At a Scientific Gathering, U.S. Policies Are Lamented

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February 19, 2006
At a Scientific Gathering, U.S. Policies Are Lamented
By CORNELIA DEAN

ST. LOUIS, Feb. 18 - David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning
biologist and president of the California Institute of Technology, is
used to the Bush administration misrepresenting scientific findings to
support its policy aims, he told an audience of fellow researchers
Saturday. Each time it happens, he said, "I shrug and say, 'What do you
expect?' "

But then, Dr. Baltimore went on, he began to read about the
administration's embrace of the theory of the unitary executive, the
idea that the executive branch has the power or even the obligation to
act without restraint from Congress. And he began to see in a new light
widely reported episodes of government scientists being restricted in
what they could say in public.

"It's no accident that we are seeing such an extensive suppression of
scientific freedom," he said. "It's part of the theory of government
now, and it's a theory we need to vociferously oppose." Far from
twisting science to suit its own goals, he said, the government should
be "the guardian of intellectual freedom."

Dr. Baltimore spoke at a session here at the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. Though it was
organized too late for inclusion in the overall meeting catalogue, the
session drew hundreds of scientists who crowded a large meeting room
and applauded enthusiastically as speakers denounced administration
policies they said threatened not just sound science but also the
nation's research pre-eminence.

The session was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a
nonprofit organization that has been highly critical of the Bush
administration.

Not all of the speakers had harsh words for the administration. Rita R.
Colwell, who headed the National Science Foundation, the government's
leading financing organization for the physical sciences, from 1998 to
2004, said she had never experienced political pressure in that job.
But, Dr. Colwell said, the free flow of scientific information is
crucial for maintaining the nation's leadership in research. Threats to
that, she said, are second only to terrorism as threats to the nation's
security.

Another speaker, Susan F. Wood, former director of the office of
women's health at the Food and Drug Administration, said administration
interference with the agency's scientific and regulatory processes had
left morale there at a "nadir."

Dr. Wood, who received a standing ovation from many in the audience,
resigned in August to protest agency officials' unusual decision to
overrule an expert panel and withhold marketing approval for Plan B,
the so-called morning after pill, a form of emergency contraception.
She said she feared that competent scientists would leave rather than
remain at an agency where their work was ignored because "social
conservatives have extreme undue influence."

Later, in response to a question, she said that she might have
consulted the agency's inspector general over the Plan B decision, but
that inspectors general often had to be prodded by Congress before
taking action. Democrats have little power in this Congress, she said,
and Republicans who care about science have been "remarkably silent."

Others in the audience said efforts to stifle researchers were attacks
on more than science.

"Administrative legitimacy has been violated as much as scientific
legitimacy," said Sheila Jasanoff, an expert on science policy who
teaches at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. "You
can't get the most solid possible basis for making a decision unless
you have not just the most credible and legitimate form of science but
also the most credible and legitimate administrative process."

Leslie Sussan, a lawyer with the Department of Health and Human
Services who emphasized that she was speaking only for herself, drew
applause when she said she saw the administration's science policies as
"an attack on the rule of law as a basis for self-government and
democracy."

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