Sciience and politics in America 1
- From: "Lance" <lachenicht@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 4 Sep 2005 03:50:21 -0700
New York Times
September 4, 2005
Political Science
By DANIEL SMITH
When Donald Kennedy, a biologist and editor of the eminent journal
Science, was asked what had led so many American scientists to feel
that George W. Bush's administration is anti-science, he isolated a
familiar pair of culprits: climate change and stem cells. These
represent, he said, ''two solid issues in which there is a real
difference between a strong consensus in the science community and the
response of the administration to that consensus.'' Both issues have in
fact riled scientists since the early days of the administration, and
both continue to have broad repercussions. In March 2001, the White
House abruptly withdrew its support for the Kyoto Protocol on climate
change, and the U.S. withdrawal was still a locus of debate at this
summer's G8 summit in Scotland. And the administration's decision to
limit federal funds for embryonic-stem-cell research four years ago --
a move that many scientists worry has severely hampered one of the most
fruitful avenues of biomedical inquiry to come along in decades --
resulted in a shift in the dynamics of financing, from the federal
government to the states and private institutions. In November 2004,
Californians voted to allocate $3 billion for stem-cell research in
what was widely characterized as a ''scientific secession.''
Yet what remains most divisive, according to Kennedy, is not the Bush
administration's specific policies, but a more general sense that
''scientific conclusions, reached either within agencies or by people
outside of government, are being changed for political reasons by
people who have not done the scientific work.'' It is this sense that
science is being ''misused'' that has given rise to two Congressional
bills.
In late June, Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat,
introduced the Restore Scientific Integrity in Federal Research and
Policymaking bill. Many on the right interpreted the move as little
more than a clever bit of partisan grandstanding. ''This all comes out
of the Kerry campaign's attempt to spin the legitimate efforts of the
administration to monitor scientific reports,'' Robert Walker, a
Republican lobbyist and former chairman of the House Science Committee,
told me. Even scientists, the ostensible beneficiaries of the bill,
expressed little enthusiasm. ''It won't get very far,'' said Kurt
Gottfried, a Cornell physicist and chairman of the Union of Concerned
Scientists, based in Cambridge, Mass., which has been highly critical
of the Bush administration. ''We've come to have a cynical attitude
about what can happen in this government.''
Both sides have reason to be skeptical. The bill -- which aims to put
an end to the censorship and alteration of government scientific
information and to the application of litmus tests in making advisory
appointments -- is nearly identical to one introduced in February by
Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, that has been
languishing in the House. And though Durbin's bill is also sponsored by
such formidable Democratic figures as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Harry
Reid, the Senate minority leader, it has about as much chance as
Waxman's does of becoming law. Yet, as some have noted, the mere fact
that it has appeared in the Senate points to the deep political rift
over differences between the scientific community and the White House.
The notion that there is a widespread ''misuse'' of science first
gained its force from a series of instances in which administration
officials have, as Gottfried and others see it, ''broken with an
unwritten code of scientific conduct.'' Two of these instances, widely
publicized by watchdog groups and reporters, have taken on almost
metonymic significance. In 2002, William R. Miller, a prominent
psychologist, was asked during an interview for a position on a
National Institutes of Health advisory panel on drug abuse if he had
voted for Bush. He replied that he had not. He was subsequently denied
the appointment. (The administration maintains that the decision was
made for other reasons.) Then, in June 2003, The New York Times
reported that White House officials had demanded that a reference to a
study in an Environmental Protection Agency report showing sharp
increases in global temperatures be replaced by a reference to a study
financed in part by the American Petroleum Institute that questioned
those increases. According to a widely circulated internal memo,
switching the studies and deleting other references to the human
contribution to global climate change would have meant that the report
no longer accurately represented scientific consensus. Rather than make
the changes, the E.P.A. removed the entire section on global warming
from its report, which focused solely on the environment. In and of
themselves, neither of these instances was unusual; all
administrations, according to Daniel Sarewitz, a former Congressional
staff member and director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and
Outcomes at Arizona State University, seek to some extent to mold
scientific evidence to fit their political agendas. But scientists like
Gottfried contend that the ''scope and intensity'' of the episodes
under Bush are unprecedented.
