Article Published: Saturday, August 14, 2004 - 4:17:26 PM PST

<IMG  SRC="http://www.presstelegram.com/images/dpo/3pix.gif" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1" BORDER="0" DATASIZE="43">4,000 scientists challenge Bush
48 Nobel winners also sign paper citing misuse or stifling of advice.
By Matt Crenson
AP National Writer
Last November, President Bush gave physicist Richard Garwin a medal for his
"valuable scientific advice on important questions of national security." Just
three months later, Garwin signed a statement condemning the Bush
administration for allegedly misusing, suppressing and distorting scientific advice. So
far more than 4,000 scientists, including 48 Nobel prize winners, have put their
names to the declaration.

The scientists' statement represents a new development in the uneasy
relationship between science and politics. In the past, individual scientists and
science organizations have occasionally piped up to oppose specific federal
policies such as Ronald Reagan's missile defense plan. But this is the first time
that a broad spectrum of the scientific community has expressed opposition to a
president's overall science policy. Scientists' feud with the Bush
administration, building for almost four years, has intensified this election year. The
White House has sacked prominent scientists from presidential advisory
committees, science advocacy groups have released lengthy catalogues of alleged
scientific abuses by the administration and both sides have traded accusations at
meetings and in the pages of research journals. "People are shocked by what's
going on," said Kurt Gottfried, a Cornell University physicist and chairman of
the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has been in the vanguard of the
campaign against the administration's science policy. Although generally not
political, the group which advocates for use of accurate scientific information in
policy making has occasionally taken liberal positions, such as opposition to
nuclear weapons. Administration officials dismiss the scientists' concerns as
misguided and accuse them of playing politics of attempting to undermine Bush
administration policies by claiming they are based on bad science. "I don't like
to see science exploited for political purposes, and I think that's happening
here," presidential science adviser John H. Marburger III said in a telephone
interview. Some scientists critical of the Bush administration make no secret
that they would like to see the president defeated; four dozen Nobel
laureates have endorsed John Kerry for president.

Bipartisan signers But signers of the declaration include scientists with
ties to both Republican and Democratic administrations: Lewis Branscomb, a
Harvard University professor, headed the federal Bureau of Standards in the Nixon
administration. Russell Train was director of the Environmental Protection
Agency under Presidents Nixon and Ford and supported George H. W. Bush during the
1988 presidential campaign. Physicists Neal Lane and John Gibbons were both
science advisers to President Clinton.

Conflicts the norm Scientists collect evidence and conduct experiments to
arrive at an objective description of reality to describe the world as it is
rather than as we might want it to be. Government, on the other hand, is about
anything but objective truth. It deals with gray areas, competing values, the
allocation of limited resources. It is conducted by debate and negotiation. Far
from striving for ultimate truths, it seeks compromises that a majority can
live with. When these conflicting paradigms come together, disagreements are
inevitable. For example, when a panel of experts, by a 28-0 vote, declared a drug
safe for over-the-counter sales in December, they expected the Food and Drug
Administration to approve it for nonprescription use soon thereafter. But six
months later the agency disagreed, citing a lack of data about the safety of
the drug for 11-to 14-year-old girls. Three physicians on the FDA advisory panel
protested in an editorial published by the New England Journal of Medicine,
claiming the agency was distorting the scientific evidence for political
reasons. The drug in question: a morning-after contraceptive known as Plan B. "A
treatment for any other condition, from hangnail to headache to heart disease,
with a similar record of safety and efficacy would be approved quickly," the
protesting panel members wrote.

The federal government relies on hundreds of scientific and technical panels
for advice on a wide range of policy issues. Advisers range from wildlife
biologists who provide expertise on endangered species to physicists who help
guide the development of new weaponry. Incorporating scientific advice into policy
making involves an implied contract of trust between government officials and
scientists. Scientists trust that their advice will be weighed honestly,
without attempts to distort, deny or refute it. Government officials trust that
scientists will not inject personal opinions or a political agenda into their
advice. In the larger dispute, scientists charge that the Bush administration
has violated its side of the bargain in two ways: By manipulating scientific
information to suit political purposes and by applying a political litmus test to
membership on scientific advisory committees. The conflict usually centers on
scientific advice involving politically contentious subjects such as
reproductive health, drug policy and the environment. Climate scientists, for example,
complain they have been frustrated in their attempts to include full and
accurate information about global warming in official government reports a charge
the administration denies.

Stem cell fight The administration also finds itself at odds with many
medical researchers over use of embryonic stem cells. President Bush, concerned that
harvesting the cells requires the destruction of human embryos, decided in
2001 to restrict federally funded research to a few dozen existing cell lines.
But medical researchers, believing stem cells offer a key to curing many
debilitating diseases, say the decision severely hampers their work. "I don't get
the sense that science was particularly part of the decision making," said
Elizabeth Blackburn, a UC San Francisco biologist. Marburger, Bush's science
adviser, sees it differently: "The really important questions here are ethical
questions; they're not science questions." Democrats further politicized stem cell
research when they invited Ron Reagan, son of the late president, to speak at
their convention in Boston this summer. "We can choose between the future and
the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere
ideology," Reagan said in his speech, urging the audience to "cast a vote for
embryonic stem cell research." In any argument people will emphasize information
that supports their position and ignore contrary evidence, said Roger Pielke,
Jr., a science policy expert at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He calls
the strategy "cherrypicking' and considers it a legitimate debating tactic.
"That is different than actually going out and manufacturing or altering the
scientific process in a way that guarantees the result will agree with your point
of view," Pielke said. Bush's critics say his administration is doing just
that when it screens scientific advisers based on their political views. They
argue that when it comes to science, professional qualifications should trump
party affiliation.

Blackburn became a cause celebre for many scientists who felt her dismissal
from
the President's Council on Bioethics in February was retribution for her
disagreements with the administration over stem cells and other issues. Gerald T.
Keusch, associate dean for global health at Boston University, says he
resigned as director of the National Institute of Health's Fogarty International
Center last year after the administration shot down 19 of his 26 picks for
advisory positions. He said one candidate was turned down because she had served on
the board of a nonprofit organization dedicated to international reproductive
health, another because she supported a woman's right to an abortion. Dr. D.A.
Henderson, a biological weapons expert, said that when President Bush's father
chose him for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, it
didn't matter that he was a Democrat and that his wife was president of Planned
Parenthood of Maryland. All that counted was his expertise. "I can't imagine
that happening today," said Henderson, although he has worked in the last three
administrations and now advises the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Marburger dismisses such notions: "I can say from personal experience that the
accusation of a litmus test that must be met before someone can serve on an
advisory panel is preposterous," he said in an April response to the Union of
Concerned Scientists statement. As proof, he offered himself. He's a Democrat.


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