by Peter W. Huber
"Expert" witnesses claim a luxury car accelerates when you step on the brake, though no defect is ever
found. Whooping cough vaccine, said to cause brain damage and death, is almost removed from the market, though
thirty years of epidemiological studies attest to its safety. Cerebral palsy cases, using electronic fetal monitoring
(EFM) as evidence, flood the courts, despite overwhelming proof that EFM does not reduce birth defects.
Spurious claims such as these, backed by fringe eccentrics whose "research" has no standing in the scientific community, have resulted in astronomical judgments that have bankrupted companies, driven doctors out of practice, and deprived all of us of superior technologies and effective and life-saving therapies.
Peter Huber, an MIT-trained engineer and one of the country's leading experts on liability law, offers a scathing indictment of how legions of case-hardened lawyers have successfully shifted the law from the rule of fact, using professional "expert" witnesses to press unsubstantiated claims on the basis of what nobody but a lawyer would call science. In the let-it-all-in atmosphere of today's courtrooms, lawyers have set off in pursuit of scientific speculators, cranks, and iconoclasts.
Galileo's Revenge documents this peculiarly American phenomenon, showing how ancient rules of evidence do not discriminate between serious science and junk.
"Junk science! Peter Huber's catchy phrase accurately describes the kind of bogus science that increasingly pollutes the minds of ill-educated Americans. Huber's focus is on how junk science has invaded our courts in the form of so-called expert witnesses who for high fees -- as Huber puts it, like hookers in June -- will defend the most arrant nonsense. It would be amusing were it not for lives and medical careers ruined by legal malpractice that promotes medical quackery. Galileo's Revenge is a witty, informed, hard-hitting indictment of ignorant judges and greedy lawyers. Read it and weep." -- Martin Gardner, author of Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus and The New Age
"Peter Huber has become not only the nation's most profound and interesting writer on science and technology but also the foremost scourge of the liability bar. In this inflammatory and enlightening book, Huber avenges Galileo and matches Mencken with a luminous and crushing defense of real science against the cranks, hustlers, alchemists, astrologers, treehuggers, witch- hunters, and hookers with degrees in the 'let-it-all-in' circus that passes for science in the nation's courts. Not only will you not be able to put it down, but when you are through you will want to throw it at a judge." -- George Gilder, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, and author of Microcosm
"This superb book is devastatingly funny, yet it is sad to see so many judges taken in by environmental and health hoaxes with a thin but misleading scientific patina." -- Aaron Wildavsky, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley
"A feisty Peter Huber takes on the Goliaths of medical liability and judicial systems and documents the continuing heresy of pseudoscience and the mistaken post hoc logic of causation and its fringe experts. These have not only distorted justice but are also degrading the quality of the medical care we all receive, at enormous cost to us all." -- John M. Freeman, M.D., Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine