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| News: No faith in science - Part I |
2005-04-19 07:00:00 <Community Research> |
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News: No faith in science - Part I
By Carolyn Abraham
9 April 2005
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[Mods note: The following news article has been split into a three-part posting due to its length. Please find at http://sympaticomsn.workopolis.com/servlet/Content/qprinter/20050409/COVER09 the complete article.]
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American scientists say the Bush administration is interfering with research, especially on sexuality and the environment. As CAROLYN ABRAHAM reports, religion and ideology are involved -- but so is a public disenchantment with science itself
On the fringes of Interstate 85, where the highway snakes through Atlanta's inner city, researchers from Emory University came to study the off-road behaviour of long-haul truckers.
There, amid the empty lots, nudie bars and by-the-hour motels, they set up their living lab -- and landed in one of the ugly morality debates dogging American science.
The project was inspired by research in Africa, where the mix of truckers and sex workers on the Kinshasa Highway is infamous for spreading AIDS along the continent's spine. Emory's experts wondered if the same would be true in North America.
Preliminary field work showed that long-haul truckers (close to four million in the United States, including half a million Canadians) are at the centre of a desperate network of truck-stop hustlers.
Prostitutes, drug dealers and truck chasers -- gay or bisexual men who idolize truckers as "the last of the cowboys" -- vie to eke out a living off the drivers, who may bring home something worse than cargo.
In 2002, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the government's prime funder of medical research, agreed it was worth learning more. It awarded the Emory scientists a $1.1-million (U.S.) grant.
But a year later an official called to warn them their project was on an ominous list circulating in Washington.
The Traditional Values Coalition, which lobbies on behalf of 43,000 U.S. churches, spotted the study on the NIH website: "Wait until you see how angry the American people get," its president wrote to Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, "when they discover that NIH have been using federal tax dollars to study 'lot lizards' -- prostitutes who service truckers in parking lots."
The group deemed the project and 200 others an immoral or "nonsensical" waste.
With Congress threatening action, the NIH undertook a review of all its behaviour-related studies. Although attempts to strip funding failed, the episode spawned a chill that shows no sign of thaw.
With the re-election of President George W. Bush and the Republican congressional majority, scientists across the United States have found themselves in a surreal era of self-censorship. Conservatives used key-word Internet searches to compile their watch lists, so researchers are hunting for euphemisms for homosexuals and prostitutes (replaced with "high-risk population").
"Many STD/HIV researchers who are seeking federal funding are reconsidering details down to the level of how they title their grants, so as not to draw unwanted --ideologically and certainly not intellectually driven -- scrutiny," said Jeanne Marrazzo, who researches sexually transmitted diseases at Washington State University. "It's scary."
Such measures might sound more like Soviet-era paranoia than modern American science. But there is no mistaking the degree of mistrust many U.S. researchers feel in this political climate. "I think folks are worried this smacks of McCarthyism 50 years later," said David Celentano, an AIDS researcher at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Celentano described grant-review hearings attended by religious-group members and political appointees. He said it was the NIH that has advised researchers to take projects "underground" -- to replace lesbians, for example, with "prospective mothers."
NIH officials would not discuss the policy on the record. But a recent article in the Johns Hopkins alumni magazine included comments from an unnamed official pressed to explain the ambiguous-language directive. "Don't make me speak to you about this in public," she said. "There are spies everywhere!"
Politics and science have clashed before in the United States, and around the world, on issues such as nuclear arms or, most recently, stem cells.
But never before has the U.S. scientific community been embroiled in such a broad, sustained battle with political leaders.
The government ignored the protests of its top geologists in 2003 when it decided to allow the sale of a book at Grand Canyon National Park claiming that Noah's biblical flood created the chasm 4,500 years ago -- an estimate scientists suggest is short by six million years.
Most publicly, even Congress intervened to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had lived in a "persistent vegetative state" for 15 years. Despite medical evidence of severe brain damage and no hope of recovery, religious groups took up the case as a right-to-life issue.
Mr. Bush interrupted his Texas vacation to sign the bill, and his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, sought to have the state take custody of Ms. Schiavo's care. The U.S. Supreme Court six times turned down requests to consider the case before she died on March 31.
Controversy over the treatment of science has erupted around national security, myriad environmental issues and endangered-species programs. Medical research in particular has been caught in the crossfire. Whenever it involves issues of sexuality, such as STD prevention, AIDS policies or reproductive issues, critics charge, morality trumps medical evidence.
"It's part of an anti-scientific revolution," said Columbia University professor Peter Bearman, commenting on the push to keep safe-sex education out of schools. "There's a lot of hostility toward science in America right now."
Over the past year, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a non-profit advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass., has documented dozens of alleged cases where it argues that the Bush administration has sacrificed scientific integrity in the interests of big business, big oil and the religious right. It cites censored data, altered websites and the appointment of under-qualified extremists as science advisers while other candidates are asked if they voted for Mr. Bush.
Last February, the UCS drafted a petition to "restore scientific integrity" to government policymaking and 62 prominent scientists signed on. That number swelled to 4,000 before last fall's U.S. election, and the protest now bears more than 6,300 signatures, including 48 Nobel laureates and former presidential science advisers dating back to the Eisenhower administration.
Government supporters suggest that scientists are traditionally liberal secularists, and simply resentful that the balance of power has tilted out of their favour.
Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, the powerful government body that oversees medical research, argued that scientists who backed Democrat John Kerry for president are the ones who "have politicized" issues. Asked why scientists felt such opposition, he replied: "We don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. . . . There's no shortage of researchers who are ready to roll up their sleeves and do hard work. So that's fine, we don't want 'em."
Founded in 1969, the UCS does have a history of protesting against conservative-leaning government policy, but it hardly stands alone in its criticisms of the Bush administration. Leading scientific journals, professional societies and mainstream media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, have featured editorials, speakers and articles noting the alleged abuses.
"Scientists are not known for signing [petitions] like this," said UCS spokesman Lexi Schultz. But the current situation, she said, "is different, qualitatively and quantitatively, than anything we've seen before."
The Emory team, led by sociologist Yarghos Apostolopoulos and Sevil Sonmez, now has the results of its truck-stop study in hand and believes more than ever in its merits.
They found that truck drivers, often exhausted and lonely, are undoubtedly "bridges" ferrying infections back to their wives and partners at home. Blood tests at three Atlanta truck stops turned up STDs from Hepatitis C to HIV, in some cases in people who had no idea they had been infected.
Dr. Sonmez stressed that not all truckers are involved in risky behaviour. "But even if it were 10 per cent or 5 per cent of the four million truckers . . . you are looking at quite a disaster" in terms of chains of transmission. "Unless you understand what is going on, the dynamics of the infection, you cannot do anything to prevent it."
The Emory group hopes to win a second grant to survey truckers across the country. Given the evidence, Dr. Sonmez remains optimistic that "efforts will not pay off to stop this kind of research."
Online at: http://sympaticomsn.workopolis.com/servlet/Content/qprinter/20050409/COVER09
Source: Toronto Globe and Mail
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