DDRI: Late 20th-Century Consumer Advocacy and the Uses of Science: An Historical Study of Public Citizen's Health Research Group

这篇论文项目由美国国家科学基金会的科学、技术和社会计划支持，考察了公共公民健康研究小组(PCHRG)的历史。调查PCHRG是由拉尔夫·纳德和西德尼·沃尔夫创立的一个小型、有影响力的消费者权益倡导组织，是一种在20世纪末不断变化的社会、政治和经济气候中探索消费者运动对科学和科学知识政策辩论的影响的方法。该项目仔细审查了该小组在其存在的35年中处理的一些问题，之所以选择这些问题，是因为这些问题对本组织的内部演变具有重要意义，以及更广泛地说，这些问题反映了消费者倡导作为这一时期影响科学辩论、科学政策和以科学为基础的社会和经济政策的模式的前景和局限性的方式。该项目采用了三种社会科学研究方法：档案研究、口述历史和关键线人访谈。这项研究将美国历史文献中两个不同的重点领域结合在一起，借鉴了经济和政治历史学家的工作，他们在整个20世纪辩论了消费者运动在确保政治改革方面的有效性，以及科学和健康历史学家，他们研究了工业发展、消费社会、科学和健康的接口。科学文献的历史表明，美国政治经济、科学理论和研究的演变以及疾病性质和分布的变化是相互联系和相互影响的现象。这个项目将探索20世纪末的改革者如何利用消费政治来试图影响这种影响的性质和方向。政府在监管科学研究中产生的技术、技术和化学品方面的作用仍然存在争议。该项目的另一个目标是考虑如何在保持美国在快速转型和竞争激烈的全球经济中的地位的挑战与国民健康、福祉和环境可持续发展的目标之间取得平衡。这个项目记录了一群主要的消费者权益倡导者的努力，有助于引发关于美国监管的性质和目的、它与科学的复杂关系，以及消费主义作为塑造科学和政策的一股力量的效力的辩论。

This dissertation project, supported by the Science, Technology & Society program at NSF, examines the history of the Public Citizen Health Research Group (PCHRG). Investigating PCHRG--a small, influential consumer advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader and Sidney Wolfe--is a means for exploring the effects of the consumer movement on science and science-informed policy debates within the shifting social, political, and economic climate of the late 20th century. The project examines closely a number of the issues taken up by the Group over the 3½ decades of its existence, selected for their importance to the organization's internal evolution and, more broadly, the ways they reflect the prospects for and limitations on consumer advocacy as a mode of shaping scientific debate, science policy, and science-based social and economic policies in this period. The project employs three methods of social science research: archival research, oral history, and key informant interviews. This research binds together two distinct areas of focus within the literature of American history, drawing on work by economic and political historians who have debated the effectiveness of consumer movements in securing political reforms throughout the 20th century, and historians of science and health who have studied the interfaces of industrial development, consumer society, science, and health. The history of science literature has shown that American political economy, the evolution of scientific theory and research, and the changing nature and distribution of disease are linked and mutually influential phenomena. This project will explore how reformers in the late 20th century used consumer politics in an attempt to affect the nature and direction of that influence. The role of government in regulating the techniques, technologies, and chemicals that issue from scientific research remains contested. A further goal of the project is to consider ways to reconcile the challenges of maintaining America's standing in a rapidly transforming and competitive global economy with ends of national health, well-being and environmental sustainability. By chronicling the efforts of a leading group of consumer advocates, this project contributes to debates about the character and purpose of American regulation, its complex relation to science, and the efficacy of consumerism as a force in shaping science and policy.