Cancer from Beef: DES, Federal Food Regulation, and Consumer Confidence by Alan Marcus

Abstract

396 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Cancerfrom Beef: DES, FederalFood Regulation, and Consumer Confidence. By Alan Marcus. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pp. x+235; notes, bibliography, index. $38.50. Cancerfrom Beefis, the story of a public controversy that involved the application of scientific research in industry, the development of sophisticated assay methods, the imposition of legal guidelines on food production, and consumers’ concerns about the healthfulness of modern food production methods. Alan Marcus details the fascinating history of DES (diethylstilbestrol) as a cattle feed ad­ ditive. He relates how scientists were dethroned from their privi­ leged position in a tripartite “partnership” of scientists, industry, and government. Since the late 19th century, scientists have been the arbiters of special knowledege generated through rigorous, methodical, unbi­ ased research. By the 1920s, scientists in both industry and govern­ ment were believed capable of and interested in solving social prob­ lems through science. By the 1930s, Marcus argues, this had created a nonhierarchical “regulatory relationship” between the two (p. 4). DES fractured this relationship. Was the addition of DES to beef feed harmful or not harmful to the human consumer? Scientists con­ ceded that they did not have the evidence to answer this question definitively. Modified regulatory procedures incorporated a costbenefit analysis and were opened up to various other constituencies, including consumers. Marcus documents the written and oral, formal and informal means by which the scientist Wise Burroughs disseminated informa­ tion about DES in cattle feed in the early 1950s, even before any patents had been awarded and before the Food and Drug Adminis­ tration (FDA) had considered the safety of DES additives. (The FDA was involved because DES was considered a drug.) While expanding on the intellectual, professional, and economic reasons that Bur­ roughs and other scientists had for pushing DES, Marcus also consid­ ers the role played by Eli Lilly and Company in patent development. By the 1960s, science had “lost its cherished regulatory place” (p. 48). In Marcus’s view, regulation was no longer an example of cooperative partnership based on scientific consensus. The FDA was moving from after-the-fact enforcement to research-based preven­ tion. Rather than relying on science and scientists drawn from indus­ try, the agency began to depend more on its own scientists. New legislation, most especially passage of the 1958 Delaney clause prohibiting the sale of food containing substances found to induce cancer in humans or other animals, moved regulation far­ ther from science into legal argumentation. Application of the Dela­ ney clause to DES highlighted troubling questions. How can we de­ termine the long-term effects of minute doses of potentially carcinogenic substances? What is a functional and acceptable assay TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 397 method? What constitutes evidence of harm or safety? When science and technology did not provide simple, unequivocal answers to these questions, nonscientists entered the arena with their own interpreta­ tions of the evidence. At regulatory hearings, in the courts, in the halls of Congress, and in the media, a multitude of interested par­ ties—including consumers, beef producers, and government offi­ cials—participated in the debates. A short review can only suggest the depth of research presented in Cancerfrom Beef Marcus’s text describes the scientific and techno­ logical disputes over the use of DES from the 1950s into the 1980s, the procedural maneuvers used by regulatory agencies such as the FDA, and the court battles mounted over the use of DES in cattle feed. It enumerates the shifting allegiances within the scientific com­ munity and among scientists, feed and pharmaceutical companies, and regulators. The analysis is so dense that at times it is difficult to follow the line of argumentation. And, even with its wealth of data, the book is in the end unsatis­ fying. Marcus is so intent on documenting the “lost reverence” (p. 151) for experts and expertise that he does not address the im­ portant issue of how one should choose among competing claims to scientific and technological authority. Scientists who disagreed with Burroughs are relegated to the margins ofthe scientific commu­ nity; consumers who resisted DES-fed cattle are considered dupes of false science. It is important that we understand the...