Politicization of Science

Dr. Henry Miller, physician and Fellow at the Hoover Institution, recently wrote an Opinion for the San Diego Union-Tribune (March 10, 2006) on the Politicization of Science.  For the public "consumer," this translates into situations where government officials can be in a position to extend unmerited bias to either the expediting or delaying of development of products and treatments relating to human health.   The entire article has been included in this forum.

Politicization of Science is Bipartisan,  by Dr. Henry Miller (to the San Diego Post)

Angered by the Food and Drug Administration's repeated delays in approving over-the-counter distribution of the morning-after contraceptive Plan B, Susan Wood quit six months ago as the agency's assistant commissioner of women's health. Instead of rolling over and "going along to get along" - the bureaucrat's credo - Wood voted with her feet.

Since her resignation, Wood has been writing articles and giving lectures in which she laments that "our federal health agencies seem increasingly unable to operate independently and that this lack of independence compromises their mission of promoting public health and welfare," as she wrote in a recent op-ed.

However, Wood also mentioned that she is a 15 year veteran of the federal government, which makes one wonder where she spent the 1990s. Although there is no question that many of the Bush administration's science-related appointments and its record leave much to be desired - witness the litmus tests for appointees to science-related positions, distortion of information to consumers about health and safety issues, undisguised antagonism toward embryonic stem cell research, and the FDA's appparently politically motivated decision on over-the-counter sales of Plan B - the Clinton administration's blatant perversion of science was even more pervasive and egregious.

As Clinton's science and technology czar, Al Gore was entrusted with choosing many top appointees to regulatory agencies, thereby obtaining the leverage to politicize the administration's policies and decisions. There was no room for dissention or respect for data-driven policy in the Clinton administration, no participation in the marketplace of ideas unless you were a true believer and willing to toe the party line. And on many environmental and public health issues, it was a very radical party line, indeed.

As to more direct politicization of decision-making during the Clinton-Gore years, I was a senior FDA official during most of the first term, and, like many of my colleagues, was appalled at the willingness of then-FDA Commissioner David Kessler to take orders from above about which products should be expedited and which should be delayed by regulators. For example, the agency approved a dubious female condom after being informed by the secretary of Health and Human Services that it was a "feminist product" and that delay was not acceptable; and FDA officials went to [extraordinary] lengths to look for reasons to deny approval to biotech-derived bovine somatotropin, a veterinary drug, because the vice-president's office considered it to be politically incorrect.

Never has American government been burdened with such politically motivated, anti-science, anti-business, anti-social eco-babble as duiring the Clinton-Gore years, but during that time I don't recall hearing from the born-again, now-vociferous defenders of scientific, data-driven public policy.

Lamentably, both Democrats and Republicans have learned to excel at the Emperor's New Clothes School of policy-making. By moving from step to bureaucratic step according to the rules, with everyone pretending that the evolution and substance of the policy are plausible, the pols and bureaucrats can confer legitimacy on almost any policy, no matter how flawed, unscientific, or inimical to the public interest. There is an axiom in the nation's capital that something said three times becomes a fact; and adherence to the procedural requirements of federal rule making is the apotheosis of that idea.

As Massachusetts Institute of Technology meterologist Richard Lindzen has sagely observed, science "provides our only way of separating what is true from what is asserted. If we abuse that tool, it will not be available when it is needed." Cynicism about the motivations and actions of those in government is healthy.  But if criticism about abuses of science - among other things - is to be credible, it should be consistent and evenhanded, even if not wholly apolitical.