Monday, June 14, 2004
Attendance Required
In case you don't know about it already, I want to draw attention to a conference in D.C. next month that overlaps with many of the concerns of this blog. Entitled "Integrity in Science: Corporate and Political Influence on Science-Based Policymaking," the event is being put on by the Center for Science in the Public Interest on July 12. Speakers include former EPA head Carol Browner and, on the other side of the fence, our dear friend Jim Tozzi. I'm definitely going to be in attendance, and if you're in the DC area and care about these issues then so should you. Everything you need to know to register is right here....
Posted by Chris Mooney at 9:36 AM Eastern | Comments
The Price of Honesty
Colin Powell has done something that no one else in the Bush adminisration seems capable of: He's admitted error in the face of one of Henry Waxman's many dogged inquiries. In this case, the State Department had released a bogus report showing a decline in the number of global terrorism incidents. The Post gives Waxman's staff short shrift for their role in exposing this report's errors, but this story gives credit where credit is due.
The whole incident leaves me wondering: What would happen if some prominent Bushie actually told the truth in response to Waxman's many science-related inquiries? Yes, there would probably be a front page story about the admission of error, and that's bad PR. But I think that in the long run, the administration's credibility would be much, much higher. Indeed, with the latest news, Powell's own reputation is starting to recover from the hit it took after his fiasco of a WMD speech to the United Nations.
Posted by Chris Mooney at 9:20 AM Eastern | Comments
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Harry Potter Deficiencies
This is off the topic of science, though it is on a subject I've written about before. I saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban last night. As have most of the critics, I thought it was far better than the two previous films--darker, more artful, and much more emotionally sophisticated.
However, there was a glaring flaw in the film that no critic so far has noticed (at least as far as I can tell). The director didn't bother to fill in viewers on an absolutely crucial element of the back story. To spare all the non-geeks, I won't go into much detail, except to say that much of the film will make no sense to someone who doesn't know about the historic connections between Harry Potter's parents and some of his teachers at Hogwarts. The more I think about it, the more startled I am that this linchpin of the story was left out.
This, I think, points to a central flaw in the strategy of having each successive Harry Potter movie directed by a different filmmaker. Errors and omissions on the part of one director will have to be corrected by the next one--and if they aren't, the films will make less and less sense to someone who hasn't read the books. As a result, the striking coherence of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films seems unlikely to ever be achieved in the Harry Potter series.
Posted by Chris Mooney at 11:35 AM Eastern | Comments
Saturday, June 12, 2004
Reagan and AIDS
GoozNews has an eloquent discussion of the topic:
The second great tragedy I witnessed during the Reagan years was the AIDS epidemic, a plague that was first identified in 1981 when five young homosexual men in Los Angeles came down with a rare form of skin cancer. By the mid-1980s, HIV/AIDS was killing tens of thousands of Americans per year. The obituary pages of the nation's leading newspapers read like a dirge for the worlds of high fashion, literature and the arts, where many gay men had made their careers.
What was the Reagan administration's first response to this crisis? In 1983, Presidential press spokesman Larry Speakes made a tasteless joke about "gay cruising" when a reporter dared ask about Reagan's response to the epidemic. His government did not begin appropriating money to NIH to begin studying the disease until 1985. It took until 1987 -- one year before leaving office -- before the president made his first public utterance about AIDs.
I don't see how any memorialization of Ronald Reagan can be complete without including these kinds of details.
Posted by Chris Mooney at 2:09 PM Eastern | Comments
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Glassman, Yet Again
Now the San Francisco Chronicle has fallen prey to the non-disclosure routine....
Posted by Chris Mooney at 3:22 PM Eastern | Comments
My Latest Piece
The Center for American Progress has just published a new piece by me about the corruption of op-ed pages. Some of the material has previously appeared on this blog but I haven't pulled it all together before now. I start off with a nice swipe at Ronald Reagan:
These days we're facing what might be called a propaganda overload. It often seems that every advocate has his own facts, and every special interest spontaneously generates arguments that suit its particular agenda. Take the embryonic stem cell issue. Back in 2001 President Bush wanted to both allow some research and please religious conservatives, so he falsely asserted that "more than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines" existed and would be available for federally-funded research. So egregious was this misrepresentation that we now witness a supreme irony: Nancy Reagan, wife of the late president who blocked federal funding for fetal tissue transplantation research, is actually clamoring to have science set free.
After this current events intro, the article then (somewhat awkwardly) transitions into talking about propaganda on op-ed pages. Again, you can read it here.
Posted by Chris Mooney at 12:01 PM Eastern | Comments
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
The Case Against Left Wing Yahoos
God I hate what the anti-globalization movement has become. I'm here in San Francisco, where a bunch of yahoos have been shutting down traffic and getting arrested to protest the BIO 2004 conference--the annual get-together of the biotech industry. The activists hate GM foods, which they incorrectly characterize as dangerous to human health. It's a protest based on fiction and tinged with irresponsible Luddism.
