- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
From Valley Forge to the Lab: Parallels between Washington's Maneuvers and Drug Development2 weeks ago in The Curious Wavefunction
-
Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.2 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
Course Corrections5 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry
Chemistry is not a world unto itself. It is woven firmly into the fabric of the rest of the world, and various fields, from literature to archeology, thread their way through the chemist's text.
Marketing molecular fear
"A woman can recite the most complicated recipe, but how many can name the ingredients in a headache tablet? If you don't want drugs you know nothing about, take Bufferin...."
This short commercial by actress Joan Fontaine aired in the mid-1960s, an era when Tylenol (acetaminophen) was just gaining market share in the US as a painkiller for adults. I'm fascinated with the way in which it foreshadows the modern trope of avoiding chemicals you can't pronounce, already marketing the molecular fear that now fuels the largely unregulated, 12 billion dollar a year vitamin and nutritional supplement market in the US. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had appeared in 1962, starting a shift towards seeing chemical as a synonym for poison.
Much like the material put out fifty years later by Jospeh Mercola, Dr. Oz and The Food Babe, this ad tacitly assumes people are incapable of understanding science and must rely on experts of some sort. Who you should not trust. And women, no matter how competent within their limited domestic sphere, are even less capable.
4 comments:
Markup Key:
- <b>bold</b> = bold
- <i>italic</i> = italic
- <a href="http://www.fieldofscience.com/">FoS</a> = FoS
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Good video.. And the writing is also unique. I liked it. Best essay writing service
ReplyDeleteYour post will be rather good, and I’m sure some will find it interesting because it’s about a topic that’s as widely discussed as others. Some may even find it useful.Thanks so much for your post.i was looking this blog laminar air flow manufacturers
ReplyDeletelaminar air flow manufacturers
It is hard to name the ingredients in head ache tablet. It shows our careless attitude and we are not bothered about our health. We prefer these pain killers for quick relief from pain. Custom essay writing service is going to conduct a seminar on the topic molecular fear. Please join us.
ReplyDeleteThe other side of this argument is "It's natural so it is safe!" I like to reply- Dhatura, potato seeds, snake venom are all natural.Eat/inject and see how safe they are! And as most chemistry students know, the chemistry of natural products course has the toughest formulae to learn.
ReplyDelete