Galileo's revenge

"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 M.I.T.-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. "One way to dishonor Galileo is to imprison him for heresy," Huber writes. "Another, quite as effective, is to teach his views side by side with those of astrologers and. Mystics." Galileo's Revenge documents this peculiarly American phenomenon, showing how ancient rules of evidence do not discriminate between serious science and junk.