Pseudoscience Enthralls the Elites—Michael Crichton (1942 – )
While completing his medical degree at Harvard University, Michael Crichton supported himself by writing pseudonymous novels. Two of them won awards, and Crichton took a new career path, that of author. A number of his techno-thrillers have become best-sellers and then made into films, e.g., Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park. Known for meticulous attention to scientific detail, he has served as visiting writer at MIT.
In his novel, State of Fear, Crichton raises serious questions about the theory of global warming. His villains are eco-terrorists, intent upon producing disastrous variations in the atmosphere and oceans. Impatient with their lack of supporting data, they decide to manufacture some of their own, even if it kills some people. Throughout the book, Crichton cites evidence that global warming is questionable, if not a downright fiction.
At the end of the novel he provides an historical example of false science run amok. By it, he punctures the notion that consensus in the scientific community constitutes sure proof. The following selection demonstrates that the intellectual elites have been woefully wrong before.
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation, and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of this theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.
The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful—and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing—that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well known to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.1
Footnotes:
1Michael Crichton, State of Fear (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 575-576. Crichton goes on to add, “The theory of eugenics postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race. The best human beings were not breeding as rapi
