Walker: "I nearly bought a wool jumper in town. £140. Nice work if you can get it." Farmer: "I got about £2 for the fleece." Walker: "£2?" Farmer: "Per sheep, per year. Clipped it off her in two minutes, rolled it, bagged it, drove it to the depot. The cheque for the whole flock didn't cover the diesel." Walker: "Then who's getting the £140?" Farmer: "Not me, not the shearer. He costs me more per sheep than the wool fetches. I pay to have it taken off." Walker: "So you lose money shearing." Farmer: "Every year. And I can't not shear, or she cooks in July and the flies eat her alive. The wool's a welfare job that used to be an income." Walker: "Sell it yourself, then. Cut out the middleman." Farmer: "Not allowed. By law it goes through the board. Has done since 1950. I can keep a fleece for the wife to knit with, and that's about the extent of my freedom." Walker: "So where does it go?" Farmer: "Washed in Bradford, if we're lucky. Shipped to China, spun, knitted, shipped back, and sold to you with a label about heritage. By the time it's in the window there are eleven people between us and I'm the only one who met the sheep." Walker: "That's mad." Farmer: "My grandfather paid the rent on the wool cheque. I pay a man to take it away. Same sheep, same hill, same jumper in the window. Only the price of the farmer went down." Walker: "What would fix it?" Farmer: "You buying the jumper. And asking them where the other £138 went."

Every time the science has been settled, somebody paid for the settlement, and the bill has a name on it. 1747: James Lind cures scurvy with lemons. The Navy keeps it settled as a disease of damp air for forty-eight years and loses more sailors to it than to the French. 1799: Bleeding is settled. George Washington is drained of nearly half his blood for a sore throat and is dead by evening. 1847: Childbed fever is settled as bad air. Ignaz Semmelweis washes his hands and the deaths on his ward fall from one mother in ten to one in a hundred. He is sacked, committed, and beaten to death in an asylum. 1915: Pellagra is settled as an infection. Joseph Goldberger proves it is the corn diet of the poor by injecting himself with sufferers' blood. The South keeps the corn, and 100,000 Americans die of it. 1941: The lobotomy is settled, and about to win a Nobel. Rosemary Kennedy, twenty-three, is left unable to walk or speak, one of 40,000 Americans put under the pick. 1956: The pregnancy X-ray is settled as harmless. Alice Stewart shows one scan doubles a child's chance of cancer. She loses her funding and the scans run for another quarter century. 1961: Thalidomide is settled as safe for morning sickness. Ten thousand babies. 1971: DES is settled as a pregnancy protector. The daughters of the women who took it develop a cancer nobody has seen before. 1972: Sugar is settled as harmless. John Yudkin writes that it is not, and the fat men and the sugar men end his career between them. 1984: Fat is settled as the killer, and a generation of mothers swaps the butter for a tub of oil. 2004: Vioxx is settled as a safe painkiller. Up to 140,000 heart attacks before it is pulled. The science was settled every single time. The only thing it ever settled was who took the blame afterwards.