbor in … Read more
Number of words: 778 In the early 1940s, a similar notion had gripped the eccentric Oxford geneticist Edmund Ford. A firm believer in Darwinian evolution, Ford nonetheless knew that Darwin’s theory suffered from an important limitation: thus far, the evolutionary progression had been inferred indirectly from the fossil record, but never demonstrated directly on a … Read more
Number of words: 270 In a case-control study, risk is estimated post hoc—in Doll’s and Wynder’s case by asking patients with lung cancer whether they had smoked. In an often-quoted statistical analogy, this is akin to asking car accident victims whether they had been driving under the influence of alcohol—but interviewing them after their accident. … Read more
Number of words: 181 But many epidemiologists argued that such cause-effect relationships could only be established for infectious diseases, where there was a known pathogen and a known carrier (called a vector) for a disease—the mosquito for malaria or the tsetse fly for sleeping sickness. Chronic, noninfectious diseases such as cancer and diabetes were too … Read more
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