Rick Montgomery, "Bruised Science. Researchers in U.S. increasingly feel embattled, distrusted" (2005)

BRUISED SCIENCE
Researchers in U.S. increasingly feel embattled, distrusted

By RICK MONTGOMERY
The Kansas City Star

Sun Mar. 06, 2005

They don't need microscopes to find it. Everywhere they look, America's scientists see evidence of a widening public assault on, and distrust of, their work. Skeptics fire away on many fronts:

•  Conservatives call areas of environmental research politically laced, while scientists accuse the Bush administration of manipulating or ignoring critical findings.

•  Despite discoveries nearly every day in paleontology or astronomy, religious opponents of evolution have found new energy and are pushing back in school boards across the country.

•  Fresh products of corporate science trigger backlashes in all directions: activists opposed to genetically modified foods; mainstream groups worried about Vioxx and other wonder drugs.

•  Fast-developing medical advances unleash troubling ethical questions.

Each controversy differs from the other — from proposals to criminalize an aspect of embryonic stem-cell research in Missouri and Kansas, to efforts to teach “intelligent design” alongside evolution. Yet all are converging now, obscuring the lines that separate science — once seen as a bastion of the unbiased — from politics and opinion.

“Scientists feel they're under attack. And they are,” said Austin Dacey, director of research and education for the Center for Inquiry at State University of New York, in Buffalo.

The tensions carry real-world implications. A recent survey published in the journal Science showed scientists feeling pressured by political and cultural forces to sidestep sensitive areas.

“Most respondents worked hard to avoid controversy,” the study found.

As one researcher put it, “I would like to lunatic-proof my life as much as possible.”

Nearly a half-century after the Soviet space satellite Sputnik spurred America to embrace the hard sciences, the periodic tables have turned.

Scientists are now on the defensive. Policy-makers grill them. Doubters seek to debunk the most fundamental beliefs about global warming, natural selection and the wonders of modern medicine.

On the political right, deep suspicions stir about the ideological leanings of the scientific community. On the left, grave concerns are voiced about the Bush administration's respect for science. And in the middle reside the confused — most of us, probably — who are more than a little worried about where researchers, if allowed to run unrestrained, might take all of us.

What has brought on the bruising of science? And why now? Here are 10 theories on why scientists feel bruised.

No. 1: Too much information

Public mistrust and “scientific integrity” were recurring themes at last month's annual meeting in Washington of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Association President Shirley Ann Jackson placed some of the blame on the spread of partisan think tanks, media manipulation and “the Internet — an engine of information and disinformation without equal.”

“What happens when the marketplace is populated with self-proclaimed experts? When we have instantly available authorities to support every view?” asked Jackson, a physicist. “The result is … the devaluing of science.”

Last week's “blog wars” had Internet users exchanging fire about Peter Jennings' TV special on UFOs. The Web log of junkscience.com overflowed with venom over a consumer group's lawsuit calling for tighter regulations on salty foods.

“Our public discourse abounds with controversy,” Jackson said. “The volume and passion of the rhetoric sometimes drowns the voice of science itself.”

No. 2: A brief history of hype

The voice of science too often screams, however.

Sixty years ago this summer, the scientific consensus held that plant life would not return to Hiroshima for seven decades after a U.S. atomic bomb leveled the Japanese city. Yet trees were leafing out the next spring.

In the 1970s, Newsweek told of climate experts fretting over “global cooling.” And population-bomb theorist Paul Ehrlich predicted that food shortages in the 1980s could kill 4 billion people — most of Earth's inhabitants.

A famous 1980 study declared a link between coffee and fibrocystic breast disease. Scientists summarily rejected it by 1995.

“The tension underlying (today's conflicts) was created years ago by those who offered up science as the source of ultimate answers to society's problems,” said Daniel Sarewitz of the Consortium for Policy, Science and Outcome at Arizona State University. “Who offered that up? Scientists.”

Although the urgency of some of their prophesies helped build an ecological movement that brought cleaner air and water to U.S. cities, it came at a cost to the messengers' credibility.

