After all, who transmits such quantities of data? Colossal information shipment is hard to escape notice. “We never found out for sure, but to this day we assume that administrators who monitor Internet traffic somewhere came into work Monday morning, were struck by the amount of data going through the routers, and shut things down,” Flicek said.

Genomics gave new meaning to the phrase “big data.” One person’s genome, for instance, consists of 3 billion base pairs. Spelling out the order of, or sequencing, each pair requires about two bits of computer storage, making the whole genome’s storage size 12 billion bits. This translates to about 1.5 gigabytes of data. A modern machine can sequence more than 500 billion base pairs in a week or just over. That is 167 human genomes and 250 gigabytes—or the equivalent of 63,000 standard song files or 200 movie files. The research bottleneck used to be collecting data. Now, the greatest challenge is making sense of it.

Things weren’t always like this. When genomics first began carving its niche in the scientific world, the path to gene discovery was quite different. Researchers pored through recent literature, honed in on a handful of genes that sounded promising, and then, armed with these candidates, designed experiments to test correlation between them and the traits they were suspected to underlie. Call it a paragon of the traditional scientific method: Ask a question, conduct background reading, formulate a specific hypothesis, test it with an experiment, and draw a conclusion.

Over the past 10 or so years, however, meta-reviews of the literature to trace the success of candidate gene methods have disclosed staggeringly abysmal conclusions. Of hundreds of published papers using this approach, only a tiny fraction of results—6 of 166, to be exact—could be consistently replicated. Gradually, candidate gene techniques waned in favor of tactics that scanned the entire genome without any conjecture about the role of any particular gene.

Flicek’s story involved a massive undertaking called the 1000 Genomes Project, an international effort to catalogue a wide array of human genetic variation by inspecting the full genetic makeup of—you guessed it—1,000 people. What are the scientists looking for? In projects like this, often they won’t know until they find it. What is the hypothesis? In a word: vague. The human genome is laden with diversity, both among and within populations.

This way of tackling a scientific problem marks a significant shift from the time-honored scientific method. Those in the field might call it data-driven research, to be contrasted with standard hypothesis-driven science. Critics are more likely to make charges of fishing expeditions. However couched, the change in approach is this: Instead of designing an experiment to test a defined, preconceived hypothesis, researchers first amass large banks of information and then wade through them with the aid of powerful computers to unearth biologically pertinent findings.

For the maneuver to be mathematically robust, data sets must be big. Accordingly, the emergence of the method was fostered by the coupling of biology and computer science that enabled mammoth data production and storage. The approach plays a central role in disciplines ending with “-omics,” which by definition seek to characterize biology in a big way. (Some familiar examples include genomics, which deals with the complete DNA sequences of organisms; proteomics, or the large-scale study of all the proteins; and metabolomics, which involves all small molecules generated in metabolism).

Drifting research paradigms raise questions of who in the scientific community is adapting, how rapidly, and how they are interacting with their more traditional counterparts. Specifically, are those controlling the purse strings caught up on what is happening at the research bench?

A recent article in Nature lends some unique insight. Author Kendall Powell takes readers behind the scenes inside a funding committee of the American Cancer Society, which has funded 44 Nobel Prize laureates, as committee members deliberate through multiple rounds of scrutiny and elimination. Their discussions and decisions shed light on the cherished criteria that filter the haves of research funding from the have-nots. One proposal was cut for allegedly committing a very telling blunder:

Another outstanding application … runs into trouble because of a lack of scientific details. … [the primary reviewer] can’t see how the applicant will filter the genes that are pulled from the proposed screen. The problem with this particular fishing expedition, says the second reviewer, is that “he didn’t explain how he would sort through all the fish”. This proposal, too, is knocked out of the competitive range.

To understand the reviewers’ reasoning, it helps to take a look at the recent history of research funding and the relevant pressures that have developed. Over the last decade, many government science agencies have faced stagnant budgets that at best have kept up with inflation despite increasing numbers of competitive applications. At the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, the largest public funding source for biomedical research in the United States, just less than 20 percent of grant applications were funded in 2009, compared to 32 percent in 2000.

The result is a notoriously grueling application process. Researchers typically begin writing a grant months before the deadline and the entire pipeline of peer review can take up to a year. Subject to scrutiny are the researcher’s background, equipment and facilities needed, time, and most importantly the projected overall impact of the scientific outcome. Innovative, thought-out work with expected output is a must. In 2002 the National Science Foundation, which funds approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic science research in universities, announced that proposals must demonstrate broader impacts on society in order to be seriously considered. Committee members become increasingly nitpicky, writes Powell, with reviewers “looking for any excuse not to fund a project.”

A prime choice for such an excuse is the fishing accusation, many researchers gripe. In her blog, one scientist observes that she and her colleagues have all received the fishing remark at some point in their proposal reviews, and it was always intended as derogatory. “This kind of hedge trimming suggests that only the safest, most predictable work should be done,” she writes, “and any exploratory tangents should be lopped off early.” She continued in an email to me, “It’s a problem of overabundance of caution.” Dr. Tim Birkhead, a professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Sheffield, voices similar concerns in an article printed in the Times Higher Education. “The scientific research councils seem to be obsessed by hypothesis testing. Many times I have heard it said by referees rejecting a proposal: ‘But there was no hypothesis.’” The problem with this model, he says, is crippling risk aversion. When scientists “basically have to know what they are going to find before putting in a research application,” research becomes “trivially confirmatory and inherently unlikely to discover anything truly novel.”

Still, reluctance to support fishing is not necessarily an assault on big data. “The success of fishing depends on how good your lure is,” explains Dr. Peter Good, a program director at the National Human Genome Research Institute who manages portfolios of grants involving genomic technology development. To get funded, “you have to lay out your ideas – technology-driven or hypothesis-driven – demonstrate what you’re doing is significant, better than anything else out there, and show reviewers you know what you’re doing.”

Dr. Elizabeth Pisani takes that argument one step further in her article, “Has the internet changed science?” What goes on in the laboratory has never been as neat as what gets written in the scientific paper, she points out. The paper follows a template that frames research as a linear story, aligning with the steps of the classic scientific method. Yet the findings that become published are frequently not the ones that were initially pursued. As information accumulates and trends can be detected, researchers can come up with new, increasingly refined hypotheses. Thus, drawing a sharp distinction between data-driven and hypothesis-driven methods, much less presenting this divide as new, is misleading. The two are not conflicting, but complementary. As Peter Good says, “Data-driven really means hypothesis-generating.” It would be silly for a committee to bias (intentionally) against one or the other side of the same coin.

Here is another way to view it: Hypothesis-driven and data-driven do not represent two opposing and nonoverlapping camps of inquiry but rather a continuum addressing the initial idea’s degree of specificity. Data-driven research then falls on one end of that continuum, with a more flexible starting hypothesis. In genomics lingo, that would mean the difference between “we predict a genetic basis underlying this trait” and “we predict that X specific gene is implicated in this trait.”

Different fields have varied traditions about where they fall on that spectrum. Genomics is one where data-driven methods have now been in play for a while, meaning geneticists who sit on review committees are less likely to take a knee-jerk “But where is the hypothesis?” reaction to grant proposals. But departments are integrating—or ignoring—big data at unequal rates. Things get tricky when a committee comprises researchers from diverse backgrounds who subscribe to distinct conventions of how research ought to be conducted. “Issues can crop up when you send a grant to a study section with no geneticists, and they say, ‘this is a fishing expedition,’” says Dr. Matthew State, an associate professor of genetics at Yale University School of Medicine. “You then say ‘Right!’ and have to explain that empirically, it works here.” Often, however, no side is clearly right or wrong. Chalk it up to a clash of scientific cultures.

The scientific method may not be becoming obsolete but it is evolving to exploit the power of modern information technology. Meanwhile, funding agencies are dealing with changing burdens of their own. Difficult decisions must be made and disagreement is expected. There will likely never be a perfect system that will satisfy everyone. Here’s to the goal that the laboratory and funding worlds evolve in a way that is as synchronized and symbiotic as possible.

Ilana Yurkiewicz holds a B.S. from Yale University and was a staff writer at The News & Observer. Currently a clinical research assistant at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, she will matriculate at Harvard Medical School in the fall.

To our dismay, and the nation’s detriment, self-described climate change deniers – strongly supported by fossil-fuel interests — continue to mislead Congress and the public.

In late January, we joined 14 other leading scientists in writing a letter to every member of Congress, asking our elected representatives to separate science from policy. We called attention to the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change, urging Congress to “address the challenge of climate change, and lead the national response…” We want Congress to understand that, with each passing day, the problem worsens.

Our letter was certainly not the first plea to Congress to address climate change, and it won’t be the last. An open letter just last May from 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences urged similar actions. But the race to run away from the problem is nothing short of staggering. [emphasis added]

So begins an excellent Politico op-ed by John Abraham,  associate professor of thermal sciences at the University of St.Thomas, Peter Gleick,  president of The Pacific Institute, Michael Mann,  director of the Earth Science Center at Penn State University, and Michael Oppenheimer,  professor of geosciences at Princeton University.

The NYT magazine published a piece last month  with a similar theme, “Fact-Free Science,” which noted:

… more than half of the Republicans in the House and three-quarters of Republican senators … now say that the threat of global warming, as a man-made and highly threatening phenomenon, is at best an exaggeration and at worst an utter “hoax”…. These grim numbers, compiled by the Center for American Progress, describe a troubling new reality: the rise of the Tea Party and its anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, anti-elite worldview has brought both a mainstreaming and a radicalization of antiscientific thought.

Even former leading Republican members of the House have made the same point (see Former GOP chair of House Science Committee Sherry Boehlert on “Science the GOP can’t wish away”).

While some ‘appeasers’ think we should let the deniers win the debate and simply stop talking about climate science, that is the road to certain ruin.  As difficult as it is to imagine a aggressive action on climate or clean energy energy time soon, there  is no possibility whatsoever of  the nation and the world taking the necessary steps to avert multiple simultaneous catastrophes in the coming decades absent  abroad understanding of the science.  Moreover, if only the anti-science crowd participates in the debate, then there is no possibility the public’s confusion will end.

Imagine if the  public health community had taken the same view of the lies from the tobacco industry and given up on the health message.

“Energy independence” and “reducing dependence on oil” are great messages — indeed, they have been great messages for decade upon decade upon decade now, far longer than  climate change has been a major message — but they have never succeeded in creating a sustained set of policy is to actually reduce oil consumption in absolute terms (let alone the set of policies needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in absolute terms).

In the end,  you can’t cure the disease unless  you understand the diagnosis and prognosis.  And so we come back to the article by the four scientists:

Nothing exemplifies this more than a bill by House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), to overturn the scientific finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health.

We are saddened and disturbed that Upton is apparently planning to hold a vote in committee very soon to overturn a science-based determination absent any scientific justification for doing so.

This science-free approach serves only the interests of oil and coal producers and other big polluters who don’t want Congress — or the American people — to know what decades of scientific research have revealed about current climate trends and the growing future risks we face.

Science is the Achilles heel for those who try to perpetuate the myth that climate change is not occurring, or that the massive build-up of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere is not the main reason the climate is changing. There is no serious disagreement in the scientific community that global temperatures are increasing, sea levels are rising, the oceans are becoming more acidic and that fossil fuel combustion is the primary cause.

In addition, the rapid shrinking of Arctic sea ice and the pattern of extreme weather and climate — including widespread drought, extraordinarily intense rainstorms, heat waves and wildfires — reflect more than just natural climate variability.

These findings have been confirmed by all the leading scientific academies around the world, most prominent among them, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which last year issued a series of four comprehensive reports that were unambiguous. The academy stated, “Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities … and in many cases is already affecting a broad range of human and natural systems.”

Like the tobacco industry before them, fossil fuel interests regularly trot out discredited voices, false and disproven arguments and selective and misleading evidence to generate doubt. Their goal is to create the perception that fundamental aspects of climate science are controversial. They are not.

All their claims, all the studies they cite and all the evidence they have presented has been thoroughly reviewed by climate scientists. There is no scientific basis for contesting the academy’s finding. But that doesn’t stop fossil fuel interests from pouring millions of dollars into distorting, misrepresenting and, at times, falsifying the science.

We are disheartened that many in Congress choose to be guided by those who profit from pollution. Now we learn that Republicans in the House are proposing to cut more than $170 million in climate change programs, as well as to compromise the EPA’s ability to carry out its science-based mission. Given the staggering costs of disaster response and the financial ambush awaiting us if we fail to anticipate the risk of massive climate disruption, such action can only be labeled irresponsible.

These same Republicans pledged no cuts to national security. Yet the growing risk of climate change has been clearly identified as a national security threat by top military experts and analysts.

If Congress turns a deaf ear to science, it would be up to mayors, city planners, the building trades, transportation officials, health care workers, small and large businesses, universities, city councils, agriculture interests, water management officials and many others to take the lead in laying out the risks. We are grateful that many already are.

Hear!  Hear!

This reposted from ClimateProgress.org where Dr. Joseph Romm is Editor.

This coalition, promoting disinformation while claiming to be dedicated to science, is nothing new. In fact, today’s climate deniers are using the same playbook used by supporters of Ronald Reagan’s failed “Star Wars” program in the 1980s, and by the tobacco industry to avoid regulation of secondhand smoke in the 1990s. Indeed, science denial, free-market fundamentalists, and big industries have a long and sorry past together.

Let’s start with secondhand smoke. In the 1950s, scientific evidence demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the tars in tobacco smoke caused cancer. The tobacco industry responded by trying to get science on its side, pumping money into scientific and medical research that might show that tobacco was all right after all. It didn’t work. Despite decades of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the industry was losing the public relations battle, and, more important, customers. By the 1980s, smoking rates had decreased dramatically.

In the early 1990s, things got even worse for the industry, as science showed that secondhand smoke was deadly, too. Philip Morris executives decided then that science itself was their enemy. In 1993 they created an organization called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, or TASSC, and a website, junkscience.com, which claimed that the science surrounding secondhand smoke was “junk.”

Soon, TASSC was making that claim about the science related to the ozone hole and global warming as well, and Philip Morris was recruiting third parties—mostly libertarian think tanks and antitax groups, such as the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, and National Empowerment Television, a conservative TV network—to join the effort.

It is perhaps not surprising that the tobacco industry found antigovernment groups willing to make common cause. But it is a bit more surprising that they found reputable scientists—indeed, some exceptionally distinguished ones—willing to help them. As we document in our new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming—the tobacco industry and libertarian think tanks knew that to make their claims seem credible, they would need scientists to make them.

In the 1950s, the Tobacco Industry had recruited C.C. Little, a prominent geneticist (and one-time eugenicist) to direct a “research program” to challenge the mainstream scientific position that tobacco was deadly.

In the 1970s, after Little retired, R.J. Reynolds created its own Biomedical Research Program, and recruited former National Academy of Science president Frederick Seitz. From 1979 to 1985, Seitz (by this time retired from the presidency of Rockefeller University) ran a research program for Reynolds that served to generate results and experts that could be deployed to defend smoking.

How did Seitz segue from defending tobacco to attacking these other lines of scientific inquiry? Well, in 1984, Seitz had joined forces with Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and William Nierenberg, retiring director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, to create the George C. Marshall Institute. The goal of the new organization was to defend President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (also known as “Star Wars”) from attack by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and in particular by the equally prominent physicists Hans Bethe, Richard Garwin, and astronomer Carl Sagan.

Between 1984 and 1989, the Marshall Institute focused on defeating communism by emphasizing the Soviet threat and the defensive possibilities of Star Wars. In hindsight it is clear that they greatly exaggerated both. One 1987 piece by Jastrow thundered that “America had five years left” before the Soviet Union became so superior it would achieve world domination without firing a shot. The collapse of the Eastern Block only two years later proved them wrong, yet the Marshall Institute didn’t go out of business for its inaccurate advocacy.

Instead, they found a new enemy to fight, an internal enemy they perceived as the next great threat to liberty—environmentalism and the science that supported it.

During the 1988 election, candidate George H. W. Bush had promised to address climate change—pledging to meet the “greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” But soon after Bush took office, Nierenberg presented a briefing to the White House staff that claimed global warming was caused by the sun, not greenhouse gases, and that as solar irradiance declined during the 1990s, the Earth would begin to cool.

Despite a complete lack of evidence that the sun actually had increased in brightness during the previous few decades, Nierenberg’s briefing was taken seriously. One White House staffer commented on the written report that accompanied it, “Everyone has read it.” And it strengthened a faction within the White House, led by Chief of Staff John Sununu, which opposed environmental regulation.

