Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.
The audience was polled prior to the debate, but the results have little to say about the merits of the question. The motion itself is flawed, as either a vote for or against could well prevent the assumed underlying goal of strengthening the science base on which public health policy decisions are made. The motion implies that one should choose either weak epidemiology data or mechanistic information. However, both mechanistic data and epidemiological findings are often suggestive, but not conclusive, when taken alone. With this in mind, it seems imprudent to discard one set of inconclusive data for another set of inconclusive data.