berman@psuvax1.UUCP (Piotr Berman) (07/25/86)
Recently Michael Stein and Tim Sevener wrote again on yellow rain topic. I read recently in NYTimes that a group of British and Canadian biologist discovered yellow rain toxins to occur in Thailand far from any war zones, thus indicating that those toxins do occur naturally in this area. NYT referred to an issue of Science. Did anyone read the original article in Science? Piotr Berman PS. Seems that we live in a post-expert era. Twenty years ago many people believed that experts can provide answers for our questions. Now in any dispute of significance, be it (alleged) evils of pornography, (alleged) merits of SDI, etc., we have experts testifying either way. Some of them have very dubious credentials, some of them are 'guns for hire', i.e. are being paid to get certain kind of conclusion, some (if not most) have biases which subtly interfere with the way they reach their conclusions. My observation in this case is the following: although the experts used by US administration were more trustworthy than the ones in Tobacco Institute, the administration exhibited definitely less caucious approach than in the case of yellow rain. In one case, the 'defite' conclusions were reached astonishingly fast, in the other, we need 'more study. Seems that our administration cares more about the adverse effects in SE Asia than in N America.