In my mind I return again and again to Philip Handler, the chairman of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and president of the Academy between 1960–1980. For those two decades he dominated and dictated American science policy, and was a premier example of the corrosive consequences of unbridled power, as Lord Acton had warned. The distortion Handler produced in the warp and weft of science still exists today, more than 30 years after he died from cancer.

The groundwork for what Handler did was laid innocently during the Civil War by Congress when it chartered the Academy as an honorific society. The Academy’s character changed profoundly after Handler’s stewardship began. He was ambitious and strong-willed, and believed intensely that science was the supreme form of human knowledge. By force of his personality he subordinated the Academy to the Council and made the Council a powerhouse of scientific jurisprudence, a star-chamber court for scientific advice.

Stakeholders seeking lampshaded analyses of scientific questions could turn to Handler for help. Innumerable times during his long tenure as the czar of American science he scripted narratives whose common plot involved an ad hoc committee of carefully chosen experts that analyzed data and produced a report styled as a product of the committee’s deliberations. Committee critics frequently pointed to the biases of the chosen experts and complained that the conclusions in the reports were foreordained. Such criticism almost always had no legs because in the public perception, which was where Handler and his clients intended that the narrative should have its impact, the Council was synonymous with the Academy, and the Academy was referred to in print so often as the “prestigious National Academy of Sciences” that it seemed “prestigious” was actually part of its name.

Handler wasn’t a lackey for the powerful interests that sought his help. Far from it. He was arrogant and hubristic, a man to be feared, particularly by the more than 1000 employees of the Council, all of whom served at his pleasure. Handler had strong views regarding the important questions that occurred at the interface of science and society. He championed nuclear power, a strong military posture, and the healing power of pharmaceuticals. He was hostile to environmental constraints, social programs, and the general drift of the times, which he claimed subverted the youth of America. His views usually coincided with those of the stakeholders who called upon the Council. No conspiracy here. Just a fortuitous community of interests.

Experts on Handler’s committees were rarely members of the Academy but frequently were financially tied to the stakeholder. By controlling committee membership, Handler controlled the work product of the committee, like a fisherman with a fish on a hook.

My life course collided with Handler’s juggernaut when he was in the process of bending to his will the analysis of the health hazards of the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) produced by a huge antenna, initially called Sanguine but renamed Seafarer, that was under construction by the U.S. Navy.

In the late 1960’s the Navy proposed building the antenna in northern Wisconsin, where it would stretch over parts of 26 counties. Political pressure forced the antenna out of Wisconsin, and the Navy began construction on the upper peninsula of Michigan. The antenna was intended to create an EMF that would be reflected by the ionosphere and then detected by submarines while submerged. Dr. Robert O. Becker, who was the director of the EMF research laboratory where I worked, had served as a member of a panel appointed by the Navy’s Captain Paul Tyler to evaluate EMF animal studies that had been commissioned by the Navy, and to give an opinion regarding potential environmental impact of the EMFs from the antenna. The panel did not endorse the safety of the antenna, which was what Tyler expected. On the contrary, the panel warned of potential dangers and health risks of the EMFs and strongly recommended that the Navy conduct further health-related studies.

But Tyler had other ideas. He contacted Handler and the upshot was his appointment of a committee to reexamine the EMF matter. With unseemly haste, the committed issued the decision the Navy wanted—the antenna EMFs posed no health risks whatsoever to the people in Michigan. Nevertheless the committee’s report gained no traction because the committee members were so obviously biased and conflicted in interest.

Public concern in Michigan over the potential risks of the antenna EMFs continued to grow. During the 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter promised the people in Michigan that the antenna would not become operational over their objections. Prompted by mounting adverse publicity and political pressure, the Navy approached Handler again, with a far larger budget, and asked him to appoint a bigger committee that did not contain only members with gross conflicts, and that would be perceived as following a deliberative and thoughtful process for issuing a decision. He chose the chairman of biology at Harvard as the chair of the committee. All the other committee members were MDs or PhDs and, at least to naïve observers, seemed suited to the task. Unfortunately almost all of the committee appointees had no experience in the area of health risks due to EMFs, except for the grossly conflicted members from Handler’s first Seafarer committee, whom he had reappointed to his second Seafarer committee.