Scientists here at the BIO conference just scratch their heads at this stuff. Yesterday, for example, I sat through a panel of Nobel Laureates in which J. Michael Bishop, chancellor of the University of California San Francisco, observed (according to my notes) that the European resistance to GM foods is "rooted in misunderstanding."
So is the latest protest. What's most stunning is that GM foods are hardly the only product that the biotech industry produces. I'm here mainly for the panels on stem cell research, for instance, which the BIO crowd is clearly for. Are the anti-globalization people against it? Are they teaming up with the religious right on this issue?
Many other biotechs, meanwhile, are essentially mini-pharmaceutical companies trying to use insights into human genetics to cure disease. Once again: This is something to protest against and shut down traffic over?
Posted by Chris Mooney at 8:46 PM Eastern | Comments
Monday, June 07, 2004
Reagan's Scientific Legacy
Everyone is heaping praise on Ronald Reagan; much of it focuses on his basic good-naturedness and optimism. I have no quibble with this type of celebrationism; it's indisputable that Reagan was a winning guy and a larger-than-life president.
But unfortunately, Reagan's legacy is more complicated than that, as the New York Times recognizes this morning. Let me add some details of my own that the Times misses.
Reagan's scientific legacy isn't a particularly good one. It includes, for example, his 1980 campaign endorsement of creationism, as well as his refusal to speak out about the AIDS epidemic as the death toll continued to mount. In these respects Reagan was the first Republican president to cater to the newly powerful religious right on matters of science, a very troubling legacy in my opinion. Subsequent Republican leaders--Gingrich and Bush, principally--may have gone farther in this direction than Reagan ever did, but Reagan started the trend. Indeed, that he's now being spoken of as a possible posthumous champion of stem cell research is highly ironic: Reagan put in place a ban on fetal tissue transplantation research not unlike W.'s almost-ban on stem cell research.
Now, I don't mean to detract from the entirely appropriate celebration of Reagan's legacy that has now begun. But I think it's important to point out some of the more troubling aspects of his legacy, too, so that we get a complete picture.
Posted by Chris Mooney at 8:01 AM Eastern | Comments
Thursday, June 03, 2004
On the Road
I won't be posting again this week; I'm currently readying myself for a week long trip that starts early tomorrow and which includes my first college reunion as well as some reporting at this conference in San Franscisco. Next week I hope to get online from my hotel room and blog a tad, but posting will be significantly more spotty than usual until I return to D.C.....
Posted by Chris Mooney at 4:17 PM Eastern | Comments
How the Other Side Thinks
I've been meaning to blog about this screed published a while back in FrontPage magazine, which is basically a huge slam on the Union of Concerned Scientists. The author is Lowell Ponte. His lengthy piece contains plenty of passages like this one:
What this attack on President Bush reveals is that he is the genuine scientist who wants extreme claims to be carefully qualified and circumscribed. And it reveals that those attacking Bush are irresponsible, unscientific, and motivated by politics instead of a sincere search for facts.
Bush has been called many things, but I think I can safely say that "genuine scientist" is a first.
What's most revealing, though, is why Ponte seems to hate the scientific establishment so much. It's because scientists are often dependent for their research on government handouts, rather than battling it out in the "free market":
Science, you need to understand, is in America today a mostly-socialist institution – and one of the most "politicized" realms in our society. Most science is now done with government grants or at government institutions such as state universities.
The overriding agenda of nearly all science is to make government bigger and its spending on science more lavish. Any President who aims to cut taxes and reduce the size of government is, therefore, by definition the enemy of our scientific establishment.
To understand science and scientists in America today, you need to think of them as existing in the now-extinct Soviet Union.
In this analysis, scientists are basically the intellectual equivalent of welfare queens. A lack of competition among them has created a "prison of Leftist conformity." If Ponte's views are representative--something I'm not at all sure about--it seems that much of the right's distrust of American science may ultimately translate into a fundamental distrust of those dependent on big government.
Of course, the benefits of government sponsored research seem completely lost on Ponte. So do the downsides of "private sector" science, including a lack of openness, disinterestedness, and so on. Still, Ponte's article provides a good window into the thinking of a hard core free marketeer when it comes to the American science community.
Posted by Chris Mooney at 2:34 PM Eastern | Comments
More on the Plan B Decision
Slate's Liza Mundy has a great piece explaining just how full of crap the FDA's stated objection to giving this drug OTC status is. You will recall that the FDA's acting director of drug evaluation and research, Steven Galson, argued that there wasn't enough data to show how the drug might affect those between the ages of 11 and 14. Well, not only do girls at this age rarely have sex; it turns out that collecting data on them is pretty much out of the question:
Yet flimsy as it is, the young teen excuse is the one that Barr's company is going to have to deal with as it scrounges for the new information required to get the FDA to reconsider its "nonapprovable letter." One possibility Galson held out was for Barr to do a study assessing the effect of over-the-counter Plan B on the youngest girls. The trouble is that the federal government itself forbids researchers from talking about sex with this age group. CDC researchers, for example, must gather their data on young teens by asking older teens, retrospectively, about their first sexual encounter. Barr's researchers, when they first fanned out into those malls, were forbidden from interviewing unaccompanied teenagers, even older ones, which meant excluding what is arguably the most relevant portion of that age group. Even in family-planning clinics, Barr could not interview any lone teen under 14. In inviting further teen studies, Galson was asking the near-impossible.
