Oreskes and Conway summarize the chapters to follow, in which they will look in depth at Seitz, Singer, and their collaborators’ strategies and effects on government policy over almost four decades. They point out that the merchants of doubt are really one branch of a vast corporate marketing strategy. Moreover, the merchants of doubt largely succeeded because the media and government are often not scientifically literate enough to distinguish legitimate research from confidently-asserted nonsense. In this way, the authors emphasize that many different actors and institutions are all partially responsible for the way the merchants of doubt have undermined good health and economic policy—and all of them must be reformed, in different ways, in order for science to take back its rightful place in public life.