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SCIENCE-US: Top Scientists Want Research Free From Politics
By Adrianne Appel
BOSTON, Feb 14, 2008 (IPS) - Leading U.S. scientists called on Congress Thursday to make sure the next
president does not do what they say the George W. Bush Administration has
done: censor, suppress and falsify important environmental and health research.
"The next president and Congress must cultivate an environment where
reliable scientific advice flows freely," said Susan Wood, a former director of
women's research at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Wood
resigned her post in 2005 in protest over the FDA’s delay in getting
emergency, over-the-counter birth control onto the market.
"Serious consequences can result when drug safety decisions are not based
on the best available scientific advice from staff scientists and experts," she
said.
Wood joined a panel of prominent scientists in Boston - convened by the
Union of Concerned Scientists, an activist group - to announce a joint
statement asking Congress to protect scientific integrity. Among the more
than 15,000 government scientists signing onto the statement are Harold
Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre and former
director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Anthony Robbins,
professor of medicine at Tufts University and former director of the National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
"Although surely the worst, the Bush Administration is not the first, nor will it
be the last administration to mistreat and misuse science and scientists,"
Robbins said. The White House itself has been directly involved in the
suppression and falsification of science, Robbins stressed.
But interference from the White House is just part of the problem, said
Francesca Grifo, a former government researcher and now a director at the
Union of Concerned Scientists. Industry lobbyists are all over government
agencies, trying to influence research that will impact their corporations, she
said. "These special interest groups are being given access at the highest
level."
"Government scientists have had their findings subjected to censorship and
misrepresentation," said Kurt Gottfried, professor of physics at Cornell
University and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The public
and Congress have often been deprived of accurate and candid scientific
information."
"The pursuit of science in an open society has had a long and fruitful tradition
in America," Gottfried said. "Unfortunately, this tradition has been violated in
recent years by the government itself."
The Union of Concerned Scientists has been tracking the Bush
Administration’s activities within the scientific community. No fewer than
1,191 scientists employed at nine federal agencies have reported to the group
that they fear retaliation from their superiors because the results of their
research are threatening to corporate or other interests, according to Grifo.
"What we've been seeing is that when certain programs produce research
results that are considered inconvenient they are being penalized by having
their funding cut," Grifo told IPS. One such program is an annual listing of
pollutants released by private companies, called the Toxic Release Inventory.
"We have seen it undermined," Grifo said. The NASA satellite research
program Mission to Planet Earth, which documents environmental
degradation, also has been the target of severe budget cuts, Grifo said.
"When science is falsified, fabricated or censored Americans' health and
safety suffer," Grifo said.
This interference has been directed at climate change research, new birth
control drugs, species protection, consumer safety studies and agricultural
research, the scientists said.
The suppression of health data by the federal Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) may cost many people who were at Ground Zero in New York
City - or lived nearby on Sep. 11 - their health, the scientists said.
Following the attacks of Sep. 11, then-EPA administrator Christine Todd
Whitman went before the public and safety personnel on numerous occasions
and said that the dust hovering over Ground Zero and settling over New York
was not harmful. Many rescue workers and local residents have since become
gravely ill due to the toxicity of the air they breathed.
The fate of the Greater Sage grouse is unknown since a top government
official interfered with scientific studies showing that the bird and its habitat
needed protection from development, the scientists said. Julie MacDonald
stalled the release of studies on the grouse by questioning the methodology
and conclusions. An expert panel never saw the studies and so recommended
the bird not be protected.
Robin Ingle, a former statistician with the Consumer Product Safety
Commission, said the commission refused to warn the public about gross
problems with products like all-terrain vehicles even when research made
clear how dangerous they were. "A political appointee at my agency
prevented my research on all-terrain-vehicle safety from reaching the public,
even when deaths and injuries occurred," she said.
"It's very important that scientific and mathematical research on consumer
products be free of the push and pull of politics because you don't want it to
be biased in favour of the industry," Ingle told IPS.
In another example, a microbiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture
was prevented 11 times from publicizing his research about the dangers of
bacteria in the air near massive pig farms in Iowa and Missouri - a big
business that supplies America's pork. His research found that the bacteria
are resistant to antibiotics. But his supervisor refused to allow him to discuss
his results, saying in one memo to him: "politically sensitive and controversial
issues require discretion."
(END)
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