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Researchers decry rising political pressure
LAUREN MORELLO, GREENWIRE, 02/21/06
ST. LOUIS -- Recent claims of scientific censorship by NASA's top climatologist and others are evidence of an unprecedented "demand for orthodoxy" from the White House, Nobel Prize-winning biologist David Baltimore said last weekend at the annual meeting here of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The problem is an outgrowth of the Bush administration's belief in the unitary executive, said Baltimore, the president of the California Institute of Technology. That legal theory, he said, argues that the Constitution vests the power to execute federal law in the president, limiting the powers of Congress and the judiciary.
The problem for researchers, Baltimore said: Nearly all U.S. science is funded through the executive branch.
"It is no accident that we are seeing such an extensive suppression of science," he added at the session Saturday. "I think it's a theory of government, a theory of government we need to vociferously oppose."
Baltimore's comments came during a session organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Since 2004, the organization has circulated a letter demanding freedom from censorship for government scientists. More than 8,000 scientists have signed the statement, including nearly 50 Nobel laureates and 63 National Medal of Science recipients, the group said.
The letter "seemed to me to encapsulate a feeling that had been growing in me over a period of time about the position truth had in the present administration," Baltimore said. "We as scientists saw this very dearly."
Some fear 'brain drain'
The current political atmosphere could lead to a long-term "brain drain" from government agencies that safeguard the nation's health and security, said Susan Wood, former director of women's health programs at the Food and Drug Administration.
Scientists "will move on," Wood said, citing her own case. She resigned from FDA last summer after the agency overruled an expert panel that recommended making emergency contraception available over-the-counter.
"Whether you care about reproductive health worries ... or good governance, you should care about what happened here," Wood said. "It's setting off the alarm bell that things are quite wrong and out of sync."
The problem is not limited to the White House, said Dan Kammen, a professor of public policy and director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California-Berkeley.
Kammen was invited to testify before the House Science Committee last fall on the controversial strategic plan for the federal Climate Change Technology Program, of which he is critical. But days before the hearing, the panel rescinded his invitation and those of all witnesses save one Bush administration official, in what he said was a bid to avoid discussion of the CCTP plan's significant flaws.
But not all of the speakers offered such vociferous criticism of the current administration.
"Scientists have a responsibility," said former National Science Foundation director Rita Colwell. "It's necessary for us to speak but also to maintain the peer-review system ... and to recognize our own areas of conflict of interest."
Colwell was careful to note that during her six-year tenure -- overlapping both the administration of presidents Clinton and George W. Bush -- that she never felt any political pressure. "I want to make that very clear," she said.
Still, she noted, that situation seems to be changing, with the incidence of scientific censorship by the federal government "rising with disturbing frequency."
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