Harriet A. Washington — A Terrible Thing to Waste
41 published claims from this book.
- A large share of herbal supplements are secretly adulterated with undisclosed pharmaceuticals
- A small average IQ drop hugely swells rates of disability and shrinks giftedness
- Adding iodine to salt closed a 15-point IQ gap cheaply
- Black mothers’ self-sacrifice was recast as negative stereotype
- Claiming IQ gaps are immutable functions as a self-fulfilling excuse for inaction
- Commercial baby food commonly contains lead exceeding federal limits
- Convergent correlational evidence should justify action absent perfect scientific certainty
- Courts dismissed racial motivation in toxic siting despite strong circumstantial evidence
- Environmental justice activism today parallels the civil rights movement’s uphill struggle
- Erring toward banning suspect chemicals is far less costly than erring toward permitting them
- Eugenic ideology suppressed research into infectious causes of low IQ
- Extremely tiny PCB concentrations cause permanent fetal brain and IQ damage
- Flint’s lead-contaminated water caused hundreds of excess fetal deaths and miscarriages
- Foods labeled ‘generally recognized as safe’ are often never actually tested for safety
- Genetic causation of a trait does not imply the trait is unchangeable
- Hundreds of thousands of minority students attend schools near toxic contaminated sites
- Industry chose profitable lead additives over safe unpatentable alternatives
- Intelligence is malleable and shaped by environment, not fixed by heredity
- Iodine deficiency is a major unrecognized cause of lowered intelligence
- Iodizing salt in 1924 closed a 15-point IQ gap cheaply
- IQ testing’s inventor never intended it to measure fixed innate intelligence
- Lead poisoning costs the US billions of dollars and millions of IQ points yearly
- Mixed-race children’s IQ tracks rearing environment, not racial genetics
- Monsanto knew decades early its PCB dumping was lethally toxic and hid it
- Officials sited toxic PCB dumping in a black county despite contrary scientific criteria
- Perceived safety, including from nature, physiologically switches off chronic stress responses
- Population IQ scores have risen rapidly over decades, refuting fixed-IQ claims
- Pre-market chemical safety testing would save more than it costs
- Race, not chance, determined toxic waste site placement in Houston
- Race, not income, best predicts where toxic waste sites are located
- Rapid IQ gains from reduced disease burden rule out genetic explanations
- Researchers actively steered black children into lead-tainted homes for a study
- Tens of thousands of US industrial chemicals remain untested for human harm
- Testing policy alone, not genetics, determines who is labeled gifted
- The ‘crack baby’ epidemic was a myth that stigmatized black mothers for years
- The lead industry blamed child victims and parents rather than its own product
- The precautionary principle should override demands for exhaustive proof before acting
- Tiny prenatal chemical doses harm fetuses while equal adult doses cause no effect
- Toxocara canis infection lowers IQ independent of socioeconomic and racial factors
- US law requires proof of racist intent, not just disparate impact, to win
- US regulation demands proof of harm before restricting industrial chemicals