[Dialogue] Top Scientists Want Research Free From Politics

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Friday, February 15, 2008 by Inter Press Service
<http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41205>  

Top Scientists Want Research Free From Politics

by Adrianne Appel

BOSTON - 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.
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"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 <http://www.ucsusa.org>  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."

C 2008 Inter Press Service

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/15/7085/

 

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