A recent article in The Scientist: Magazine of the Life Sciences listed the top five science scandals of 2011 (science scandals). Diederik Stapel, University of Netherlands, fabricated data that misled some readers into believing that thinking of meat makes people surly. Judy Mikovits, of the Whittemore Peterson Institute, fabricated data that made it look like a mouse leukemia virus caused chronic fatigue syndrome. Paolo Sebastiani, Boston University, falsified data that made it look as if 19 specific genes were associated with living longer. Science, the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, retracted his paper even though it was cited only 25 times, which gives you an idea of how many people read it. Felisa Wolfe-Simon reported discovery of a species of bacteria that was unusually tolerant to arsenic. It’s not clear why The Scientist thought this was a scandal rather than just a case of a young scientist making observations that displeased her establishment adversaries (see “Scientist in a Strange Land,” Popular Science, October, 2011). Science didn’t retract the article, but it published eight other articles that criticized Wolfe-Simon’s work. Edward Wegman, George Mason University published a paper showing that climatology is an inbred field where researchers collaborate and review each other’s work (as if that were a bad thing). It turned out that he had plagiarized his analysis.

These five obscure instances are what a big-time science journal considered the premier ethical lapses in science during 2011. But these cases of fraud, falsification, and plagiarism, if that’s what they were, probably affected only a few hundred people at most—the rest of the ten billion people on earth were unaffected. For this reason, the magazine article seriously trivialized the concept of ethical misconduct in science. Meaningful misconduct hurts people, and a scientist should hurt a lot of people to qualify for a top-five ranking. By this standard, my candidates for the top five science scandals of 2011 involved publications by Leeka Kheifets, James Rubin, Michael Repacholi, Joe Elder, and Mays Swicord. Articles they published in 2011, which were continuations of their life work, directly and materially contributed to the occurrence of cancer and other dreadful diseases in many million men, women, and children.

Leeka Kheifets, of UCLA, published papers in which she argued against the existence of health risks due to exposure to environmental EMFs (magnetic fields and cell phones). As she has done many times throughout her career, she employed the ambiguities and uncertainties inherent in the methods of epidemiology as shields to deflect attention away from the realization and recognition that environmental EMFs are major determinants of human disease. She has lobbied continuously since the late 1980s on behalf of her clients, particularly the Electric Power Research Institute which named her one of its top scientists and heavily supported her financially. Her investigations have consistently been badly designed, poorly reasoned, and inarticulately expressed. Her attractiveness to EPRI and her other clients has not been her brains, but her consistency. When someone says the same thing in public and quasi-public forums over and over for more than two decades, there is a tendency on the part of some people to accept the rhetoric irrespective of analysis. She is a bad scientist who knows or should know that she grossly misleads people, tricking them into causing their own cancers. She was a one-woman super-PAC before super-PACs became popular.

James Rubin, King’s College London published a blindingly biased paper in which he argued that there was no such thing as electromagnetic hypersensitivity (no robust evidence). His numerous studies on electromagnetic hypersensitivity are all negative, but that negativity was manufactured by employing experimental designs and statistical analysis that were virtually guaranteed to produce negative results. By means of jaundiced analyses he comes to the conclusion that EHS sufferers have a purely psychosomatic disease, a viewpoint that has untold benefits for his clients and funders, particularly the cell-phone companies.

His work is a scientific Ponzi scheme in which he gets money from the phone industry effectively by promising negative results, creates and publishes such results, and is then rewarded by the industry with even more funds, like petting a trained dog. The natural consequence of his work is to stigmatize EHS sufferers as neurotics who need the care of a psychiatrist, not an internist or allergist. Rubin is almost a perfect example of a scandalous scientist in a scandalous system that consists of cell-phone companies having enough money to buy any results they want, dependable trained dogs who produce the desired results, and scientific journals such as Bioelectromagnetics that publish the results without properly vetting them, and without insistence on simultaneous publication of conflict-of-interest statements.

