From: reh@juliet.caltech.edu (Rachel E. Hull)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Short: The Surgeon General Warns...
Date: 10 Jun 1995 22:46 PDT


Well, it had to happen someday, and here it is. Mulder and Scully debate 
the evidence for and against health risks in smoking.

Of course, the X-Files and the characters Dana Scully, Fox Mulder, and
the Cigarette Smoking Man are the creations of Chris Carter and the
property of Fox Broadcasting Company and Ten-Thirteen productions; used
without permission...etc. No stepping upon of copyrighted toes is
intended.

Oh, and while I'm at it, I should mention that the arguments, structure,
and even much of the wording of this are shamelessly stolen from a
sidebar accompanying an article by Steven B. Harris, M.D., entitled "The
AIDS Heresies: A Case Study in Skepticism Taken Too Far," appearing in
*The Skeptic,* (Vol. 3, No. 2, 1995). The sidebar itself was entitled "A
Dialogue in Inductive Frustration." I've really only added a bit of
characterization here and there, and peppered it with Mulderisms and
Scullyisms. Now it's mine.

I considered making this a dialogue between Mulder and the Smoking Man
himself, but decided that the Smoking Man simply doesn't talk this
much...nor would he go to such lengths to explain himself. Of course,
now I'm in the rather untenable position of having Scully--a medical
doctor--defend smoking.

Enjoy. Please send flowers and chocolate (or rotten tomatoes and old
shoes) to REHULL@STUDENTS.WISC.EDU, not to Caltech. Please be
gentle...it's my first time.
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Proxy Variable
or:
The Surgeon General Warns...

     Mulder and Scully were eating ribs one day when Mulder remarked
that he wanted to be there on the day "that black-lunged son of a bitch"
died in a paroxysm of coughing, since his cigarette habit was surely
increasing his chances of lung cancer.
     "Prove it," she challenged, just to keep in practice.
     "Well," Mulder began, "the Surgeon General and a lot of scientists
and doctors say you should quit...."
     "Mulder!" chided Scully, "Since when did you become a fan of the
Argument from Authority? There are plenty of scientists who don't
believe that smoking causes cancer."
     "Sure, but all those scientists are paid by tobacco companies or
grants from the Tobacco Institute," Mulder protested, "You can't trust
them."
     "Well, what do you expect?" she said, as they watched a man at a
nearby table light up and take a satisfying drag. "You of all people
should know that whenever scientists take an anti-establishment
position, funding is cut off. Nobody but the Tobacco Institute will
support their research. Surely you'd be the last person to expect them
to abandon their research just because they hold unpopular opinions?"
     "Okay, let's look at the data," Mulder said. "What about the fact
that 90% of lung cancer occurs in smokers?"
     "Yes, but that doesn't say much. After all, 90% of all UFO
sightings can be attributed to swamp gas," answered Scully ironically.
"The flip side of your statistic is that 10% of lung cancer occurs in
non-smokers. Obviously your hypothesis doesn't plausibly explain all
lung cancer. Even for smokers there must be other significant variables.
My own grandfather smoked three packs a day right up to the day he was
hit by a drunk driver at the age of 92. A lot of people smoke for a
whole lifetime and never get cancer."
     "Look, I'm sorry about your grandfather, Scully," said Mulder,
wiping a bit of barbecue sauce off her chin, "but I didn't say the
correlation was perfect, though it is certainly there. Two-pack-a-day
people have 13 times the lung cancer risk of non-smokers."
     "Where are you getting those numbers, Mulder?" Her eyes bugged out
just the *tiniest* little bit. "Are you saying the *government*
conducted an experiment where they assembled a group of non-smokers and
randomized half of them to start smoking, and the other half to stay
smoke-free, and then make sure each and every subject did as told for
the next 40 years, so as not to bias the results? That's incredible--not
to mention unethical! I must've missed that study," she said wryly.
     "I dunno." He grinned playfully. "In the absence of any other
plausible explanation...it's a novel theory." He shook his head. "No,
Scully, I agree that an experiment like that would be impossible, since
you can't control a random protocol like that. People will start smoking
or stop on their own."
     "So you admit you don't have any proof...you don't know of any
scientifically controlled experiment where the smokers and nonsmokers
are exactly equivalent in every variable except smoking behavior?" She
folded her arms across her chest. "In every experiment that I know of,
the smokers and the nonsmokers are self-selected for their behavior and
bound to be different not only in smoking behavior, but also because of
whatever made them smoke or not smoke to begin with, right?! Science
that inexact won't even make Beakman's World, Mulder."
     "But you can't deny that when smokers quit, we know their risk of
dying drops," Mulder retorted hotly.
     "You mean with regard to the smokers who don't quit? So what? The
people who quit smoking did so for a reason other than chance or the
experimental flip of a coin; that means that variables other than
smoking behavior are at work. Besides, did you know that for the first
year after quitting, the risk of death for a new quitter actually goes
up with regard to his fellow smokers who keep right on smoking?"
     "Boy, you really *do* watch the Learning Channel, Scully," said
Mulder admiringly--and grudgingly--"but that's easily explainable. The
mortality goes up for the quitter group for a while only because the
people who quit often do so because they are already quite sick."
     "If so that makes my point about self-selection, doesn't it? You're
saying that in that first year of quitting, the higher death rate of
quitters is caused by another factor in our study other than smoking--
namely, sickness. Well, so long as we're talking about third factors, I
have a hunch that stress causes cancer, and stressed-out people take up
smoking to try to relieve the stress, and that's why there's a higher
incidence of cancer in smokers. Moreover, maybe the act of quitting
stresses people out, and that's really why quitters die faster in that
first year after quitting. Smoking is just a marker for stress--what
scientists call a 'proxy variable.'"
     As always when confronted by better logic than his own, Mulder
began to revert to temper-tantrum mode. He shouted hoarsely, "This is
ridiculous! You're just using your intellect to make yourself believe
something you want to believe for other reasons. There is experimental
evidence! How much will it take for you to believe, Scully? Smoking
causes lung cancer in lab animals! Are THEY stressed?"
     "Actually, yes--have you ever seen one of those rabbits with a
leather muzzle over its nose, and a cigarette stuck in it which it can't
take out? It's not tobacco smoke, it's stress: that would be bad for the
rabbits. In any case, I don't even believe that there's ever been a
report of an experiment in which smoking causes lung cancer in animals."
     Convinced that the Truth is out there, Mulder later went back to
research the scientific literature. And he found...nothing. As Scully
suggested, there is in fact no such report; at least, not anymore.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Flame trollers beware:
Don't try to figure out the author's position on smoking. It's
irrelevant; this story is supposed to be funny. So light(en) up. :-)

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Rachel Hull
REH@JULIET.CALTECH.EDU
Research Associate, Caltech Office of Public Events
and
REHULL@STUDENTS.WISC.EDU
Chief Virtual Bodyguard and Official Noggin Polisher of the MPPB
Bolz Center for Arts Administration, UW-Madison Graduate School of Business

"Any society that scorns excellence in plumbing because it is a humble 
profession and rewards mediocrity in philosophy because it is an exalted 
profession is doomed to failure: neither its pipes nor its ideas will 
hold water."
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