That's a great trick for keeping this drug from going over the counter: Demand research that isn't necessary and can't even be done. Clearly, the days when we could trust the FDA to make reasonable and science-based decisions, on the basis of drug safety and effectiveness, are over. That--and a lot of unwanted pregnancies--is the real tragedy here.
Posted by Chris Mooney at 4:26 AM Eastern | Comments
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
God Bless NPR
You gotta love it. The Discovery Institute is going totally bonkers because NPR has courageously decided to do something that few other media outlets would dare: Refuse to prop up pseudoscience.
According to Discovery--see here and here--NPR is privileging the pro-evolution position in its reporting and programming. The biggest complaint is that an ID supporter was not allowed debate an evolution supporter recently on "Science Friday." Discovery calls this "censorship," and it's true that NPR probably shouldn't have invited the ID dude on the air and then canceled him at the last minute. Once you've invited someone to debate, you shouldn't then revoke the invitation.
NPR is right on the broader point, though. ID supporters don't deserve equal time with evolution supporters, because they haven't successfully shown that their theory is a scientific rival to evolution. By creating the appearance of a one-on-one debate between ID and evolution, NPR would essentially be giving the impression that the two views have equal scientific stature. But they clearly do not.
So despite the gnashing of teeth over at the Discovery Institute, NPR has done the right thing. But now comes the hard part. NPR needs to stand its ground and refuse to give in, despite loudly trumpeted accusations of censorship. The station needs to realize that these meritless charges are totally predictable: Discovery's goal is to be part of the debate, to claim a seat at the scientific table. When the ID viewpoint is excluded, Discovery's gang can be expected to cry bloody murder. And pretty soon, its media surrogates will take up the accusation (if they haven't already).
I say let them. Science isn't a democracy, period. NPR needs to keep that firmly in mind as it comes under attack.
UPDATE: PZ Myers concurs with and adds to this post, including making a suggestion for how all of you blog-reading activists can support NPR:
The Discovery Institute is frantically playing the martyr card now, and is dispatching press releases crying about their victimhood. They are going to get picked up by news sources with less integrity than NPR. In particular, the right wing is going to flare up in righteous fury and scream about discrimination and unfairness, and they are going to shrilly rant about it. As Mooney says, science isn't a democracy. Science isn't fair. Stupid ideas get shut out, unless their backers can actually pony up some evidence, which the DI cannot do.
It would be nice if everyone would do me a small favor. NPR is going to get nattered at by creationist dingleberries over this. How about sending a polite, brief, supportive e-mail to the NPR ombudsman and telling him they did the right thing? His name is Jeffrey Dvorkin, and you can reach him at ombudsman AT npr.org, or by a form on his web page. He also has a regular column—I wouldn't be surprised to see this DI propaganda campaign as a subject for discussion there in the near future.
UPDATE TWO: Brian Leiter also blogs this post.....
Posted by Chris Mooney at 4:36 PM Eastern | Comments
"Sound Science" Even I Can Appreciate
Check out this story on CNN.com. Through analyzing something called the "cosmic microwave background," astronomers have been able to figure out what the Big Bang sounded like--namely, "a growing hiss that resembles a roaring jet plane flying low overhead." In fact, it turns out that the creation of the universe can even be described in terms of music theory. The Big Bang struck a chord that's "somewhere between a major and a minor third," as the CNN story puts it.
All this is fascinating stuff, but what I enjoyed most about this news story (originally from Space.com) was this quote near the end:
"Just as the government likes...we're doing sound science," said Steve Maran, press officer for the American Astronomical Society.
What a clever guy this Maran must be. Not only is this a great talking point; in my view, the research described here is probably the only type of "sound science" that's actually legitimate or worth doing in the first place.
Posted by Chris Mooney at 12:31 PM Eastern | Comments
Words of Wisdom
In response to a post by Sean Carroll on Big Bang deniers, PZ Meyers has this to say:
It's not to say that crackpots are never found to be right, but it's rare, and they don't get to win out in the end without putting in a heck of a lot of real scientific work. Our problem right now is that some of these fruitcakes are getting organized and trying to ram their nuttery down the throats of the scientific and educational establishment without doing any of the legitimate work. Petitions are never the way to carry out science.
When it comes to science debates between fringe and mainstream, truer words were never spoken.
Posted by Chris Mooney at 8:18 AM Eastern | Comments
Another Lawyer
On a whim, I decided to find out who James M. Taylor, who wrote the screed about climate science in the Boston Globe, actually is. Guess what: He's not a climate scientist. Not even close.
Posted by Chris Mooney at 7:09 AM Eastern | Comments
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