IDEOLOGY TRUMPS SCIENCE ON MANY GOVERNMENT PANELS

by Sharon Begley

Blame the media. When reporters write about controversial subjects, we have this bad habit of portraying science the way we do politics, except with more polysyllabic jargon.

Just as we give space to both sides when we cover, say, capital punishment or affirmative action-moral and social issues with no empirically based, objectively right answer-so we apply the equal-time rule to questions like whether climate is changing or lead is neurotoxic.

That conveys a grossly wrong impression. Although it can sometimes seem otherwise, as when the public gets whiplash from ever-changing dietary advice, in science there actually are right answers (eventually), and until then a preponderance of evidence and agreement with both an existing body of knowledge and a theoretical edifice.

All this brings us to how the Department of Health and Human Services is filling its 258 scientific-advisory panels.

When we last checked in on Secretary Tommy Thompson, his office had made some remarkable choices. For a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel on safety standards for lead in children’s blood, he tapped a doctor with no relevant research experience (the doctor treats lead-poisoned kids) and who in June stated in a legal deposition for industry that a lead level of 70 micrograms per deciliter is harmless (the federal standard is 10).

That and other industry-linked appointments received wide media coverage when House Democrats wrote to Mr. Thompson in October that “scientific decision-making is being subverted by ideology.” But the lead panel was only the opening gambit. HHS is now going beyond packing panels that weigh existing data to stack committees that determine what research actually will be conducted in the future.

Before this, both Republican and Democratic administrations had respected the decades-old tradition by which scientific panels were assembled. To ensure that only the best researchers served , knowledgeable scientists at HHS agencies such as the National Institutes of Health or CDC forwarded to the secretary the names of the leading lights. (Yes, Virginia, science is an elitist institution, not a democracy.)
HHS seems to have other ideas. “You need a diversity of opinions to get goof advice and counsel,” says William Pierce, HHS spokesman.

Unfortunately, that has brought the appointment of a scientist who hasn’t been in the forefront of lead research for years and the loss of researchers who have done seminal work on lead.

Ideology is also trumping science at CDC’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. One of its study sections weighs the scientific merits of competing grant proposals on workplace injuries and decides which get funded. Since its inception, members have been appointed by NIH scientists based on scientific expertise. Not anymore. Having rejected those nominees, scientists say, HHS staffers asked them which presidential candidate they voted for in 2000 and what they think of stem-cell research and abortion-issues with no relevance to the section’s work.

Give HHS credit. Apparently annoyed at what pesky scientists discovered about workplace injuries and other contentious issues, “They seem to have decided that they have to prevent the ‘wrong’ research from getting done in the first place,” one academic says.

Think how much easier life would be, at least for industry and its friends, if no one had ever studied the effects of lead on the brain. Or if a panel of the National Academy of Sciences hadn’t concluded in 2001 that levels of arsenic the administration wanted to permit in drinking water would give thousands of us cancer. The threat, says epidemiologist Dana Loomis of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who chairs the NIOSH study section, is that ideology rather than scientific merit will shape the research agenda. “A free society cannot be afraid of knowledge,” he says.

It goes without saying that every administration is entitled to appoint people who share its values and political views. But those appointees belong in policy jobs, not on panels charged with assessing science. The latter examine existing research and say that this level of lead in 100,000 kids will produce this degree of cognitive impairment, or this level of arsenic in drinking water will produce this many cancers. Policy makers decided if those consequences are acceptable or not, and if preventing them costs too much. That is a value judgment, on which reasonable people can differ. But let’s not pretend the underlying science is other than it is.

For more than a century the quasigovernmental NAS has managed to balance its study panels without resorting to unqualified people tapped for their ideology. A General Motors scientist served on a committee studying the greenhouse effect; a leading proponent of the view that hormone-disrupting chemicals post no real risk to people serve on one studying those compounds. Yet, both brought something to the process: expertise and relevant research experience.

Simply having an opinion isn’t a qualification. If ideology continues to triumph in the appointment of federal science panels, the inevitable result will be a terminal loss of public trust in the integrity of science.

#

Sharon Begley is a science columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

“Now, science panelists are picked for ideology rather than expertise,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 6, 2002