BPA: Theory v. Empiricism
Tonight the NYTimes has an article on bisphenol A (BPA) headlined: "In Feast of Data on BPA Plastic, No Final Answer". It's a very good overview of the current status of the research on BPA; which is to say that despite the hyperbolic claims of some there's precious little evidence that BPA causes harm in humans.
Is there a tsunami of literature showing that on a molecular level cells sometimes adapt to BPA? Sure. Is there evidence that these changes lead to any harm? Not so much.
So what's going on? What's going on is a very public battle between theory, hatched from conventional thinking about what constitutes an endocrine and how it should work, and what we witness in the world - i.e. dramatically decreased morbidity and mortality among inhabitants of modern economies exposed to lots of BPA - and no evidence of an excess of morbidity or mortality for those exposed to more, rather than less, BPA.
Much is at stake in this contest. Will the effort to turn scientific research into a sort of blue collar affair in which statistical tools supplant genius be successful? Or will modern research efforts, bounded by old paradigms, be overcome by the simple collection of observations and the unanticipated spark of induction that leads us to a wholly new understanding? It's part of a larger political battle and this time everyone's pulling out all the stops. One side or the other will lose and lose big. Moneywise I'm long on the empiricists.
