Elizabeth Whelan, Fierce Fighter Against Junk Science, Is Dead.

Elizabeth Whelan, founder of
the American Council on Science and
Health, died yesterday. Whelan had devoted her life to
combatting the misinformation and disinformation that are
all-too-often peddled by activist charlatans. I could count on her
and ACSH to steer me right when reporting on public health,
environmental, medical, and regulatory issues.

Whelan’s characteristic scientific insight is fully on display
in her co-authored 1984 Reason article, “Sweet
Truth,” which called into question the validity of animal
testing for determining the likelihood that various substances
cause cancer in human beings. She used the FDA’s attempt to ban the
sweetener saccharin to illustrate just how wrong-headed and
unscientific reliance on such tests is. After reviewing all of the
data, she concluded: “Saccharin presents a risk to humans that in
all likelihood is negligible, if not nonexistent.”

The article concluded:

In the tradition of individual rights and limited government, it
is the business of government to protect individuals from being
harmed by others. It is not the business of government to prevent
individuals from pursuing actions that may result in harms only to
themselves. Such restrictions erode freedom of choice and
individual responsibility, essential ingredients of a free
society.

Just so.

Thirty years after the FDA first tried to ban it, saccharin was

delisted in 2000 from the U.S. National Toxicology Program’s
Report on Carcinogens, where it had been listed since 1981
as a substance reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen. The
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finally
got around in 2010 to agreeing to no longer list saccharin and
its salts as hazardous.

The notice
of Whelan’s death over at ACSH notes:

Beth was a giant in the annals of public health. With
postgraduate degrees from Yale and Harvard, she grew increasingly
frustrated with the discrepancy between what she knew to be
fact-based scientific truth, and the distorted information that the
public was hearing and reading from the media. Unlike many of her
colleagues, however, she resolved to do something about it. That’s
how ACSH was born.

By sheer force of will — despite her youth and inexperience with
any sort of activism —she recruited several towering figures in
epidemiology, science and public health. These included Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug, father of the Green
Revolution—the man who is credited with saving more lives than any
other human being— and Dr. Fredrick Stare, the founding chairman of
the Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Department. Other
scientists and policy experts, now numbering close to 350, flocked
to join the nascent nonprofit’s Board of Scientific Advisors and
Policy Experts.

At the same time, she assembled and led a coterie of scientific
professionals at the ACSH headquarters in New York City. Before
long, publication after publication—all strictly devoted to the
concepts of sound science and independent peer review—began to
flow. These continue to this day. Every effort she inspired
promoted the mantra of evidence-based science, while at the same
time countering the hysteria and hyperbole spread by the media and
agenda-driven activists. Beth firmly believed that the nonsense and
destructive myths posing as science were only allowed to exist
because of what she termed “mute science”: competent, expert
scientists failing to speak up to dispute the junk science advocacy
agenda that permeated the media. Beth led the way in urging
scientists to speak out against the fallacies that are all too
pervasive in our culture.

Beth’s legacy will live on long past her all-too-brief sojourn
on Earth. Her commitment to the precepts of sound science have been
passed on to all who knew her.

She will be sorely missed.

Disclosure: I have worked on a couple of projects for ACSH in
the past, including my report,
Scrutinizing Industry-Funded Science: The Crusade Against
Conflicts of Interest.