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Sasha Kaurov, PhD

The Numerology of Toxicology: How Bad Science Travels into the Regulatory Domain

Scientific literature is routinely shaped, and sometimes outright manufactured, by parties with a commercial stake in the conclusions. Studies designed to defend a product’s efficacy or safety often acquire an outsized regulatory presence, circulating across jurisdictions and becoming load-bearing references for decisions made by agencies around the world. Once embedded, such studies can prove remarkably durable, continuing to anchor regulatory judgments long after their weaknesses are known.

Here I trace one such trajectory in detail: a case study of a widely used herbicide whose underlying safety studies penetrated regulatory regimes globally despite serious methodological and ethical problems. Following these studies from their origin into the decisions they came to support reveals how readily flawed evidence can be laundered into authoritative fact.

From that case study, I take up  a more general question: how did toxicology, as a discipline, come to rely on frameworks and risk-assessment defaults that began as essentially self-admitted arbitrary numerical choices half a century ago, yet still persist in regulatory standards worldwide? I argue that confronting the contingent, even numerological, origins of these conventions reveals just how arbitrary they are, and how much of the real risk they fail to capture.

WHO: Sasha Kaurov trained as an astrophysicist, earning his PhD at the University of Chicago and subsequently holding a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He then moved into studying public trust and perception of science, along with questions of scientific integrity. He holds appointments at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research and the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, and previously held one in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is currently completing a second PhD at the School of Science in Society, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. With Naomi Oreskes, he founded the site www.reckoningscience.org.

Join us! This is a free event brought to you by Bay Area Skeptics. All are welcome.

WHEN:  Thursday 9 July 7:30pm Pacific  (GMT-7)

HOW:  Livestream HERE.

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