Alan Bromley, appointed a few months later as the president’s science advisor, realized how the White House staff had been misled. After some effort, he managed to restart discussion of the pros and cons of carbon taxes and cap and trade systems within the White House. In 1992 President Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change despite continued opposition inside his own administration. But the Framework Convention was only a promise of intent—it set no binding limits on greenhouse gases. That was supposed to be done later, in what became the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in the mid-1990s. By then, the Marshall Institute had forged links to the American Petroleum Institute and to Republican leaders who now controlled Congress.

Meanwhile, Seitz and Nierenberg had joined forces with another Cold War physicist, S. Fred Singer, one of the original rocket scientists of the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1990, Singer had established the “Science and Environmental Policy Project” in office space shared with the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, a think tank financed by the strongly anticommunist Unification Church. In editorials published by the Washington Times (owned by the Unification Church) and in many other venues, Singer now took on the issue of the ozone hole, insisting that the problem was being exaggerated, and that there was no scientific consensus on the issue, and it would be premature to regulate chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC’s.

Of course, in retrospect scientists from around the world decisively and conclusively determined CFC’s to be a major threat the ozone layer, which is the planet’s natural line of defense against cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. Thankfully, world leaders listened to the urgency of the actual science, and in 1987 signed the Montreal Protocol, which set a declining cap on ozone-depleting pollution. Kofi Annan hailed the treaty as “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date,” and thanks to swift political action, scientists believe the ozone layer will recover fully by 2050.

Undeterred by overwhelming scientific evidence, Singer also defended tobacco. In the mid 1990s, finding all avenues for legitimate scientific debate about the effects of second-hand smoke exhausted, he turned to   attacking the Environmental Protection Agency’s review process. His work was extensively cited in a handbook of antiscience circulated by the industry in 1993: Bad Science: A Resource Book. The two-hundred page collection of opinion pieces and quotations was designed to make mainstream science appear corrupt and unreliable. But legitimate scientific debate occurs in the pages of academic journals, not in op-eds or in industry-circulated handbooks.

Then, in 1996, Singer joined Seitz and Nierenberg in attacking a young scientist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Benjamin Santer, over his leadership of one chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment Report.  In the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, they attacked Santer, and claimed that he had altered the report to fit U.S. climate policy (as if there even was one!). The attack on Santer in op-eds and other non-science fora presaged last year’s assault on climate science, the theft of email from the University of East Anglia, and subsequent media feeding frenzy.

The attack also presaged Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe’s recent threat to indict climate scientists, and the witch-hunt by Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli focused on climate scientist Michael Mann, who had previously taught at the University of Virginia, and who has been exonerated by four separate panels. All these events are consistent with a longer history of attempts to undermine science and scientists to prevent government regulation of harmful industrial products and activities.

The New York Times recently declared the East Anglia affair a “manufactured controversy,” but this is just the most recent in a pattern of manufactured controversies spanning decades, a product of the ideology that George Soros has called “free market fundamentalism.” It is an ideology that rejects the idea that government regulation is ever appropriate.

Over the past half century, science has demonstrated that many industrial activities and consumer products are damaging to the natural environment and to human health: tobacco, DDT, acid rain, ozone depletion, and the burning of fossil fuels. These activities have unintended consequences that the marketplace did not anticipate, and did not succeed in preventing. Because these unintended consequences are “market failures,” it is reasonable to conclude that something needs to be done, something that creates a “price” for bad behavior that markets can recognize.

That something could be a carbon tax, or it could be a cap and trade system, or it could be some other form of regulation or prevention. Yet some people have continued to insist—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that all problems can and should be solved in the marketplace and no government action is needed. Because science suggests that government action is needed to protect the common good, free market fundamentalists have come to see science itself as their enemy.

The efforts of these free market ideologues to undermine legitimate scientific debate in the popular media helps to explain why, 18 years after President Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention, people are still confused about the science of climate change. It also helps explain why the federal government has taken no action to reduce emissions while nearly every other major economy puts together climate action plans. Meanwhile, the ice caps continue to melt, the permafrost thaws, and weather events become more extreme.

Ironically, worsening climate change and the increasing risk that we are approaching irreversible tipping points make it more likely that the heavy-handed government intervention that conservatives dread will actually be required. The longer we wait, the harder the problem of climate change will become to solve—and the more likely it is that climate change will become not just inconvenient, but very destructive, and perhaps catastrophic.

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of history of science and provost of Sixth College at UC San Diego. Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology, living in Pasadena, California.

President Barack Obama appointed former U.S. Navy Secretary and former Mississippi Governor Ray Mabus to “restore the unique beauty and bounty of this region.” Mabus’s task demands the full resources of the scientific community of the gulf region, as well as specialists from around the globe. What’s more, British oil giant BP will be held liable for damages resulting from the spill, but many of these damages will require scientific research in order to understand and quantify. Without coordinated leadership from the government, the ecosystems and communities of the gulf may be suffering damages without reparation for years.

To meet this challenge, the administration must establish a clearinghouse for gulf region science as soon as possible, led by a scientific leader like Dr. John Holdren, the Presidential Science Adviser, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Director, or Dr. Subra Suresh, the incoming director of the National Science Foundation. This effort must have a clear sense of urgency, with flexibility for rapid response. In the words of Sustainable Ecosystems Institute director Deborah Brosnan, we need a “science war room” for the Gulf of Mexico, including “ecologists, wildlife biologists, oceanographers, fisheries scientists, toxicologists and ecological economists.”

This gulf research war room should be an interagency effort, including NOAA, the Department of Interior (National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey, and Fish & Wildlife Service), Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Energy, NASA, and state agencies. The initial actions of the federal government to comprehend this catastrophe are a good foundation for such a coordinated effort:

Funding research: The National Science Foundation has taken the lead in soliciting academic research on the BP spill, requesting proposals for grants from its Rapid Response Research program on May 27. Since then, NSF has already awarded 44 grants worth nearly $5 million. Funding for this national priority should be multiplied at least a hundredfold and billed to BP. Program leadership should rapidly and transparently establish a strategic mission and a process for utilizing the best science to direct remediation efforts.

Data publication: The government has begun the effort of compiling and publishing the reams of scientific data relevant to the BP disaster online. Data.Gov/restorethegulf links to dozens of datasets and agency websites. GeoPlatform.Gov/gulfresponse includes multiple layers of geospatial data. All the data being collected by the government, BP contractors, and the academic community on this disaster should be brought together as rapidly and transparently as possible.

Scientific symposia: The government has begun convening scientific symposia on the BP spill. On May 27, Environmental Protection Agency, NOAA, and the University of New Hampshire Coastal Response Research Center convened a meeting to “study dispersant use and ecosystem impacts of dispersed oil.” NOAA, NSF, U.S. Geological Survey, and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership (a group of oceanographic institutions) held an emergency Gulf Oil Spill Scientific Symposium on June 2 and 3 at Louisiana State University. Lubchenco outlined the work NOAA is conducting, as did USGS director Marcia McNutt. Clear lines of inquiry should be established for future conferences, and much greater outreach needs to be made to the scientific community.

One of the most critical roles for the gulf research war room will be the long-term monitoring of health impacts of this toxic event. Center for American Progress health experts Ellen-Marie Whelan and Lesley Russell recommend that the Department of Health and Human Services assistant secretary for health “be designated to launch and oversee the coordinated response plan implemented whenever a situation arises that can threaten public health.” The assistant secretary  “would have responsibility for ensuring—in conjunction with other federal, state, and local agencies, academics, and the private sector—that needed services are delivered and information is collected, and that data, information, and resources are transferred to the responsible HHS agency or agencies.”

In the wake of the Exxon-Valdez disaster, criticism was leveled against the oil company and the federal response for ignoring the need to do long-term monitoring of health effects of the toxic spill. The government should learn from these mistakes.

The leader of this public effort must face the challenging but critical task of resolving conflicts with the scientific investigations now enmeshed with the foreign oil giant BP. As established by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, BP is liable for any damages to public natural resources, and government officials are now working with BP contractors on the natural resource damage assessment process, as required by 15 CFR 990.14(c). But quantifying exactly what those damages are will require unbiased scientific research.

BP is hiring as many scientists as possible to join its private contractor army and influence the research. The U.S. government must move quickly to protect the integrity of this process.

How quickly? Well, BP already is doling out grants from its $500 million Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, a Tobacco Institute-like program managed by a BP-picked panel to disburse scientific research grants in the coming years. In an environment of declining federal funding for the sciences, many research institutions have become dependent on private sources of financing to fund their research, and many are clamoring to get a piece of BP’s money. Louisiana State University, University of Florida’s Florida Institute of Oceanography, and Mississippi State University’s Northern Gulf Institute have already accepted $10 million each.

Currently, there is no mechanism to ensure that this BP-funded research remains impartial to the interests of the funder. In a foreshadowing of future conflicts, the Obama administration stands accused of “political intervention” for attempting to establish even moderate oversight over BP’s private slush fund. BP’s emerging control of the science behind its own natural resource damage assessment and resulting liability stinks of the same self-regulation that helped cause this disaster in the first place. It is the responsibility of the federal government to act on behalf of the public good and protect the integrity and transparency of the science surrounding the gulf disaster.

The Senate should take note of this pressing need as they debate a new oil regulation package over the coming week.

Brad Johnson is the Think Progress Climate Editor at the Center for American Progress.

His work at DOE inspired him to write Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. The book explains how groups like the tobacco industry use various “tricks of the trade” to mask the health hazards of the products or operations by “manufacturing uncertainty” about risks and by debating the validity of scientific data.

“These are tricks that turn positive studies into negative ones or take one positive study and do a literature review which buries the positive study in what is essentially a whole mass of garbage so it looks like there is nothing there,” he told Science Progress in a podcast interview last year.

Doubt Is Their Product illustrates how “product defense firms” hired by big industries managed to consistently delay government actions to control the health risks of beryllium, tobacco, asbestos, lead, chromium, and other deadly chemicals. In his research, Michaels “found some very powerful smoking guns,” which he made available at www.defendingscience.org “so anyone can download them and read exactly how these people work.”

Several of these smoking guns came from Hill & Knowlton, a public relations company that defended the tobacco industry for over a decade. In addition, the company listed among its accomplishments that it was essentially able to delay regulation for a couple of years on Freon, a chlorofluorocarbon known for depleting the ozone layer.

Noting the difficultly of spotting these “tricks of the trade,” Michaels said that he supported prohibiting financial conflicts of interest in scientific studies and government advisory panels as a way to curb “industry’s assault on science.”

“We know the basic problem is that scientists who are paid to find a certain result will find that result. That’s certainly what we see in these studies over and over again: that scientists who work for these companies that actually manufacture uncertainty never find a result the sponsor doesn’t want,” he said.

Michaels also did a book event at the Center for American Progress: view full event video (CAP site)

Update: The New York Times commended David Michaels for his commitment to worker safety and endorsed his nomination for OSHA director in an editorial yesterday. Michaels “seems just the right man to steer the agency back toward an emphasis on protecting workers after eight years of lax oversight and favoritism to industry under the Bush administration,” the newspaper wrote. The editorial suggested that Michaels may meet resistance from business interests, but that they may want to rethink their position on the nominee since “his emphasis on cultural change and involvement of workers in improving safety could help ease the polarization between business and labor.”

Image: CAP

The saga began on June 26, when CBSNews.com’s Declan McCullagh—the journalist responsible for launching the infamous Al Gore/Internet story—breathily reported that the Obama administration Environmental Protection Agency “may have suppressed” a scientific report skeptical of human-caused global warming. Based on internal emails provided by the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, McCullagh’s story highlighted the work of a longtime EPA employee named Alan Carlin, an economist at the agency’s National Center for Environmental Economics. Carlin, it turned out, had prepared a 98 page report questioning the mainstream scientific understanding of climate change on multiple fronts. The scandal, McCullagh suggested, was that Carlin’s dissent was not adequately considered in the process leading up to the agency’s recent proposed endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.

Conservatives pounced on the “news”—here was an apparent science whistleblower story that closely paralleled many alleged Bush era scandals. “Are we witnessing the Democrat war on science?” asked Ben Domenech at the New Ledger. The leading global warming skeptic blog, Watts Up With That, soon posted the “censored” internal EPA document, claiming it had been obtained “courtesy of our verified contact at the EPA, who shall remain anonymous”—real cloak and dagger stuff. And Senator James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma, who has long been the leading congressional enemy of accurate science on climate change, promptly called for a “criminal investigation” into EPA’s malfeasance—on Fox News, of course.

In their zeal to find a “war on science” episode to claim as their own, however, these conservatives forgot one essential matter: substance. If the claims about climate science in Carlin’s report—co-authored with another EPA employee from the same office, John Davidson—aren’t plausible; if leading climate scientists do not accept them; if they lack all credibility; then where there’s smoke there’s no fire. For not only would the EPA be correct to reject Carlin’s claims on substantive grounds, but indeed, as an expert scientific agency it would be bound by its mandate to do so.

Here’s where conservatives’ claims absolutely falls apart. Carlin is, as has constantly been pointed out in the aftermath of McCullagh’s article, an economics expert, not a climate scientist. And as climate scientists have considered his claims, they have withered.

Climate researcher Gavin Schmidt of NASA, for example, has written a very devastating analysis of the claims made in Carlin’s paper, calling it “a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at.” For instance, much like Washington Post columnist George Will notoriously did earlier this year, Carlin’s report claims the globe is in a cooling trend. This is an egregious misreading of the last 10 or so years of global temperatures, and is based quite literally on a trick: If you begin with the hottest year on record—1998—then of course it looks like we’ve been cooling since then.

The Carlin report also contains numerous other climate science canards, including suggestions that the temperature trends we’ve seen are better understood as a result of solar variability than of human activity—a claim that flies in the face, as Gavin Schmidt puts it, of mountains of peer-reviewed research undertaken to detect climate change and attribute its causes. On a scientific level, this just won’t cut it.

Alan Carlin is simply not James Hansen, arguably the most famous of many scientists who claimed to have had their work suppressed or in some way interfered with during the Bush administration. You will recall that the Bush administration had taken a stance critical of mainstream climate science; Hansen felt compelled to defend it; and then NASA underlings interfered with his access to the media. That’s a vastly different story from the present one: The Obama administration has taken a stance aligned with mainstream climate science; Carlin is criticizing it; and his scientific claims are not standing up very well. Of course the Environmental Protection Agency can’t use them to help make policy. According to the EPA, Carlin’s claims were, in fact, considered—and rejected.

All of which is not to discount the possibility that a real science scandal could emerge under the Obama administration. I rather doubt it will happen on global warming, but surely there could be a scientific issue where a dissenter within the administration advances scientific claims with quite a great deal of merit to them, only to find these claims disregarded or, worse, interfered with in some way. If that happens, I and many others will criticize the administration for it. But first there will have to be some scientific substance to the whistleblower’s case; the claims should be, at minimum, seriously arguable based on the latest and best science. That’s something conservatives have flagrantly failed to understand in the present instance.

It’s precisely that disregard for scientific substance, of course, which explains why they could perpetrate a “war on science” in the first place.

Finally, it’s worth adding that even if they were documented to have occurred, one or a few instances of real scientific suppression by the Obama administration would still not render this administration somehow equivalent to the last in its nefariousness. The core point about the Bush administration is that abuses of science were systematic and legion in number, as documented by myself, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and many others. And this overwhelming assault on science was unprecedented in modern American politics. Thus far the Obama administration has done nothing remotely comparable.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

But let’s rewind and recall why we’re doing this. The last administration was—and I think this is an objective statement—the most scientifically controversial in modern American history. Hordes of journalists, advocates, and citizens have now documented all the various ways in which the handoff of information from government scientists to administration officials and the public was repeatedly and egregiously corrupted. The nature of the problem couldn’t be more clear—but as we’ll see, discovering how to fix it turns out to be quite intricate, complicated, and even off-putting.

In fairness, there are many reasons to feel hopeful about OSTP’s undertaking. On a structural level, the administration is doing exactly what it ought to: OSTP is the best choice to serve as the central federal nerve center for scientific integrity matters. The office will have to punch above its weight in this role, since it will need cooperation from much larger government science agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. But the president’s memorandum makes clear that this is now OSTP’s job, and everybody else in government needs to help out.

So we can now think of OSTP as the in-government advocate for the scientist—often the “little guy” in the context of larger federal doings. Finally, somebody’s going to stand up for him, or for her.

Still, it’s easier said than done. As Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the lead non-government advocacy group on scientific integrity matters, put it recently to Science Progress, “It’s not a simple thing to say, ‘Oh, let’s just outlaw abuses of science.’ It’s actually a fairly nuanced, complex thing to look at.” Indeed. Consider, say, the problem of potential conflicts of interest among scientists appointed to serve on federal advisory committees. Where do you draw the line between scientists who are too conflicted to serve and those who are somewhat conflicted, but probably okay? A regulation that isn’t flexible and sensible in such an area could cause more harm than good.

Or take another area of scientific integrity where the last administration saw plenty of controversy: The relationship between government scientists—who tend to be career civil servants—and public affairs officials—who are frequently political appointees. When a government scientist receives a media query on a sensitive subject like global warming, we’ve seen how public affairs “minders” can abuse their power, for instance by seeking to block the interview or listening in on it in a way that could be intimidating for the scientist in question. And yet at the same time, there may be very good reasons to have a public affairs official sit in on a media interview—including to protect the scientist involved. Similarly, there might be good and entirely apolitical reasons to redirect an inquiring journalist away from one agency scientist and to another better equipped to deal with a particular query. Only a very sensitive regulation or group of regulations can root out abuses in this area without going too far.

Indeed, to see how hard it can be to achieve the appropriate balance on matters of scientific integrity, just look at the very different sets of comments offered to OSTP by two key nonprofit advocacy groups on the same side of the issue: The Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Both organizations have done important work on scientific integrity in government, sometimes even in collaboration. Yet their comments take a significantly different tone, and have strongly different emphases.

The UCS recommendations are all about transparency, transparency, transparency. They strongly emphasize the need for mechanisms to ensure greater public access to scientific documents produced by government, and to the scientific rationales underlying government actions. The basic idea seems to be that by making more information about science-based decision making available, and by liberating government scientists themselves to speak freely, we will change the system and ensure a much healthier relationship between science and government.

PEER doesn’t disagree about transparency. But by God, the organization wants scientific integrity wrongdoers to be punished—made an example of. Phrases like “negative career consequences,” “sanctions,” and “appropriate disciplinary action” adorn PEER’s comments, which are scathing in their remarks about government officials (and PEER names names) who have violated scientific integrity principles in some way. Moreover, the group wants an utter ban on the alteration of “technical documents for non-technical reasons unless the basis is included as part of the document.” Where the UCS approach is largely about letting in sunlight, then, the PEER approach largely focuses on outing and punishing abuses so as to deter future ones.

As such differences get worked out, the wonks and the lawyers will have to take over, and it’s likely their nuanced discussions won’t command much public attention. Catching a fossil fuel industry type messing with climate science documents in true “smoking gun” fashion sparks a lot more attention than a protracted deliberation about how to define “conflict of interest.” And yet tuning out now would be a massive mistake—we’ll be living with the results of scientific integrity deliberations for a long time. And if we don’t get it right now, we’ll be having the same discussion again in two decades.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

OSTP used its new blog to open a comment period to accept public input on the six principles outlined in the presidential memorandum.

That comment period closes Wednesday, so we devote our most recent podcast to talking with Francesca Grifo, senior scientist and director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She discusses about how better transparency could eventually supercede the need for whistle blowers, and explains the importance of protecting integrity as Congress develops long-lasting climate change and clean energy legislation.

Listen to the podcast or read an edited transcript here.

To right past wrongs and prevent assaults on the future work of government scientists, President Obama issued a memorandum on scientific integrity in March. The document tasked the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy with coordinating a set of recommendations “to guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch.” OSTP opened up the process to the public by requesting comment on the six principles outlined in the memorandum on its new blog, which the President highlighted in his recent speech at the National Academy of Sciences. The public comment period closes this Wednesday, May 13.

Over the past few years, the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists has focused closely on the impacts of the Bush administration’s manipulations on environmental regulation, public health, and the morale of federal scientists.

Science Progress spoke with Francesca Grifo, the senior scientist and program director, about the forward-looking comments her group submitted to the administration—which focus on protecting government scientists, making science-based policymaking more transparent, and monitoring potential abuses—as well as the need to look backwards and repair past abuses. This interview has been editing and condensed. For the full conversation, see the audio available in the sidebar.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt, Science Progress: Was it the Bush administration’s abuses that led to these priorities that you focus on, or were there existing problems in the system that went unaddressed from previous administrations?

Francesca Grifo: I think there are both. Obviously, we are responding very much to the last eight years, but I think we are also equally certain that there are some agencies that have always been troublesome, that have been places where, for example, corporate influence has been a way of life. Obviously, those are much deeper, harder, more difficult problems to address.

When we look at the specific items that we put into these comments, we’re mostly referring to the last eight years. In our publication, “Federal Science and the Public Good,” we tried to characterize the abuses of science and then make the connections between those specific abuses and what we need to do about it.

It’s not a simple thing to say, “Oh, let’s just outlaw abuses of science.” It’s actually a fairly nuanced, complex thing to look at. So we really focused on protecting scientists and making the government more transparent.

That being said, we also have another set of processes going on, and in fact very soon, we’ll hear back on them—the administration’s decisions on regulatory reform. That’s another big piece of it, but it’s not in these comments because the president has a separate process for that.

SP: What are some of the problems over the years that necessitate a focus on whistleblower protections for government scientists?

Grifo: What we realized is that, obviously, we can’t have our eyes and ears everywhere. In fact we rely heavily on those who are I the midst of these situations to be able to speak about them.

We have many examples of where there has been retaliation or job changes. We know of one whistleblower at the FDA, for example, who was moved to an empty office with just a desk and nothing else after he blew the whistle on an issue. We’ve had other problems at different agencies, but the FDA has had quite a few.

It’s really important that the public be able to hear from these folks—that they feel empowered to speak out. Now, we do have whistleblower protections, but unfortunately, most of those protections have been significantly eroded by the courts. So we need to come out and be clear about more specific protections and protections that really do address federal scientists and the particular needs of those federal scientists.

SP: And the second issue you’re talking about is transparency: making information and research available to the public and to third parties so they can review what goes into policy decisions. It seems like this would work in concert with whistleblower protections, so that ultimately, whistleblowers didn’t have to be the people sounding the alarm.

Grifo: We would love to put whistleblowers out of business. We would like to make it so that we no longer needed them. That’s really the key.

Many of these things that we talk about as examples in the Bush administration were things that happened because the doors were closed; because the meetings were closed; because drafts of documents, when they moved from an agency to the White House, to the Office of Management and Budget were not made public in between. So we left it open for scientific documents coming out of the agencies to be changed. And the public didn’t know, except that we at UCS got documents dropped on our doorstep, and phone calls, and it was all very cloak-and-dagger. But fortunately, there were a lot of courageous people who revealed what was going on.

SP: What sort of role is strengthening scientific integrity going to play in the development of climate and energy legislation?

Grifo: When this climate legislation becomes law, it’s going to be a law that’s around for many decades. And because of that, it’s going to be making periodic science-based decisions. Let’s think ahead to 2040, or another time in the future, and recall that conditions will change. The scientific knowledge will change. What we know about climate change and what we know about the success or failure to mitigate climate change and to stop climate change will all be a changing scenario.

And so we’re going to want to revisit these things. We’re going to want to ask questions about how we’re doing on emissions reductions. We may want to look at the size of the cap, and so on, as we get this new information.

The special interests that have been responsible for the problems in the past—they’re not going to go away. They’re going to continue to be engaged in this. So what we want to do is have this climate legislation be a smart law—a law that is bulletproof, that has specifics in place that will prevent the abuses of science in the future.

Another example are the National Ambient Air Quality laws. Again, this is something that is examined periodically, as the science comes in periodically. And unfortunately, as we’ve watched ozone and particulate matter and these other standards get set, we’ve seen that that the process was open to manipulation. So we’re trying to learn from this past experience to say, “How can we scientific integrity-ize” or make the new laws something that will really be robust to this sort of interference?

Again, we come back to the same sorts of things: transparency, protecting whistleblowers, trying to set the law up so that we’re paying attention to conflicts of interest.

SP: This need for “smart laws” seems important, because we know enough to act, but we don’t know everything about these issues at this particular moment. We’re going to learn things and we’re going to have to make continual adjustments. This seems like another important reason for protecting scientific integrity now, as well as going forward.

Grifo: The devil is in the details. I think it’s very tempting to think only about these big-picture climate issues. That’s exciting and important—don’t get me wrong. But I think we need to ask: Are the scientific studies and other research transparent and publicly accessible? Are the scientists’ dissenting views part of the public record? Can these scientists discuss their work with the media? Do we have legislation that incorporates scientific advisers and advisory committees? And if we have those committees, let’s think about the selection process—how will we resolve potential conflicts of interest?

There are many, many details like that, and we’ve learned from past experience how to do the right thing in the future.

SP: I want to back up to a survey that UCS released last year on scientific interference at the Environmental Protection Agency. One of the most astounding numbers that came out of that was the fact that 60 percent of the respondents to the survey said they had personally experienced at least one incident of political interference with scientific work during the last five years. What’s the mood at agencies like the EPA now?

Grifo: Obviously, we haven’t re-surveyed, so we don’t have numbers, but when we have talked to people, the mood has definitely been better. When we look at the memo to employees that Administrator Lisa Jackson sent out on January 23rd, there is some amazing language in there. For example: “Science must be the backbone for EPA programs.” She talks about respecting the workforce, and making sure that Americans don’t lose faith in their government. And the way to do that, of course, is transparency.

What was also important was she followed that up on April 23rd on transparency in EPA’s operations. In that memo she specifically lays out guiding principles, she talks about revealing appointment calendars, the Freedom of Information Act, rulemaking proceedings. Because much of EPA’s business is conducted through rulemaking, she says, “each EPA employee should ensure that all written comments regarding a proposed rule received from members of the public, including regulated entities and interested parties, are entered into the rulemaking docket.”

What that means is, there’s no behind-closed-doors meetings. If there’s a meeting with industry, that information gets put into the public rulemaking docket—and that’s huge.

Unfortunately, they’re not quite where we’d like to see them on communications policies and media policies. They’re still struggling with that and we look forward to working with them because, obviously media policy is very important. And they’re close; they’ve made progress, certainly, but that is one place where we’ll continue to work with them.

SP: What would you like to see in terms of media policies that would really set things aright in comparison to the last administration?

Grifo: One key piece is the role of the public affairs officials. In the past some have been very harsh gatekeepers, picking and choosing among scientists with different perspectives to decide who gets to have an interview and who doesn’t.

What we think the role of the public affairs office really is, is if a scientist gets a request for an interview, you don’t have a “minder” on the interview—a “minder” being someone from the office listening in. That’s just difficult and intimidating. What you have to have is a system where the scientist does the interview; they let public affairs know they’re doing it; they then report back to public affairs on how the interview went and what they discussed, so that public affairs is in the loop, but they’re not controlling the scientists’ information.

Now the other thing that’s important to be clear on is this: you don’t have every scientist in the agency making policy and confusing the public. We get that. That’s not a good thing for anybody: not for the agency, not for the public, not for the scientist. But rather, this applies when a scientist is discussing research results. This is not decisions based on those research results; this is not interpretations based on those research results for policy decisions; this is discussing research results. When we’re talking about more complex things like policy decisions, that’s different. But even in a policy decision, even taking those research results and applying them—a scientist can do that. They simply need to take off their federal agency hat and say, “I am now speaking as a private citizen. This is what I think.”

It’s also very important for scientists to be clear about, “Here’s what I know and here’s what I have the data to support; here’s what I think that means; and here’s where I’m being speculative. And I’m going to make sure everybody’s clear on which things go in those three baskets.” And that’s key to good communication.

SP: In the comments you submitted to the administration, you talk about ways of presenting non-official materials by scientific authors working in the government that don’t represent policy positions, but are still available for the public and interested parties to look at. Are there any precedents for that? It seems like a tricky way of communicating with the public.

Grifo: There are precedents. And that was part of our media scorecard work where we looked at a number of different agencies and compared not just their actual media policies, but the implementation of that media policy. And we found agencies that do it very well. We found agencies that do allow this sort of thing, and, you know, the sky doesn’t fall. The agency doesn’t fall apart. And that was part of why we did it. We really wanted people to be able to see that in fact this is doable. It doesn’t create this nebulous, difficult-to-deal-with situation.

SP: One of the first things that the Obama administration has done in the first 100 days is rescind the Bush Executive Order 13422, which gave the Office of Management and Budget a large amount of control over the scientific and regulatory work that was being done by these other agencies. How can the government go about reinstating the distance between the White House and these other agencies that are working independently?

Grifo: Again, it’s about clarity and it’s about transparency. With the regulatory reform, one of the big issues has been that the agencies do their bit, the science happens; scientific advice is incorporated; you end up with a draft for a rule; and it goes to the White House and gets changed.

So I think one of the most simple, straightforward things is that in that rulemaking process, the agencies need to have a draft that is made public. Very clearly, just out there for everybody to see before it goes to the White House for finalization.

Does the preliminary rule need to be made public? No necessarily. It would be great, but not necessarily. What needs to be made public, most importantly, is the scientific information that is going into that rulemaking process.

Furthermore, this does not have to be terribly burdensome. This is something agencies are pulling together anyway. And we’re not asking of early, pre-decision drafts. People say, “Oh you want us to document and reveal everything.” No. Not everything. But at a point where the scientific piece is done in the agency and is going to go on to inform the White House’s policy decision, there’s no reason we can see why that scientific piece can’t be made public, so that we call understand the scientific basis for that policy action.

So the White House has to be courageous and come out and say, “The science is telling me to do this, but I’m doing this. Because this is not a scientific decision; this is a policy decision.” And that’d okay. We may not like it. But that’s how the system works.

Sometimes decisions are made entirely on the science; sometimes they’re made on a variety of factors. And of course in many instances the law determines what that balance is. In other instances, the White House determines that. But the key here is for all of us to see the scientific basis. And what we saw in the past was, rather than be courageous and come out and talk about which parts were policy and which parts were science, we saw changes in the science to cover up an often unpopular policy decision. And that’s what really does nobody any good service.

SP: You mention in your comments the need to redesign online portals like science.gov and regulations.gov. How important is it that these sites get an overhaul?

Grifo: I think at some point when someone made these, they had the right idea, and they meant well. But I think they don’t function; they don’t work. And the bottom line there is to improve search and browsing functionality so that people can use them.

Rulemaking is not meant to be a process for just 20 people in the beltway. Really and truly, the best rules are the ones that benefit from the knowledge and input of many, many forms of expertise. And the only way to do that is to have a website where people can easily track and follow and know what’s going on in terms of seeing the text of these rules, the scientific basis of the rules, and with that full understanding, interact with the rulemaking process.

The sites don’t work the way they are; they’re difficult. Anybody who wasn’t determined would just say, “Forget this.” And that’s not what we want.

SP: The administration just released rules on lifecycle emissions for biofuels. What role does scientific integrity play in this set of regulations?

Grifo: It’s going to be the same as all these other issues. When we’re talking about biofuels and the way that they’re regulated, again: Are the scientific studies and other research transparent and publicly accessible? Do the federal scientists have the freedom to discuss their work with their colleagues and around the world? It comes down to dealing with conflicts of interest; creating accountability in the system; looking at transparency; being clear about the role of the Office of Management and Budget in formulating that policy.

The questions are the same. That’s what made this scientific integrity issue so interesting and so broad, and in some sense, so timeless. We’re talking about process. We’re talking about how the government uses scientific information to make the best rules.

So whether it’s biofuels or biodiversity, the process really needs to be one that is robust and that stands up to scrutiny. And that scrutiny is about the scientific information not being tampered with, but coming into the process clean and then staying clean through the process.

SP: Any concluding thoughts while the administration is still absorbing information from the public on this issue?

Grifo: As much as we want to go forward, and as much as this administration wants to look forward, I think there’s a certain amount of going backwards that we have to do to make sure that we undo the problematic decisions in the past.

What comes to mind immediately in that respect are many endangered species decisions that were made with lousy science. The Endangered Species Act specifically says “best available science,” and in multiple species’ instances, that was not the case.

So that’s just one example of where those decisions still stand, and each of those decisions have consequences and you get this rippling effect outward of the consequences of one lousy decision that was based on manipulated science.

Much as we all want to look forward, unfortunately, some of us have to continue to look backwards to clean up a number of messes that are still out there.

Another big issue that the administration is still grappling with is that of conflict of interest.

When we look at all of these committees and the way that scientific advice comes into the administration, we have to make sure that scientists whose science we trust aren’t getting money from the regulated entity.

Now it’s hard to think how this would apply when you’re talking about somewhat esoteric or basic research. But if we’re talking about places like the Food and Drug Administration—where scientists are making recommendations on these advisory committees on which drugs to approve and which drugs not to approve—we ought to have zero tolerance. I don’t think those scientists can make the best decisions if they’re taking money from a drug company whose products we’re talking about, or from a related product maker. It’s just not going to happen.

So we have to be creative and devise other ways of still getting their expertise, but not allowing them to be in the decision-making position.

SP: Are there significant differences between implementing scientific integrity rules in biomedical science versus environmental science?

Grifo: Not really. Where we see the difference is when we’re talking about an agency that is a research agency versus an agency that is a regulatory agency. That’s where I would say there are two classes of agencies.

Because obviously the pressure is much greater from special interests and others on the agencies that are making the rules—and that’s FDA, that’s EPA. Whereas the pure research agencies, such as National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation—while they’re certainly not perfect and totally clean, the level of this problem is so much less—significantly lower than it is at the regulatory agencies.

But Science Progress Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Moreno looked back over the history of science policymaking in the United States Friday at a CAP event celebrating the release of Science Next, and noted that we’ve come a long way. “Today there is virtually no debate,” he said, about the fact that the government should invest in science. But the direction of science has felt adrift, he said, and “as progressives, we can’t just be science boosters. We need to worry about where it’s going.”

That’s a question our former colleague Rick Weiss, a co-editor of the book and now the director of communications at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, indicated is central to the Obama administration. Science-based decision making now enjoys a “very high profile,” he said. Speaking specifically of the current discussions on responding to the H1N1 flu outbreak, he said “science,” and concern for public health, “is at the core of every one of those decisions.” He emphasized the commander-in-chief’s own interest in technical details. “The president wants to see the science and he wants to see the evidence,” he said.

Henry Kelly (pictured above), president of the Federation of American Scientists and a contributor to Science Next, addressed the importance of considering where science is going in light of a competitive international economy. “We’re trying to compete in a world where jobs require a high level of skill, but the United States is falling behind,” in science and technology education, he warned. Moreover, he said that the country can’t hope to slow the widening gap in social inequality without workforce improvements. Among Kelly’s suggestions is using research to develop better educational tools—an approach he wrote about in the SP article on educational video games that was the basis for his chapter in the book.

Though President J. Q. Adams might have been ahead of his time in championing federal support for basic research, later proponents could not have predicted the power of successful investments like those that formed the foundation of the Internet. And as radically as the web as changed the way  private enterprise works, Jim Turner, director of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities Energy Initiative and contributor to Science Next, argued that the government has not yet realized that the technology actually has implications for the future of federalism itself.

“Not only does the Internet change the way government works,” he said, “but it changes the relationship between federal and state government,” allowing for information sharing that can improve the quality of public services. Turner explained the idea of “public policy quality management” in the article he authored with Maryann Feldman that found its way into Science Next, drawing lessons for the work of Joseph Juran, who pioneered the manufacturing processes that first transformed the Japanese, and then the U.S. industrial sectors.

You can read Weiss and Moreno’s introduction to Science Next, “Time for Science to Reclaim Its Progressive Roots,” or order the book online.

Full video from the event is available here.

In this environment the “socialization” of the scientist becomes ever more challenging and important. As the National Academies notes in the newly published third edition of its celebrated brief text, On Being A Scientist, society must trust in the competence and judgment of the scientist (and colleagues must trust each other), in order for the enterprise to flourish. As the philosopher of science Peter Caws has long observed, science generates fiduciary knowledge. Those of us not steeped in a field must have confidence in expertise.  Without professional ethics the house of science is a deck of cards.

The appearance of the third edition is timely for another reason. President Obama has made clear his refreshing view that good policy must be guided by the best possible evidence. The onus is now on the scientific community to rise to the challenge, now more than ever.

There are two reasons to celebrate this decision. The FDA’s own scientific review shows Plan B to be a safe and effective contraceptive for women, including young women. Thus, the decision is a victory for women’s health and liberty. In addition, this decision is perfectly timed to highlight the point of two actions that President Obama took earlier this month. On March 9, the president issued an Executive Order that lifts the Bush administration’s restrictions on funding for human stem cell research. He also issued a Memorandum on Scientific Integrity. The memorandum grants the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy responsibility for ensuring the highest level of integrity in the federal executive departments and agencies, and instructs him to propose a plan based on a set of principles. The principles are not novel. The first two state:

(a) The selection and retention of candidates for science and technology positions in the executive branch should be based on the candidate’s knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity;
(b) Each agency should have appropriate rules and procedures to ensure the integrity of the scientific process within the agency;

In fact, the court’s decision is based on the findings that the FDA has violated its own standards, which substantially reflect these principles. The court’s decision shows the extent to which the previous administration had set them aside.

The court’s opinion should also raise a red flag for the Obama administration. One of the major actors in delaying Plan B approval and imposing the age restriction was Steven Galson, M.D., M.P.H. Galson is presently the acting Surgeon General and Acting Assistant Secretary for Health. In 2003 through 2005, the critical time period for the FDA’s actions on Plan B, Galson was the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the FDA. The court’s findings of fact state: “the pressure coming from the White House appears to have been transmitted down by the Commissioner’s office in such a way as to significantly affect Dr. Galson’s position” on Plan B. One of Galson’s subordinates testified, “Dr. Galson . . . told me that he didn’t have a choice, and . . . that he wasn’t sure that he would be allowed to remain as Center Director if he didn’t agree with the [Not-Approvable] Action.” In other words, Galson caved to political pressure.

The pressure—in this case on his career—was significant. But consider the action of one his colleagues. Dr. Susan Wood was then Assistant Commissioner for Women’s Health and Director of the FDA Office of Women’s Health. In September 2005, she resigned her position in protest over the FDA’s actions on Plan B. Galson saved his job, but abrogated scientific integrity, sacrificed women’s health, and violated the law in the process. It appears that he was and continues to be well rewarded.

In its holding, the court remanded to the FDA “for reconsideration of whether to approve Plan B for over-the-counter status without age or point-of-sale restrictions.” The FDA’s scientific process has already recommended over-the-counter distribution of Plan B to young women. Now is it time to honor those recommendations, and perhaps to do a little housecleaning, as well.

Lisa C. Ikemoto is a professor at the University of California Davis School of Law.

This is an idea that I and others-especially the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS-have explicitly pushed for in the past. The basic notion is to be able to conduct an intellectually sound version of what Bush science adviser John Marburger himself purported to do back in 2004, after leading scientists, organized by UCS, brought scathing charges against the administration on scientific integrity grounds. The UCS claimed that scientific information had been undermined across the government, at agencies ranging from the National Cancer Institute to the Environmental Protection Agency to the Fish and Wildlife Service. It was among the earliest-and by far the most prominent-airings of what would become the Bush “war on science” allegation.

In his response, Marburger took the UCS head-on. He claimed that his office conducted a “thorough investigation into all the allegations”-which necessarily involved getting information about what had happened from each federal agency involved in a science scandal. And yet Marburger summarily dismissed the charges in a way that few observers found remotely credible. One of those unsatisfied observers? John Holdren, who told me of Marburger’s effort for my book The Republican War on Science: “One supposes he was ordered to produce a rebuttal, but they could have produced a more nuanced rebuttal than that crass, heavy-handed, and grossly wrong one that they issued.” Indeed, in my book I compared many of the original charges with Marburger’s attempted rebuttal, and found the latter largely wanting on points of substance.

Now Holdren will get to try his own hand at this scientific integrity business. Thanks to the president’s memorandum, there are many reasons to expect he’ll do a better job of it. The memorandum makes official that this is not to be a rearguard, wagon circling action, but rather, forward-looking and comprehensive. Moreover, the federal agencies and their leaders have to cooperate with the science adviser to make sure it’s done properly.

Officially, Holdren is to take no more than 120 days to come up with a plan for how the White House can ensure, across the government, that scientific information is used properly in decision-making; that such decision-making is transparent; that scientific whistleblowers are heeded and protected; that scientific advisory committees are properly staffed with experts rather than ideological hacks, and so on. Most important, there will be rules that agencies must follow to ensure scientific integrity; and procedures in place to investigate, should anyone allege that they haven’t done so.

Provided the executive branch does indeed set up a system set up like this, it would be a huge step forward. The whole problem with the Bush administration’s responses to many allegations of political interference with science is that the answer was always the same: Nothing to see here folks, move along. Repeatedly, Bush spokespeople-Marburger, and also various press secretaries-simply asserted that all the whistleblowers were wrong, all the journalists were wrong, heck, anybody was wrong who suggested anything untoward had happened. They didn’t seriously investigate the problems; they dismissed the idea that there were any problems. Needless to say, it wasn’t a very credible approach.

Now, not only can we hope for a more transparent method of dealing with any potential new politics and science allegations; we can also hope for a much stronger presidential science adviser with the power to investigate them. For that’s perhaps the most significant aspect of the President’s scientific integrity memorandum. It puts John Holdren on a par with the heads of the federal agencies-with the cabinet-who need to report to him to show that their houses are in order. In other words, he’ll serve as a central science czar whose role is to provide good advice and preserve informational integrity, and who will actually be listened to and heeded.

Now, if we could only get Holdren through the Senate and into his job.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Luckily for me, I didn’t.

Colbert’s segment was entitled “Obama’s New Science Policy.” For as he pointed out, our new president now acknowledges that science “exists.” Obama will restore science to its “rightful place,” Colbert observed—which, under Bush, had been solely for the purpose of outfitting Dick Cheney with new parts.

To get ready for this segment, I emailed friends and people I knew who had already been on the show, asking them what kinds of questions Colbert’s faux right-winger would be likely to ask the author of The Republican War on Science. Easily the most memorable response came from science journalist Eric Roston, who suggested: “Why do hurricanes hate America?”

So lest they go completely unused, here are a few of my painstakingly prepared replies to hypothetical questions, none of which he asked, none of which I answered:

Didn’t scientists start the “war” in the first place? Didn’t they commit acts of aggression?

Yes, if you mean by learning things.

Why should I care about science?

Because America is really good at it—much better than France.

Is there really a “war” on science? Where are the bodies?

Well, there haven’t been heads spitted on pikes—but there has been the equivalent of torture. Scientific studies have been confined in dark places for long periods of time. And they’ve been put on the rack and twisted until they can be made to say anything. (This last one I ripped off from Tom Toles.)

And so on. In retrospect, it’s probably good that I didn’t get to use my “wit” in this way. The whole point of “The Colbert Report” is that the host is funny, not you. If you’re trying to be funny, you’re very likely to be annoying, or worse.

So rather than eliciting any further groans, allow me to try something I’m somewhat more competent in than humor: Remarking upon Stephen Colbert’s role in the mass communication of science today. As Dan Vergano, USA Today‘s science correspondent, wrote recently on my blog:

A think piece is out there on how much science Colbert does (from Tiktaalik to astronomy.) He is the modern-day heir to Johnny Carson, who used to bring anthropologists and Paul Ehrlich onto his show.

Here it goes, Dan.

It’s absolutely true that as host of a show that regularly draws over a million viewers, Colbert features an astonishing amount of science content. Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson is a frequent guest, as is Columbia University string theorist Brian Greene. Other scientists who have appeared include Brown University’s Kenneth Miller, Oxford’s Richard Dawkins (making the non-scientific case for atheism), human genome project head Francis Collins, and numerous others.

And in addition to its many scientist guests, the show has also featured numerous science-related segments, such as “America’s Galaxy is Big” and several concerning the Pluto-demotion saga. In each case—always in the context of Colbert’s role-playing—the show conveys a large amount of scientific information, raises very important questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, and explores and its relationship to others areas like politics. And the viewers—or at least those viewers who get the jokes—come away with good reasons for trusting in science, rather than in “truthiness.”

In other words, you might say that George W. Bush’s anti-intellectual administration created a perfect opening for Stephen Colbert’s hugely popular caricature of anti-intellectualism; and this in turn transformed Colbert into possibly our most important defender and explainer of scientific knowledge. (Again, if you get the jokes.)

That might sound surprising at first, but as Dan Vergano noted above, television talk show hosts have often played an important role in bringing science to the public. Johnny Carson helped make a star of Carl Sagan. Recently David Letterman featured President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, in a kind of educational/public service segment about climate change.

Nowadays Colbert is doing as much mass science communication as anyone, but the question then becomes: How do you keep the joke going in the wake of Obama’s restoration of the so-called “reality-based community”? Our new president isn’t going to be nearly so easy to make fun of—not for trusting to his gut over his head, anyway. Ironically, the restoration of science in Washington might make the communication of science through comedy a more difficult endeavor. Reality is resurgent now, and truthiness is tumbling. This is the challenge of our times—for comedians, anyway.

Still, I would never underestimate Stephen Colbert’s ability to find humor in any situation. Who else would say, in a discussion of the difference between basic research and technology, “Are you telling me there are stem cells in my iPhone?”

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Good riddance to the lies, the deception, the White House-edited pseudoscience reports. Good riddance to the stacked science advisory committees, the faux peer-review of proposed regulations, the junkyard claims of “junk science.”

Good riddance to the scientist manqué at the top of the Environmental Protection Agency who big-footed actual evidence for political convenience. Good riddance to the leadership at the Office of Science and Technology Policy that supported President Bush’s skepticism about the need to address climate change aggressively.

Good riddance to the vice-president who thought the telecom revolution was about better bugging of innocent citizens’ phone calls. Good riddance to the president who cared more about human embryos than he did about children living in the lower Ninth Ward.

Now, however, comes the difficult task of looking forward—of finding the place for progressive voices in an administration refreshingly committed to treating science fairly, but burdened by an inheritance of underfunded agencies and dispirited federal scientists. And all this comes in the midst of an economic crisis that precludes the cash infusion that our emaciated science agencies and their surviving public servants need and so richly deserve.

But there are two aspects of the current predicament that give me hope. First, of course, is that when it comes to science, Obama really does get it. Back in October 2008, he sent via the government employees union several letters to federal workers in the science-based agencies, stating in no uncertain terms his commitment to evidence. “In an Obama administration, the principle of scientific integrity will be an absolute, and I will never sanction any attempt to subvert the work of scientists,” he wrote.

By my reading, those missives could be reduced to about seven words—two-sevenths exhortation—“Hang on!”—and five-sevenths supplication—“I’m going to need you!”

The supplication gets me to my second reason for hope, which is that despite all the failings at

• the Food and Drug Administration: the Plan B debacle, the parade of contaminated foods, and the failure to follow up on serious side effects of drugs
• the EPA, with its repeated overruling of science on pesticide approvals, chemical contamination standards, air and water pollution
• the Interior Department, which, according to The New York Times, is “riddled with incompetence and corruption, captive to industries it is supposed to regulate and far more interested in exploiting public resources than conserving them.”
• the Department of Agriculture, which has been repeatedly scolded by federal courts for its failed science policies and which, according to a just-released Inspector General report, “does not have a strategy for monitoring new transgenic plants and animals that may be developed and imported into the United States”
• the National Institutes of Health, which has not paid sufficient attention to conflicts of interest among its grantees and provided too much cover for the morally corrupt Bush stem cell plan
• the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—consider the Columbia disaster and the pending loss of the shuttle fleet with no other means of reaching the space station
• the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which failed in “almost every respect” to protect Hurricane Katrina victims from the well-understood risks of formaldehyde fumes, according to a congressional investigation, and which has alienated scientists around the world for failing to share important public health data

…Despite all these failings and more, the amazing thing is that every time I talk to the men and women who are actually doing the science in these agencies, I find them almost without exception to be hugely talented and dedicated professionals. Most of them are working on shoestrings but virtually all of them are squeezing all the integrity they can into the process, wanting nothing more (and nothing less) than to get the best answers to the smartest questions so the United States can be a leader among nations and help save the world. Who can’t relate to that?

In short, I am heartened that the nation is endowed with a huge corps of public-servant scientists devoted to going where the evidence takes them and who, as of Wednesday, will for the first time in years be respected by the highest officials in the land for what they do. What’s more, one of the silver linings of our recent eight-year nightmare is that scientists have awakened to the political context within which they work, and more of them than ever seem willing to speak their minds when it comes to how their studies are to be integrated into the world of public policy.

Now is the time for progressives inside and outside of science to solidify these gains for the common good—to avoid overreaching in these days of our political ascendance and instead prove that science can bring economic as well as environmental benefit, prove that scientists can be responsive to social, ethical, and cultural concerns, and prove that evidence is a better source of ideas than ideology.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

Ethically Challenged
One Quarter of Stem Cell Lines Eligible for Federal Funding Fail Ethics Guidelines
By Rick Weiss
An expert panel at Stanford University determined in July that nearly one quarter of the colonies of human embryonic stem cells that the Bush administration had approved as ethically derived and eligible for study with federal funds did not meet Stanford’s ethics standards.

Enormously Pathetic Agency
The Evisceration of the EPA
By Chris Mooney
There was a near-complete breakdown at our central environmental regulatory agency under the Bush administration. And that was just what things looked like in April.

The Halfway House Between Science and Secrets
An Interview With Bruce Schneier on Science and Security
By Jonathan Pfeiffer
A National Research Council report recognized that the 9/11 attacks provoked counter-productive security measures that stifle access to fruitful scientific research. Security expert Bruce Schneier talked with Science Progress about the science that makes us smarter and the security that makes us safer.

Minding Mental Minefields
How to Stockpile the Neuropharmacological Arsenal
By Rick Weiss
Another report from the National Research Council argued that the military should harness the power of neuroscience research to amplify the cognitive prowess of U.S. military personnel and make foreign soldiers, um, less smarter.

Plight of the Postdoc
Is Modern American Science Strangling Its Young Talents In the Cradle?
By Sheril Kirshenbaum
Colleges and universities are graduating more science and engineering PhDs, but diminishing opportunities are derailing young scientists from future careers as scientific leaders.

Hearts and Minds
Expelled Suggests Defenders of Evolution are Losing Them
By Chris Mooney
The successful right-wing documentary demonstrated that science needs a loud, accessible, entertaining, mass media response to creationist nonsense.

The Staggering Cyclone Nargis Catastrophe
A Disastrous Convergence of Variables
By Chris Mooney
The alarming death tolls from the storm were a product of poverty, poor infrastructure, and a negligent government. Better forecasting for the North Indian region would be a start for protecting citizens from future cyclones. Democracy in Burma probably wouldn’t hurt, either.

Manufactroversy
The Art of Creating Controversy Where None Existed
By Leah Ceccarelli
Contemporary rhetorical tactics designed to confuse politicians and the public about scientific issues are as old as antiquity. The methods are just as disingenuous 2,500 years after their invention.

Contraception Is the New Abortion
The Latest Right Wing Trend? Attack Birth Control
By Jessica Arons
An HHS rule was just the most recent attempt in a longstanding campaign by social conservatives to turn discomfort with abortion into opposition to contraception.

Ubiquity Requires Redundancy
The Case for Federal Investment in Broadband
By Mark Lloyd
The attacks of 9/11 and body blow of Hurricane Katrina highlight for all but the most doctrinaire advocates of free markets that there is an exceedingly strong case for direct government investment in the deployment of advanced telecommunications services to build a safe, strong, and resilient America.

Science Under Obama
Next Administration Would Chart a Dramatic New Course
By Chris Mooney
The day after the historic election, Mooney wrote that there’s much for scientists to like about Barack Obama’s plans for science policy. But, Mooney asked, will the president-elect make it a priority, and what about the money?

Wikipedia and the New Curriculum
Digital Literacy Is Knowing How We Store What We Know
By David Parry
Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing. Encyclopedias are no longer static collections of facts and figures; they are living entities. Just check the entry on Global Warming. This article generated a spirited discussion on Science Progress and around the blogosphere.

Taken together, the seven science advisers he has so far appointed are surely the most distinguished group of scientists at the highest levels of government in decades. They would make the founders of our republic—the most technology-oriented pantheon of revolutionaries in history—proud.

Steven Chu is the first Nobel laureate in science nominated for a cabinet position, Secretary of Energy. Chu has the ability to recognize good science and, just as important, sees our energy and environmental problems within a larger framework of the innovation economy. To coordinate energy and climate policy in the White House Obama has selected former Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner. Former New Jersey environmental commissioner Lisa Jackson will run EPA. And L.A. deputy mayor Nancy Sutley will direct the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

All these impressive credentials are a beginning, not an end. But at the very least they say to the American people that respect for evidence will once again have a central role in government science policy.

As the Passover ritual says, if this is all the president-elect had done for science and our country that would have been sufficient. But he is also expected to name the highly respected Harvard University physicist and climate expert John Holdren as his White House science adviser. Holdren, a former board chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is a vigorous supporter of efforts to put innovation back on our national agenda, as it is crucial to all aspects of our national security and prosperity.

Obama will apparently also name Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lubchenco, also much admired in the scientific community, is a member of both the National Academy of Science and the British Royal Academy.

Again, all these impressive credentials are a beginning, not an end. But at the very least they say to the American people that respect for evidence will once again have a central role in government science policy. The role of regulatory agencies—to create a level playing field of safety and opportunity—will be restored to its proper place in government, in the context of a public policy that builds the cleaner, green economy that must be the foundation of the new American prosperity.

Especially striking is the turn away from the tiresome, divisive and dispiriting culture wars that so politicized science—a sorry trademark of the past eight years. Americans can now look forward with pleasure to further smart appointments, including new leadership for the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

At Science Progress we are committed to the proposition that sound public policy requires taking evidence seriously. If democracy is to thrive, we must find new and better ways to integrate the spirit of open inquiry into our policy process. That’s why we cover the latest research and discussions shaping science policy and develop pragmatic proposals that promote science and innovation that ensures greater freedom, justice, and quality of life for all people. We celebrate the new appreciation for the contributions of science to policy and to shaping a better world.

Yet the outgoing Bush administration has left us with a parting shot: a midnight regulation that could clear the way for new coal-fired plants not restrained by greenhouse-gas rules. Just one week ago today I experienced the “sunniest” day of a stay in Beijing. That was a bright, noxious haze in which I could roughly make out the rim of the sun. The seven for science named so far can’t alone protect us from the future we can read in the Beijing sky, but they can help show us the way.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

The distortion and suppression of science is dangerous, and not just because it means that public money gets wasted on programs, like abstinence-only sex “education” schemes, that do not work. It is dangerous because it is an assault on science itself, a method of thought and inquiry on which our modern civilization is based and which has been hugely successful as a way of acquiring knowledge that lets us transform our lives and the world around us. In many respects science has been the dominant force — for good and ill — that has transformed human lives over the past two centuries.

She is careful, and correct, to note that researchers (and policymakers) bring their own ideological bias to doing science and interpreting the results. But crafting effective policy requires a critical recognition of those biases, rather than a fanatical posture that selectively highlights or igores the work of a vast global network of smart people producing useful knowledge.

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is author of two previous books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs at The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum. (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

Every presidential election year going back to 2000—and before that, in 1992 as well—the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has released a report, addressed to the incoming administration, providing input on presidential appointments in the area of science and technology. In essence, these reports have underscored the indisputable importance of filling positions ranging from the White House science adviser to the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in a timely manner, and with the best possible candidates. And in some sense, each report reiterates several core points: The overarching need for an influential, cabinet-level science adviser (call the position the “First Scientist”) who is appointed just after the election, for instance; and the need for streamlining the appointments process and cutting down on red tape. In addition, the 2004 and 2008 reports both stress the importance of nonpartisan, expertise-based assessments of which scientists will serve on the federal government’s many science-related advisory committees.

Sadly, such repetition may stem in part from the fact that of late, these valuable reports have been more or less ignored. The Bush administration did not appoint an influential, cabinet-level science adviser, and certainly did not appoint its senior science adviser promptly. It was, in fact, the slowest administration ever to fill the top 500 positions in government, according to the Brookings Institution, and left many science-related agencies (such as the Food and Drug Administration) leaderless for significant periods of time. (Given recent concerns about foodborne illnesses and contaminants, let’s hope that wouldn’t fly this time around.) The Bush administration also became notorious for politicizing the membership of scientific advisory committees—presumably the reason the 2004 and 2008 NAS reports both take up this issue (which in 2000 wasn’t on the radar).

Marburger…will always be remembered as the science adviser who took Bush’s side when the nation’s scientists stood up and challenged the administration on the grounds of scientific integrity.

For indeed, while the core NAS recommendations haven’t changed much, it is indisputable that they read far differently now than they did eight years ago. Consider what has happened to the post of the presidential science adviser, arguably the most luminous gem in the science and technology appointments trove. Bush’s current adviser, physicist John Marburger, is the longest-lasting occupant of this role in American history, having served for a full two terms (although he was originally appointed very late in 2001). And yet at the same time, Marburger’s tenure probably represents the “nadir” for the position in terms of its influence, as University of California-Merced science historian Gregg Herken put it to me last year.

Marburger is, most emphatically, not what the NAS recommends; he lacks the title of “assistant to the president,” and thus does not serve in a cabinet-level role. And while it’s probably more important for a presidential science adviser to have a good relationship with the president than with the scientific community, it’s quite clear that Marburger’s position vis a vis the latter has been hopelessly undermined—he will always be remembered as the science adviser who took Bush’s side when the nation’s scientists stood up and challenged the administration on the grounds of scientific integrity. (There are good reasons to think that either Barack Obama or John McCain will restore prominence to the science adviser position.)

Over all, there is little to dispute about the body of the NAS recommendations; the problem here has always been political responsiveness to them on the part of the administration, rather than their substance. Still, there’s something new to the 2004 and especially the 2008 NAS reports that I think bears remarking upon.

In addition to demanding action from the president, both of the more recent reports also call upon the nation’s scientific community—and particularly its membership societies—to appoint its most promising young researchers to serve in government science and technology posts, and to create more fellowships, like the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences’ excellent program, to get younger scientists training in the workings government. In short, the idea is that while the president and his transition staff should grasp the importance of science and technology appointments, the science community, at the same time, must be ready to offer up its best and brightest.

Indeed, in the 2008 report one senses a stronger tone (stronger for the generally staid National Academies, anyway) about the need for scientists to embrace public service; as it concludes, researchers “have much to give back. Government service is an excellent means by which to repay that debt.” This is remarkable, because it’s fairly notorious that scientists have not always clamored to be involved in government. It takes away from their research work; it doesn’t necessarily lead to academic career advancement; it requires uprooting and can even pose political risks. Nevertheless, here is the NAS saying strongly that there must be much more of it. That’s critical, because to reconnect science and the political process, what we need to see most is bridge building from both sides.

And we need to see it urgently: The impending presidential transition is one in which the candidates cannot afford to dally on the issue of science appointments. Modern presidential transitions, each more complex than the last one, require an enormous amount of planning and effort, beginning even before the party’s nominating conventions. While the campaigns are certainly busy, they should heed the NAS advice and not loose a minute in restoring the integrity and prominence of federal scientific service.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

On the one hand, Americans express strong confidence in the leaders of the scientific community; among important institutions of society, only leaders of the military are better trusted. (Journalists and members of Congress are basically considered slime). Americans also claim to be very interested in new scientific discoveries and developments—according to the National Science Foundation, surveys conducted each year from 2001 to 2006 found that “between 83% and 87% of Americans reported that they had either ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ interest in new scientific discoveries.”

That strong respect for science—and interest in it—doesn’t seem to go much beyond a surface level in many cases.

Obviously, though, this isn’t the full picture. The same Americans who express such confidence in the leaders of science probably couldn’t name any of them. When polled in late 2007 and asked to name scientific role models, the best Americans could come up with were the names of people who were either not scientists, or not alive: Bill Gates, Al Gore, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. Moreover, while many people claim to be very interested in new scientific discoveries, they’re more interested in other things. According to NSF, as of 2006 only 15 percent of the public followed science news “very closely,” meaning that science ranked behind 10 other news subjects in terms of people’s interest. (Science’s ranking vis-à-vis other news subjects has been slipping of late; and indeed, declining treatment of science in the news reflects as much.)

The best way I can process these findings in my own head is to draw an analogy with the way scientific information gets treated in the context of political debates. On the one hand, everybody—left, right, and center—claims that science lies on their side, including the Christian right. The perception is basically universal that it is good and advantageous to appear both pro-science and informed about science.

As soon as you get into the details of what politicians or advocates are actually claiming, however, things quickly get murky. The science often fails to support their assertions, and the pro-science aura quickly dissipates under scrutiny—supplanted by opportunism or, in some cases, outright cynicism and manipulation. Consider the arguments about how much mercury we should let polluters spew into our atmosphere, or the carbon emissions and food price increases produced by making ethanol from corn.

The same, in a sense, goes for the public, although I don’t think anything deliberate or nefarious is happening here. Still, that strong respect for science—and interest in it—doesn’t seem to go much beyond a surface level in many cases. If you put it to the test—by asking the public to, say, take sides in a perceived conflict between science and their religious beliefs—then suddenly science doesn’t fare very well. According to NSF, when Americans reject belief in evolution or the Big Bang (which they do far more frequently than citizens in many other countries), it’s not, for the most part, because they don’t understand the basics of what the science says. Rather, it’s that they don’t let science win out in competition with other things that are important to them—like, in this case, religion.

What does it all add up to? I think the person who probably put it best is social scientist Daniel Yankelovich, who, writing in 2003, observed the following:

Science has reached greater heights of sophistication and productivity, while the gap between science and public life has grown ever larger and more dangerous, to an extent that now poses a serious threat to our future. We need to understand the causes of the divide between science and society and to explore ways of narrowing the gap so that the voice of science can exert a more direct and constructive influence on the policy decisions that shape our future.

Yankelovich, obviously familiar with the polling data that I’ve been citing, went on to draw a distinction between “respect” for science on the one hand—which is clearly widespread—and “influence” for science on the other—which is not. Scientists, he wrote, “do not have the influence due to them by virtue of the importance and relevance of their work and of the promises and dangers it poses for our communal life.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. The numbers I’ve cited above simply do not support the argument that we live in an absolutely antiscientific society, a land of know-nothings. But clearly, science isn’t at the top of many people’s agenda, whether they’re average citizens, politicians, or journalists.

Should it rate higher? I, for one, believe so.

To see that, consider a very important question for most people: Where should I buy a home? Amid the housing market meltdown, it has become apparent that home investments can be risky ones, especially when they’re made without adequate information. And yet how many people weigh the likely impacts of global climate change when making their home purchases? It is going to raise sea levels, worsen droughts in many parts of the west, increase the risk of wildfires…all matters that will ultimately factor into real estate markets and prices. But I for one find it almost impossible to believe that many people are taking this into account in any serious way.

That’s what’s missing. Americans might tune in to some science news, visit science museums, and even adjust their diets and prescriptions based upon the latest studies. But it’s not enough. Without anything beyond a surface-level appreciation of science, they stand far too blind when staring down something of paramount importance: The future.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Michael Jacobson, Executive Director of CSPI, opened the event by emphasizing that politicians must “allow facts to drive policymaking, not the other way around.” Merrill Goozner, the director of CSPI’s the Integrity in Science project, remained optimistic, stating that the group wanted to look forward rather than backwards. He called for the federal government to take an increased role “if our nation is going to curb many of the [scientific] challenges that lie ahead.”

The conference covered a variety of topics, including curbing industry influence on regulatory science, conservation, and conflicts of interest, but one major topic of conversation was renewable energy. Gal Luft of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security spoke of the need for Congress to mandate that every new car sold in America be “flexible”—able to run on multiple sources of energy rather than only on gasoline. Ken Zweibel of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory then argued that solar and wind energy “are a lot closer to economic reality than people realize.”

Integrity in the science that informs renewable energy policy making is a critical issue, as recent years have seen many officials and the Bush administration downplay the reality of global climate change and delay serious efforts to invest in renewable energy. For example, the Illinois FutureGen project, which was supposed to create the world’s first near-zero emissions coal plant, had its funding removed one day after Bush’s 2008 State of the Union address in which he argued that the country should “fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions.”

But the most recent disregard of scientific evidence in crafting energy policy is in the national discussion over offshore oil drilling. Just yesterday, President Bush lifted executive orders that ban on off-shore oil drilling. A legislative moratorium still bars companies from drilling on the continental shelf, but the scientific and economic reality is that offshore drilling will not yield more oil for many years, and that oil would then be sold on the world market, reducing domestic oil prices by an insignificant amount. The Center for American Progress has a full ten reasons why lifting the ban on offshore drilling is such a bad idea. As Congress considers lifting the ban, they should heed Rep. Miller’s words and let science inform their decisions.

Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) has served in the House of Representatives since 1998, but prior to that he was assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. With Representatives Bill Foster (D-IL) and Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), he is one of the three physicists in Congress. In commemoration of the release of the first printed edition of Science Progress, Rep. Holt sent us his thoughts on the critical role that respect for open scientific inquiry plays in making policy that improves the lives of all Americans.

On Wednesday, President Bush argued that, “Congress must face a hard reality: Unless members are willing to accept gas prices at today’s painful levels—or even higher—our nation must produce more oil. And we must start now.” Unfortunately, the president’s proposal to end the moratorium on offshore drilling in sensitive coastal areas would not lower gas prices. The science contradicts President Bush, and arguments from legislators that the U.S. should open offshore fields for drilling are simply the latest instance of federal policymaking that willfully ignores scientific evidence.

According to an Energy Information Administration study, drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf would increase domestic oil production 7 percent by 2030 compared to a reference case, but “because oil prices are determined on the international market…any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.” Further, it would take years for production to begin, and the nation lacks both the infrastructure necessary to conduct offshore drilling and the capacity necessary to refine extracted oil. The science is clear: offshore drilling in sensitive coastal areas would not even come close to alleviating the energy crisis. But these aren’t the only reasons; the Center for American Progress has a full “Ten Reasons Not to Lift the Offshore Drilling Moratorium.”

The president’s proposal demonstrates both a lack of imagination and a refusal to incorporate science into executive decision-making. Instead of trying to produce more oil, the United State should be researching technologies that would move us beyond our dependence on oil. The real solution to the energy crisis—and to the climate crisis—is to innovate, become more efficient, and move forward. That’s why offshore drilling in sensitive areas is a bad idea. For a long-term plan, it is remarkably short-sighted.

Cartoon by Mike Luckovich, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. From the Cartoonist Group.

Dr. Neal Lane, Malcolm Gillis University Professor and senior fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, and former science advisor to President Bill Clinton, offered a keynote address highlighting three significant challenges for the United States that will require technical solutions: climate change and rising global demands for energy; the competitiveness of American business and industry; and affordable and effective health care.

“Looking forward, the quality of our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren in the 21^st century will depend on the U.S. continuing to be a leader in science and technology,” he said, adding that he believes that leadership is well within the grasp of the United States, but it is not a given. “Our success will depend on America making many of the new discoveries and new inventions,” he said, “but it will also depend on how we use that technology to deal with a host of serious problems that threaten Americans, and in some cases billions of people around the globe.”

The room erupted in applause when Lane said that the federal government must restore the public’s trust in the integrity of science. Scientific information cannot be used to spread dogma, he said. He stressed that government websites and publications must provide accurate information, government scientists must be able to speak openly, and only qualified individuals should serve on advisory committees. “I never thought I would put those down as bullets in a talk,” he lamented. “It seemed very obvious to me.”

The “science fair” presenters gathered after the keynote for a panel discussion moderated by R. Alta Charo, Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law & Bioethics, University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. Baden spoke about the need to direct federal funding not just to support research, but to the laboratory infrastructure at public universities that cannot otherwise keep up with the more lavish facilities of private schools. Without good labs, he said, these schools lose talent to the wealthier schools. Building on ideas in Lane’s keynote, Kalil talked about the need to increase funding high-risk, transformative research, early-career researchers, and long-term projects.

Addressing the issue of ethical approaches to scientific research, Hudson argued that the United States must rethink the structure of clinical drug trials. In her opinion, drug researchers are too focused on “protecting” their subjects from the science, rather than communicating with them and addressing their concerns. Batten also emphasized the necessity of effective science communication, this time between scientists and policymakers, citing as a prime concern the Bush administration’s regressive policies regarding climate change.

Charo identified a common thread running through the concerns of all the participants: the dilemma of basing policy on “truth,” when politicians can manipulate the concept into something that no longer resembles the truth of scientists. “Scientists talk in terms of hypotheses and probabilities,” she pointed out, whereas “politics and law tends to move on the assumption that the case is ‘X’ and we need to base a policy on it.” But troubles arise over who gets to own that truth, she said. In light of the inherent uncertainly of science, she explained, the United States has seen the difference in the treatment of truth used to delay necessary policies, as in the case of global warming. She also pointed to political manipulations of truth that have been used to “justify absolute falsehoods” as in the case of the Terri Schiavo controversy and battles over reproductive rights. She added that “nationally, we’ve seen it blurring the definition of science in the continued attempts to introduce creationism and so-called ‘Intelligent Design’ into the school system.”

Rick Weiss, CAP Senior Fellow and former science reporter for the Washington Post, closed the event, arguing that science must trump the superstitions that lead to uninformed policies on issues like contraception, sex education, and drug abuse. “Imagine what the world would be like if reason and evidence were really the currency of the day.” Science, he reemphasized, is crucial to solving the most pressing issues in environmental protection, health care, food security, and climate change, but equally important is the effective communication of science that will drive sound policymaking.

To watch video of the entire event, visit the CAP events page.

The first validation came with a long awaited report from the NASA Inspector General’s office on the James Hansen affair, in which the agency’s (and the world’s) most famous climate scientist charged that the NASA headquarters public affairs office had blocked his access to the media. The Hansen saga has received much attention; there’s even a book about it. Anyone familiar with the details of the case would already know that untoward behaviors occurred—most notably, a young political appointee named George Deutsch, apparently following orders from his public affairs superiors, blocked Hansen from doing a requested NPR interview. It appears that interfering with climate science amounted to a routine among these folks: A number of NASA climate-related press releases were also either blocked or suspiciously altered so as to minimize their impact or to otherwise align them with administration policies.

Surely these appointees—political appointees—had some idea of what they were doing, why they were doing it, and who might be pleased by their actions.

The Inspector General report comes across as fairly hard-hitting; it says more or less point blank that the complaints leveled by NASA scientists have far more substance than the evasive defenses that have emerged from the agency’s public affairs folks (and that have been parroted by administration defenders). All in all, the Inspector General found that “during the fall of 2004 through early 2006, the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public.” So insofar as it’s possible to “prove” that political interference with science occurred, this report does precisely that. And in the process, it vindicates those of us who have been flagging these types of behaviors for years.

One troubling aspect of the Inspector General’s work, however, lies in its suggestion that these abuses don’t go beyond a few bad apples: The report found “no credible evidence suggesting that senior NASA or Administration officials directed the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs to minimize information relating to climate change.” And again: “The defects we found are associated with the manner of operation of the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs and are largely due to the actions of a few key senior employees of that office.”

I for one find this highly dubious. Are we seriously supposed to believe that this public affairs office was a rogue actor? Surely these appointees—political appointees—had some idea of what they were doing, why they were doing it, and who might be pleased by their actions. Mark Bowen, author of the aforementioned book about the Hansen affair, Censoring Science, finds the NASA Inspector General report wholly unsatisfying on this particular point of ultimate responsibility and agency. Bowen charges that the Inspector General “leaves out any connection” between individuals in the public affairs office and “those who directed the censorship from within the White House.”

And speaking of censorship—Hansen’s story, while perhaps the best known, represents just one climate science abuse narrative that has emerged from this administration. There have been many, many others. Moreover, as I and others have argued, the most important such story is also, perhaps, the least known. It involves the concerted campaign to suppress the Clinton-era “National Assessment” of climate change impacts on the United States–and the subsequent failure, on the part of this administration, to produce a legally required follow up assessment.

You can read about the whole sordid saga here; it’s pretty outrageous stuff. But finally, there’s a mildly happy ending: Thanks to a court order, the Bush administration has at last coughed up an assessment of how global warming will change the lives of all Americans by producing rising sea levels, droughts, and numerous other troublesome outcomes. As Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity, which had sued the administration last year to get the assessment produced, put it, “The tide is finally turning, and the administration has been forced to acknowledge the harsh reality of global warming.” (The original deadline for delivery of the assessment was 2004. It only took until 2008.)

Not surprisingly, not everyone is completely happy with this end product. The World Wildlife Fund, for instance, has charged that the report, hastily put together, isn’t as useful to policymakers and stakeholders as it ought to be. I don’t doubt it—but nevertheless, this really does feel like the end of an era. There’s less and less fighting over climate science, and the Bush administration’s many transgressions keep meeting with slow repudiations and reversals.

All in all, it leaves you feeling a lot like someone who has finally won an eight-year court case, but went through incredible suffering and sacrificed untold resources in the process—it’s hard to really celebrate. You’re glad it’s over, but you still hate and lament what you went through. You mourn the incredible waste—so much time lost, when it didn’t have to be that way. Or to give NASA’s inspector general the last word: “In sum…none of this course of conduct was in the public’s best interest.”

There’s a lot of repair to be done.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Like a growing number of others, I can no longer pretend that this doesn’t matter.

The orderly and unbiased testing of reality to see how things actually work—the art and science of science—has ever been the engine of better health, higher productivity and greater economic power, not to mention enhanced entertainment and leisure-time options. So it is something of a wonder that so many today eschew it, and so openly.

But while incurious leaders and an undereducated public surely account for much of this disconnect, scientists and the marketers of science deserve blame too, having done so much to lose the public’s trust.

Unkeepable promises, exaggerated claims, financial conflicts of interest. It all starts to sound like the worst of politics and business. So why believe scientists when they tell you that the Earth is going to cook, or that vaccines don’t cause autism, or that life has been living for 4 billion years?

This is an excellent time for a Renaissance of reason. For one thing, the world is not waiting for us to put our lab coats back on. And while there is nothing that says the United States really has to be No. 1 in science, being on top is good for the competitive juices and can, if nothing else, bolster the gross national product. But more fundamental is the simple fact that facts work best. They are the raw materials on which ingenuity and innovation work their alchemy.

It’s not just the facts, Ma’am, of course. “Facts do not speak for themselves,” Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “they are read in the light of theory.” And not just scientific theory, as Gould probably meant, but political theory too. So yes, when it comes to crafting policies, power and politics will have their say.

But first there has got to be an honest call for facts. And some assurance that the facts that do come in—the ones showing that new drug to be a winner, for example—are not just the ones that were left standing after the evidence for nasty side effects was buried.

The United States has lost a good deal of credibility in recent years, and has even been ridiculed, because of its careless blending of faith and fact. Faith, for example, that government and taxes are bad and that markets will bring us what we need, even as evidence has repeatedly shown that without blue-skies, taxpayer-funded basic research there would be no Internet, no biotechnology, no DNA databases to convict the criminal or exonerate the bystander—not to mention no science for science’s sake, the nonprofitable but hugely enriching enterprise of finding out what the heck we are and where we came from.

We Americans have been ridiculed, but we can fight cat calls with fact calls. My goal is to have history look back at the post-Bush era as the time when evidence was reintegrated into the business of government decision making.

New York City hosts the first World Science Festival. Experts and public officials took the opportunity to decry U.S. attitudes toward scientific enterprise; Mayor Bloomberg attacked official manipulation, distortion, or ignorance of science for political ends. (NRDC President Frances Beinecke has more on that at Switchboard.)

A new book on the intricacies of stem cell research, The Stem Cell Dilemma, makes C-Span’s Book TV.

Tomorrow is the last day for regular price register for the Fourth National Integrity in Science Conference. This year’s focus is on “Rejuvenating Public Sector Science“—a topic David Michaels highlights in his recent interview.

CongressDaily (subscription) reports that the Iraq supplemental funding bill that passed the Senate last week contained $1.2 billion in federal R&D to make up for cuts in the 2008 omnibus spending package approved by Congress in December. The funding faces higher hurdles in the House, which did not include the science supplemental in its version. The legislation would include $100 million for the DoE office of Science. Fermilab is one major research institution that would benefit from the boost—it is poised to layoff 140 staffers because of unanticipated cuts in the FY2008 budget.

For Levin and Gerson, though, dismissing concerns about a conservative “war on science” just serves as a springboard for another offensive.

A new wave of conservative science punditry—epitomized by an essay by Yuval Levin in The New Atlantis entitled “Science and the Left,” which was itself recently publicized by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in an oped in the Washington Post—demonstrably lacks such candor. Setting out to debunk the idea that there really is a “war on science” coming from the right, these writers don’t bother engaging on the facts of the case at all. They don’t attempt to show that, say, conservative anti-evolutionists are right, or that conservative global warming deniers know what they’re talking about. Instead, Levin and Gerson ignore, trivialize, and even mock the very serious argument that scientific information has been systematically mistreated under this administration and by the American political right. Here’s Gerson: “There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a ‘war on science.’” As for Levin: “Beneath these grave accusations, it turns out, are some remarkably flimsy grievances, most of which seem to amount to political disputes about policy questions in which science plays a role.”

And that’s it for these authors—rather than taking apart the “war on science” argument, they simply assert with a wave of the hand that we’re all confused, that the facts of science aren’t under attack from the right, it’s just that disagreements have occurred over ethics and policies. But of course, that’s hokum. As the author of the original book making this argument—The Republican War on Science—I took pains to show that in each of my case studies, the scientific information itself was under attack. And as for the literally hundreds of scientists employed by this government who have now been shown, in successive surveys conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, to have experienced political interference in their work? Once again, these scientists trade in facts, analysis, and expertise. They know the elementary science-policy distinction as well as everyone; as government researchers they live and breathe it. They’re still outraged.

For Levin and Gerson, though, dismissing concerns about a conservative “war on science” just serves as a springboard for another offensive—trying to show that the political left’s loving embrace of science might well lead it off a cliff. Levin rightly observes that there’s something in the spirit of modern liberalism that grows out of the scientific revolution of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, which unleashed a profound distrust of hoary old authorities and empty traditions (especially religious ones). Levin even admits: “The left is therefore generally justified in thinking of itself as the party of science.” (Why, thank you.) But that’s just a set-up: Levin’s lengthy essay (parroted by Gerson) proceeds to argue that the liberal embrace of science engenders two key conflicts—one, with its support of environmental values, and second, with its support for equality. Science, according to Levin, can undermine both.

But the arguments adduced to show this hardly withstand scrutiny. True, in the European green movement we do see a rift between science and a value system rooted in the desire to preserve the authenticity of “nature”—hence the sabotaging of biotech crop fields. But this case notwithstanding, there are many more ways in which science bolsters the environmental cause—most obviously, by allowing for the serious and detailed analysis of environmental impacts and problems. Environmental scientists, based at universities across the country, hardly see any conflict between the two chief words that describe their professions. What does irk them, however, is to conduct a painstaking study of an environmental problem, only to find some industry-funded scientist with the gall to assert that their facts are wrong—and then to further watch that industry-funded scientist get pulled before Congress by conservatives to testify, or get used by the Bush Office of Management and Budget to torpedo a proposed environmental regulation.

Score one for science, and one for equality at the same time.

But then Levin strays still farther, arguing that some fundamental conflict exists between the liberal embrace of science on the one hand, and the liberal concern for preserving equality on the other. You’ll only follow Levin down this road if you share a key assumption—that abortion, in vitro fertilization, and genetic pre-screening constitute a “new eugenics,” which I certainly do not. Science Progress’s Jonathan Moreno has already taken apart Gerson’s (er, Levin’s) clumsy attempt to draw an analogy between old eugenics and “new,” but let me just explode one of Levin’s additional assertions. “Science, simply put,” he writes, “cannot account for human equality, and does not offer reasons to believe we are all equal. Science measures our material and animal qualities, and it finds them to be patently unequal.” Oh, really? What more equalizing force could there be than a book like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which shows that racialist theories cannot explain how it is that Europeans managed to take over virtually the entire Earth—rather, distinct environmental and technological advantages made all the difference. Score one for science, and one for equality at the same time.

In the end, Levin and Gerson (who just does the Cliff Notes version) fundamentally ignore the assault upon scientific conclusions and expertise that now exists, and that emanates largely, in this country, from the political right. Instead, they seek to turn the tables and depict science as a kind of Kryptonite for the political left, because it undermines some of our core ideals. But that’s just wrong—science helps advance and strengthen those ideals. Finally, then, Levin and Gerson don’t just conveniently ignore the core of the “war on science” argument; they also creatively redefine liberal ideals and values so as to create greater tensions between them than actually exist. Fundamentally, they’re ignoring the truth about what progressives think and argue—and thus, unfortunately, engaging in still more conservative obscurantism.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Gerson’s only example to this effect is the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gerson is right that important progressives of that era favored eugenic theory, and he is correct that sterilization was an important and shameful part of eugenic social policy. Having established a paradigm case of misguided liberalism, Gerson identifies the “new eugenics” of genetic screening, in vitro fertilization and abortion. In this paradigm, the real war is not conservatism versus science but the continuing war of liberalism versus human equality.