Next we have Joe Elder and Mays Swicord, who come as a matched set because of their long career of cooperation in an effort that has at its natural consequence the worldwide increase in human disease. Elder began his career in EMFs working for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Swicord began working for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. After a few years they went over to the dark side and began working for EMF-producing companies, tasked not to do EMF research, but to lobby governments in favor of the safety of environmental EMFs. The fraud they sought to and succeeded in establishing—a two-headed abomination—is so pervasive and pregnant in society that it’s hardly recognized, but rather remains hidden in plain sight. First they argued, in effect, that it was scientifically and ethically acceptable to perform involuntary human experimentation. That is, to expose human beings to cell-phone EMFs and determine the nature and extent of their health impacts by counting the dead bodies. Second, they popularized the notion that what is or is not safe should be determined by a committee of experts wherein economic interests are represented by the sharpest minds on that side, and all other stakeholders in the issues are unrepresented. The fruits of the labor of Elder and Swicord are on display in an article published in Lancet Oncology in 2011. The article is intrinsically heinous because it is based on the proposition that involuntary human experimentation is acceptable. The article is also ethically corrupt from a procedural perspective because the administrative organization, staffing, research design, and funding were all controlled by the industries whose activities were putatively under investigation. It simply doesn’t matter what the authors (there were 60 of them) had to say, or that a handful of them were intellectually honest and not industry sycophants like Elder and Swicord. Value-laden conclusions and judgments of any non-representational EMF committee are worthless, whether they are positive, negative, or neutral. The reasoning would be important, but such committees are invariably devoid of reasoning because they operate by consensus, which is more affective than rational.

The best of the worst is Michael Repacholi. In 1996 the World Health Organization began what it said was a project to assess the scientific evidence of possible health effects of EMFs. But the project was corrupted from the start because it was controlled by the power- and cell-phone companies in the industrialized countries. The companies designated Michael Repacholi as the project head. For many years he had been a consultant and spokesman for power companies, so it was unrealistic to expect he would conduct an open and honest inquiry. But his performance in office was even more miserable than could have been anticipated based on what had been known about his personal opinions when he was appointed.

During the time he headed the EMF project at WHO, Repacholi dealt almost exclusively with experts on the payroll of cell-phone and power companies. He produced a series of reports and evaluations that exonerated these industries from any responsibility for human disease produced by the EMFs they generated and dispersed into the environment. Scientists who disagreed with the viewpoint of the EMF companies were systematically excluded from the WHO EMF adjudicatory process. The general public, a major stakeholder in the EMF debate, had no representation at the table when Repocholi’s committees broadly sanctioned widespread EMF exposure. Instead, the WHO scientific reviews of EMFs were star-chamber processes in which only pro-industry spokesmen were heard, and the results of the processes were foreordained.

Repacholi gave many speeches but was never held accountable in any serious dialogue or debate, and was never required to justify his extreme positions. He invariably appeared in forums that were friendly to his mission, and under conditions that insulated him from the necessity for reasoned discussion. Using his bully pulpit at WHO, he encouraged human beings, including young children, to chronically irradiate their brains with EMFs by falsely proclaiming that they were safe. 2011 was no different (cell phones safe). He bears direct personal responsibility for many cases of human disease.

If you want to see examples of scandals in science—true scandals, not cases akin to the number of angels that can fit on the tip of a pin—look at the life work of Kiefets, Rubin, Elder, Swicord, and Repacholi.

Capitalism has two master narratives. From the left, everyone is encouraged to pursue ever more wealth. Corporations are more important than human beings and enjoy enhanced freedom because corporations are more efficient at making money. There is a strong bias against adopting regulations limiting pollution because the effect would be to impede profit-making. The preference is to externalize all environmental and human costs. A broad mass of contented workers will generate the resources needed to repair the environment and cure the diseases. The poor will ultimately be better off because there will be jobs for everybody who wants to work.

The narrative from the right is quite different. Capitalism calls on us to learn faster by cooperating with one another to make progress at an ever-increasing rate. It encourages us to learn more and develop our talents. The pool of talented new problem-solvers is inexorable and will produce new ideas and new market possibilities. Every country, every company, and every individual is completely free to learn, study, improve, and make progress, without any limits.

Both narratives are the product of a perspective, not a snapshot of reality. They play out at a cosmic level, in an eternal pattern of thesis, antithesis, and resolution. But we don’t live our lives at that level. We live with our two feet on earth, immersed in a semi-random semi-law-governed time-ordered series of events. We know that, sooner or later, we’ll probably get sick and certainly die.

For the sake of argument, assume that your sickness and death will be partly caused by chronic exposure to man-made environmental electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Given the antithetical superstructure of capitalism, can you see how foolish it is to expect anyone else to assume responsibility for protecting you from EMFs? That’s simply not how the system works.

Novelty within science is often rejected because it seems wrong, but this rule doesn’t apply to EMF-induced health hazards. The idea that man-made environmental EMFs are health hazards is novel in the sense that it is not yet part of the standard curriculum at Harvard or Yale, but the idea hasn’t been rejected by government agencies because it seems wrong. The problem is that the idea is bad for business.

