The Scientist has an excellent article attempting to fairly evaluate the Bush record on science:
What may be adding to the perception that the Bush administration is harder on science than ever before is that in recent years, biology has borne the brunt of political interference in science, which is a decidedly unfamiliar experience for many life scientists. "So far, most of [biologists'] experience with Congress has been showing up and asking for money and going home," says Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists. Now, politicians spend less time talking about atomic energy and space exploration, and more time debating issues related to climate science, biodiversity, reproduction, and molecular biology. So for biologists, it's natural to wholeheartedly believe that politics is interfering more in research, because it's something they largely have not encountered for years, says Kevles. Especially for young scientists, who have only the NIH boom of the 1990s as a comparison, what's going on "is kind of a shock."
Moreover, the media can magnify the current conflict between science and politics, because journalists are more likely to latch onto stories involving emergency contraception or stem cells than supersonic jets, given that life science issues affect, by definition, people's lives. "There's something about life science and its relation to health that does tend to bring it home to citizens more than Star Wars and physics would," notes Mark S. Frankel, director of the Scientific Freedom, Responsibility, and Law Program at AAAS.Despite renewed political interest in biomedical research, the field is doing well, by many measures. In recent years, the only scientific discipline to enjoy lush sums of money has been the life sciences, which has outpaced growth in all other areas. The pace of growth has now flattened (even decreased when factoring in inflation), but this pattern is "not entirely unexpected," given that the budget couldn't continue indefinitely at its previous pace, regardless of who was in office, says Kei Koizumi, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the AAAS.
Flat funding has also been the state of things for years in every other scientific discipline, Koizumi notes. "The biomedical research community is beginning to experience some of the funding pressures other communities have gotten used to," he says. In other words, imposing flat funding on science is a decision that the government often makes, and may not necessarily reflect an "antiscience" attitude, says Greenberg. It's natural for the government to ask the biomedical community to take time to "digest" the rapid increase, and allow the government to focus on science that was "neglected" during the NIH boom, he adds.
Biomedical research is hardly neglected. According to a 2005 analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, funding for biomedical research doubled between 1994 and 2003, even adjusting for inflation. The private sector has kept its R&D funding flowing in recent years, reaching its highest estimated level of close to $40 billion in 2005, only among companies that are members of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). The current administration has encouraged this growth by continuing an R&D tax credit that lets companies write off a portion of their R&D expenses. (The credit expired last December, however, and was also in place for much of recent administrations.) "The President has a very strong record of support for private sector science," according to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), led by Marburger.
Read the whole thing. I think this is fair analysis. Partly, the Bush administration is at fault -- if not in the substance of the things they are doing, then in the degree that they are doing them. But partly, we are also applying expectations that are wildly ahistorical. Politicians have never entirely kept their nose out of science. Funding levels have never increases at the rates they were in the biological sciences in perpetuity.
Is this a reason to stop criticizing the Bush administration? No. Is this a reason to stop pushing for more funding? No. But those who forget history -- aside from committing preventable errors -- tend to blow things out of proportion. We shouldn't get to histrionic about this.
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Interesting view. Thanks for the link.
I beg to disagree.
Saying that "Daddy Bush and Richard Nixon did it too" is not exactly a pass. And the examples from the Clinton administration aren't examples of him manipulating science, that's a complete misread of history. Clinton wasn't manipulating science and ignoring it for partisan advantage. Yes, he waited until he was a lame duck before he let the cat out of the bag on some EPA regulations because he knew they'd be controversial, but in the end it he consistently stood by science, believed it, and tried to based policy on empirical fact.
Then this crap about the 19th century? Give me a break! What a red herring. There were no scientific agencies in the 19th century and the federal government was about 1:1000th the size it is now. Talk about comparing apples to oranges. Sheesh.
Compare that to George "Jury still out on evolution" Bush who has put a political contributor in charge of NIH, pay lines are going down, idiot underlings are censoring science like Hansen, Human ES cells can't be studied in a meaningful way with federal dollars, etc. Policies aren't based on sound science, just look at abstinence education, his intitiatives in Africa that are based on preaching this abstinence morality nonsense, when we know that the best way to prevent spread of HIV and teen pregnancy is education about contraception and use of condoms. Ideology over empirical fact, every time with these guys.
This author has purposefully masked the degree of manipulation by these politicians. Yeah, a couple of presidents did similar things with political hot-potato issues. So what. George Bush has systematically been terrible for science, across multiple disciplines, and in critical areas of research such as global warming and ES cells. Several agencies, such as FDA and EPA have been captured by industry interests. Although this is not exactly being anti-science so much as "whore for business".
Then there are treasures like this one:
How many things are ridiculous about this statement?
1. Yes, it's great that drug companies which make billions of dollars a year have gotten a windfall at the expense of tax payers.
2. Oh, and they're so great at doing basic drug research. It's not like they specialize in making "me-too" drugs and are actually responsible for a minority of "new" drugs on the market (see Marcia Angell).
3. Oh, and it's not like they spend more on marketing than R&D which is designed to make people take drugs that they don't need (and we wonder why medical costs have gone up since DTCA was legalized).
4. That chart is lovely, Bush gets credit for a curve that shows a consistent upwards slope for PhRMA, so it's ok that NIH just totally flattened out. It's not like there's anything important happening in academia.
Yes this article is real genius. It's about as good a denialist argument I've ever heard. Nice combination of red herrings, selective use of evidence, and alleged conspiricies (scientists are just angry at Bush because they're Democrats). Whatever.
Jake,
while funding is one component, it is the Bush Administration's willful disregard for and outright distortion of scientific evidence (global warming, needle exchange, stem cell research, endangered species protections, the evidence for evolution, HPV vaccine, just to name some of what the Bush administration has done) that is most distressing. That, and the emphasis on biopreparedness, which is gutting other health-related areas, is what makes me think Bush et al are anti-science.