Merchants of Doubt

by

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Frederick Seitz Character Analysis

Along with S. Fred Singer, the physicist Frederick Seitz is one of the two main “merchants of doubt” whose stories stand at the center of Oreskes and Conway’s book. After working on the atomic bomb during World War II, Seitz became a renowned textbook author, then president of the National Academy of Sciences throughout the 1960s and Rockefeller University for most of the 1970s. However, his strong support for free market fundamentalism, nuclear weapons development, and the Vietnam War made him controversial among fellow scientists. After retirement, he founded the George C. Marshall Institute along with William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow, and he became a full-time merchant of doubt. Seitz worked for the tobacco industry, managing a research program designed to create “friendly witnesses” for the industry and show that factors besides smoking were the true causes of conditions like lung cancer. Seitz also played a role in starting the Marshall Institute and publicly defending Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative against fellow scientists. Finally, he spread doubt about secondhand smoke’s health effects and played a role in the campaign to discredit climate change research. In particular, Seitz fueled Fred Singer’s attacks on the climate scientist Ben Santer. Seitz’s success at delaying policy action on a wide range of issues showed Oreskes and Conway that the U.S.’s current political, economic, and media systems tend to reward disinformation and undervalue scientific consensus.

Frederick Seitz Quotes in Merchants of Doubt

The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Frederick Seitz or refer to Frederick Seitz. 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:
Science, Trust, and Public Policy Theme Icon
).
Introduction Quotes

Millions of pages of documents released during tobacco litigation demonstrate these links. They show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. These documents—which have scarcely been studied except by lawyers and a handful of academics—also show that the same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole.

Call it the “Tobacco Strategy.” Its target was science, and so it relied heavily on scientists—with guidance from industry lawyers and public relations experts—willing to hold the rifle and pull the trigger.

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

Over the next half century, the industry did what Hill and Knowlton advised. They created the “Tobacco Industry Research Committee” to challenge the mounting scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco. They funded alternative research to cast doubt on the tobacco-cancer link. They conducted polls to gauge public opinion and used the results to guide campaigns to sway it. They distributed pamphlets and booklets to doctors, the media, policy makers, and the general public insisting there was no cause for alarm.

The industry’s position was that there was “no proof” that tobacco was bad, and they fostered that position by manufacturing a “debate,” convincing the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present “both sides” of it.

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

On one level, then, the scientific process worked. Scientists took the nuclear winter hypothesis seriously, and worked through it, evaluating and improving the assumptions, data, and models supporting it. Along the way, they narrowed the range of potential cooling and the uncertainties involved, and came to a general consensus. Without actually experiencing nuclear war, there would always be quite a lot of “irreducible uncertainty” in the concept—no one denied that—but overall, the first-order effects were resolved. A major nuclear exchange would produce lasting atmospheric effects that would cool the Earth significantly for a period of weeks to months, and perhaps longer. It would not be a good thing.

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), Frederick Seitz, Carl Sagan
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:
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.

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, Dixy Lee Ray, Sherwood Rowland
Page Number: 153-4
Explanation and Analysis:

Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, William Nierenberg, Ronald Reagan
Page Number: 164
Explanation and Analysis:
Conclusion Quotes

Free market fundamentalists can perhaps hold to their views because often they have very little direct experience in commerce or industry. The men in our story all made their careers in programs and institutions that were either directly created by the federal government or largely funded by it. Robert Jastrow spent the lion’s share of his career at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies—part of NASA. Frederick Seitz and Bill Nierenberg launched their careers in the atomic weapons programs, and expanded them at universities whose research activities were almost entirely funded by the federal government at taxpayer expense. Fred Singer worked directly for the government, first at the National Weather Satellite Service, later in the Department of Transportation. If government is bad and free markets are good, why did they not reject government support for their own research and professional positions and work in the private sector?

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, William Nierenberg, Robert Jastrow
Page Number: 250
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Merchants of Doubt LitChart as a printable PDF.
Merchants of Doubt PDF

Frederick Seitz Quotes in Merchants of Doubt

The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Frederick Seitz or refer to Frederick Seitz. 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:
Science, Trust, and Public Policy Theme Icon
).
Introduction Quotes

Millions of pages of documents released during tobacco litigation demonstrate these links. They show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. These documents—which have scarcely been studied except by lawyers and a handful of academics—also show that the same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole.

Call it the “Tobacco Strategy.” Its target was science, and so it relied heavily on scientists—with guidance from industry lawyers and public relations experts—willing to hold the rifle and pull the trigger.

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

Over the next half century, the industry did what Hill and Knowlton advised. They created the “Tobacco Industry Research Committee” to challenge the mounting scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco. They funded alternative research to cast doubt on the tobacco-cancer link. They conducted polls to gauge public opinion and used the results to guide campaigns to sway it. They distributed pamphlets and booklets to doctors, the media, policy makers, and the general public insisting there was no cause for alarm.

The industry’s position was that there was “no proof” that tobacco was bad, and they fostered that position by manufacturing a “debate,” convincing the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present “both sides” of it.

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

On one level, then, the scientific process worked. Scientists took the nuclear winter hypothesis seriously, and worked through it, evaluating and improving the assumptions, data, and models supporting it. Along the way, they narrowed the range of potential cooling and the uncertainties involved, and came to a general consensus. Without actually experiencing nuclear war, there would always be quite a lot of “irreducible uncertainty” in the concept—no one denied that—but overall, the first-order effects were resolved. A major nuclear exchange would produce lasting atmospheric effects that would cool the Earth significantly for a period of weeks to months, and perhaps longer. It would not be a good thing.

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), Frederick Seitz, Carl Sagan
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:
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.

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, Dixy Lee Ray, Sherwood Rowland
Page Number: 153-4
Explanation and Analysis:

Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, William Nierenberg, Ronald Reagan
Page Number: 164
Explanation and Analysis:
Conclusion Quotes

Free market fundamentalists can perhaps hold to their views because often they have very little direct experience in commerce or industry. The men in our story all made their careers in programs and institutions that were either directly created by the federal government or largely funded by it. Robert Jastrow spent the lion’s share of his career at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies—part of NASA. Frederick Seitz and Bill Nierenberg launched their careers in the atomic weapons programs, and expanded them at universities whose research activities were almost entirely funded by the federal government at taxpayer expense. Fred Singer worked directly for the government, first at the National Weather Satellite Service, later in the Department of Transportation. If government is bad and free markets are good, why did they not reject government support for their own research and professional positions and work in the private sector?

Related Characters: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway (speaker), S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, William Nierenberg, Robert Jastrow
Page Number: 250
Explanation and Analysis: