Government Suppression of Scientific Findings Gets Top Billing in Nature. (February 23, 2006)

AAAS President-elect David Baltimore

At the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) annual meeting in St. Louis last Saturday, Nature reports that Nobel Laureate and AAAS President-elect David Baltimore "urged scientists to challenge perceived censorship of their research.  Tensions between the Bush administration and researchers have been high for years, but Baltimore said he had recently grown convinced that the problem cannot be shrugged off as the usual battles between science and politics."

Professor Baltimore told his audience, "It is no accident that we are seeing such extensive suppression of science. It is part of a theory of government [the unitary executive*], and I believe it is a theory that we must vociferously oppose."

Quite apart from any other considerations, Baltimore stressed that a unitary executive threatens to undermine the independence of science conducted under the auspices of the federal government.

This past January NASA climatologist James Hansen accused the agency of trying to stop him doing media interviews that might cover policies on greenhouse-gas emissions. Hansen won the round when a Bush political appointee, a 24-year-old NASA press officer, resigned.

But US Government scientists are concerned as to their role in public debate over science policy. Are they or aren't they allowed to speak their mind based on what they consider is the best scientific data?

Louis Clark, president of the Government Accountability Project, a Washington-based non-profit that is advising Hansen told Nature that federal scientists, can present their data publicly but must be clear that they are not representing their agency or government policy. "The cardinal rule," Clark says, "is that you can speak for yourself, but you can't speak for the government unless you're authorized to do so."

Nevertheless, it is quite clear that in the US as in Australia's CSIRO, there is an odour of authoritarianism and coercion of government scientists when it comes to sensitive areas such as anthropogenic effects on climate.

Nature's editorialist, however, remains sanguine as far as the US is concerned, "It is by no means the case that these proud federal agencies or their staff have fallen subject to the executive branch's decree. Most federal agencies have a deep stock of integrity, which even eight years of the Bush administration will not erode away."

But the journal also reports that while "Rita Colwell, who headed the National Science Foundation under presidents Clinton and Bush, told the AAAS meeting that she had "not at any time come under political pressure from any quarter", Susan Wood, a former scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, spoke of her reasons for resigning last August, after her boss repeatedly delayed a decision to make the Plan B contraceptive more widely available. The morale of scientists at her former agency was at its lowest point ever, Wood said.

The similarities between the descriptions of the suppression of publicly expressed views by government scientists in the US and in Australia are unmistakable and might be said to bear the hallmark of convergent evolution.

And there is mounting evidence that despite the claim by both governments that their government scientists are free to express their opinions as long as they make it clear that they are not speaking for the agencies employing them, covert suppression is exercised.

What is disconcerting, not to say highly disturbing, are the indications that in Australia as in the US, the government works to suppress findings that conflict with its priorities. It bespeaks a culture that should be alien in the extreme -- but isn't.

*A theory of government that a president can bypass Congressional and judicial oversight and run the country single-handedly.