The old eugenics movement has become a favorite of conservative commentary, but the commentators in question seem not to know more than the bumper sticker history. In fact, both progressives and conservatives favored eugenics; the most vigorous critics of eugenics were themselves progressives; and after World War II conservatives (who detested FDR and the New Deal) were distressed at the bad odor their movement had come under in the wake of Hitler’s murderous racism and longed for the day that eugenics would be restored. Perhaps the most important source of support of eugenics research for more than 70 years has been the Pioneer Fund, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a hate group.

Apart from these curious historical omissions, Gerson’s careless reference to genetic screening seems calculated to associate it with abortion and even Nazism. Perhaps Gerson has not, as I have, spent many hours in neonatal intensive care units with doctors and nurses who care for infants with severe genetic anomalies and who are destined to live short, painful lives. He is entitled to believe that the aggressive and successful efforts by the Jewish community to eliminate Tay-Sachs disease through genetic counseling and screening are misguided, but he is not entitled arbitrarily to associate those efforts with a moral taint, much less Nazism. I have also seen courageous parents take their babies born with Trisomy 13 home to die. Those who moralize about such matters adopt a perilous course.

Gerson’s selective history might be ascribed to a bad case of amnesia. Concluding his piece with a dire warning to liberals who are blinded by their “war on equality,” he proves not only to be a bad historian of the turn of the last century but a miserable one about the past 60 years. Unless, as a movement committed to a war on equality, liberals simply lost their way when they championed civil rights for African-Americans, women, and gays.

Pardon me, sir, but conservatives are in no position to lecture liberals about human equality.

But a British study published in 1998 drew a link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism. While the study itself was flawed and discredited, and subsequent research has demonstrated no link between vaccines and autism, parents and advocacy groups are still wary.

To learn more about vaccine safety, Science Progress spoke with Dr. Saad Omer, the associate director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Parents concerned about vaccine safety, he says, are coming from the right place in terms of their desire to protect their children, and that it is the responsibility of the public health community to broadcast the right information so that people can make informed decisions about the risks and benefits of vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases. This interview has been edited.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt, Science Progress: Some recent media coverage has focused on the March ruling from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to Terry and John Poling, who claim that a vaccine contributed to their daughter Hannah’s development of autism. In a New York Times editorial, Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia laments the fact that the program abandoned a previous standard for a “preponderance of evidence” for determining the link between vaccines and injuries and instead ruled that their claim was made on standards of “biological plausibility.” Is there a problem with the way that vaccine injury compensation program ruled on this issue, and what does it say about the way we are approaching vaccines in general?

Dr. Saad B. Omer: Let me start with the case, to briefly describe it for those who are not familiar with it. It was a case of a nineteen-month-old girl who received several vaccines together after a delay due to current bouts of otitis media, or an ear infection. And so those vaccines were administered together and she developed some symptoms after that, and at the twenty-three month assessment she was diagnosed with having mild symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, and during her evaluation she was diagnosed with a mitochondrial disorder. A claim was filed in a federal court, and the government settled, awarding them compensation for that.

So to put things in perspective for that case—and in terms of people drawing conclusions from it—I would caution that this is just a case and the question I often ask, even within the scientific community is “where are the controls?” Because when we assess scientific evidence, we need to keep in mind that we need to compare an association of an event with an outcome in both cases and controls, we haven’t had that kind of evaluation yet. And I can go into specific examples of what problems one can have. However, this is a “biologically plausible hypothesis.” What does that mean? That means we should explore this kind of hypothesis under a counterfactual model but should not draw conclusions from it at this point.

And just to clarify why we are on this topic: even if this link is established, and what it says is that mitochondrial disorders, which are a kind of disorder in the cell’s energy mechanism, is proven to be exacerbated by vaccines and result in autism spectrum disorders, metabolic disorders are very rare and it would explain a very small proportion of autism diseases—just to put that in perspective.

Now to the second part of your question, about the change in the standard in the vaccine court that resulted in the awarding of this compensation. First of all, it wasn’t the injury compensation program that changed it, it was the interpretation of a couple of circuit court decisions. These higher court decisions were the result of some cases from the compensation program that were appealed and there were a couple of decisions which the Special Masters of the compensation program, not the HHS, interpreted as having said that the evidence should be evaluated on a standard of “biologically plausible.” I think that’s dangerous, because I can sit here and come up with twenty or thirty different hypotheses which would be biologically plausible on several biological models. We are not talking about probable; we are talking about plausible. Even with probable models, we know the human body is complex, and if you test twenty different biological hypotheses, a majority of them won’t pan out in humans. So I think it’s not a very robust standard to go by because what we are saying is that we would have judgments on these cases based on something that could happen, not something that does happen.

SP: The government has programs that do vaccine surveillance and maintain safety. Could you talk a little bit about what those programs are and how effective they are?

Omer: One major program is the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting system, which is jointly managed by the CDC and the FDA, and events that seem to be associated with vaccines are reported into that system. It’s a good system for generating signals but it has its limitations. The major limitation is that we don’t have a good denominator to calculate rates so we cannot assume all the vaccine doses that entered the market were administered, so we don’t know the rates.

But another interesting problem that has come up is due to the fact in the U.S. adverse event reporting system, anyone can report a case into the system. There was a recent analysis published in Pediatrics that showed that most of the rise in reports of autism-related symptoms associated with vaccines has been due to increased reporting of litigation-associated cases. So we have that kind of a problem with VAERS but it still has a lot of utility in terms of generating signals. For example, it generated a signal for the old rotavirus vaccine.

Then the CDC has the Vaccine Safety Datalink. They have put together a system by linking databases from several large HMOs, and it covers approximately two percent of the U.S. population of zero to six years. Fortunately because vaccine events are rare, you need large databases to get enough numbers and do a robust scientific study, so that’s a good system.

Then there is the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Network, which is a network of a few centers of excellence, mostly academic centers, coordinated by the CDC, to assess vaccine safety in a clinical setting.

So this is basically what the vaccine safety system is in the U.S. However I must say, I think vaccine safety needs a lot more resources than it is provided. Because as I said, vaccine events are rare so you need large numbers to study these phenomena and the resources that are available are very low.

SP: These are very personal choices that parents are making about whether or not to exempt their children from getting vaccinations. What do you say to parents who might be thinking of exempting their children from getting vaccines because of what they might have heard about these possible links to autism?

Omer: There have been several studies—both in the U.S. and outside, in Denmark and other parts of Europe—that have looked at the issue of vaccines and autism and we haven’t found any credible association between vaccines—either thimerosol, which is a mercury preservative that was of concern a few years ago—and MMR, the measles mumps and rubella vaccine and autism. So there have been several studies, and our website, vaccinesafety.edu, discusses some of these issues so people can go and look up specific evidence related to that.

On the other hand, we know that there is risk of—even an individual level risk—of acquiring vaccine-preventable diseases in the United States if your child is not vaccinated. For example, in a national-level study it was found that kids who are exempt from vaccination requirements had thirty-three times—not percent, it’s times—higher risk of acquiring measles with those who are vaccinated, who do not seek exemptions, and [in a Colorado study] six times higher risk of acquiring pertussis than those who are vaccinated. So there are real risks involved in terms of acquiring vaccine-preventable diseases

One last point in this regard: we do know that congenital rubella syndrome is associated—and there are some studies showing an association—with autism-like symptoms. So we know that part of that syndrome is explained by a congenital rubella syndrome which used to occur when the population-level immunity in the U.S was relatively low. So actually, MMR vaccine prevents against something that is associated with autism. So if you are thinking specifically in terms of autism, one should consider that we are talking about something that prevents autism. Congenital rubella syndrome is when mothers get rubella in pregnancies, and children develop certain abnormalities.

SP: So in your experience, where does this misinformation about the risks of vaccination come from? Is it usually generated through parents talking to parents? Is it the media? Is it doctors talking to parents?

Omer: It’s several sources. We found in our studies—looking at parents of children exempted from vaccination requirements, compared to those vaccinated—there was an association with types of provider, trust in government, the sources of information people tended to get, information from some of the advocacy sites tended to seek exemptions at a higher rate, etc. So yes. There are several sources of that, and there are passionate people who feel there is an association with vaccines and autism, and that includes some celebrities as well. So that gets people’s attention.

On the other hand I must say that most parents, even those that are concerned about vaccine safety, are coming from the right place. All of us want our children to be safe from any harm, including harm from any pharmaceutical interventions. So we shouldn’t be dismissive of that, but it’s our responsibility, for those of us in the public health community, to put out the right information so that people make a truly informed decision about the risks and benefits of vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases.

SP: What do you think is most important for people who are both working in the public health community, people who are policymakers, people who might be hearing about this issue, and for parents to take away from this whole conversation in the public sphere at the moment?

Omer: One thing that people should realize is that we know that vaccines have some side effects. And we should acknowledge that, everyone who is involved. However, the risk and benefit calculus for all vaccines that are out there, based on our current knowledge, heavily favors not only getting your child vaccinated, but also getting them vaccinated according to the specified schedule. I have seen a new trend where people are splitting the difference and saying, “OK, I’m going to get my kid vaccinated, but I’m going to get them vaccinated late.” Well the risk of illness is not constant across childhood and so that’s why the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the American Academy of Pediatrics come up with these recommendations to look at several factors, including the burden of disease. So it’s important to not only get your child vaccinated, but also to get them vaccinated per specified schedule.

During his testimony, John Stephenson, director of the Government Accountability Office’s Natural Resources & Environment department, criticized the thirty-two-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act for being “outdated” and “cumbersome.” TSCA requires the EPA to secure information on all new and old chemical substances and to regulate those chemicals found to cause unreasonable risk to the public or environment. This means the EPA, and not the chemical manufacturers, must prove the safety of chemicals. As history would suggest, this is a Sisyphean task for an already resource-strapped agency. According to senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), of the 80,000 or so chemicals currently used by industry, the Agency has only tested 200.

Is there a solution to this appalling situation? Stephenson believes the answer may lie in the Europe Union’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals program, also known as REACH. In 2006, the EU passed REACH, a 849-page piece of legislation requiring that all chemicals produced or imported in the EU of one ton or more in volume be tested for health and safety risks and registered with a central chemical authority. What makes the policy unique is that chemical manufacturers and importers must prove to federal authorities their chemicals are safe, not vice versa. (For a more in-depth analysis of REACH, see the BBC’s Q&A report on the program).

Stephenson went on to praise REACH, believing its model fosters a fruitful partnership between industry and government because authorities can better protect the public and chemical companies can avoid litigation if hazardous chemicals are identified upfront rather than down the road. Critics argue such approaches could hamstring the chemical industry’s ability to innovate; force companies to move off-shore, costing U.S. jobs; and forcing many small businesses under. Minority witness V.M. Delisi of Fanwood Chemical Inc. echoed these concerns, suggesting it was a “myth” to believe chemical companies have unlimited sources to deal with the onus of proving the safety of their products. Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) countered such fears, saying companies that have created safer alternatives to toxic chemicals have seen their products kept out of the market because weak regulation favors cheaper, more hazardous chemicals. Stronger regulation would foster innovation and safer options, she argued. Annette Gellert, co-founder of the WELL Network, a nonprofit focused on the environment and its connection to the health of children and families, noted that if the U.S. maintains weak chemical regulation it could become a dumping ground for toxic products that cannot be sold in Europe and other stricter countries.

As Chris Mooney explained in his recent column, the EPA is in the midst of a complete meltdown. After censoring its own scientists, demonstrating disdain for scientific integrity, and failing to prevent mercury pollution, repairing the damage done to the EPA by the Bush Administration will require the upmost attention of the next President. But some are left to wonder why it even came to this stage. As Tuesday’s hearing wrapped up, Chairman Boxer’s (D-CA) said simply: “No one can explain to me where there is room for politics when you are looking at the health and safety of the American people.”

The Scientist NewsBlog reports on conflicts of interest within the HHS Stem Cell Council (free registration):

The Center for Science in the Public Interest polled the 25 voting members of HHS’s Advisory Council on Blood Stem Cell Transplantation (ACBSCT) and found that 11 reported having financial ties to stem cell and umbilical cord blood banking companies, drug makers, and the transplantation industry.

Apparently, none of the original applicants to the Council were screened for such conflicts.

Science Progress recently covered a report in The Chronicle on a study (subscription) from the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that many academic scientists are adding their names to reports and papers written by corporations.

In any other context, both of these revelations would have been shocking. But within the medical profession, this is apparently not unusual.

The Health Section of the NYT yesterday reported that the Association of American Medical Colleges is proposing a ban on medical giveaways:

Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded.

The NYT also recently profiled a small group of scientists who decided to cease all paid services or consulting appointments with the food, drug, and medical device industries:

No longer will they be paid for speaking at meetings or for sitting on advisory boards. They may still work with companies. It is important, they say, for knowledgeable scientists to help companies draw up and interpret studies. But the work will be pro bono.

…

They are part of a group responding to accusations of ethical conflicts inherent in these arrangements, and their decisions repudiate decades of industry influence, says Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, a professor at the Tufts School of Medicine, who has written a book on conflicts of interest.

Well it’s high time, too. Just because a practice is pervasive within a profession does not mean it passes ethical muster. And just because somebody is a well-intentioned doctor does not mean she’s immune to bias. That is why we institute ethical regulations. So far, the medical and scientific community has been surprisingly lax about conflicts of interest. One would hope that the personal decision of a few scientists and the ban by the Association of American Medical Colleges indicate the beginning of a trend in the opposite direction.

Sirine Shebaya, Ph.D. is a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

We’d be fortunate if scientific integrity was the only trouble spot at EPA these days.

At long last, the UCS findings came out last week, and sure enough, the results are appalling. The nonprofit group received responses from 1,600 EPA scientists, and found an “agency under siege from political pressures”: 60 percent of respondents said they’d personally experienced political interference in their work in the past 5 years. Meanwhile, just over half of respondents—783, by number—said they could not freely share their findings with the media. These results might help explain recent actions by a group of unions representing EPA’s 10,000 employees, who in March broke away from the agency’s management, citing, among other complaints, systematic undermining of EPA’s scientific integrity principles.

But to be honest, we’d be fortunate if scientific integrity was the only trouble spot at EPA these days. Even as its scientists languish, the agency’s regulatory decisions are also being dramatically undercut on issues ranging from global warming to mercury pollution. Not only does EPA have problems heeding the research; it also has huge problems following the law.

Take mercury. As I’ve written here at Science Progress, a very conservative D.C. Circuit court just shot down EPA’s bizarre industry-friendly regulatory scheme for this toxic metal, saying the agency had employed the “logic of the Queen of Hearts.” Something very similar has happened on global warming—in Massachusetts vs. EPA, the agency lost at the U.S. Supreme Court over its failure to regulate car and truck greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. EPA had tried, in typical conservative fashion, to exploit scientific uncertainty in order to avoid the compulsion to regulate, but the (once again) conservative court would have none of it. That was in April of 2007.

A year later, the agency has still done nothing but study, study, study what to do next.

In short, we’re witnessing the meltdown of EPA.

But perhaps most outrageous is EPA’s treatment of California’s request—in the absence of serious action by the agency—to set up its own program for regulating vehicular greenhouse gas emissions. As National Journal recently reported in a scathing article on the agency’s failings entitled “Vanishing Act,” investigations by House Democrats suggest that EPA’s professional staff “overwhelmingly” recommended that agency administrator Stephen Johnson let California move ahead on its own. He didn’t.

All of these scandals, taken together, have people seriously comparing the state of EPA today to its previous nadir, under anti-regulatory zealot Ann Gorsuch Burford during the Reagan years. Reports and word of mouth (some of which I myself have heard) suggest that morale is exceedingly low at the agency these days—which, again, would explain the unions’ action. In short, we’re witnessing the meltdown of EPA, and there’s only one conceivable rescue: A new president who makes resuscitating the agency a key priority.

In this respect, one would imagine that any of the three candidates would improve matters—but at the same time, none of the three are currently talking about it much. That needs to change; Americans want a functional government, a competent one, and given how bad things have gotten at places like EPA during the Bush administration, that won’t happen without thorough housecleaning, to say nothing of a re-commitment to principles of scientific and regulatory integrity.

