Why Government Can't Do Science
Bethell, Tom
"Why Government Can't Do Science" CAPITOL IDEAS By Tom Bethel/ Why Government Can't Do Science Two comments on the midterm elections—the good news and the bad. It does seem that something has changed. That's good. The bad news is...
...The universal franchise has turned Congress into an income-redistribution machine, in which organized groups decide what Congress does, no matter who's in charge...
...On paper, multiple theorizing may be countenanced, but in practice, the leaders in the field don't even want to think about the possibility that a big error may have been made...
...He never explains why...
...Faith in the great scientific center of disease fighting was a nonideological, bipartisan verity of Capitol Hill...
...Meanwhile, the oldest baby boomers are beginning to think about retirement...
...I like to think that sanity will prevail and that medical care and education will be turned back to the voluntary economy...
...Its guiding spirits see democracy as an opportunity to reach into other people's pockets...
...Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee...
...Rival theories, some or most of which are bound to be wrong, are discouraged once decision making is centralized...
...Meanwhile, almost all researchers are pursuing the same theory—that mutated genes cause cancer...
...The logic of universal democracy seems ironclad and unbeatable...
...The sequencing has gone full speed ahead, but the idea behind it seems to be wrong...
...trial lawyers exploiting the breakdown of tort law...
...Likewise, I think medical scientists are likely to be the true beneficiaries of massive NIH funding...
...More people do seem to be figuring out what a rotten thing the Democratic Party is—a morally disreputable gripe machine that mobilizes victim groups, stirs the pots of envy, and cultivates resentment and grievance...
...The NIH budget has enjoyed fantastically rapid growth...
...A small recent improvement is attributable to the decline in smoking...
...As recently as 1989, its budget was a mere $7.9 billion...
...The National Cancer Institute now receives close to $5 billion a year, and since the War on Cancer in 1971, tens of billions of dollars have been spent...
...The theory is that knowing the nature and location on the genome of a disease-causing mutation will allow us to cure the disease...
...Each year now itspends about double what Craig Venter's private company, Celera, spent to spell out the human genome from scratch...
...Still, I was glad to see the party do well...
...Excited, formulaic reports of medical breakthroughs" run "far beyond clinical reality...
...And in those years government-funded education seemed to be in good shape too...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 2 5...
...The universal franchise has turned Congress into an income-redistribution machine...
...On the morning after the election, I heard Dennis Hastert on National Public Radio...
...It will be intriguing to see what comes of that...
...War with Iraq, if it comes, will be a very uncertain roll of the dice...
...Billions more dollars will be needed, in other words...
...Journalists are of no help in this field...
...Right after Hastert's boast about NIH's largest-ever increase, he said: "We must help research facilities find cures sooner for diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes, Parkinson's, and AIDS...
...Test scores went down, not up...
...and blacks who think they deserve special treatment because their great-great grandfathers might have been slaves...
...The main con-sequence, in education, was prosperity for the professional class of educators...
...Political support arose naturally, from fear and hope, but was also cultivated by the NIH management" Greenberg tells the story of Senator Orrin Hatch, a "standard, anti-Washington, budget-cutting conservative," finding a lump under his arm, and calling the National Cancer Institute...
...As for searching for genes that cause diseases that are not even unambiguously inherited, such as diabetes, Alzheimer's, and cancer, that is surely going to be a blind alley...
...That seems undeniable...
...The mutation responsible for sickle-cell anemia, for example, has been known for decades, yet no cure has been forthcoming...
...It has been one of the few remaining agencies of the federal government where you can walk in without identification, as was once possible all over Washington...
...That is where they originated, and where they belong...
...We hear endlessly about the suspect ethics of gene manipulation, but these ethical quandaries always presuppose a science that is on track...
...It is not...
...its budget has grown from $28 million in 1988 to $466 million today...
...The NIH building budget, a mere $190 mil-lion in 1998, has risen to $632 million this year...
...teachers' unions protecting their perks...
...In fact, it has precisely doubled (to $27.3 billion) in the last five years...
...In an odd but interesting book last year, Science, Money and Politics (University of Chicago Press), Daniel S. Greenberg, who for years published a newsletter about science and politics, points out that "NIH was not a hard sell [in Congress...
...Other-wise, it will surely be a disastrous move...
...Liberals have been complaining that the Democrats failed to oppose Bush forcefully enough, and some say that they will move to the Left...
...Since then something has changed, but I'm not sure what it is...
...Decoded" is a serious misnomer in itself...
...Another who deserves a building named after him is Sen...
...First, President Bush did an outstanding job of campaigning for candidates in the last couple of weeks...
...It now seems quite likely that this theory is wrong...
...Maybe gene therapy can be made to work one day, but that day is probably far off...
...He's good at retail politics, just as Ronald Reagan was...
...The bad news is that nothing much will change...
...Not an attractive bunch...
...ne government agency that I have been keeping an eye on is the National Institutes of Health...
