A scientist may be wrong, and often is. Or he may be so blinded by his political prejudices that he searches for "scientific" arguments why it is better to kill one hundred million people in a nuclear exchange than to defend them by Star Shields. But even that level has now been surpassed, for the sub-sewer regions of pseudo-science have just been entered by a band of five pioneers whose senior member is Matthew Meselson, professor of biochemistry at Harvard.
In the September issue of the Scientific American (along with the obligatory "scientific," article on disarmament) the band of pioneers has authored an article on Yellow Rain, concluding that what is known by that name is not a chemical warfare agent, but bees' excrement.
Most of the material presented (apart from some disgusting pooh-poohing of witnesses' testimony) is probably perfectly correct
¾and perfectly irrelevant. Typically, they show color photographs to compare the spots on leaves used as international evidence for chemical warfare with spots on leaves known to be bee droppings, and they dwell at length on the similarity. What they do not dwell on is the difference: laboratory tests proved that the evidenced samples contained mycotoxins, as did the blood and tissue of civilian victims, and as did two Soviet gas masks retrieved from Afghanistan in 1982. But the samples presented by the pioneers, collected in non-combat areas (through a $256,000 grant of the heavily left-leaning MacArthur Foundation) did not contain them, for the simple reason that they were nothing but bee crap. The pioneers make no attempt to explain what did make hundreds of Hmuong die vomiting blood.But there is worse. Apparently Prof. Meselson, and presumably his accomplices, perpetrated this abject dishonesty knowingly. When interviewed by William Kucewicz, the Wall St. J.'s redoubtable expert on Soviet chemical warfare [AtE Jun 84], Meselson admitted that laboratory tests of his samples
¾described in great detail in the article, including photographs by a scanning electron-microscope¾ showed all of them void of any mycotoxins; but, he says, there wasn't room to include these negative results in the (10-page) article. (If he were a professor of history, he might prove Lee Harvey Oswald's innocence in an article claiming Oswald and Kennedy were never in Dallas at the same time; but space limitations would force him to leave out their last visit.)Once again there is a precedent in the 1930s, though not perpetrated by scientists. Auschwitz (in pre-war Poland) was not yet built, but other concentration camps, such as Dachau, Oranienburg and Buchenwald, were already in existence, and rumors leaked out of what was going on there. This was giving the Nazis a bad name, so Hitler opened them for an occasional well prepared and managed "inspection" by various prestigeous, Nazi-approved foreigners. They were not Nazis, but (presumably) simpletons who did not pry deeper so as not to "exacerbate tensions," appear paranoid, or "engage in anti-German propaganda." Every time they gave a camp a clean bill of health, the Nazi press gloated and called German concentration camps Zierden der Zivilisation (ornaments of civilization).
The double-Z Award to Prof. Meselson and his co-decorators.
[More: "The 'Bee Feces' Theory Undone" by W. Kucewicz, W. St. J. 9/6/85 -- well worth a trip to the library!]
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Vol. 13, No. 2
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 13, No. 2 Date: November 29, 2004 03:39 PM Title: Brave New Words
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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