Unintelligent people often take a dim view of the EMF controversy. Some of them see it as a matter to be resolved by experts, and others put their faith in the government. They say, “If cell phones caused brain cancer the government would ban them.” How sad it is to have such poor understanding, but how satisfying! People who look at the world through the pin-hole of misplaced confidence think that every important question has an easy and definitive answer.

The safety-of-X problem, where X is an environmental electromagnetic field (EMF) from a man-made device, is commonly styled as involving facts exclusively within the domain of scientists, who are idealized as coldly rational thinkers. When I began studying the problem, in 1972, earlier concern regarding the health of servicemen exposed to EMFs from military radar and communications equipment had ended, and scarcely a ripple of interest remained in the public consciousness. The bell curve for interest regarding leakage of EMFs from microwave ovens had already crested and was entering its falling phase. Publicity about hazards from EMFs produced by high-voltage powerlines was just beginning. This manifestation of the problem lasted until the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences concluded in 1998 that there was no “conclusive proof” of health hazards due to powerline EMFs, which in industry-talk means “perfectly safe.” At about that time public attention began to focus on the possible effects of cell-phone EMFs on the brain, and we are somewhere in the middle of that cycle. Soon history will repeat itself in the context of smart meters and electric cars. The problems posed by cell phones, smart meters, and electric cars will probably wind up in Boot Hill, just like those triggered by radar, microwave ovens, powerlines, electric blankets, electric welding machines, police radar guns, airport scanners, TV and radio towers, and ham radios.

I’ve been a serious student of the physics, biology, sociology, ethics, justice, and legal structure of the safety-of-X problem for many years, and I’ve studied the long series of government decisions that exonerated man-made EMFs from any role in producing human disease, thereby rationalizing judgments to not regulate environmental EMFs. Not placing the EMF problem in the same regulatory category as smoking, drugs, and alcohol might be a good thing. Perhaps the government should just forget about regulating EMFs, I don’t know because I’ve never seen both sides of the issue briefed. What I do know about is scientific/legal reasoning. On this score, I can plainly see that the government decisions effectively declaring environmental EMFs are perfectly safe were all false negatives. What really interested me was the explicit reasoning the government used. It’s fascinating because it tells us a lot about science, democracy, and what we really care about, so I investigated the matter. The convenient thing about analyzing a series of identical governmental reasoning processes is that if you understand one, you understand them all, like explaining a case of HIV infection on the basis of knowing the genome of the virus.

Usually, pertinent details regarding the safety-of-X genome, who actually did what and why, are hidden inside a government labyrinth behind a corporate veil. X = powerlines was an exception. In that case, l learned details about the government-industry axis by obtaining correspondence between investigators working for the Electric Power Research Institute and the Department of Energy (see Chapter 11 in Going Somewhere), and I took part in the NIEHS process (see The NIEHS RAPID Program: Anatomy of a Failure and Chapter 27 in Going Somewhere). Consequently X = powerlines was what I studied, in depth.

In the mid-1990s Congress adopted the traditional viewpoint that scientists know best, and told the Director of the NIEHS to assess whether powerline EMFs were human health hazards. One reason Congress put the NIEHS on the spot in the first place was the brouhaha about powerlines that had been raised by Eddie Murphy’s role in Distinguished Gentleman. Democratic congressmen needed cover regarding complaints from their constituents about powerlines and cancer, so they called on the NIEHS. The Director was expected to ask scientists he trusted for the answer and then convey it to Congress and the people, like Judge Stone giving advice to Andy Hardy.

The NIEHS treated the safety-of-X problem as if it were an abstract scientific question capable of resolution via a self-extracting procedure based on laboratory and epidemiological data alone. Like an Aristotelian syllogism, the answer was always already present in their premises. Consequently the NIEHS indeed failed to warn the public about the dangers of powerline EMFs, like all other previous government agencies and committees that had considered the safety-of-X problem. The deeper question I sought to understand was how the powerline hazards issue became a matter of Aristotelian logic. In other words, within the four corners of their multi-hundred page final report, how was the NIEHS able to sustain the Pinocchio-type claim that powerline EMFs were perfectly safe? Why didn’t everyone see its nose grow longer? I analyzed the question in 1998 and found that the cognitive structure within which the NIEHS framed the discussion of the problem was what permitted their answer to be deduced. Click here to read the report.

The safety-of-X problem is a personal and sociological mega-issue. There is no scientific solution at any level. Executive-department agencies are political entities. They can’t do any better than the NIEHS, which functioned exactly as Congress intended, which was to confine itself to noncontroversial issues and avoid research that could lead to results supporting government regulation of industry. NIEHS accomplished its goal by arguing from within a cognitive construct that made their perspectives seem objective.

