culprits in disease.

It is undoubtedly true that pollutants and industrial

wastes are the immediate physiological causes of cancers, miners' black
lung, textile workers' brown lung, and a host of other disorders.
Moreover, it is undoubtedly true that there are trace amounts of cancercausing substances even in the best of our food and water unpolluted by
pesticides and herbicides that make farm workers sick. But to say that
pesticides cause the death of farm workers or that cotton fibers cause brown
lung in textile workers is to make a fetish out of inanimate objects. We must
distinguish between agents and causes. Asbestos fibers and pesticides are
the agents of disease and disability, but it is illusory to suppose that if we
eliminate these particular irritants that the diseases will go away, for other
similar irritants will take their place. So long as efficiency, the maximization
of profit from production, or the filling of centrally planned norms of
production without reference to the means remain the motivating forces of
productive enterprises the world over, so long as people are trapped by
economic need or state regulation into production and consumption of
certain things, then one pollutant will replace another. Regulatory agencies
or central planning departments will calculate cost and benefit ratios where
human misery is costed out at a dollar value. Asbestos and cotton lint fibers
are not the causes of cancer. They are the agents of social causes, of social
formations that determine the nature of our productive and consumptive
lives, and in the end it is only through changes in those social forces that we
can get to the root of problems of health. The transfer of causal power from
social relations into inanimate agents that then seem to have a power and life
of their own is one of the major mystifications of science and its ideologies.
Just as pollution is the most modern and up-to-date version of the external
hostile forces of the physical world that are said to confront us, so simple
internal forces, the genes, are now held responsible not only for human
health in its normal medical sense but for a variety of social problems,
among them alcoholism, criminality, drug addiction, and mental disorders.
We are assured that if we could only find those genes that underlie
alcoholism or the genes that have gone awry when we get cancer, then our
problems will be over. The current manifestation of that belief in the
importance of our inheritance in determining health and disease is the
human genome sequencing project, a multibillion-dollar program of