Boston Globe Editorial: Politics versus science

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GLOBE EDITORIAL

Politics versus science

January 24, 2006

MIXING POLITICS with science produces bad science and casts a shadow over

government's efforts to fund medical and scientific research, protect public

health, and oversee the approval of new prescription drugs. This work requires

high standards in the publication of scientific information, and in the

appointment of researchers and advisers on the basis of merit, not politics.

The

Bush administration has fallen so far short of these standards that Congress

felt the need to stand up for them late last year in a Health and Human

Services appropriation bill.

With the amendment, which forbids misleading information in the guise of

science and prohibits potential nominees from being asked about their political

views, it is less likely that a National Cancer Institute website will again

have information from discredited studies linking abortion to breast cancer.

Eminent scientists under consideration for government advisory committees

won't be rejected simply for having failed to vote for Bush, which

happened to Dr. , a University of New Mexico professor and author

of

more than 100 peer-reviewed articles. He was rejected for a National

Institute on Drug Abuse advisory panel after being quizzed about his 2000

election

choice.

In 2002, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy rejected

nominees who had been selected by staff scientists for an advisory panel on

lead poisoning in children. Instead, he stacked the panel with nominees

sympathetic to industry as the panel was about to consider tightening the lead

standard. The standard has remained unchanged. If such abuses of government

power occur again, the public will have recourse to the amendment, sponsored in

the Senate by Durbin of Illinois and in the House by Henry Waxman of

California.

The two Democrats succeeded in getting both Republican-led houses to accept

this amendment, with its implied criticism of Bush administration actions,

because members of Congress did not want to be seen as voting against integrity

in science.

As part of an appropriations bill, the measure will have to be renewed each

year. But it is one response to a statement against political interference in

science that has been signed by more than 8,400 US scientists, including 49

Nobel laureates. In the fall of 2004, a panel of the National Academies of

Science, chaired by Porter, a former Republican congressman from Illinois,

excoriated the practice of subjecting nominees to scientific advisory

committees to political tests.

The amendment should be a bulwark against the politicization of science. It

is a commentary on the Bush administration that in the nation's 230-year

history such a law was never considered necessary. It is now.

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