Perhaps most important, though, will be to re-establish some serious distance between agencies like EPA on the one hand, and branches of the White House—like the Office of Management and Budget or the Council on Environmental Quality—on the other. There’s much evidence—including from the recent UCS investigation—suggesting these political branches are really calling the shots at EPA, and that this lies at the root of many or even all of the recent scandals. The original concept for the functioning of the regulatory state was that independence and professionalism would reign at the agencies doing the people’s business. It’s staggering how far we’ve drifted from that vision.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs at The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

According to the Chronicle, researchers conducting the study searched a database of millions of court documents provided by Merck for liability cases involving its drug Vioxx, which was pulled from the market because of safety concerns. They found that papers reporting clinical trial results seemed to be written by Merck employees, only to have the names of academic authors added later.

The report includes an editorial by the editor-in-chief and executive deputy editor of JAMA, condemning such ghostwriting as “unprofessional and demeaning to the medical profession and to scientific research.” The editorial includes new guidelines to prevent such behavior: in particular, it calls for authors to disclose any financial conflicts of interest to their supervisors.

The study adds to the growing list (subscription) of recent similar breaches of scientific integrity. A clear and simple conflict of interest standard adopted by all scientific journals could go a long way to preventing future conflicts like this.

Manufactroversy (măn’yə-făk’-trə-vûr’sē)
N., pl. -sies.

1. A manufactured controversy that is motivated by profit or extreme ideology to intentionally create public confusion about an issue that is not in dispute.
2. Effort is often accompanied by imagined conspiracy theory and major marketing dollars involving fraud, deception and polemic rhetoric.

With all the sophisticated sophistry besieging mass audiences today, there is a need for the study of rhetoric now more than ever before. This is especially the case when it comes to the contemporary assault on science known as manufactured controversy: when significant disagreement doesn’t exist inside the scientific community, but is successfully invented for a public audience to achieve specific political ends.

Three recent examples of manufactured controversy are global warming skepticism, AIDS dissent in South Africa, and the intelligent design movement’s “teach the controversy” campaign. The first of these has been called an “epistemological filibuster” because it magnifies the uncertainty surrounding a scientific truth claim in order to delay the adoption of a policy that is warranted by that science. Languaging expert Frank Luntz admitted as much in his now infamous talking points memo on the environment, leaked to the public in 2002, where he confessed that the window for claiming controversy about global warming was closing, but he nonetheless urged Republican congressional and executive leaders “to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.” ExxonMobil was doing this when it published its “Unsettled Science” advertisement about climate science on the editorial pages of the New York Times in March 2000. A more recent guest editorial by a reader made the same claim in the pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in January 2008. All three seemed to be following the playbook of the tobacco industry when scientists discovered that their products cause cancer; when a threat to their interests arises from the scientific community, they declare “there are always two sides to a case” and then call for more study of the matter before action is taken.

I think it’s shortsighted to cede the public stage to the anti-science forces in the naive hope that no one will pay attention to them.

South African President Thabo Mbeki’s support for AIDS dissent eight years ago is a similar case. Like global warming skepticism, this assault on the science of HIV/AIDS research ingeniously turned the scientific community’s values against it by drawing on the importance of rational open debate, a skeptical attitude, and the need for continued research. Mbeki alleged that the mainstream scientific community branded scientists who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS as “‘dangerous and discredited’ with whom nobody, including ourselves, should communicate or interact.” Claiming the successful dissident’s authority in post-apartheid South Africa, Mbeki condemned the mainstream scientific community for occupying “the frontline in the campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism which argues that the only freedom we have is to agree with what they decree to be established scientific truths.”

A parallel case is being made by the intelligent design movement in conjunction with its “teach the controversy” campaign against evolutionary biology. Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled, portrays scientists as participating in a vast conspiracy to silence anyone who questions the Darwinian orthodoxy. This movie promises to be the most extreme application yet of the intelligent design movement’s “wedge” strategy to break the supremacy of evolutionary theory in contemporary science. Just as a wedge can be set into a chink in a solid structure and, with the careful application of some concentrated force, will split that structure to pieces, so too do the producers of this movie hope that it can break the scientific community and allow for a change in how science is taught in America. Of course, any claim by biologists that there is no scientific controversy to teach merely feeds the conspiracy theory.

In light of this difficulty, some have suggested that the best response to manufactured controversy is no response at all. They say that countering such nonsense merely gives these modern-day sophists publicity and enables their continued efforts to reopen debate on settled science. I understand this impulse to remain silent in the face of foolishness, but as a professor of rhetoric, I think it’s shortsighted to cede the public stage to the anti-science forces in the naive hope that no one will pay attention to them. Ever since the field of rhetoric was born, there have been those who misuse the power of persuasion to mislead public audiences, and it has been only through vigilant counter-persuasion that such deception has been overcome.

The ancient sophists, or “wise men” (wise guys?) who taught the new art of rhetoric to those who would pay their fee in the 5^th century BCE, included Gorgias, who was said to have boasted that he could persuade the multitude to ignore the expert and listen to him instead, and Protagoras, who claimed that there are always two sides to a case and it’s the sophist’s job to make the worse case appear the stronger. It was to oppose this kind of deception that Aristotle codified the art of Rhetoric in his treatise by that title. He recognized that before lay audiences “not even the possession of the exactest knowledge” ensures that a speaker will be persuasive, so Aristotle promoted the study of rhetoric so that experts could confute those who try to mislead public audiences.

Today’s sophists exploit a public misconception about what science is, portraying it as a structure of complete consensus built from the steady accumulation of unassailable data.

As a scholar of rhetoric, I have studied some modern cases of manufactured controversy to discover how to best confute these contemporary sophists, and I have come up with some preliminary hypotheses about what makes their arguments so persuasive to a public audience. First, they skillfully invoke values that are shared by the scientific community and the American public alike, like free speech, skeptical inquiry, and the revolutionary force of new ideas against a repressive orthodoxy. It is difficult to argue against someone who invokes these values without seeming unscientific or un-American. Second, they exploit a tension between the technical and public spheres in postmodern American life; highly specialized scientific experts can’t spare the time to engage in careful public communication, and are then surprised when the public distrusts, fears, or opposes them. Third, today’s sophists exploit a public misconception about what science is, portraying it as a structure of complete consensus built from the steady accumulation of unassailable data; any dissent by any scientist is then seen as evidence that there’s no consensus, and thus truth must not have been discovered yet. A more accurate portrayal of science sees it as a process of debate among a community of experts in which one side outweighs the other in the balance of the argument, and that side is declared the winner; a few skeptics might remain, but they’re vastly outnumbered by the rest, and the democratic process of science moves forward with the collective weight of the majority of expert opinion. Scientists buy into this democratic process when they enter the profession, so that a call for the winning side to share power in the science classroom with the losers, or to continue debating an issue that has already been settled for the vast majority of scientists so that policy makers can delay taking action on their findings, seems particularly undemocratic to most of them.

Aristotle believed that things that are true “have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites,” but that it takes a good rhetor to ensure that this happens when sophisticated sophistry is on the loose. I concur; only by exposing manufactured controversy for what it is, recognizing its rhetorical power and countering those who are skilled at getting the multitude to ignore the experts while imagining a scientific debate where none exists, can scientists and their allies use my field to achieve what Aristotle envisioned for it—a study that helps the argument that is in reality stronger also appear stronger before an audience of nonexperts.

Leah Ceccarelli is an associate professor in the Communication Department at the University of Washington. She teaches rhetoric and is the author of the award-winning book Shaping Science with Rhetoric.

The incident simply points to a larger problem: Federal policy regarding comprehensive reproductive health care is inadequate.

Last week, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, uncovered this ironic situation while trying to “connect” to “reproductive health literature.” Health care providers, researchers, and advocates around the country were alarmed to learn that POPLINE (POPulation information onLINE), had rendered the search term “abortion” a stopword—which directs the database to ignore the term when used in a search. UCSF librarians discovered this deliberate restriction when they were unable to find a single document containing the word “abortion” in POPLINE’s database, and contacted the administrators at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to ask them why. Simply put, the UCSF librarians were told that “abortion” was eliminated as a search term by the POPLINE administrators so that the latter could examine the database for information “that might not have been consistent” with guidelines from a government agency that funds the project. And our UCSF colleagues were then given some mystifying, convoluted search term suggestions for finding medical literature on the subject, including “fertility control, post-conception” and “pregnancy, unwanted.”

By Friday morning, news of the self-censorship had spread like a virus. Countless members of the medical, scientific, and advocacy communities responded and by early Friday evening, Hopkins Dean Michael J. Klag issued a statement unequivocally denouncing the administrators’ decision to censor the word abortion and promising to get to the bottom of it. By Tuesday, he issued a follow up statement citing his opposition to the decision and his speedy response, while blaming “an overreaction on the part of POPLINE staff” to a search by USAID [United States Agency for International Development] officials who “found two items in the POPLINE database that advocated for abortion.”

So let’s pause for a moment and review what happened: a vigilant literature search on the word “abortion” by unidentified Federal employees at USAID resulted in finding two abortion articles in the POPLINE database that they deemed to feature inappropriate advocacy. Once notified by the Feds, Hopkins administrators immediately made abortion a stopword—an additional step not requested by USAID, but implemented to allow administrators to search for other material that might have been inconsistent with the agency’s guidelines—effectively ending access to abortion research to health professionals and the public on their 30-year-old database.

While giving credit to Dean Klag for his quick response to an untenable situation, there are two important questions that remain: Why are Federal employees at USAID so attentively monitoring scientific research articles on the POPLINE database for the word “abortion”? And why are Hopkins administrators so afraid of them? The Dean states that USAID is prohibited by law from funding any abortion activities or supplies. This is all the more reason for concern by researchers, civil libertarians, health care providers, and patients who deserve the best possible care. But the incident simply points to a larger problem: Federal policy regarding comprehensive reproductive health care is inadequate.

The Real Impact of Limiting Access to Information

The medical and scientific needs of the reproductive health professional community were impeded by POPLINE’s decision to remove abortion as a search term on its publicly funded database. If this action had gone unchecked, the decision would have limited the medical and scientific community’s ability to access information on a range of patient care scenarios, including women experiencing both wanted and unintended pregnancies.

A clinician seeking information while providing abortion care services would have been unsuccessful in accessing key medical and scientific literature on the topic—potentially endangering the patient. Women with wanted pregnancies and their health care providers looking for information on spontaneous abortion (miscarriage), inevitable abortion, incomplete abortions, missed abortions, and related medical information would have also been denied this key data.

Unsafe abortion practices claim thousands of lives worldwide every year and any public health student, policy maker, or provider seeking vital information on the topic of unsafe abortion would have also come up empty-handed.

Ideology Trumping Science Is About More Than Just Abortion

The specter of ideology trumping science goes way beyond POPLINE and abortion. There is more visible political opposition to important health classifications like family planning, sexuality, and reproductive health than we have seen in years. Political posturing can get in the way of science, public health, and patient care—even POPLINE’s reputation is potentially at risk.

Even self-censorship of a specific term like “abortion” in a scientific setting—especially as a result of Federal government monitoring—sets a dangerous precedent.

Over the last seven years, we have witnessed an intentional blurring of the lines between opposition to abortion and a more general objection to contraception. For example, many of President Bush’s anti-choice family planning political appointees have been openly anti-contraception as well. Bush’s 2002 appointment to a key FDA panel, Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, complained about contraceptive use even among married couples. And more recently Bush appointed Susan Orr as the acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs to oversee family planning funding for clinics serving poor women, even though she previously worked to limit access to contraception as the senior director for marriage and family care at the Family Research Council, an organization well-known for its anti-contraception stance.

And now the term “reproductive health” is being targeted. At the United Nations, there are unbelievably rancorous debates about whether or not to include the terms “sexuality” and “reproductive health” in treaties because many politicians view them as faux terms for abortion.

It may have been that POPLINE staff made the decision based on fear of losing their USAID funding. USAID does have a history of basing reproductive care funding decisions at least partly on ideology and politics. For example, they have withheld funding from developing countries if potential grantees provide abortion services or give abortion referrals to women.

It’s also possible the suggestion came from above. With the Bush administration’s history of attempting to (and often succeeding in) restricting access to abortion services and information at every possible turn, it’s not so unlikely they’d attempt to scrap the word altogether.

The bottom line is that even self-censorship of a specific term like “abortion” in a scientific setting—especially as a result of Federal government monitoring—sets a dangerous precedent. We must follow the example of our UCSF colleagues and make preserving access to reproductive health science a part of our own work plans. It’s scary enough to consider the possibility that ideological searches are being performed by anonymous government employees who troll our scientific databases for the word “abortion.” “Contraception,” “sexuality,” and “reproductive health” are the next stopwords, unless we remain vigilant and protest loudly.

Pablo Rodriguez, MD, is the Board Chair of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals. Wayne C. Shields is the President and CEO of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals. Jennifer Aulwes is the Media and Policy Manager for the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals.

Controversy arose when it became known the ATSDR’s report, “Health Consultation on Formaldehyde Sampling of FEMA Temporary-Housing Trailers,” contained scientifically unsound information as a result of what Rep. Nick Lampson (D-TX) called, “not following typical protocol you teach in basic science classes.” Dr. Christopher De Rosa, the CDC’s chief toxicologist testified at the hearing that the report was, “possibly misleading, and a threat to public health.” Subcommittee members were flummoxed to learn how mismanagement at the CDC, the ATSDR, and FEMA stalled revision of the report, delaying measures that would protect thousands of hurricane survivors from exposure to unhealthy levels of formaldehyde.

The hearing also highlighted the collapse of management among the different federal agencies. Dr. Christopher De Rosa, the whistleblower at the CDC who questioned the soundness of the ATSDR report, revealed his troubles in getting the attention of his superiors–he even had a letter he sent to FEMA expressing his concerns quietly filed away. De Rosa was eventually put on a 90-day work improvement plan and relocated to another department for making noise about the flawed ATSDR report, a claim his superiors deny. De Rosa’s superiors, Dr. Howard Frumpkin and Dr. Thomas Sinks, Director and Deputy Director at the ATSDR respectively, acknowledged the bad science in the report and the delayed response of ATSDR in fixing their report, promising that steps were being taken to address the shortcomings. Subcommittee Chairman Brad Miller (D-NC), with email records on hand, grilled the two ATSDR officials on how such a mistake could happen.

Formaldehyde is strong-smelling gas used in the production of particle board and urea-foam insulation, major material components in most trailer homes. It is considered a carcinogen and is absorbed into the body through the respiratory tract, and through eye and skin contact. Symptoms of formaldehyde exposure include skin rashes, sinus problems, headaches, depression, insomnia, nausea, eye irritation, nose-bleeds, and recurrent colds. Long-term effects include changes to the immune system, possible development of some cancers, and the risk of damage to DNA. Nevertheless, after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, FEMA provided such trailers leeching unhealthy levels of the gas to over 100,000 families who lost their homes until more permanent alternatives became available.

Subcommittee members agreed this was only the beginning of a greater investigation and possible litigation if these agencies are found guilty of gross negligence or wrong-doing.

For more backstory:

Scientist: CDC Bosses Ignored Warning (AP)

CDC officials admit failings on FEMA trailers, will not fire whistleblower (E&E Daily, subscription)

Jonah Lehrer at the Frontal Cortex argues that we need more science critics and an open public atmosphere for critiquing science. His suggestion to science bloggers: Don’t post anonymously.

Eric Berger over at SciGuy discovered that the Federal government spends 200 times more on bioterrorism preparedness than on hurricane research. This discrepancy is even more significant, he suggests, because bioterrorism might happen while hurricane disasters will happen.

Jacob Goldstein at the Wall Street Journal Health blog covers several stories on the growing number of parents refusing to vaccinate their children over fears that the injections may be linked to autism or neurological disorders, despite the fact that no solid evidence exists suggesting vaccines pose any such danger.

The Chronicle’s Wired Campus covered the news that Intel and Microsoft have teamed to open research centers at top universities to enlist them in a new initiative to harness the power of parallel computing for the next generation of computing systems. It’s worth noting the long-haul five-year commitment to the research.

Eighteen states pledged or planned to adopt California’s emissions standards in an effort to curb global warming. The denial only continues the Bush Administration’s foot-dragging approach to global warming, as Center for American Progress Senior fellow Robert Sussman explained in a recent column.

The Post reports that union leaders and employees cited decisions on fluoride drinking-water standards and mercury emissions from power plants as further instances in which the management flagrantly disregarded the Agency’s own standards for scientific integrity. As Chris Mooney pointed out in a column on a recent juridical rebuke of the mercury decision, the calculated dismissal of scientific evidence damages the entire decision-making process and exposes citizens and the environment to harmful pollutants. While the regrettable decisions of the current EPA management will likely be reversed in the not-too-distant future, the damage to the integrity of data-driven decision making and the scientific community is a scar that may linger.