It falls to John H. Marburger III, the president's science adviser, to
respond to complaints like Gottfried's, and he has consistently
maintained that they are a distortion of the administration's position.
Recently, however, observers have noted that even he seems unusually
insistent on reaffirming the scientific facts. While a guest of the
Princeton Environmental Institute this spring, he responded to a
question about the Kyoto Protocol by stating: ''Global warming exists,
and we have to do something about it. And what needs to be done is to
reduce CO2.'' His remarks were quickly picked up by intrepid
administration-watchers. Chris Mooney, a science journalist and author
of ''The Republican War on Science,'' wrote, ''I don't think the
president has ever stated the facts so plainly -- has he?'' And in
February, Marburger responded to a question about intelligent design by
stating categorically, ''Intelligent design is not a scientific
theory.'' More visibly, he used much the same phrasing when he was
asked by a Times reporter last month to respond to the president's
endorsement of teaching intelligent design in schools.
When I spoke with Marburger in late August, several months after I
first met him, he was adamant that his comments had carried not even a
tinge of rebellion. ''At least I haven't noticed any change in
myself,'' he said with some amusement. ''I still don't think there are
any administration policies that are in conflict with science or with
the way nature works.''
This has been Marburger's stance since Bush's first term. Many
scientists, based on what they knew about him, had hoped for something
different. Though a delay in appointing Marburger led to speculation
about the administration's commitment to science -- his appointment was
not finalized until nine months into Bush's first term, and when it
was, his position was stripped of the title assistant to the president,
a designation it held since Bush's father's presidency -- his resume
dovetailed with the concerns of the scientific community. A 64-year-old
physicist, academic and university administrator, Jack Marburger was a
lifelong Democrat and was widely regarded as a deft conciliator.
Whatever hopes scientists harbored for Marburger, however, were dealt a
severe blow after the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a report in
February of last year charging that the administration's political
agenda had permeated ''the traditionally objective, nonpartisan
mechanisms through which the government uses scientific knowledge in
forming and implementing public policy.'' A petition appended to the
report and signed by more than 60 pre-eminent scientists, including 20
Nobel laureates -- among them Harold Varmus, former director of the
National Institutes of Health -- accused the administration of
''systematically'' manipulating scientific findings. There were those
who hoped that Marburger would tender his resignation in a show of
solidarity; instead, he emerged in defense of the administration,
claiming that the U.C.S. report was ''wrong and misleading'' and
insisting that his employers had applied ''the highest scientific
standards in decision making.'' These statements alienated many
scientists (Howard Gardner, a Harvard cognitive psychologist, went so
far as to call Marburger a ''prostitute'' on National Public Radio),
and the protests quickly grew more partisan. In June 2004, 48 Nobelists
released a letter endorsing John Kerry, and several months later, a
political action group, Scientists and Engineers for Change, arranged a
series of lectures by prominent scientists in key battleground states,
in a show of force that recalled the vehement opposition of the
scientific community to the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater
in 1964.
Bush's success in the election did little to tamp down scientific
activism. The U.C.S. has continued to publicize instances in which
politics seems to be intruding on science, and the original petition
has garnered more than 7,000 additional signatures. The organization
has also teamed up with Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility, a nonprofit Washington-based watchdog group, to produce
a series of surveys tracking political interference, both real and
perceived, with government employees in federal agencies. And in June,
the American Civil Liberties Union released a report, ''Science Under
Siege,'' charging that post-9/11 security measures have imperiled the
country's technical competitiveness by restricting access to equipment
and documents and obstructing the movement of foreign scientists.
