Commentary: Bush administration faulted for playing politics with

Congressman Henry Waxman, D.-Calif., in a recent Scientific American article, portrays why he is named Science's Political Bulldog when he declares, If the science doesn't fit what the White House wants it to be, it distorts the science.

Blasts like that against the White House science policy started as soon as George Bush arrived in the Oval Office. Many scientists complained in private but held tight in public until Waxman heard from a growing group of scientific organizations, advocacy groups and former health officials.

By August 2003, Waxman had had enough. His office issued a report detailing interference in more than 20 areas affecting health, environment and other research agencies.

Especially offensive to Waxman is any politicization of the National Institutes of Health or its affiliates, which the congressman considers to be the nation's premier scientific organization. For example, prompted by the urging of the Republican majority of Congress, NIH officials were provided with a hit list of nearly 150 investigators whose scientific projects were questioned via telephone calls in an attempt to stifle the scientific process.

To investigators contacted, the message was clear: Big Brother is watching. To NIH's credit, no grants or investigations were cancelled, but the intimidation was felt nevertheless.

Science can be manipulated in a variety of ways to achieve political ends, especially when scientific research is heavily dependent upon governmental funds. Chief among these methods are supporting most heavily those scientific investigations which are in accord with political goals, denying funds to endeavors which may have findings contrary to those political goals, and ignoring accepted scientific discoveries that do not fit with the political agenda.

The following are just a small sampling of such recent manipulation:

1. Support for Abstinence Only programs. Beginning with the Welfare Reform bill of 1996, more than a half-billion dollars have been allocated to fund education programs that teach abstinence only until marriage programs in our schools. Programs which also teach contraception and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases are not eligible for these funds. Despite strong scientific evidence that such education is ineffective in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, Bush, in his 2004 State of the Union address, called on Congress to double its funding for these programs, to the tune of $270 million for fiscal 2005.

2. Denial of funding for embryonic stem cell research. The scientific community today believes there is great potential for finding cures for a host of diseases through stem cell research utilizing embryonic cells. Nevertheless, due to the strenuous opposition of some right-wing and conservative religious groups, the Bush administration has denied federal funding to any entity which would promote the development of additional lines of embryonic stem cells. Bush's contention that there were sufficient lines already available has been proven inaccurate, but so far urging from the scientific community to open up this area of research has fallen on deaf ears.

3. Ignoring the dangers of pollution and global warming. Despite worldwide acceptance of scientific findings that pollution due largely to the burning of fossil fuels is leading to potentially catastrophic global warming for our planet, this administration has chosen to turn its back on the dangers. The Kyoto Protocol, endorsed by most of the developed countries of the world, who have agreed to make efforts to reduce their greenhouse emissions, has not been signed by this administration. Bowing to strong lobbying efforts of the coal and gas interests, it is attempting to downplay or even deny the significance of the correlation between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

Kirsten Moore, president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, recently wrote: The American public deserves policy informed by the best scientific advice available, not science tainted by political motives. It is time for the Bush administration to stop manipulating science and put our public health and environmental health ahead of its ideology.

Fortunately, despite these attempts, as Dr. Gerald D. Fischbach of Columbia University so succinctly put it, It's hard to stop science.

Robert S. Coplan, M.D., M.P.H., has spent a half century studying, practicing and writing about medicine and issues facing the health care and biotechnology industries.

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