Pandora's Lab

Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong (2017), a popular science book by American researcher, inventor, and science historian Paul A. Offit, surveys a set of seven moments in the history of science that are now seen as mistakes, each of which either sparked future innovation to ameliorate it or led to catastrophe. The book’s title is a reference to Pandora’s box, an artifact in Greek mythology allegedly opened by Pandora, the first human woman, releasing the evils of humanity into the world. Pandora’s Lab suggests that scientific inquiry is prone to create similar kinds of artifacts, and uses its historical examples as cautionary parables about the extreme difficulty of knowing how an invention will affect the world.

One of Offit’s tales is that of Madison Grant, a “race theorist” who implemented pseudoscience as a powerful tool to promote racist rhetoric. Grant was an esteemed conservationist: he saved two ubiquitous American species, the bald eagle and the American bison, from the brink of extinction. He also championed conservation efforts for the Redwood trees of northern California and founded two institutions central to conservation and wildlife education, the Wildlife Conservation Society and New York’s Bronx Zoo. Grant completely missed the mark, however, when he synthesized his internalized racism and pseudoscientific beliefs about evolution into a scientific treatise called The Passing of the Great Race. The work warned that interracial “breeding” was dangerous in human groups. The book was promoted by President Roosevelt and was a main source of inspiration for Hitler, who called it his “bible.” Grant’s book was instrumental to the emergence of eugenics, a scientific field that studied how to control populations, particularly for immoral ideological ends.

Another figure Offit analyzes is Fritz Haber, a German chemist who invented synthetic fertilizer. This invention is difficult to roundly condemn since it helped expand access to scalable food products to over 3 billion people. However, synthetic fertilizers are known today as a blight on the environment. They are one of the main pollutants in our oceans and waterways and contributors to climate change. While the failure of synthetic fertilizers, in Offit’s view, demonstrated some of the flaws of human-centered design, another mistake, the trans fats fad in the 1980s, was simply due to hasty and inadequate research. This huge public health failure resulted from a campaign to replace saturated fats with trans fats, the latter which some scientists believed were far less harmful. The campaign lasted for more than a decade before the scientific community accepted that trans fats were deadly when consumed regularly.



Perhaps the most sinister mistake Offit surveys is the popularization of the icepick lobotomy. This surgical procedure, in which a human suffering from a debilitating psychiatric problem is “cured” by separating the thin strands that connect the right and left lobes of his or her brain, was invented by surgeon Walter Freeman. The procedure earned his mentor, António Egas Moniz, a Nobel Prize in 1949. Today, the icepick lobotomy is known as a debilitating procedure that eliminates many of an individual’s higher mental faculties, including one’s ability to express profound emotion. It induces a state called catatonia, characterized by a flat affect, slowness or absence of speech, and reduced intelligence. Offit argues that the lobotomy was criminally misused by people who viewed the mentally ill as problematic and wanted to quickly dispatch them.

Offit touches on several other topics, which range from Rachel Carson’s fallacious characterization of all chemicals as “dangerous” in the context of biology and environmental engineering, to the liberal use of the toxic metal mercury in thermometers and as children’s toys. Offit advocates for a cautious and pro-research sensibility in the scientific world, and contends that many missteps can be averted if we simply dedicate time and resources to understanding a problem as fully as possible before choosing a “solution.” In the contemporary world, where pseudoscience is often implemented as a political weapon, Pandora’s Box warns that this weapon almost always finds unintended targets.