The Numerology of Toxicology: How Bad Science Travels into the Regulatory Domain

Scientific literature is routinely shaped, and sometimes outright manufactured, by parties with a commercial stake in the conclusions. Studies designed to defend a product’s efficacy or safety often acquire an outsized regulatory presence, circulating across jurisdictions and becoming load-bearing references for decisions made by agencies around the world. Once embedded, such studies can prove remarkably durable, continuing to anchor regulatory judgments long after their weaknesses are known.

Here I trace one such trajectory in detail: a case study of a widely used herbicide whose underlying safety studies penetrated regulatory regimes globally despite serious methodological and ethical problems. Following these studies from their origin into the decisions they came to support reveals how readily flawed evidence can be laundered into authoritative fact.

From that case study, I take up  a more general question: how did toxicology, as a discipline, come to rely on frameworks and risk-assessment defaults that began as essentially self-admitted arbitrary numerical choices half a century ago, yet still persist in regulatory standards worldwide? I argue that confronting the contingent, even numerological, origins of these conventions reveals just how arbitrary they are, and how much of the real risk they fail to capture.

Speaker: Sasha Kaurov, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

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