The way the NIEHS and all its doppelganger federal EMF-advice-giving agencies act is what we want, so that’s what we get. I think that more so than any other people who have ever existed, we Americans who choose to vote get what we want. We wanted laws against drugs, under-age drinking, and people blowing smoke in our faces, so we got them. We don’t really care about what makes us sick, or kills us so our government has no mandate to pursue the matter. Actually, it has a mandate not to do so, arising from the loud, strong voices of the EMFs companies, all of which have property and first-amendment rights that are as strong as those of a natural person.

The only possibility for resolution of the safety-of-X problem exists at the level of the individual. That resolution depends on personal choices regarding the relative priority of specific values, and only secondarily on scientific information. Of course the industry research is rigged. We all know that. That simply means that each individual has the responsibility to exercise due diligence in seeking reliable information that promotes safeguarding health. The honest scientific information is not fundamentally controversial, and its meaning is relatively clear. Only individual awareness, knowledge, and choice can lead to an honest resolution, one person at a time.

When I wrote the report I did not fully understand the extent to which science can be corrupted by money, or how little most people care about the impact of the man-made environment on their health, at least in cases where recognition of a serious risk would entail a modification in lifestyle. It would probably be worthwhile for us, as individuals, to take a new look at science, and at the relationship between science and societal values. Exactly what is science, who and what does it serve, and what do we regard as most important?

In October David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times made a request of people over 70. “I’d like to ask for a gift. I’d like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way.” This is my report.

I am a first-generation Italian American. My father graduated from elementary school and worked in a machine shop. My mother graduated from what was called a technical high school, where she learned to make ladies’ hats. My parents loved me very much and provided for all my physical needs, but they never talked to me or gave me any advice, except on several occasions my father said to me, “Work with your mind, not your back.” I didn’t really know what he was talking about until 1957, when Denny DeMarco moved into the neighborhood where I lived in southwest Philadelphia. One day he asked me, “What do you want to be?” The question took my breath away. The implication was that if I didn’t do something, I’d wind up being nothing. Denny was only a year older than me, but he was a polymath, and I quickly decided I wanted to be like him, somebody who knew things. Later that year the Russians launched Sputnik, and I wondered why it didn’t fall down. I asked famous people whose names I saw in the newspaper and they said it was a matter of physics. I saw that if you knew physics you knew what would happen in the world, so I decided to be a physicist and I began my studies at St. Joseph’s College. That was the first important thing I learned. To have a chance at happiness, you have to want something and you have to embark on a course of action in the general direction of getting what you want.

I learned two important things in college, how to think, and how to overcome fear of failure. The Jesuits taught me how to think. With every passing year I am more grateful for that gift, although I know I was somewhat of a disappointment to them. They taught me abut St. Thomas Aquinas, but I went to the philosophy library at the University of Pennsylvania and saw that there were other philosophers including Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Marx, and Freud, none of whom were ever mentioned in any of my classes. If you learn how to think, you have a fair chance for accomplishing something beneficial during your life because thinking is antithetical to the arrogant behavior that leads to poisoned human conduct, like Joseph McCarthy or Rush Limbaugh.

Professor Ensor taught me how to overcome fear. I was woefully unprepared for college, and I flunked all four tests in my freshman-year calculus course. Everybody gave me no chance of passing the course, which was an absolute requirement to study physics. Before the final I went to see Professor Ensor, who taught the course, and asked, “What should I do?”

“What do you want to do, Andrew?”

“I want to study physics. I want to study physics so bad I can taste it. I love physics; I can’t imaging living life without being able to study physics.”

I was pretty emotional, I guess, but I was sincere. Physics was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen.

“Well, you need to pass calculus,” he said. “If you flunk it nine times, take it a tenth time. There’s no alternative if you want to study physics.”

The conversation crystallized things for me. I expected to flunk and then take the course again, and again if I had to, until I passed it which, one day, I would do. I felt at peace, and that I had control of my life. I took the semester final on a cold December morning and my grade was 99%, higher than anyone had ever scored on a final examination in Professor Ensor’s calculus class. I don’t know how to explain that except to say it was a miracle. I passed the course. If you identify what you want and are always engaged in pursuing that goal, you’ll be happy and there won’t be any room for fear.

