Political Science By DANIEL SMITH September 4, 2005
When Donald Kennedy, a biologist and editor of the eminent journal Science, was asked what had led so many American scientists to feel that George W. Bush's administration is anti-science, he isolated a familiar pair of culprits: climate change and stem cells. These represent, he said, ''two solid issues in which there is a real difference between a strong consensus in the science community and the response of the administration to that consensus.'' Both issues have in fact riled scientists since the early days of the administration, and both continue to have broad repercussions. In March 2001, the White House abruptly withdrew its support for the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, and the U.S. withdrawal was still a locus of debate at this summer's G8 summit in Scotland. And the administration's decision to limit federal funds for embryonic-stem-cell research four years ago -- a move that many scientists worry has severely hampered one of the most fruitful avenues of biomedical inquiry to come along in decades -- resulted in a shift in the dynamics of financing, from the federal government to the states and private institutions. In November 2004, Californians voted to allocate $3 billion for stem-cell research in what was widely characterized as a ''scientific secession.'' Yet what remains most divisive, according to Kennedy, is not the Bush administration's specific policies, but a more general sense that ''scientific conclusions, reached either within agencies or by people outside of government, are being changed for political reasons by people who have not done the scientific work.'' It is this sense that science is being ''misused'' that has given rise to two Congressional bills. In late June, Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, introduced the Restore Scientific Integrity in Federal Research and Policymaking bill. Many on the right interpreted the move as little more than a clever bit of partisan grandstanding. ''This all comes out of the Kerry campaign's attempt to spin the legitimate efforts of the administration to monitor scientific reports,'' Robert Walker, a Republican lobbyist and former chairman of the House Science Committee, told me. Even scientists, the ostensible beneficiaries of the bill, expressed little enthusiasm. ''It won't get very far,'' said Kurt Gottfried, a Cornell physicist and chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, based in Cambridge, Mass., which has been highly critical of the Bush administration. ''We've come to have a cynical attitude about what can happen in this government.'' Both sides have reason to be skeptical. The bill -- which aims to put an end to the censorship and alteration of government scientific information and to the application of litmus tests in making advisory appointments -- is nearly identical to one introduced in February by Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, that has been languishing in the House. And though Durbin's bill is also sponsored by such formidable Democratic figures as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, it has about as much chance as Waxman's does of becoming law. Yet, as some have noted, the mere fact that it has appeared in the Senate points to the deep political rift over differences between the scientific community and the White House. The notion that there is a widespread ''misuse'' of science first gained its force from a series of instances in which administration officials have, as Gottfried and others see it, ''broken with an unwritten code of scientific conduct.'' Two of these instances, widely publicized by watchdog groups and reporters, have taken on almost metonymic significance. In 2002, William R. Miller, a prominent psychologist, was asked during an interview for a position on a National Institutes of Health advisory panel on drug abuse if he had voted for Bush. He replied that he had not. He was subsequently denied the appointment. (The administration maintains that the decision was made for other reasons.) Then, in June 2003, The New York Times reported that White House officials had demanded that a reference to a study in an Environmental Protection Agency report showing sharp increases in global temperatures be replaced by a reference to a study financed in part by the American Petroleum Institute that questioned those increases. According to a widely circulated internal memo, switching the studies and deleting other references to the human contribution to global climate change would have meant that the report no longer accurately represented scientific consensus. Rather than make the changes, the E.P.A. removed the entire section on global warming from its report, which focused solely on the environment. In and of themselves, neither of these instances was unusual; all administrations, according to Daniel Sarewitz, a former Congressional staff member and director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, seek to some extent to mold scientific evidence to fit their political agendas. But scientists like Gottfried contend that the ''scope and intensity'' of the episodes under Bush are unprecedented. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/magazine/04SCIENCE.html?ex=1283486400&en=db44d8e77dacc23d&ei=5088 Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _______________________________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