To many in the scientific community, it is unfathomable that Marburger
would risk his reputation by staying on and continuing to defend the
administration. Others see the fact that he has remained in office as
indicative of nothing more than the very real compromises involved in
formulating science policy. ''If you haven't been there and lived in
the White House, and thought deeply about your role and the ethical
dilemmas you incur, such as whether or not to resign, then it might be
quite difficult to understand what's happened with Marburger,'' says
Neal Lane, Bill Clinton's second science adviser and a prominent
supporter of the U.C.S. petition. Those who have worked closely with
Marburger agree that his response is based on a careful cost-benefit
analysis. ''The choice is between Jack and a Neanderthal,'' says one
former Bush administration official, whose livelihood still depends on
the federal government and thus spoke to me on the condition of
anonymity. ''The scientific community will never understand that.''
For Marburger, what is at stake is less complicated and less political.
He insists that the ''science wars'' are illusory and that the Bush
administration's stewardship of science is both defensible and in
keeping with the ideal of scientific progress. Despite the ugly names
he has been called along the way, he remains sanguine about science's
prospects under the Bush administration -- for the simple reason, he
says, that he is careful to make a distinction between Science (which
his tone alone capitalizes) and the people who conduct it. Whether
scientists set up camp outside the White House, Marburger suggested to
me recently, or whether they remain quietly in their laboratories,
science will continue to lumber on as it always has. So, too, will
Washington.
One afternoon in March, I met Marburger for lunch at the Bombay Club,
an Indian restaurant not far from the White House. It was raining, and
Marburger, a sensible man who walks to meetings and lunches, arrived in
a long black overcoat, his white hair sprinkled with rain. He spoke in
a quiet, professorial tone about the work of Hans Bethe, the Nobel
Prize-winning nuclear physicist, who died the day before, and about
nonlinear optics, a field made possible by the invention of the laser
and in which Marburger was a pioneer. All this seemed at odds with the
prevailing image of a man torn between the scientific community that
had fostered him and the administration that had taken him in, and I
asked what he thought about the notion, widely held in the scientific
community, that he must be ethically conflicted.
''I don't feel conflicted,'' he said calmly. ''I don't feel that I'm
someone who is, as I've been described, at the 'eye of a hurricane' or
at the 'center of a storm.''' That image, he said, comes from the fact
that ''we're very closely tied to the dynamics of politics in our time,
but we're not very closely tied to what is actually happening in
science.''
For Marburger, this is true even, or especially, when it comes to
scientific developments that have generated the most controversy.
Global warming, which many scientists see in Manichaean terms -- the
evidence of increasing climate change versus the administration's
unwillingness to take steps to combat the danger -- Marburger sees in
terms of a larger back-and-forth between scientific advances and the
willingness of the culture to alter itself accordingly. Each
generation, Marburger told a group of environmental scientists at
Princeton in the spring, has a natural resistance to changing its
lifestyle, and our generation has a resistance to changing the way it
produces energy -- ''one of the deepest and most pervasive aspects of
the economy.'' He sees the stem-cell debate in similar terms: science
can point us to the facts, but it cannot solve what for some are the
moral issues raised by the use of human embryos in research. In late
July, when as staunch a Bush ally as Bill Frist, the Senate majority
leader and a physician, backed a bill that would loosen federal
restrictions on stem-cell research, Marburger remained silent. Then in
August, it was reported that Harvard researchers had used existing
embryonic stem cells to convert adult skin cells into stem cells. The
bill supported by Frist, which had been gaining momentum in the Senate,
despite Bush's threat of a veto, suddenly seemed likely to lose votes.
For Marburger, the fact that new research had direct political
consequences was as it should be: the findings raised ethical issues
that were separate from the scientific ones, which would be worked out
in due course.
