Bad science causes bad U.S. public health policy

None of us would let President George W. Bush near a chemistry lab; his use of science is so bad he would likely blow us all to kingdom come just trying to heat water in a test tube.

It is not his fault, however, because the president’s principal lab partners in the making of science-related federal government policy are American business interests such as the petroleum industry, and the Christian right, two cornerstones of the president’s political support. If you wanted good science as the cornerstone of federal policy you are in the wrong lab.

The last five years have produced so many examples of the Bush administration allowing corporate and religious interference in the science issues of public policy that one has to wonder if the president once looked through a powerful microscope at human DNA and decided it was really a dollar bill sign wrapped around the Ten Commandments. While politics and money have always polluted science, the Bush administration has made the business and religious perversion of science in federal policy-making so systematic that the subjugation of science in this country by these interests appears to be the administration’s policy.

Consider the new federal food pyramid, the foundation of the U.S. government’s approach to the war on obesity. Despite that fact that we know refined carbohydrates – sugar – are the biggest source of the excess calories making America the most overweight country in the world, the Bush administration allowed the food industry to kill any direct suggestion in the new food pyramid that we all cut back on refined sugar.

Consider emergency contraception (EC). In 2003 an expert scientific panel of the Food and Drug Administration unanimously agreed that EC was safe, and 23 of the panel’s 27 members urged the FDA to allow sales without a prescription because EC could potentially prevent hundreds of thousands of unwanted pregnancies and abortions.

Despite all of that the Bush administration has repeatedly blocked EC sales by having its FDA administrators contravene all of the science and say EC is not safe. The real issue is not safety, however, the administration opposes EC because EC is opposed by the Bush supporters in its anti-abortion rights constituency.

There is nothing inherently wrong in the administration opposing EC because one of its core constituencies opposes EC. What is wrong is the cloaking of a political and ethical issue in the garb of safety by the administration, because it tears yet another hole in the FDA’s tattered reputation for scientific objectivity in the public interest.

The administration’s rejection of its own panel’s assurance of EC’s safety has led to the recent resignation of its top scientist on women’s health issues. It has also led to widespread condemnation of the FDA for failing to be truly independent of interests beyond those of the public it is supposed to serve. An editorial in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, one of the country’s two top medical journals, called it “A Sad Day at the FDA.”

Consider the president’s ban on federal funds for research on new embryonic stem cell lines. It turns out that one of the key underpinnings for the president’s approach (which I had supported) – a ban on the use of new lines because there were enough existing cell lines to support research – was based on bad science. The president claimed there were more than 60 stem cell lines currently in existence to support future research; there are actually fewer than 20 such lines, a number completely inadequate to support future research.

The lack of an adequate cell line foundation to support the president’s approach has led other Republicans such as Senate Majority Leader Dr. William Frist and Nancy Reagan to oppose the president’s ban as policy based on faulty science. Sadly, they are right.

The list could go on for pages. Here are but a few others:

. undermining of scientific evidence suggesting fossil fuel consumption is contributing to global warming, in order to protect oil and coal industry interests;

. disparagement of the effectiveness of condoms to reduce the risk of HIV-AIDS, in order to promote the religious goal of abstinence before marriage;

. Bush administration support of the pseudo-science of intelligent design as an alternative to more than a century of hard science supporting evolution as the biological basis of human life;

. the stuffing of the government’s science advisory committees in many areas with ideological supporters of the White House’s political, social and business agendas, according to a study by The Washington Post;

. the recent altering – by an administration official who used to be a lobbyist for the petroleum industry – of the administration’s own scientific report on global warming to make its conclusions about the link between fossil fuel burning and global warming less definitive. The official resigned when this became public.

The list is so long, and the effort to suborn science so pervasive, that in 2004 scientists from around the world took the unprecedented step of denouncing the Bush administration’s systematic efforts to replace science in the public interest with science in the interests of the Republican Party’s key constituencies of social conservatives and big business. Thousands of scientists, including more than 60 National Medal of Science winners, many Republicans, 48 Nobel Prize winners and 135 members of the National Academy of Sciences, ultimately signed the Union of Concerned Scientists condemnation of the Bush administration’s policies. No previous administration in the history of the United States has ever earned such a condemnation.

It is one thing, and perhaps an acceptable thing, for a president’s administration to reject scientific evidence in pursuit of its policies. That is their prerogative, even if one feels they are wrong. It is not unlike a patient rejecting my advice to exercise in order to lose weight and get his diabetes under control.

What has set the Bush administration apart, however, has not been its systematic rejection of scientific evidence in the development of public policy. What sets it apart has been the use of the executive arm of the federal government to systematically undermine real science with junk science, science created by industry to support business goals, and by religious groups to pursue Christian religious goals in education and public policy. That is not rejection of science; that is killing real science with fake science.

It is a familiar approach, one taken by the tobacco industry in the last 40 years as it was overwhelmed with mounting evidence that smoking cigarettes kills. The tobacco industry created its own science in its own interest, science that creatively suggested smoking was not that bad, that secondhand smoke was not harmful, and that nicotine was not addictive.

The problem with the Bush administration’s approach is not just that its “science” is so bad it would have blown up the college lab. The problem is not just that perversion of science is perversion of the truth on which we base our beliefs and public policy, and our advancement as a society. It is not simply that this is a perversion of our trust in public institutions such as government and academia. In fact, perverted science may, in the short term, accomplish political and social objectives that many people legitimately support.

In the end, however, perverted science causes perverted public health policy, and perverted public health policy ultimately will cause real harm to real people. That would mean you. It means the further spreading of AIDS because some people think condoms promote sex before marriage and sex before marriage is a sin before God. It means further warming of the world’s oceans, threatening cities such as New Orleans and Miami, and entire countries, such as Bangladesh. It means that on the food pyramid our government cannot be trusted to put our health and nutritional interests above the wealth and business interests of the food industry.

It means the petroleum industry may control what we think we know about whether the burning of fossil fuels contributes to global warming, and Christian fundamentalists may control what we learn about the origins of the human race, or whether women have access to emergency contraception. It means the wholesale purchase of the sources of scientific information upon which we base our decisions as voters and as consumers by those whose best interests are probably not the public’s collective interest. It means the future Darwins will be working for the religious right and the Louis Pasteurs will be working for ExxonMobil.

When that happens, no matter what the Bush administration’s supporters win in the short term, we and our children have all lost something terribly important in the long term. We will have lost the ability to trust that science works ceaselessly to pursue the truth, as it always has, in a slow, meandering and sometimes misguided but methodical fashion. If we let that happen we will have allowed the Bush administration to kill the golden goose of good science.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.