New York Times: At a Scientific Gathering, U.S. Policies Are Lamented

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Sun, 19 Feb 2006 17:37:05 -0500

NEW YORK TIMES - SUPPRESSION OF SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM

 

 

 

 

The New York Times

 

February 19, 2006

At a Scientific Gathering, U.S. Policies Are Lamented

By CORNELIA DEAN

 

 

ST. LOUIS, Feb. 18 — David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning

biologist and president of the California Institute of Technology, is

used to the Bush administration misrepresenting scientific findings to

support its policy aims, he told an audience of fellow researchers

Saturday. Each time it happens, he said, " I shrug and say, 'What do

you expect?' "

 

But then, Dr. Baltimore went on, he began to read about the

administration's embrace of the theory of the unitary executive, the

idea that the executive branch has the power or even the obligation to

act without restraint from Congress. And he began to see in a new

light widely reported episodes of government scientists being

restricted in what they could say in public.

 

" It's no accident that we are seeing such an extensive suppression of

scientific freedom, " he said. " It's part of the theory of government

now, and it's a theory we need to vociferously oppose. " Far from

twisting science to suit its own goals, he said, the government should

be " the guardian of intellectual freedom. "

 

Dr. Baltimore spoke at a session here at the annual meeting of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science. Though it was

organized too late for inclusion in the overall meeting catalogue, the

session drew hundreds of scientists who crowded a large meeting room

and applauded enthusiastically as speakers denounced administration

policies they said threatened not just sound science but also the

nation's research pre-eminence.

 

The session was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a

nonprofit organization that has been highly critical of the Bush

administration.

 

Not all of the speakers had harsh words for the administration. Rita

R. Colwell, who headed the National Science Foundation, the

government's leading financing organization for the physical sciences,

from 1998 to 2004, said she had never experienced political pressure

in that job. But, Dr. Colwell said, the free flow of scientific

information is crucial for maintaining the nation's leadership in

research. Threats to that, she said, are second only to terrorism as

threats to the nation's security.

 

Another speaker, Susan F. Wood, former director of the office of

women's health at the Food and Drug Administration, said

administration interference with the agency's scientific and

regulatory processes had left morale there at a " nadir. "

 

Dr. Wood, who received a standing ovation from many in the audience,

resigned in August to protest agency officials' unusual decision to

overrule an expert panel and withhold marketing approval for Plan B,

the so-called morning after pill, a form of emergency contraception.

She said she feared that competent scientists would leave rather than

remain at an agency where their work was ignored because " social

conservatives have extreme undue influence. "

 

Later, in response to a question, she said that she might have

consulted the agency's inspector general over the Plan B decision, but

that inspectors general often had to be prodded by Congress before

taking action. Democrats have little power in this Congress, she said,

and Republicans who care about science have been " remarkably silent. "

 

Others in the audience said efforts to stifle researchers were attacks

on more than science.

 

" Administrative legitimacy has been violated as much as scientific

legitimacy, " said Sheila Jasanoff, an expert on science policy who

teaches at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. " You

can't get the most solid possible basis for making a decision unless

you have not just the most credible and legitimate form of science but

also the most credible and legitimate administrative process. "

 

Leslie Sussan, a lawyer with the Department of Health and Human

Services who emphasized that she was speaking only for herself, drew

applause when she said she saw the administration's science policies

as " an attack on the rule of law as a basis for self-government and

democracy. "