Most people know the Church forced Galileo to recant his \blasphemy"" after he asserted the Earth rotates around the sun, and that John T. Scopes was convicted in 1925 of teaching evolution in a Tennessee classroom.
We like to think ours is a more enlightened age, where science is unrestrained by hidden agendas and influences. But the current presidential administration has caused people to question their naivet??.
Last Saturday in Fayetteville, Ark., the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing convened a panel to examine the degree to which presidential administrations have influenced federal science policies. Though the panelists didn't agree on the extent of the problem, each agreed the system must be monitored-the media have to be vigilant and the public has to be informed.
The first panelist was Dr. Kurt Gottfried, professor emeritus of physics at Cornell University. Gottfried co-founded the bipartisan Union of Concerned Scientists, which protests the way the Bush administration ""manipulat[es] the process through which science enters into its decisions."" UCS's membership includes more than 5,000 scientists, among them Nobel laureates and recipients of the National Medal of Science.
Gottfried pointed to high-level defections from Bush's administration, including Eric Schaeffer, who resigned from the EPA in protest in 2002. Gottfried also quoted Michael Kelly, a biologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who stepped down in protest this year.
""I speak for many of my fellow biologists who are embarrassed and disgusted by the agency's apparent misuse of science,"" Kelly wrote at the time.
Gottfried said previous administrations were more open with science policy, and he lauded Ronald Reagan for giving then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop the freedom to wage a high-profile campaign against AIDS, allowing 'condom' to become a household word in the process.
""I don't think the current administration would allow that,"" he said. ""The way it interferes with scientists' traditional collaboration has led at least one researcher to compare it to how the Soviet Union clamped down on science during the Cold War.""
Gottfried referred to the FDA's refusal this year to approve Plan B, also called the Morning After pill, a contraceptive that would prevent pregnancy if taken up to 72 hours after unprotected sex. Though the FDA's own advisory panel voted 23-4 to approve it, Steven Galson, acting director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, overruled the suggestion. Galson cited the lack of safety data for girls 14 and under as the reason for his veto.
Fellow panelist Lawrence Bachorik, the FDA's Associate Commissioner for Public Affairs, said he couldn't discuss the Plan B negotiations, but said regardless of perception, the FDA is committed to providing consumer safety. He pointed to ongoing FDA efforts to modify food labeling to combat obesity.
""When we changed food labels in 1994, people focused on how much fat they were eating, but they never counted calories. We're proposing changing food labels to make calories more prominent,"" a deed he said shows the agency's willingness to act in the public interest even before the public demands action.
Panelist Curt Suplee acknowledged that federal agencies are not encouraged to act independently. Suplee is the director of the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs in the National Science Foundation, the federal arm that funds approved science research. Making clear that he spoke only for himself and not as a government agent, Suplee said he was once told to ""add more Christian evangelicals to the review boards"" that decide whether to fund a particular project. This came despite rules allowing only Ph.D. scientists on those boards; also, it is illegal for him to even ask about a reviewer's religious affiliation. That suggestion was short-lived.
So what does this mean for us? Scientific policies have grown increasingly questionable, from the government's insistence that global warming is only a figment of the media's imagination, to its refusal to approve Plan B contraception, to its position of flimsy cooperation on stem cell research. The panelists said we as citizens can do two things:
1. Remain informed-an informed electorate wields power. When the government makes scientific claims, think skeptically about hidden influences. For example, when the USDA releases the updated food pyramid, which suggests how many servings of what we should eat each day, question whether eggs are on the list because they're truly healthful or because the egg industry lobbied vigorously to ensure its product would remain prominently listed. (The egg industry was one of many that did.)
2. Make your voice heard. It's easy for the government to ignore us, but uncompromising pressure will have an effect. You can support groups like UCS with just your signature or you can join local campus watchdog groups.
Demanding high standards is important, more so with an administration that remains unresponsive even to the pleas of Nobel laureates. Still, we have to maintain optimism, and we have to be willing to work toward recreating the separation that should exist between science and state.
Dinesh Ramde is a graduate student in journalism. E-mail him at dramde@wisc.edu.
