Political Science

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FYI,

Tuesday | May 8, 2001

Tom Siegfried: To be sound, science has to be less political 05/07/2001 By TOM SIEGFRIED / The Dallas Morning News WASHINGTON – When government leaders insist that policy should be based on "sound science," maybe they mean acoustics. Some decisions on matters that demand scientific expertise seem to ignore the best scientific evidence, favoring instead the contrarian views of scientific minorities. And it's always easy to find scientists who dispute the prevailing wisdom of their field. But sometimes the mavericks' voices are magnified when their positions support certain political prejudices.

Take global warming, for instance. Levels of carbon dioxide and certain other gases that trap heat in the air are rising. Nobody disputes that. And the evidence is strong that the Earth has been getting warmer over the past century. Most experts conclude that in the century ahead the planet will get warmer still, with disruptive consequences, if nothing is done about it. But promises to reduce carbon dioxide emissions have been withdrawn.

Yet sound science repeatedly confirms the reality of the global warming problem. In March, British scientists reported satellite measurements confirming that the Earth is giving up less heat to space than it used to. "Our results provide direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect," the scientists wrote in the journal Nature.

And the international coalition of the world's leading climate experts, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has reiterated forecasts of a 2- to 10-degree average warming of the planet in the century ahead (in reports available at www.ipcc.ch).

Other examples of science cast aside aren't hard to find. Most striking, perhaps, is the decision to revoke (or delay) new limits on the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water – again with the appeal to a need for sound science. Yet a National Academy of Sciences panel has studied the issue thoroughly and concluded in 1999 that the current arsenic standard doesn't protect human health and "requires downward revision as promptly as possible."

And then there's the enthusiasm for building a missile-defense system, despite the evidence suggesting that it's a waste of money for something that may not be needed and may never work. The nation's leading group of physicists, the American Physical Society, addressed that issue last year.

"The United States should not make a deployment decision relative to the planned National Missile Defense system unless that system is shown – through analysis and through intercept tests – to be effective against the types of offensive countermeasures that an attacker could reasonably be expected to deploy with its long-range missiles," the physics group concluded. And tests conducted or planned so far, the group said, "fall far short of those required to provide confidence" in the technical feasibility of the missile defense system being considered.

One of the nation's leading experts on missile defense, physicist Garwin of the Council on Foreign Relations, says efforts to shoot down intercontinental missiles might work, if designed to strike them on the way up – not in space as current proposals envision. The real problem, though, is not the missiles, but the nuclear bombs or biological poisons that some rogue nation might want to deliver.

"The threat is nuclear weapons or anthrax, and all these countries have much easier ways to deliver them," Dr. Garwin said in Washington last week at a meeting of the American Physical Society. Nothing in current anti-missile planning, he said, could stop a short-range missile launched from an offshore ship or a bomb exploded in a boat in a harbor.

Over on the biological side of the scientific spectrum, there's the contentious issue of embryonic stem-cell research, considered by many scientists to be the most promising approach to treating many of humankind's most devastating medical disorders. Last month the National Institutes of Health canceled a meeting to review funding requests for such research. Yet in February, a petition by 80 Nobel Prize winners urged federal funds for developing the discovery of embryonic stem cells, which are capable of growing into different kinds of body tissues.

"Federal support ... is essential to translate this discovery into novel therapies for a range of serious and currently intractable diseases," the Nobel laureates noted, citing the possibility of treatments or cures for diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, spinal cord injuries, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

All these examples aside, the stated desire for sound science in government policy seems hard to reconcile with an administration that has not yet managed to find a presidential science adviser. Or with a proposed budget that does not fund research in the physical sciences at a rate that keeps pace with inflation. Or with the growing gap between funding for biomedical or life science research and research in physical sciences and engineering – when experts insist that progress in physical science is essential to future biomedical breakthroughs.

It is perhaps possible that future appointments will ameliorate these problems and science will ultimately inform public policy in a sensible way. But until then, it will be difficult to quell the suspicion that rather than relying on sound science, some policies are based on how the science sounds – to the ears of politicians who listen only to the side of science that they want to hear.

Martha Murdock, DirectorNational Silicone Implant FoundationDallas, Texas Headquarters