Dr. Becker and I saw clearly that the ultimate decision would be a clean bill of health for the antenna, even though such a decision was incompatible with the scientific evidence. The chairman of the committee knew that the members who had experience with EMF biology were grossly conflicted, and he tried for several months to persuade Handler to balance the committee by appointing Dr. Becker and me as members. When we decided that simply was not going to happen, we sent a public letter to the committee setting forth our objections regarding the basic fairness of the committee, and arguing that the obviousness of the foreordained conclusion of safety rendered the entire process a fraud on the public. The controversy became widely known following a report in Science (Project Seafarer: Critics Attack National Academy’s Review Group).

Eight months later, during an interview with Dan Rather on CBS’ &em>60 Minutes, Dr. Becker labeled Handler’s committee for what it actually was, a “stacked deck.” Handler became very angry. In a letter published in the Detroit Free Press, he said that our charge that the NAS committee was stacked was “laughable” and “intolerable.” He suggested that Seafarer was safe, even though his committee, which was supposed to be evaluating the question, had not yet issued its report. The next month we learned that the main government grant which supported our laboratory would not be renewed. We had been warned that would happen if we persisted in crossing the powerful Handler. Nevertheless Dr. Becker had persisted. His fate was to become another heroic casualty in the endless struggle for justice.

Our remaining grant support was sufficient to carry us for almost three more years. Dr. Becker held a staff meeting and told us the date in early 1980 when our laboratory would close.

During our agonal period we both doubled down on our positions regarding the health risks of environmental EMFs. In September, 1979 an article in the Saturday Review retold the antenna story in the larger context of the heath risks of environmental EMFs and the rigging of scientific evaluations of those risks by the stakeholders that produced them. Handler went ballistic when he saw the article and struck at us viciously, but in a way that I saw was dangerous for him because he created a record by which posterity could see what kind of man he was. First he personally called the author and demanded that she retract the article because it attacked the objectivity of the Academy. He said, “I’m going to use every penny we have in the Academy to break you and break the Saturday Review.” Then he wrote the editor of the magazine that the article was “willful and venal” and “insulting to several distinguished scientists and to the National Academy of Sciences.” The letter included a manuscript in which he attacked my research, and he demanded that the article be published in the Saturday Review. I thought that publishing the manuscript was a good idea because it supported my contention that the NAS committee had been pre-programmed to reach the conclusion that ultimately was reached. But the editor of Saturday Review decided not to do so. I waited for Handler to start the lawsuit he had threatened, strongly hoping it would come. I had battle in my heart and believed that the situation would be far better for me if I could confront him directly rather than have him yap at me abominably from his lofty perch. Despite my fervent hope, the lawsuit never came. Soon thereafter Dr. Becker retired and our laboratory closed.

* * * * * * * * *

I prepared to leave New York for my new job. The night before I departed I had a dream in which I saw the soul of Philip Handle walking in the Land of the Dead, which I immediately recognized as such because I saw other souls whom I knew had died. He was pushing a wheelbarrow that supported his penis which was gigantic, roughly the size of his leg, and throbbed perceptibly with each heartbeat. When he recognized me and saw my pink cheeks he paused and pleaded for my help. “For the things I did on earth I must wander here, receiving no comfort from any soul until my sins against science have been disclosed to the living.”

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“Tell the world what I did while I controlled science.”

“Even were I to try,” I said, “no one would believe me.”

“Please try. Perhaps some enterprising scholar, even yet unborn, will crack the nut of the Academy and reveal its inner workings.”

After saying this he turned and began walking back into the shadows from which he had come. But before he disappeared, he stopped, turned, and approached me a second time. After pausing, as if to gather his thoughts, he said, “Only after my death did I understand that science is the mother of good and evil. Because of me, false notions of science have taken deep root in human understanding, where they beset men’s minds so that truth can hardly enter. Great troubles will ensue unless men are forewarned of the danger.”

