A Call for the Separation of Science and State

By Barry B. Sheppard, M.D.  

Last year a group of senior U.S. scientists composed of Nobel laureates, former federal agency directors, and university chairs and presidents went on record denouncing the current administration for obstructing the freedom and distorting the objectivity crucial for science to function to its fullest ability in service to the state.

In a 40-plus-page report this Union of Concerned Scientists eloquently and precisely portrays an administration whose actions have gone far beyond those of any prior administration, Republican or Democratic, to suppress and distort scientific research as well as to tamper with the quality and integrity of the appointment process involving the scientific advisory panels to the government. The report, entitled Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation into the Bush Administration’s Misuse of Science, describes in detail attempts to alter the findings of studies researching air pollutants, heat-trapping emissions, reproductive health, drug-resistant bacteria, endangered species, and forest health.

One example, submitted as evidence supporting the charge of tampering with the integrity of scientific advisory panels, involves the CDC Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention. This panel has advised the CDC since the 1970s on how best to protect children from lead poisoning. The panel had lowered the minimum serum lead level defining lead poisoning from its initial level of 30mcg/dl in 1975 to 25mcg/dl in 1985 and lower still to 10mcg/dl in 1991. The panel was scheduled to consider this issue again in 2002 and many familiar with the panel’s work expected that the level would be reduced yet again.

A few weeks before the scheduled meeting Tommy Thompson did what no HHS secretary had ever done before, which was to reject the nominations for panel membership submitted by the committee and the CDC staff. Instead, Thompson’s office appointed five individuals distinguished by their likelihood to oppose further tightening of the lead poisoning standard. A subsequent review by congressional staff members revealed that at least two of the five had financial ties to the lead industry. One of these was Dr. William Banner, an Oklahoma-based toxicologist and medical director of the Oklahoma Poison Control Center, who had testified as an expert witness for Sherwin-Williams paint company in a lead poisoning case. As an expert, he stated that in his view studies had never adequately associated neurologic impairment in children with any serum lead level below 70mcg/dl. This view is regarded by most experts in the field to be a fringe position—well outside the polarities of opinion held in mainstream scientific discourse.

Juxtapose this individual with Dr. Michael Weitzman, a highly respected lead expert with four years of service on the advisory panel, who was one of those dismissed to make room for Thompson’s handpicked appointees. Weitzman is chief of pediatrics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and executive director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center for Child Health Research. Unlike Banner, Weitzman has conducted research on lead exposure and published widely on the subject in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Weitzman had been slated by CDC staff scientists to chair the advisory panel in 2002. Not surprisingly, the revised panel did not lower the lead poisoning standard that year or in subsequent years. The issue of tampering with the appointment process to scientific advisory panels was aptly summed up by one of the Concerned Scientists, Donald Kennedy, past Stanford president and former FDA Commissioner: “If you start picking people by their ideology instead of their scientific credentials, you are inevitably reducing the quality of the advisory group.”

The call to arms by the Concerned Scientists is not merely the posing and posturing exhibited by members of the two parties that vie for ascendancy in the American political arena. These are fellow scientists with legitimate concerns regarding a trend in the govern-ment’s interaction with scientific advice and advisers. Science cannot be subjugated by politics. The laws of physics and biology remain unperturbed by which political party happens to hold sway at a given time. To pretend otherwise is pure folly. As physicians we must throw our weight firmly behind the positions espoused by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The health of all Americans depends on an unfettered scientific advisory community.