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

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.