BONNIE ERBE Scientific data: What is it, really?

Americans have great respect for the study of political science, but not when the meaning of the phrase is distorted to amend or cheapen true science for political gain. Unfortunately, the latter is the pattern we're beginning to discern from the Bush administration's bizarre spin on government science.
Let's look first at a recent move by the President's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to distort the venerated "peer review" process for political reasons. Peer review (i.e., rigorous and science-based review of new findings and reports by sizable committees of knowledgeable scientists in the same field of study) is the platinum standard for academic journals and government agencies. It's the best way to test the credibility of new scientific research relied upon by scientists the world over.
But the Bush OMB wants to wrest control of this process from dedicated career scientists and turn it over instead to politically driven (and in many cases industry-funded or religiously driven) "junk scientists" who would distort the peer review process for all sorts of extraneous political agendas.
Another Republican president (Nixon) oversaw creation of the OMB and its peer review process. There was an effort to assure the accuracy of scientific findings by government agencies ranging from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This Republican administration wants to dismantle the process.
Conflict-of-interest rules
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Bush administration is working to replace career scientists with "numbers crunchers, who have no scientific expertise, have offered scant rationale for wresting oversight from career scientists. Perhaps worst of all, they have written bizarre new conflict-of-interest rules for peer review that would disqualify some of the nation's best minds (because they got government research grants), while allowing industry-funded scientists to pack peer review panels. The pretext is scientific rigor, but the subtext is ideology."
Abortion politics is the first arena you might imagine this administration would infect with junk science. And that certainly has been the case (i.e., hyping the nonexistent link between abortion and breast cancer and naming a religious zealot to head an FDA advisory panel on women's health). But this war on fact-finding goes much further.
Americans suffering from Parkinson's disease, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, spinal cord injury and diabetes are denied desperately needed cures by the administration's ban three years ago of federal funding for research on new stem cell lines. At the time Bush said, "more than 60 genetically diverse" lines were available for potential research, trying to make the case the ban wouldn't hurt ailing Americans. But the president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine responded, "The president seems to have information far different from that of the bulk of the medical community."
Finally, last May his own NIH director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, admitted to Congress some 11 lines were available for research.
Word games
Would that these word games affected only the health sciences. The president's record shows he gleefully employs junk science in a variety of contexts: to reverse a 2000 campaign pledge to regulate industrial emissions of carbon dioxide; to help older industrial plants and refineries expand without paying for enhanced pollution controls; and to limit environmental reviews and public appeals while speeding up forest-thinning projects on public woodlands.
In fairness, the president has supported some minor programs to improve the environment (including $3 billion to fix up national parks and intensified clean-up of hazardous waste sites) but they pale in comparison to the damage his administration has done and proposes to do in the future behind the guise of "scientific data."
The closer we get to November, the more we will see the president moderate his immoderate positions on health, science and the environment. Strident attacks on verifiable science (to placate Wall Street and the religious right) will fade, temporarily at least. But after he wins re-election (as now seems inevitable) the voters must hold him to whatever rational, science-based campaign pledges he makes between now and then, and to reverse the damage created by his "political science" thus far.
XErbe, TV host, writes this column for Scripps Howard.