I graduated from St. Joe’s in 1962, which was a very good year for young physicists; my starting salary at RCA Victor was four times that of the non-science graduates. Nevertheless I quickly realized that I knew very little, so I went to graduate school at Syracuse University. I was becoming a better physicist but I found out that most physicists waste their lives studying silly things that nobody cares about and that don’t matter in the world, like general relativity, particle physics, and the big bang theory. Then I met Dr. Robert Becker who was an orthopedic surgeon at the VA Hospital across the street from the university. He was doing experiments on animals and people that involved using electromagnetic energy to grow new tissue, including entire limbs in amputees. Dr. Becker was like a Sophoclean hero, and certainly the greatest man I ever met. He profoundly changed the course of my life, but our meeting and the arrangements it led to that allowed me to use the research I did in his lab for my doctoral dissertation were pure luck and completely unpredictable. That is an important lesson I learned and would like to explicitly point out to young people. If you work and study, and prepare yourself, your day will come. You won’t know when, but when it does you will be in a position to capitalize on your good fortune.

For Dr. Becker the world was a round hole and he was a square peg. He was a product of the pre-capitalistic medical system, and his focus was always on treating patients, not making money. Most doctors were content to apply what they learned, Dr. Becker wanted to learn more and change what was taught. The Flexner Report, Franz Mesmer, and Albert Abrams had driven electromagnetism out of medicine, but Dr. Becker thought it belonged there and spent his life doing experiments designed to provide the necessary supporting evidence. The most important thing I learned from him during the 16 years I worked in his laboratory was how to lead an authentic life. You can’t go to the wall regarding every little issue that comes up in life, but when the issue involves the very core of your being, you need to stand up, tell it the way it is, and take the consequences. When 60 Minutes came calling and asked him whether the electromagnetic field from a huge military antenna was a health hazard, he told them it was and explained why. When 60 Minutes approached me about fields from powerlines, I too said they were hazards and explained why. We both got fired. That was catastrophic for him because he was forced to retire even though he was only 56. For me, that experience was the turning point in my life. I think every authentic life has one. I decided that Dr. Becker was right—a huge part of human disease could be traced to chronic exposure to electromagnetic fields in the environment produced by man-made devices. I decided to spend my life trying to show that Dr. Becker was right. I did, and I succeeded.

Stick with it. Do what you think is right. Acquire the tools critical to pursuing your goal. After I got my Ph.D. in physics I got my J.D. in law, which helped me a lot in dealing with the barracudas that were always swimming around me.

Here are a few other things I learned along the way. If you have children, pay attention to them. I bathed and told a bedtime story to each of our four kids almost every night. That’s an effective way to teach your children what’s important. There’s nothing more important than family. Explain the world to them, most especially that it owes them nothing except what they worked diligently to earn. A little brainwashing can be helpful, but it must be practiced when they are still quite young. My kids were raised thinking that there was a law that required kids to go to college and graduate school, and they all obeyed that putative law.

What I did well was to contribute 50% to the success of my 46-year-and-still-counting marriage and an equal percentage to raising four spectacular kids. I also solved the problem to which I devoted my professional life, and I remained healthy for 71 years. Part of Brooks’ request was to tell you what I did not do well. I can’t think of anything. I made mistakes, of course, but I corrected the important ones and the other ones don’t matter.

To sum things up, I learned that a happy life is pursuing goals, not achieving them, and that truth has a small t, not a capital T.

Biological knowledge evolved from the collective activity of many investigators who focused more or less exclusively on their individual tasks, like ants in a nest. Consequently biology is presently uninformed by any explicit overall conception similar to that achieved in physics, except for a common naïve belief that physics will eventually explain whatever biologists regard as facts. Because biologists don’t understand physics, they don’t see that explanations for the matters of interest to them cannot be achieved by thinking like physicists. Biologists must begin to think for themselves and develop their own cognitive structure. A necessary step in that direction is to learn physics. Biologists who do so will see that even though physics is conceptually trivial and irrelevant, nevertheless it is methodologically useful for studying life. Armed with this methodology and a cognitive structure of their own design, biologists would be in a good position to understand the link between EMFs and disease, both acute and chronic.

Imagine what it would be like if human beings could see man-made EMFs. Within a mile of a typical high-voltage powerline you would see a great gray cloud, darker the closer you moved toward the wires. You would encounter no resistance when you walked through it but to see your hand you would need to hold it near your nose. The Navy’s great ships would appear black, like a giant drop of India ink gliding along.

From a distance a mountain dominates the landscape and makes it seem charming and significant. Having thought this for a long time we suppose that whatever bestows so much charm must itself also be charming. But when we climb the mountain we are disappointed. Suddenly the mountain and surrounding landscape have lost their magic. We had forgotten that some greatness and goodness can be beheld only from a distance and only from below, otherwise it makes no impression. Perhaps you know people who see themselves only from a distance and find themselves attractive and robust. Self-knowledge is strictly inadvisable for persons of this kind, but they make good directors for power and cell-phone companies.