Letters

Science in the courtroom

"Courting Reliable Science" (SN: 4/18/98, p. 249) gives scant attention to what causes the problem of junk science: the economics of the legal industry.

The cases typically involve lawsuits against companies with "deep pockets." Total costs of litigation to all parties substantially exceed actual payments to the "victims." The system allows lawyers to use every possible legal tactic to promote their case: delay, obfuscation, distortion, suppression of unfavorable information, questionable experts, and so on. With few exceptions, these tactics generate added fees for the lawyers using them or for the other side's lawyers.

The final cost of the process is astronomical and produces decisions often indistinguishable from random. While the situation is obviously a magnet for scoundrels, many lawyers are honest and hardworking and struggle daily with these issues.

We need to stop making lawyer jokes and recognize that this systemic problem exerts a massively negative economic impact. Given the legal industry's close ties with government, perhaps more leadership needs to come from science and academia.

Adam L. Carley
Windham, N.H.

The view of science as "an unending search for explanations" that allows "the luxury of putting off a conclusion to await further research" is an overly academic one. In particular, scientists working in industry must routinely make irrevocable decisions based on the limited data available at the moment.

Maybe we should look to the industrial scientist, rather than the science professor, for an appropriate model of the scientific expert.

Randall Marrett
Assistant Professor of Structural Geology
University of Texas
Austin, Texas

To be meaningful, scientific testimony requires jurors who are capable of understanding it; expert witnesses who do not carry on so long, or in such detail, that they stupefy even jurors who can understand it; unbiased jurors with no ax to grind; and jurors who weigh the scientific arguments at least as much as they weigh the emotional appeals.

K.A. Boriskin
Bellingham, Mass.

Longer half-life for titanium-44

I read your article on the half-life of titanium-44 ("A half-life for titanium," SN: 4/25/98, p. 271). The question as to the actual value of this half-life has been of much current interest. In fact, in addition to the two articles you referred to, our group just published a paper reporting a value of 62±2 years for its half-life.

Our paper was submitted prior to those two and appeared in the April Physical Review C.

Eric B. Norman
Senior Scientist
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, Calif.

 

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Table of Contents -- June 6, 1998

copyright 1998 Science Service