I promised Handler I would do what he asked, not out of pity, because seeing his fate did not lessen the revulsion I felt toward him. On any list of men who have done evil to science and the idea of science, no one ranks ahead of Philip Handler. Rather it was because the corruption of science by opinions masquerading as fact that he had cultivated and propagated was the chief impediment to achieving what I sought—the unbiased and rational evaluation of the link between environmental EMFs and human disease.

* * * * * * * * *

Today the internet and the books are largely silent about Philip Handler. I think this is so because he did no good that could be celebrated, and the evil he did is so big and bright that most people still can’t see it. But I can, and I lived to tell what a very small man Philip Handler was, notwithstanding the size of his penis.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to laymen strive for obscurity under the theory that laymen believe what they don’t understand must be profound. This is the key reason that lawyers for cell phone companies are so successful in Daubert hearings where judges usually exclude the possibility that evidence showing the environmental EMFs cause disease is excluded from consideration. The judges are floored by the complex eloquence of the hired experts from Harvard and Yale, and the poor lawyers who represent the plaintiff just don’t know what to do.

The EMF industry apologist said, “The claimed association between EMFs and cancer was internally inconsistent because it showed a greater effect at lower EMFs, which is the reverse of what I would logically expect.” I asked her, “Why was it logical to expect that?” and she replied, “Because most agents act that way. Toxicologists use the statement, ‘Toxicity is dose,’ as a rule of thumb.”

“They are wrong,” I told her. “Toxicity is novelty and chronicity.”

I attended a meeting where I was the only speaker who argued that EMFs from high-voltage powerlines were health hazards. The position of the industry speakers seemed to be that the public should be kept ignorant about the hazards, taken advantage of, and then criticized for not being resilient. I thought that most of the public would probably favor my view if they understood what was happening. But they don’t, so they must accept the consequences. What they don’t know determines their fate.

Whenever you are bested in an argument or an interpretation, adopt the winning position. Someone who follows this strategy long enough, ultimately becomes a perfect thinker.

A young man asked the Elders, “What is science?” One said, “It is a quest to understand the world.” A second said, “It is a whore that man exploits for his purposes.” A third said, “It is a mirror that reveals what is in the mind of man.” But the wisest among them replied, “It is all these things.” The young man pondered this response and asked, “Which is it the most?” and the wise one replied, “In your time, a whore.”

Science should be the servant of the common good—something that seeks knowledge and truth for the benefit of all God’s creatures. This goal is not what motivates most scientists.

Ordinary people don’t care very much about science because it’s largely irrelevant to them. They think scientists are smart people who study strange things for obscure reasons. Scientists generally don’t explain their experiments, which is understandable because they are hard to explain, and lay people don’t care anyway. The amazing thing is that lay people don’t seem to care why scientists do what they do, notwithstanding that the public is paying all the bills. Even if you assumed that all public-funded research is worthwhile, questions of priority should necessarily arise because the amount of funding isn’t infinite. But serious questions regarding priority for scientific funding are as rare as Diogenes’ honest man. For example, the government spends billions of dollars to discover the Higgs boson, but nothing to discover the hazards of cell-phone EMFs. Such upside-down priorities are inevitable results of society’s disinterest in the science it funds.

The crafty man’s teacher had been a famous scientist who had prospered on government funds and whose students had grown to prominence and taken their places on the government study sections that reviewed proposals for research support. When the crafty man applied for grants, his study section viewed his applications like requests for help from a family member. The section members who were not already in his family were discreetly invited to visit his school, where they were entertained well and paid honoraria. The study section smiled on his applications and those of his students. In turn, he and his students smiled on the applications of the members of the study section and their students. So it has gone for three generations.

Clinical thinking differs from scientific thinking. Clinicians use intuition as well as logic. They typically offer informed guesses rather than complete solutions. They are as much concerned with the value of a diagnosis as with its accuracy. Probabilities are important in clinical diagnosis, which is a holistic approach to the patient.

Do you want the Federal Communications Commission to think like a clinician when it ponders the question of safety of cell phones? Alternatively, would you like the FCC to wait until God sends an angel with objectively certain evidence of harm before the agency officially announces that there might be a problem with cell phones?