...Committees of experts at the various NIH institutes are headed up by dominant figures in each field, some with Nobel Prizes, and they ensure that all, or almost all, of the funds are directed to labs pursuing the same fashionable theory...
...It, too, is on the NIH cam-pus...
...An influential figure who seems to be vying for his very own building is House Speaker Hastert—the strongest supporter of the huge expansion of NIH...
...Committee chairmen change quite frequently, so it's not surprising to learn that lots of new buildings are going up all the time...
...But at this stage, after so much has been invested in labs and postdocs and reputations, derailing the oncogene theory will be extraordinarily difficult...
...If private business had independently funded a dozen approaches to the cancer problem, we might well have the answer by now...
...The best example is cancer research...
...Probably, the anomalies in their nucleotide sequences merely accompany the cancer but do not cause it...
...Likewise the John Edward Porter Neuroscience Research Center was named after an Illinois congressman "with much say about vast flows of money," as the Almanac of American Politics put it...
...I Health care would be the first order of business, he vowed...
...So the welfare state will be booming indeed...
...They told him to "come right out there...
...He played a major role in getting Congress to fund the Human Genome Project (which started life in the Department of Energy, believe it or not...
...In fact, we should consider the alter-native, that lavish government funding will do for medical research what it did for education...
...I don't think we have seen this before from a Republican president...
...The unexamined assumption behind NIH's ever-expanding budget is that the discovery of treatments is likely to be proportional to dollars spent...
...For the foreseeable future, the care and feeding of the welfare state will remain the primary business of government...
...Strange, isn't it...
...Despite all the "breakthroughs," virtually no progress has been made...
...But nothing like this can be expected for another generation...
...Usually congressmen are not memorialized until they retire, but an exception was made in the case of Sen...
...We may fail, but if we fail we're going to die with our boots on," Hatfield said...
...The genome project already has its own institute, the National Human Genome Research Institute...
...But that was dubious long before the genome was "decoded" last year...
...There you have the authentic voice of the "new" Republican: boasting about spending increases...
...His book includes much that is good, but in some respects he seems to be stuck in the 1960s...
...I felt the relief one would experience on hearing that a gang of robbers in the neighborhood had finally been caught...
...It was diagnosed as a fatty deposit...
...His voice was not familiar to me, and if I had not heard the announcer's introduction, I might well have assumed that the Democrats had won and this was the new Speaker of the House...
...Since the welfare state is primarily a system of transfers from the working to the retired population, we can rest assured that the politically potent boomers will see to it that no spending cuts be allowed to affect them...
...But there is no evidence that more money is any help...
...Ever since, Hatch declared, he has been a big supporter of NIH, in tandem with the left-wing Democrat Henry Waxman of California...
...Green-berg's book is "odd" because he first demonstrates the entanglement of sci24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 ence and politics and then criticizes scientists for not being political enough...
...Now, over one hundred such cancer-causing genes have been reported—far too many...
...It's as though everyone is forced to look for a lost object in the same place...
...How inglorious it is for a government to make "health care" its leading concern...
...That the party controlling the White House, in an economic downturn and stock market tumble should gain seats in both houses in midterm is highly unusual, perhaps unprecedented in modern politics...
...It is an alliance of college professors isolated from the real world...
...Last March, he was "proud to announce that the House Republican budget will double the funding for the National Institutes of Health by 2003 and will make history this year by providing the largest dollar increase in NIH's budget...
...Arlen Specter, whose name was prefixed to the National Library of Medicine in 1999...
...The first "oncogene" was reported in 1976, amidst much fanfare and subsequent Nobels (one to Harold Varmus, Clinton's director of NIH...
...But unlike Reagan, Bush was willing to risk his own political capital...
...The balanced budget amendment duly failed by one vote...
...The great problem with government funding, especially at the federal level, is that research tends to focus on a single hypothesis...
...After twenty or thirty years, it's time for buildings to be torn down anyway, so there always will be opportunities to engrave the names of future allies in the budget wars...
...If things go badly, either in the war or the subsequent occupation, then a leftward tilt could pay off for Democrats...
...Now we hear of the need to unravel the "proteome" (something far more complex than the genome...
...For Greenberg, it seems, all politics are good...
...The science press tends to be in uncritical harmony with the people it writes about," says Dan Greenberg...
...I was sorry to read that its 320-acre campus, north of Bethesda, Maryland, will soon be encircled by a security fence, a victim of the "war on terror?' Only authorized personnel will be admitted...
...In the Manhattan Project, government science worked, all the way from basic research to applied technology...
...There are two items of conventional wisdom about that...
...labor unions benefiting from their antitrust exemption...
...No one quite wants to say it yet, but the genome project seems not to be working out...
...The Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center was named after the long-time chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who once vowed to the NIH director, Harold Varmus, that he would protect the agency from budget cuts...
...NIH buildings are sometimes named after congressmen, particularly those who control the purse strings...
...The election suggests that the GOP may well preside over that expansion...
Vol. 35 • November 2002 • No. 6