“I'd say 98 percent of what scientists do is still good,” said Michael Fumento, author of Science Under Siege. “But it hurts to say… I remember a time, by God, when you could look at (a published study) and trust that politics and sensationalism had nothing to do with it.”

No. 3: Kyoto or no?

Global warming is one of the hottest battlegrounds of the science wars.

Hardly anyone refutes that air and ocean temperatures rose slightly in the 20th century. The question is whether the causes are natural or manmade — and at what cost the manmade causes should be curbed.

Much of the world community is on board with the environmentalists. The Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases by 2012 took effect around much of the globe last month.

But not in the United States. The treaty was dubbed “fatally flawed” by President Bush, whose country produces 20 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.

“The scientists in Europe are stunned about what Americans are arguing,” Cornell University scientist Kurt Gottfried said.

U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, made headlines a couple of years ago when he called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” The chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee contends that there is an industry of scientists pushing flawed theories.

“To get a research grant, you've got to identify a social problem. And coming up with negative findings doesn't lead to the next grant,” said Joseph L. Bast, president of the Libertarian-leaning Heartland Institute, a Chicago research center skeptical of the environmental lobby.

On the other side, liberal politicians such as former Vice President Al Gore point to study after study on greenhouse gas emissions rising and polar ice caps shrinking. They charge that energy companies and cynical ideologues throw money at pseudoscientific front groups, which issue reports of their own, designed to sow public confusion.

“Too often debunkers have their agendas, too,” said Fumento, himself a debunker. “Everybody looking at global warming — pro and con — is on the take.”

No. 4: Spotted owls

Opponents of Kyoto point to a Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates report that the protocol would cost 2.4 million U.S. jobs, reduce the gross domestic product by 3.2 percent and drive energy costs through the roof.

Jobs are often used as a crowbar to shift opinion against scientific findings. Whether it's spotted owls vs. lumbermen in the Northwest, or sea turtles vs. shrimpers in the South, or pollution control vs. carmakers in Detroit, the argument often boils down to jobs.

With fewer environmental or safety restrictions overseas, U.S. businessmen and workers often think that researchers are making it harder to earn a living.

That spotted owl?

Despite more than a decade of research, the closing of millions of acres of forest and 30,000 lost jobs, the owl's numbers continue to dwindle.

No. 5: Politicians tackling science

Today's attacks on science differ from past conflicts in that governments appear willing to lead the charge, said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University expert on popular culture.

The Union of Concerned Scientists last month released a survey of 1,400 biologists, ecologists, botanists and others working for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. One in five said they had been “directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from a USFSW document.”

Seventy percent of staff scientists reported knowing of cases “where U.S. Department of Interior political appointees have injected themselves” in ecological decisions. A majority of respondents cited interventions by members of Congress or local officeholders.

A 2003 report, “Politics and Science in the Bush Administration,” prepared by the minority staff of a House committee for Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, found repeated “distorting and suppressing (of) scientific information.”

“Most of these issues have one of two features: (1) they are issues like abortion, abstinence, and stem cells that have active right-wing constituencies that support the President; or (2) they are issues like global warming or workplace safety with significant economic consequences for large corporate supporters of the President.”

Last year, 20 Nobel Prize winners and other noted scientists lodged a similar complaint. John H. Marburger III, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, dismissed it as “a miscellany of criticisms, many of which have been made in the past by partisan political figures and advocacy organizations.”

No. 6: Scientists tackling politics

Trained in a scientific method that adheres to objectivity, most researchers shun political spotlights, said prize-winning biochemist Maxine Singer. “We try to stick to the science.”

But driven by anger at the Bush administration, Singer last fall hit the campaign circuit with a dozen other leading scholars on behalf of Scientists and Engineers for Change, a political action group that sought Bush's defeat in the election.

“We (scientists) need to get our hands dirty” in political discourse that affects lives, she said, “and not just the month before an election.”

They do so, however, at the risk of being accused of “politicizing” science — the very charge many are leveling at Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress.

