Mission Accomplished..War on Science is Over

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L.Wood
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Mission Accomplished..War on Science is Over

Post by L.Wood »

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Mission Accomplished
The "war on science" is over. Now what?


By Chris Mooney
Posted Thursday, Jan. 15, 2009, at 2:55 PM ET

The "war on science" is over. Or at least it is in the sense that I originally meant the phrase: We're at the close of the Bush administration's years of attacks on the integrity of scientific information—its biased editing of technical documents, muzzling of government researchers, and shameless dispersal of faulty ideas about issues like global warming.

The attacks generated dramatic outrage and considerable activism from the traditionally staid science community and the sympathy of politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So it's no great surprise to find the president-elect setting out to restore dignity to the role of science in government. George W. Bush didn't even bother to name his White House science adviser until well into his first term, and his appointee (physicist John Marburger) didn't win Senate confirmation until October 2001. In contrast, Obama has already named a Nobel laureate physicist (Steven Chu) to head the Energy Department and a climate specialist and prominent leader of the scientific community, Harvard's John Holdren, as his Cabinet-level science adviser. ....

The Bush science controversies were just one manifestation of a deeper and long-standing gulf between the science community and the broader American public, one with roots stretching back to our indigenous tradition of anti-intellectualism (as so famously described by historian Richard Hofstadter in his classic work from 1963) and Yankee distrust of expertise and authority. So this is certainly no time for complacency. Scientists, with the support of the administration, should now be setting out to win over the hearts and minds of the American public, creating a stronger edifice of trust and understanding to help ensure that conflict doesn't come raging back again.

Consider: While scientists may be resurgent in Washington, their world as a whole remains distant and bizarre to most Americans. Only 18 percent of us know a scientist personally, according to a 2005 survey (subscription required), and when asked in 2007 to name scientific "role models," the results were dismal. Forty-four percent of Americans couldn't come up with a name at all, and among those few who did, their top answers were either not scientists or not alive: Bill Gates, Al Gore, Albert Einstein.

entire Slate story here

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War on Science is Over?

Post by Doug »

Despite Obama's Lofty Words, Scientific Integrity Rules Are Lagging
by Dan Froomkin

Last March, President Obama promised he'd have a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to the federal government on hand by July 29. A full year later, federal agencies still have not received any new directives and some government scientists say that conditions have not improved noticeably since Obama took power.

Obama made scientific integrity an issue in his presidential campaign, and his March 9, 2009 memo outlined a series of high-minded principles -- advocating, for instance, for "transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking."

The memo also ordered John Holdren, the director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to develop guidelines "designed to guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch." Obama gave Holdren 120 days. That deadline came and went. And Friday is its one-year anniversary.

The White House won't explain what's holding things up. In a June 18 posting on the White House website, Holdren simply said that "the process has been more laborious and time-consuming than expected at the outset." He set a new deadline, saying he would deliver "a high-quality product" to Obama "in the next few weeks." (That was three weeks ago.)

..."You can't enforce a principle, without a rule," said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a whistleblower group that he describes as "sort of a shelter for battered staff." Ruch's group is calling attention to the one-year anniversary of the blown deadline in hopes of spurring action.

"The reason that the Bush people were able to manipulate science is because there are no rules against it. And there still aren't," Ruch said.

"For changes to be meaningful and lasting, the White House must provide specific guidelines, they must provide a timeline and they must present benchmarks for agency performance, so we can measure the agencies and assure accountability," said Francesca Grifo, director of the scientific integrity project at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"That's actually how the work gets done," said Susan F. Wood, a professor involved in George Washington University's Scientists in Government program. Obama's memo was a "first step," she said. "Following through on that is really important."

A March report by Wood found that most government scientists interviewed did not view conditions at their agencies as having improved noticeably since the change in administration. That's an amazing conclusion, considering how President Bush and Vice President Cheney took political interference with science to entirely unprecedented levels.

In many cases, explained Ruch, scientists are still working for the same managers they were in the Bush administration. And, he said, "if you're going to have the same people operating with the same rules, you're going to have the same results."

Read the rest at the link above.
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