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Steven J. Milloy
Dixy Lee Ray was a zoologist who served as the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission during the Nixon administration and later became the governor of Washington from 1977 to 1981. She was a firm anti-communist and free market fundamentalist and, after retirement, dedicated her time to fighting environmentalism. Most notably, she spread doubt about the dangers of ozone depletion and DDT in her 1990 book Trashing the Planet. While her writings were completely at odds with working scientists’ actual research findings, they gave an air of legitimacy to the contrarian positions of people like Steven Milloy and Fred Singer.
Dixy Lee Ray Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Dixy Lee Ray or refer to Dixy Lee Ray. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 5 Quotes
Scientists are confident they know bad science when they see it. It’s science that is obviously fraudulent—when data have been invented, fudged, or manipulated. Bad science is where data have been cherry-picked—when some data have been deliberately left out—or it’s impossible for the reader to understand the steps that were taken to produce or analyze the data. It is a set of claims that can’t be tested, claims that are based on samples that are too small, and claims that don’t follow from the evidence provided. And science is bad—or at least weak—when proponents of a position jump to conclusions on insufficient or inconsistent data.
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Chapter 7 Quotes
So Sri Lanka didn’t stop using DDT because of what the United States did, or for any other reason. DDT stopped working, but they kept using it anyway. We can surmise why: since DDT had appeared to work at first, officials were reluctant to give it up, even as malaria became resurgent. It took a long time for people to admit defeat—to accept that tiny mosquitoes were in their own way stronger than us. As a WHO committee concluded in 1976, “It is finally becoming acknowledged that resistance is probably the biggest single obstacle in the struggle against vector-borne disease and is mainly responsible for preventing successful malaria eradication in many countries.”
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Dixy Lee Ray Character Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
The timeline below shows where the character Dixy Lee Ray appears in Merchants of Doubt. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4
In 1990, the zoologist and former Washington governor Dixy Lee Ray lent credibility to Singer’s work by citing it in her book, which was an attack...
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Chapter 7
...of the central figures in modern environmentalism. The first person to use this strategy was Dixy Lee Ray , who argued that DDT all but ended malaria in Sri Lanka—until the nation stopped...
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...lobbyist and “junk science” alarmist Steven Milloy worked with entomologist J. Gordon Edwards to repeat Dixy Lee Ray ’s claims—again, without mentioning pesticide resistance. The radio personality Rush Limbaugh, the novelist Michael Crichton,...
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...them through regulation. Thus, people like Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, Robert Jastrow, Bill Nierenberg, and Dixy Lee Ray spread lies about science in order to avoid accepting “the limits of free market capitalism.”...
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Conclusion
...as defending liberty and progress, no matter the cost to the environment. At the extreme, Dixy Lee Ray and Fred Singer accused environmentalists of trying to create a single, global socialist government.
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