The Republican War on Science. Chris Mooney. Basic Books, New York, 2005. 342 pp. $24.95 (ISBN 0465046754 cloth).
Chris Mooney is an engaging writer and meticulous journalist. The extraordinary claims he makes in The Republican War on Science are substantiated by 72 small-type pages of interview dates, references, citations, and other documentation. Daniel Smith, in the New York Times Magazine of 4 September 2005, asked, “Is the Bush administration anti-science? Or is it scientists critical of the president who have forgotten that science and politics don't mix?” Mooney's is an affirmative, forceful, and detailed answer to the first question. It is not only the George W. Bush administration that is antiscience but also other Republican presidents, notably Ronald Reagan, as well as the Republican Congress, going back to Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America, which brought a Republican majority to the House of Representatives and, later, to the US Senate as well.
Mooney's indictment is shared by many scientists. According to Donald Kennedy, editor of Science and former president of Stanford University (quoted in the Times article cited above), there is a general perception that “scientific conclusions, reached either within agencies or by people outside the government, are being changed for political reasons by people who have not done the scientific work.”
When Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, a conservative movement of right-wing anti-intellectualism pervaded his campaign against the New Deal (embodied, in the perception of that movement, by Lyndon B. Johnson), blended with deep distrust of the elite media, the nation's leading universities, and the “Eastern establishment.” Goldwater went down to defeat, but the ideological merger of pro-business conservatives, cultural traditionalists, and the Christian right that he brought together would ultimately achieve political victory. During the 1970s, a slew of new conservative activist organizations, such as the Heritage Foundation (in 1973) and the Conservative Caucus (in 1974), joined preexisting conservative action groups and think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute. The members of this alliance had mixed views, at best, of the Nixon administration, since the Nixon years brought Roe v. Wade, the ban on DDT, the Supreme Court's banning of school prayer, the end of funding for the supersonic transport program, and the appointment of the environmentalist Russell Train as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Matters changed with the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan, who during his two terms as California governor (1967–1975) had gained the trust and support of the conservative movement, and who contributed much to its expansion and political strength. At least in part out of deference to religious conservatives, such as domestic policy adviser Gary Bauer, President Reagan failed to acknowledge and speak about the AIDS epidemic until 1987, and pronounced that the theory of evolution was flawed and therefore schools should teach the biblical story of creation as well. “The pro-industry mood at the start of the Reagan administration was intoxicating,” writes Mooney (p. 39). James Watt and Anne Gorsuch, two staunch anti-environmentalists, were appointed as heads, respectively, of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Reagan administration supported industry's complaints against environmental regulation (appointing a task force on “regulatory reform”), exploited scientific uncertainty to challenge the developing consensus that human industrial emissions cause acid rain, and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, the “Star Wars” program that Reagan proclaimed as his “dream.” Early in the Reagan years, the Chicago Tribune published a “hit list,” uncovered by Congress, of scientists who were described with epithets such as “a Nader on taxes” and “bleeding-heart liberal.” (I was one of the 15 scientists on the hit list. My sin: “anti-business; get rid of him.”)
In 1994 the Republican Party gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades, led by Newt Gingrich. There are two Gingriches: the one who “presided over an era of stunning congressional science abuse” (p. 49), and the Gingrich who holds a PhD in history, has taught environmental studies, has bolstered nanotechnology, and in May 2002 (after leaving Congress) recommended in testimony before the Senate that funding for the National Science Foundation be tripled.
The Gingrich Republicans dismantled Congress's Office of Technology Assessment and inaugurated the freewheeling politicization of scientific expertise in Congress, with “experts” drawn from industry's lobbyists and from ideologically committed think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, who had derided concerns over global warming as “liberal claptrap,” presided over a series of major hearings entitled “Scientific Integrity and Public Trust,” covering three environmental issues: ozone depletion, climate changes, and dioxin risks. Adversarial proceedings pitted scientific outliers against mainstream scientists, so that members of Congress, rather than scientists, would judge at the end who was right. Robert Walker, chair of the House Science Committee, justified the proceedings:“Hearings are about trying to find out what the various points of view are” (p. 56). No one would argue against free speech and expressing diversity of opinions, but Walker failed to acknowledge that science is not a democracy, or a court's proceedings, where both sides should be equally represented. The conservative media came in support: Rush Limbaugh proclaimed that the scientific findings about the role of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) in ozone depletion are “balderdash” and “poppy-cock.” A systematic effort to undermine the scientific consensus goes now under the banner of “sound science,“shorthand for the notion that “anti-pollution laws have gone to extremes, spending huge amounts of money to protect people from minuscule risks” (p. 69). President George W. Bush has invoked “sound science” on issues ranging from climate change to arsenic in drinking water.
On 9 August 2001, George W. Bush, in his first televised address to the nation, made the claim that “more than sixty genetically diverse” embryonic stem cells existed at the time,“one of the most flagrant purely scientific deceptions ever perpetuated by a US president on the unsuspecting public” (p. 2), and limited federal funding to research with stem cell lines already in existence at that time, “a case study of how bad scientific information fuels bad policy” (p. 185). Three years later, on 8 August 2004, Tommy Thompson, Bush's secretary of health and human services, made the shocking assertion that “before anyone can successfully argue that the existing federal stem-cell policy needs to be broadened, we must first exhaust the potential of the stem-cell lines made available within the policy” (quoted on p. 188).
Members of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have claimed that abortion causes mental illness and other negative health outcomes in women, notably breast cancer, even though a massive study of 1.5 million Danish women, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997, discounted the abortion–breast cancer link. In 2002, following a letter from 28 prolife members of Congress, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) removed an online fact sheet that discounted any association between abortion and breast cancer. Thereafter, the NCI in 2003 assembled a workshop of more than 100 experts who, with the exception of one antiabortion advocate, reaffirmed that abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk.
In its first three years, the Bush administration executed an unprecedented attack on scientific results, which included the “editing” or suppression of reports from panels of the National Academy of Sciences and other advisory bodies concerning global climate change, missile defense, and other issues. A reaction from the scientific community was conveyed to the media in a press conference held by the Union of Concerned Scientists on 18 February 2004, where it was announced that 60 leading scientists, including 20 Nobel Laureates, had signed a statement denouncing the Bush administration “for misrepresenting and suppressing scientific information and tampering with the process by which scientific advice makes its way to government officials” (p. 224). Shortly thereafter, the document was signed by 48 Nobel Laureates, 62 National Medal of Science recipients, 135 members of the National Academy of Sciences, and thousands of others. (Full disclosure: I was an early signatory of the document.)
The epilogue of Mooney's book is a call to political action and journalistic good sense: “Science-abusing corporations must be fought in the courts, science-abusing religious conservatives…must be fought in the schools, the educational system, and the public arenas” (p. 254). Reporters “need to understand better how science abusers exploit the journalistic norm of ‘balance’ [by] demanding equal treatment for fringe and widely discredited views…, and should treat fringe scientific claims with considerable skepticism” (p. 253).
