EDITORIAL: Politics Versus Science

By The Boston Globe

Jan. 24–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 George Bush, which happened to Dr. William Miller, 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 Thompson 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 Richard 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 John 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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