“At one level, we want science to be politicized, because politics is about making decisions that affect the public,” said Roger Pielke, director of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. “What's troubling is that people whose role is to be objective, honest brokers are now taking political sides.

“Anytime the scientific community takes on an advocacy stance, they chip away at the legitimacy and authority that science has given us all these years.”

No. 7: Language barriers

A recent gathering of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco included a session seductively titled “Excitations of Earth's Incessant Free Oscillations by Atmosphere-Ocean-Seafloor Coupling.”

Specialization has led many researchers into tiny corners of knowledge, where their ideas, advancements and significance are lost on the layman.

A few years back, British physicist Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time could be found on coffee tables everywhere, but few would proclaim to understand much of it.

As the frontiers become more complex, one of the profession's biggest challenges is to get nonscientists to better understand all that science does and doesn't do, and how it affects society, said Austin Dacey, of the Center for Inquiry.

“Science speaks to the central questions of our culture, but precisely what it says is unclear,” he said. “We need a new language.”

Even the simplest of old terms can confuse, as the word “theory” has become a weapon in the fight over Darwinism. School officials in suburban Cobb County, Ga., placed stickers on science textbooks referring to evolution as “a theory, not a fact.”

Theory does not mean hunch, said Dacey. “Evolution is a theory in every sense that gravity is a theory. … There is no scientific controversy here. There's a public and ideological controversy.”

No. 8: Matters of faith

Science Editor Don Kennedy: “Objections to science are mostly coming from a group of evangelical Christians. They're very good working politically at the local level here and there.”

A Gallup Poll suggests the evolution debate is almost as much about confusion as faith. Three out of 10 Americans said they “don't know enough to say” whether Charles Darwin's theory is well-supported by evidence.

Although 45 percent who responded to the November poll rejected evolution and said God “created humans 10,000 years ago,” nearly half of that percentage — a group dominated by young adults — said their belief was not based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

On subjects such as stem cells, evolution, sex education and health, the armies of science and church seem doomed to clash, but scientists may be missing opportunities for alliance.

Many Christian conservatives have begun picking up the environmental standard, especially when the topic is stewardship of the land or protection of children from industrial toxins such as mercury.

Christianity Today, an important magazine in the evangelical movement, weighed in last year that Christians should be willing to adapt their lifestyles for a better environment. The magazine supported a global warming bill in Congress.

No. 9: A God gap?

Three of the greats — Galileo, Darwin and Albert Einstein — professed to deep spirituality.

However, a 1996 voluntary poll of scientists, published in Nature, showed a relatively low 40 percent believing in a deity. And among elite members of the National Academy of Sciences, only 8 percent expressed a belief in a “personal God” and 72 percent expressed “personal disbelief.”

This in a country where surveys show that 78 percent of Americans believe in angels, and about nine out of 10 believe in God.

The faith gap between scientists and the general public presents “an irresolvable conflict” in personal values, said analyst Sarewitz.

It does not, however, apply to what most researchers do, he said: Present a hypothesis about the natural world, test it, observe it and submit findings to peer review.

No avenue for spirituality exists, nor should it.

Edward Larson, a University of Georgia professor of science history and law, said his 1996 poll fairly reflected a community whose professional devotions rest in the question: How does it work?

“If not for scientists, you don't understand a rainbow,” Larson said. “You don't understand a beautiful red sunset … so you just say, ‘It must be God.' The scientists can explain it.”

No. 10: Hard consequences

Hindu scripture came to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's mind when he first saw an atomic blast, the product of his work: “I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.” He later failed to sway U.S. officials to stop the nuclear arms race.

Science can produce hard consequences — from the “race purification” programs of the eugenics movement in Nazi Germany to the prospect of someday ordering up blue eyes for your child through genetic engineering.

“We have to get past the idea that we let the scientists do their work first, and we all deal with the implications later,” said Sarewitz. “The stakes are too high.”

Choosing not to wait, a Missouri legislative committee recently advanced a bill that would make it a felony for researchers to grow human stem cells through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Critics equate the cutting-edge technology to cloning.

