SEPARATION OF SCIENCE AND STATE:

Politics and Science Do Mix: Claims that Bush misuses research are hypocritical. (Gregg Easterbrook, April 6, 2004, Boston Globe)

The Union of Concerned Scientists just accused the George W. Bush administration of deliberate "misuse" of science; pundits and some Democrats are citing the report as proof of presidential malfeasance. [...]

Twenty Nobel Prize winners for science signed the UCS report. Signatories (not necessarily Nobel laureates) include such universally admired science figures as biologist David Baltimore, president of Caltech, public health researcher Eric Chivian and biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard University, physicist Steven Weinberg, and former National Institutes of Health head Harold Varmus. Signatories also include two of the most political figures on the American scientific left, Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University and Stuart Pimm of Duke University. Both are renowned for shouting down anyone who doesn't take a purely politically correct view on every environmental issue.

Of course, there's no reason scientists who are politically active shouldn't sign a document that makes a political complaint — which brings us to the core problem with the UCS report. It protests that Bush is being political with science, but the union is itself political with science.

The group is best known for campaigning in the 1980s for the nuclear freeze — perhaps a just cause, but a quintessentially political cause. Its mission statement declares, "We augment rigorous scientific analysis with innovative thinking and committed citizen advocacy." The assumption that science and politics should mix is the whole reason the UCS exists.

Why don't these folks just suggest that government stop funding science? That way the politics would be taken out altogether.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 6, 2004 3:46 PM