This does not mean that Marburger believes there can or should be a
stark division between scientific and social issues. After serving for
14 years as president of the State University of New York at Stony
Brook, he was tapped in 1998 to become director of Brookhaven National
Laboratory, a vast and prestigious federal research complex on the east
end of Long Island, whose future had become suddenly threatened by the
discovery of a plume of radioactive tritium in the groundwater beneath
the lab's nuclear reactor site. The leak was in fact harmless -- it
contained less radioactive material than a conventional Exit sign --
but it sent local environmentalists into a frenzy. Marburger spent
countless hours listening to the concerns of activists, and he worked
assiduously to reform the laboratory's image -- presiding over the
shutdown of the offending reactor at the insistence of the Department
of Energy, against his better scientific judgment; opening up
Brookhaven to public scrutiny; and more strictly enforcing
environmental-safety regulations. After three years, Marburger had not
only resolved the conflict; he had also earned national recognition --
and it was his performance at Brookhaven that would bring him to the
attention of the Bush administration.
As the presidential science adviser -- and director of the Office of
Science and Technology Policy -- he would step into a less overtly
controversial role than the one at Brookhaven. Though scientists since
Benjamin Franklin have been acting as advisers to the government, the
position was first codified by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was motivated
to bring a scientist closer to the Oval Office by the launching of
Sputnik and the ensuing space race. It was an era in which admiration
for science and scientists was at its peak, and the cultural mood was
reflected in the White House. Early science advisers played an active
role in minting policies as expansive as a nuclear test-ban treaty with
the Soviet Union and as sensitive as U-2 surveillance of the Soviet
Union. But this heyday was not to last long. As the influence of
scientists grew, so, too, did the level of their political activism.
During the 1960's and early 1970's, they began to dispute, often on
nontechnical grounds, the Vietnam War and to fight for strict arms
control. This led, writes Gregg Herken in ''Cardinal Choices,'' a
history of presidential science advising, to ''a progressive loss of
faith in the process by both sides.'' The tension came to a head in
1973, when President Nixon, angry over the opposition of his advisers
to his antiballistic-missile program, summarily abolished the post of
science adviser. Gerald Ford reinstated it in 1976 -- and also
established the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which was
charged with analyzing the impact of science and technology on domestic
and international affairs. But the role would be only a shadow of its
predecessor.
In comparison to his midcentury precursors, Marburger is less active in
formulating public policy, and unlike his colleague Leon Kass, chairman
of the President's Council on Bioethics, he isn't asked to weigh its
ethical or moral underpinnings. The Office of Science and Technology
Policy, which is Marburger's base of operations, plays mostly an
administrative role in the White House. With a staff of just over 40
and a budget of only $6 million, the office has none of the attributes
that endow the agencies and departments it monitors with independence.
And unlike the larger policy shops in the White House, like the
National Security Council, it does not play an obvious role in the
president's day-to-day decision making. To some extent, these
shortcomings have historically been considered something of a benefit;
the gist of an old saying among O.S.T.P. staff members is that because
they have no people and no money, they can better represent the
president's scientific efforts to the rest of the government. But the
power of the office is widely agreed to depend on the science adviser's
personal relationship with the president. ''Your influence depends on
whether people around the president feel you have something to add,''
says Neal Lane, Clinton's second science adviser, now a professor at
Rice University and a senior fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute
for Public Policy there. ''The title'' -- assistant to the president --
''is important. It means you're understood to have access.''
How much access Marburger has is a matter of considerable debate. The
lack of the title, as Lane says, contributes to the conventional wisdom
that he works in an orbit far outside Bush's inner circle. But, as
Marburger points out, he does attend the senior-level staff meeting
held early each morning in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, and
he is able to see the president whenever he feels it is necessary.
Robert Walker, who served as a science-and-technology adviser to the
Bush 2000 campaign, told me, ''O.S.T.P. has been a major player in
policy, and whoever makes the argument that it's been relegated to some
backwater of the White House just reveals how little he knows about how
this administration works.''
Continued
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