Merchants of Doubt Study Guide

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway are both prominent historians of science. Beyond their well-known joint work on the relationship between corporate power, media, and policymaking in the contemporary U.S., their research also focuses on the history of geology (Oreskes) and the history of aviation and spaceflight (Conway). Naomi Oreskes studied geology at London’s Imperial College and briefly worked for a mining company in Australia before earning a PhD in Geological Research and History of Science at Stanford University. She has taught at Dartmouth College, New York University, the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University, where she is currently the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science. Most of her work has focused on the history of plate tectonics and climate science. She writes frequently for the popular press and has given hundreds of public lectures, interviews, and seminars (including a popular TED Talk) about her work. Erik M. Conway has been the resident historian at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California since 2004. After working as an engineer in the U.S. Navy for several years, Conway earned a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota for a dissertation about the history of aircraft landing gear technology. Ever since, his work has focused on the political priorities, research institutions, and scientific discoveries that have driven modern technological innovation in American spaceflight and aviation. Oreskes and Conway’s most recent project, The Magic of the Marketplace: The True History of a False Idea, is supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, and they are also working on a project called The Big Myth.

Merchants of Doubt focuses on the history of scientific research, public policy, and corporate marketing and public relations practices in the tobacco, chemicals, and fossil fuel industries. Oreskes and Conway show how corporations in these industries have undermined needed government regulation by paying well-connected scientists like Fred Singer and Fred Seitz to create think tanks, pose as experts, and convince the public that settled scientific research about dangerous products isn’t actually conclusive. This began with tobacco companies like Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds, which publicly denied the clear link between cigarettes and cancer starting in the 1950s. Other corporations and scientists have followed the same playbook ever since. Oreskes and Conway argue that the Cold War made this system possible by bringing atomic scientists into high-level government roles and convincing the public that any government regulation would set the U.S. on a path towards brutal authoritarianism. Virtually all of the “merchants of doubt” were physicists who first rose to prominence and made high-level political connections through Cold War military research. After the Cold War ended, Oreskes and Conway argue, these physicists remained committed to “free market fundamentalism”—or the idea that a totally unregulated free market is the only economic system compatible with democracy and progress. Based on this ideology, the merchants of doubt turned from fighting communism to fighting environmentalism (which remains their principal target today). Over time, the merchants of doubt have entrenched their power by establishing a vast network of corporate-funded think tanks and publications, as well as by weakening government regulatory agencies and broadly convincing the public that there are always multiple sides to any scientific debate. However, Oreskes and Conway also emphasize how researchers and journalists are learning to identify and circumvent doubt-spreading tactics in the 21st century by fact-checking contrarian scientists and reporting on their funding sources.

Since collaborating on Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have written two more books, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014) and The Magic of the Marketplace: The True History of a False Idea (forthcoming as of 2022). Oreskes’s other work focuses on the history of plate tectonics (The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science, 1999) and oceanography (Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean, 2021). Conway’s work focuses on the history of aviation and spaceflight, and his most significant book is Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars (2015). The titular “merchants of doubt” have publicized their claims through dozens of books, including Fred Singer’s frequently republished Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate (1997) and Dixy Lee Ray and Lou Guzzo’s 1990 Trashing the Planet: How Science Can Help Us Deal with Acid Rain, Depletion of the Ozone, and Nuclear Waste (among Other Things). Oreskes and Conway also cite political scientist Bjørn Lomborg as part of a new generation of doubt-mongers. Lomborg is best known for his popular 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Oreskes and Conway’s seventh chapter focuses on the controversy surrounding Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which alerted the public to the dangers associated with widespread pesticide use. The epidemiologist David Michaels looks at the manufacture of doubt in other industries like food science, pharmaceuticals, and sports in The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception (2020). Gale Sinatra and Barbara Hofer explore the psychological roots of doubt in Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do About It (2021). Finally, the issue of science denialism became even more prominent in global public life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Books like medical anthropologist Emily Mendenhall’s Unmasked: COVID, Community and the Case of Okoboji (2022) and Canadian activist Nora Loreto’s Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the COVID-19 Pandemic (2021) show how the same trends Oreskes and Conway explore in Merchants of Doubt have continued to threaten good science policy since the pandemic began.