Polls show, however, that Missourians narrowly support stem-cell research if it can cure diseases and boost the state's research industry.

“Once new technologies become viable and the economic advantages become so great, society almost always gives in to change,” said science historian Larson. “Business gets behind it, and old laws just evaporate.

“Remember our fear of test-tube babies?” he asked. “The pill? Heart transplants?

“Everybody's doing it now.”

THREE VIEWS

The teacher…

Harry McDonald, who retired last year from teaching biology at Blue Valley High School, saw in his own classroom the change in how science is regarded.

For most of his 30-year career, students rarely challenged McDonald's authority, much less the textbooks. But in the later years he noticed students coming to class armed with “a line of argument lifted right out of the creationist newsletter.”

Today he is a leading voice in the fight to keep Kansas science standards intact. The latest challenge to long-accepted tenets of evolution comes from the intelligent design movement.

McDonald points to flattening rates of science literacy amid disproportionately high numbers of foreign students pursuing Ph.D.s in the sciences. U.S. graduate enrollment in science and engineering peaked 12 years ago.

“Here's the bottom line: Our society doesn't really value science,” says McDonald. “We Americans want the beneficial results, sure, but we really don't want science to be at odds with our own belief systems.”

The preacher…

Not all religious men see scientists as a problem.

A few Sundays back, the Rev. Adam Hamilton directed a captive congregation's attention to the jumbo screens in the sanctuary at Leawood's United Methodist Church of the Resurrection. More than 1,800 worshippers gazed at a photographic image resembling a white sauce coming to boil in a skillet.

“Take a look. This is a blastocyst,” Hamilton said in a sermon focusing on embryonic stem-cell research. The blastocyst is a tiny embryo, five to seven days after fertilization, whose cells have begun to divide many times.

Hamilton used his pulpit to explain the questions, not to push answers. For six Sundays in a row, the one-time “Star Trek” buff parlayed his fascination for science into a sermon series he called “Where Science and Religion Meet,” seeking common ground on issues such as life's origins, stem cells and psychiatric drugs.

“It's not a question of science or religion,” he told his flock. “Science and religion are meant to go hand in hand in the finding of truth.”

And the berry farmer

A dozen foreign students of the University of Kansas, mostly Chinese, sat quietly through Tom Willis' 90-minute Powerpoint show.

At a Lawrence home, they listened as he spoke of “radiometric clocks,” Carbon 14 and the half-life of Uranium 238. They heard his multilayered argument that the Grand Canyon likely formed in about a month, perhaps as a result of a massive volcanic blast.

It was all part of Willis' effort to rebut the evidence that Earth is billions of years old. He thinks it could be 30,000 years old.

A Missouri berry farmer, he holds degrees in physics and statistics, and leads the Creation Science Association for Mid-America.

The students were polite, though some weren't buying. One challenged Willis to explain the age of stars: It would take millions of years for their light to travel to Earth, correct? “We don't know how light performs in deep space,” Willis replied.

He avoided proselytizing (“Don't take my word. Check the science for yourself.”) until the students pressed him for a personal view. “I believe in the Bible. I've studied the histories it tells, and I know it got everything else right.”

The World Year of Physics

Ironically, at the same time science is under increasing scrutiny, one of the most extraordinary scientific achievements and achievers of the 20th century is being remembered.

It was 100 years ago when Albert Einstein — at the time an obscure, 26-year-old employee of the Swiss patent office — began upending our understanding of the universe and of science itself.

In 1905, Einstein published three landmark papers on the properties of matter, light, space and time — and in the process set the atomic course of the 20th century.

As a result physicists, physics teachers and others around the globe have declared 2005 as the World Year of Physics, and are aiming their laser pointers on Einstein's achievement and legacy. Among the activities are Einstein@Home, in which people contribute their home computers' idle time to help search for certain neutron stars.

This report was written by Rick Montgomery, a national correspondent for The Star. To reach him, call (816) 234-4410 or send e-mail to [email protected].