The Citizen-Scientist's Obligation to Stand Up for Standards
(Page 2 of 2)
In particular, the panel said it lacked "a guiding vision,
executable goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring progress,
an assessment of whether existing programs are capable of meeting these
goals, explicit prioritization and a management plan."
In short, it lacks the characteristics on which empirical
science is based.
A year ago, the American Physical Society passed a resolution
calling on the government to delay deployment of a missile defense system
until it was demonstrated to be workable against realistic threats.
Yet the administration scrapped a longstanding international
treaty, committing billions of dollars to the deployment of a missile defense
system that even under the most liberal interpretation of the data has
a success rate of 40 percent.
We would not accept such innumerate policies in the private
sector. What if Detroit put on the assembly line a new breed of S.U.V.'s
that toppled over when executing curves at greater than 30 miles an hour
60 percent of the time, or if the makers of nuclear power reactors demonstrated
that prototypes catastrophically failed 40 percent of the time?
Dr. Shirley Tilghman and Dr. David Baltimore, internationally
known biologists, and the presidents respectively of Princeton and Caltech,
wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that human reproductive cloning
and therapeutic cloning to produce stem cells that might be used for research
were completely different biological investigations.
Further, they said a wholesale ban on cloning designed to
stop efforts to produce the former would have dire consequences for important
biological research on the latter. Yet the White House has supported a
wholesale ban on cloning, driven it seems by inappropriate fears of science.
Equally worrisome is what apparently is the distortion of
the results of medical studies in government Web sites, like the National
Cancer Institute's. It used to state that the best studies showed "no association
between abortion and breast cancer," but was altered to say that the evidence
was inconclusive until a scientific review panel insisted the original
language, which correctly reflects current research, be reinstated.
Or consider the Web page of the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, which used to point to studies showing that education on
condom use did not lead to earlier or increased sexual activity; now, it
omits this discussion.
A democracy, like science, functions best only when all actions
are open to question, and when we require the highest levels of accountability.
If there is a risk that politics is being placed above empirical truth
on issues of vital national importance, inaction by scientists may be unethical.
