Thoughts on the politicization of science through commercialization

Social Research, Winter, 2006 by M. Norton Wise

POLITICIZATION

THE CURRENT POLITICIZATION OF SCIENCE--BY WHICH I MEAN THE attempt politically to control the content of knowledge and not just the direction of research--is arguably unprecedented in history, aside from a few famous and anomalous examples like the Galileo and Lysenko affairs. (1) Although complaints have been developing for years, the first major public protest against the abuse of science by the current administration in the United States was the statement published by the Union of Concerned Scientists in February 2004, "Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation into the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science." It charged the administration with "a well-established pattern of suppression and distortion of scientific findings by high-ranking Bush administration political appointees across numerous federal agencies" and with "a wide-ranging effort to manipulate the government's scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration's political agenda." (2) Its signatories grew to include thousands of scientists and many former government officials, with 48 Nobel laureates, 62 National Medal of Science recipients, and 135 members of the National Academy of Sciences (Mooney, 2005: 225). This consensus is as unprecedented as the scope of the abuses it protests.

Chris Mooney, in The Republican War on Science, provides a well documented account of the origins of the recent political manipulation of science, which goes back to the 1970s but flourished after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 known as the "Gingrich Revolution," with its assault on federal regulation. The signal event was the dismantling of the Office of Technology Assessment, which had functioned for 24 years as Congress's source of independent advice on issues of science and technology. The tactics of the Gingrich assault were borrowed from the long experience of the tobacco industry in defusing claims of the harmful effects of smoking--simply to fund their own research, which ended up casting doubt on the certainty of the claims even when it did not contradict them. The effectiveness of the technique is shown by a 1998 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on review articles of research done on secondhand smoke, which showed that a "not harmful" conclusion was 88.4 times higher if authors had industry affiliation (Mooney, 2005: 10).

Increasingly important in the new version of this alternative research technique have been think tanks with sponsorship from industries seeking to block regulation: the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Pacific Legal Foundation, George C. Marshall Institute, Annapolis Center for Science-Based Policy, and others. But perhaps most intriguing in Mooney's analysis is his account of the adoption by opponents of regulation of a systematic rhetorical strategy. Research results that opposed or minimized the need for regulation, typically industrially funded, would be labeled "sound science" while pro-regulation research, typically carried on at universities and government laboratories, would be labeled "junk science" in the interest of manufacturing scientific doubt (Mooney, 2005: 65-76). The genius in this move is that the term "sound science" has been picked up in reporting by the mainstream media, often without recognizing its loaded meaning or that it is inscribed in such conservative organizations as the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. A countermove on the part of the Union of Concerned Scientists to recapture rhetorical control has apparently not been so effective. Its Sound Science Initiative is an "email-based vehicle for scientists to respond to and influence fast-breaking media and policy developments on environmental issues." (3)

Examples of the overt attempts to control the content of science during the current administration could be taken from virtually any area of political significance: global warming, endangered species, ozone depletion, chemical pollution, or oil drilling, without even entering the fraught areas of abortion, stem cells, evolution, brain death, or the morning after pill. One example may serve to indicate how far this movement has progressed. In March 2006 the Los Angeles Times published a penetrating account by Ralph Vartabedian of the controversy over the solvent TCE (trichloroethylene) under the headline "How Environmentalists Lost the Battle over TCE." After a four-year study, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that TCE was 40 times more likely to cause cancer than previously thought and issued a preliminary report in 2001 aiming to begin setting rigorous new standards to limit exposure. Although now virtually eliminated, TCE had formerly been widely used at military installations throughout the country for degreasing metal parts and then dumped into pits where it entered the groundwater. It is reportedly the most widespread water contaminant in the nation, involving 1,400 Department of Defense sites, with 67 EPA Superfund sites in California alone. Huge plumes spread for miles, sometimes under heavily populated areas, and are identified with elevated risks for cancer and birth defects (Vartabedian, 2006a; 2006b).