Politicized Science

...For decades, the U.S...

...Hager is an anti-abortion activist who recommends, among other things, that women read the Bible to relieve premenstrual cramps.' New members were also nominated to the CDC's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention committee as it was determining the acceptable level of exposure to lead...

...After "making contact" with a local right-to-life group concerning RU-486 (the "morning after pill"), he began to formulate his theory...

...They're not alone: a number of employees with long histories at government agencies have resigned, citing an inability to do their jobs because of what they see as the squelching of research for political reasons...

...Unfortunately, the only difference with Dr...

...In February, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued its own report echoing Waxman's charges...

...Perhaps the best example of the various interests at play in modern research is the case of James Zahn...

...1. National Cancer Institute, "Summary Report: Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer," March 4, 2003...

...They don't need a scientific study to know that global warming is a myth, the Earth was created in seven days, and Saddam Hussein was only moments away from handing weapons of mass destruction over to al-Qaeda...

...One of the signers, David Michaels, former assistant secretary for environment, safety and health at the Department of Energy, said, "It goes beyond just having the White House involved in picking industry favorites to evaluate government science...

...Pundits who say otherwise, as Feynman warns, are just fooling themselves...

...There appears today to be steady erosion in its independent status...

...The atmospheric scientist was replaced by Rajendra Pachauri, whose background is in engineering and economics...

...This emphasis on a conservative Christian worldview over scientific consensus has been felt all the way down to the National Park Service, where bookstores have begun offering books with the "alternative view" that the Grand Canyon was formed in six days several thousand years ago...

...This can be seen in a column by David Brooks (New York Times, Feb...

...it was replaced by a study funded by the American Petroleum Institute...

...In one case, the Department of Health and Human Services nominated W. David Hager as chair of the Federal Drug Administration's Reproductive Health Drug Advisory Committee...

...0 NE WAY the administration has directed research, critics say, is through the selection of industry connected or religiously driven political appointees...

...Today, a growing chorus of researchers charges that these procedures are being undermined...

...Zahn's case . . . is the extent to which it is overtly 'brash censorship.'" The reasoning behind the USDA's burying of Zahn's research was that Zahn had ignored a list of controversial topics requiring prior approval...

...Take the example of Joel Brind, the primary advocate for an abortion-breast cancer link (or ABC as he calls it...

...Nominees included Joyce Tsuji, who worked for Exponent, a consulting firm that represents a major smelter, and pediatric toxicologist William Banner, who had previously provided written testimony on behalf of lead-industry defendants...

...I'd trust politicians, who, whatever their faults, have finely tuned antennae for the flow of events...

...After an outcry by members of Congress, DISSENT / Spring 2004 4 5 POLITICIZED SCIENCE the NCI convened a three-day conference with experts on abortion and breast cancer to review the evidence, and again concluded that "filnduced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk," expressing confidence in those conclusions as "well-established...

...It wasn't until Zahn's research developed real world applications that the USDA became concerned...

...If the data show otherwise, then departments have to re-organize so they get it right...

...When Kendall Thu invited Zahn to present his findings at the National Hog Summit, a member of the National Pork Producer's Council contacted Zahn's boss, Brian Kerr, who forbade Zahn to speak to the group or even submit his work to scientific journals...

...What kind of scientific framework can explain the rage for suicide bombings, now sweeping the Middle East...

...The United States Department of Agriculture had been performing research POLITICIZED SCIENCE into ways to decrease the odor of swine farms through diet, a proposition some believe was doomed from the start because of the scientific principle that "you feed a pig roses, and it still comes out smelling like shit...

...5, 2002...

...entitled "Politics and Science in the Bush Administration" attempts to catalogue these rifts between the White House and the scientific community...

...He describes how the "pieces came together": "By 1991, I realized that my understanding of life was incompatible with a pro-abortion point of view...

...Other examples of intimidation can be traced outside the White House to conservative members of Congress who were accused of compiling a list of 180 scientists involved in research dealing with teen sex, prostitutes, and homosexuals to be handed over to Christian activists to do with what they will...

...faster than I'd trust a conference-load of game theorists or risk-assessment officers...

...The New York Times (June 19, 2003) reported that a section on global warming was removed after objections came, not from scientists, but from advisers to the president...

...I would like to say that Dr...

...It could be argued that this disdain for the scientific process on principle is the Achilles' heel of the conservative movement, crippling its decision-making abilities not only in areas of health and safety, but also in the "War on Terror...

...intelligence community has propagated the myth that it possesses analytical methods that must be insulated pristinely from the hurly-burly DISSENT / Spring 2004 n 47 POLITICIZED SCIENCE world of politics," he says...

...I'd trust Mafia bosses, studio heads, and anybody who has read a Dostoyevsky novel during the past five years...

...The problem was that Zahn's technique for detecting air contaminants also showed that hog confinements regularly violated federal pollution limits and produced antibiotic-resistant bacteria...

...3. "White House Seeks Control of Health, Safety," St...

...3, 2004) that argues for doing away with "scientism" in intelligence gathering...

...In a letter to the New York Times (June 21, 2003), former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Russell Train, who worked for both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, said, "I can state categorically that there never was such White House intrusion into the business of EPA during my tenure .. . .The EPA was established as an independent agency in the executive branch, and so it should remain...

...Traditionally, it's been seen as scientists' role to determine, say, the effectiveness of condoms or how much humans contribute to climate change...

