052 – Toby Hemenway on Science

What this episode covers

Paul Wheaton and Toby Hemenway , author of Gaia’s Garden , talk about science. Paul begins by stating they have been discussing “fact, proof, science, and how science rules (and you drool).” Toby used to work for a cancer R&D company, which he considered to be a great job. When they discovered something useful, it went from a small R&D company into a huge drug company. He was able to observe the process of a company move from being run by good and dedicated scientists into a company full of business folks trying to hide the side effects or prevent the publication of results that didn’t support positive company growth. This included results that might prove the product was potentially harmful. Paul expresses how there are indeed some sinister and evil people out there, but that there are even more people who are decent human beings. The thing that happens in a lot of places is that being evil pays. He brings this up to clarify that it isn’t the fact that they were business people, but that they were “yucky people” who happened to be business people. Toby agrees, stating that a lot of it is the business motives where they have to focus on maximizing sales and knowing what will be a drag on sales. One of the drags on sales is that there may be side effects or problems with the drugs. It is in their interest to downplay the side effects or to say there are work arounds. It makes him look at pharmaceutical companies differently. He has one friend who helped develop a popular drug, but when the man himself came down with the disease it treated, he refused to take it. He didn’t, because he understood the side effects of the drug very well. He knew the side effects were deadly and would trash his liver. When you read the potential side effects of a drug, you can know that most of the time the side effects are ten times worse than what they are saying. It is very easy to bury negative data. These are private companies that can hide their data anyway that they want. FDA supervision doesn’t help because the FDA isn’t there within the laboratory watching the experiments. The FDA is in Washington DC reading over the paperwork sent to them. They don’t have a way to know when some of the data is being withheld. There is nothing making them report negative data results. Paul feels that the important way this relates to permaculture is that we are blazing a trail on new things, innovating and trying to create a better path. People both in and out of the permaculture world, may be presenting information as absolute fact or science that really isn’t. Terms like ‘scientists have proven’, ‘always works’, ‘never works’, ‘fact’, ‘proven’, etc. Toby agrees. There are a lot of things that we haven’t really proven how they work or how effective they are yet. Permaculture seems like the cure to everything, so we get infatuated with it. It is important to be honest when we find something isn’t working the way we thought it would, that we let others know and be willing to forgive yourself for not having 100 percent perfect solutions. Paul feels it is an endless cycle of observe and innovate. He feels that permies.

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