...This is not an isolated incident...

...Scientific backing gives one's position credibility, so the temptation to skew unfavorable results is nothing new, but there is no shortage of people who insist the situation is as bad as it's ever been...

...According to the New York Times (Jan...

...It didn't help that the USDA had instituted an "advisory panel" of hog farmers to oversee his work...

...18, 2004), "a senior political appointee at the Park Service has influenced the resolution of the dispute, fueling at least the impression that political considerations could have played a part in the decision...

...AGROUP OF TWENTY former top agency officials has already sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget protesting the changes...

...In yet another example, David Rempel, a bioengineer from the University of California, described the National Advisory Committee on Ergonomics as "selected because of their opposition to the 46 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 ergonomic standard...

...Zahn's situation is an anomaly," he continued...

...The "way" involves minimizing bias through a peer-review process and performing experiments that rely on personal perceptions as little as possible when gathering data...

...Some studies have reported statistically significant evidence of an increased risk of breast cancer in women who have had abortions, while others have merely suggested an increased risk...

...His own account of this "discovery" emphasizes his conversion to Christianity rather than any hard scientific data: "With a new belief in a meaningful universe, I felt compelled to use science for its noblest, life-saving purpose," he told Physician magazine (July/August 2000...

...This did not prevent the federal National Cancer Institute in November 2002 from removing a post on its Web site that discounted the link and replacing it with the following: [T]he possible relationship between abortion and breast cancer has been examined in over thirty published studies since 1957...

...Not surprisingly, most of the "sensitive" subjects related to the pollution of air, water, or soil...

...Despite a few publications by Brind in scientific journals, the ABC link was widely discounted after the publication of "Induced Abortion and the Risk of Breast Cancer" in the New England Journal of Medicine (Jan...

...Under this proposal, the carefully crafted process used by the government to notify the public of an imminent danger is going to first have to be signed off by someone weighing the political hazards...

...It's hard to question his sincerity...

...The U.S...

...2. Hager, David W. and Linda Carruth, Stress and the Woman's Body (1996) as cited in "Jesus and the FDA," Time, Oct...

...48 n DISSENT / Spring 2004...

...That's no longer the case...

...When it comes to understanding the world's thugs and menaces, I'd trust the first 40 names in James Carville's P.D.A...

...The reshuffling did not escape the notice of former CDC chair Susan Cummins, who expressed concern in Science magazine (Oct...

...The administration dismissed the report as full of "inaccuracies, distortions, and omissions," but what at first appeared to editors at the magazine Discover to be "another broadside" from the partisan liberal from Los Angeles struck such a chord among scientists that it earned the number five slot among the magazine's top hundred science stories of the year...

...Agency for International Development and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) removed information about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing disease from their fact sheets...

...Such a proposal could be a major step toward placing the direction and dissemination of scientific research firmly under the control the White House press office...

...it was then left to politicians to decide how to deal with those findings...

...In January, eleven scientists who study work-related injuries boycotted the federal government's two-day symposium on workplace ailments to protest the Bush administration's tendency to distort science for political ends...

...Among the offending materials was a report the administration had commissioned from the National Academy of Sciences...

...Zahn, who has since resigned and was replaced by a scientist with a background in industry, claims his research was encouraged prior to the Bush administration...

...As Slate.com pointed out (April 22, 2002), the ousting of Robert Watson as head of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shortly after a fax from ExxonMobil called for his removal may not have been cause and effect...

...25, 2002) that these scientists were "placed on this committee to represent the interests of their clients...

...A recent report from the office of Representative Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif...

...Linking the administration to this episode, as Waxman attempts to do, is not easy...

...The White House has gone so far as to propose changes that would not only grant the administration authority to decide when to issue scientific findings to the public, but would allow it to manage peer reviews of "all major government rules, plans, proposed regulations and pronouncements...

...DYLAN OITO KRIDER'S work has appeared in Kenyon Review, the Houston Chronicle, the Tucson Citizen, and other publications...

...Rather than gathering evidence, conservative ideologues have begun emphasizing the virtue of relying on one's gut convictions first and then looking for the evidence to back them up...

...But we should remember that those bureaucratic scientists and analysts, for all their faults, came a hell of a lot closer to determining the actual situation in Iraq than the ideologues who were meddling in information gathering as never before...

...The problem with pre-war intelligence, Brooks insists, was that there weren't enough politicians looking over the analysts' shoulders...

...At the summit, Thu delivered an impassioned speech condemning the USDA's actions, calling them "little more than thinly veiled censorship, denying access to publicly funded research whose published works are centrally relevant for current public policy debates...

...9, 1997) that used a much larger sample than Brind's and relied on actual medical records to correct for the possibility that women might not voluntarily report their abortions...

...It's not always easy to pin down where the pressure is coming from...

...Louis Post-Dispatch, January 11, 2004...

...This and later studies led the national director of medical and scientific communication for the American Cancer Society, Joan Schellenbach, to conclude, "The scientific evidence does not support the association between induced abortion and breast cancer . . . we would advise women considering abortion that they should not be concerned with an added risk of breast cancer...

...But few doubt that the administration's reasons for wanting him gone were similar to Exxon's...

...Other studies have found no increase in risk among women who have had an interrupted pregnancy...

...What seems clear, however, is that science is operating in an environment where such intimidation is commonplace, and all the recent moves by the White House appear designed to make it easier for politicians and industry to exert this kind of pressure in the future...