Scientific inquiry: MILAN KECMANTHE PLAIN DEALER

Childhood lead-poisoning expert Bruce Lanphear is convinced that politics have poisoned a wide array of federal scientific panels and policies since President George W. Bush took office.

Lamphear, who heads Cincinnati's Children's Environmental Health Center and has published numerous scientific articles on childhood lead poisoning, was asked to serve on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention childhood lead- poisoning panel in 2000.

After Bush took office, the board replaced Lamphear and several others on the panel with scientists friendly to the lead industry. The panel decided against lowering the blood level of lead at which children are considered to be poisoned.

Advertisement

Spurred by his belief that the Bush administration stacked the panel to help the lead industry avoid lawsuits, the pediatric epidemiologist joined more than 6,000 scientists in signing a statement circulated by the Union of Concerned Scientists that asks the administration to stop distorting science for political purposes.

The lead paint incident was not isolated. Two reports issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit alliance, allege dozens of cases of scientific interference by the Bush ad ministration. Among the claims: the ad ministration suppressed research that supported tougher mercury standards for coal-fired power plants; it distorted reproductive health facts, and it tried to weaken the Endangered Species Act.

"This type of thing has happened in previous administrations, but it has now reached unprecedented levels," says Lexi Schultz of the scientists' group.

Harvard University Professor Lewis Branscomb, who headed the National Bureau of Standards during the Nixon administration and signed the scientists' group statement, agrees that the frequency of complaints has increased dramatically under Bush.

"Science advice must not be allowed to become politically or ideologically constructed," Branscomb wrote in the October 2004 issue of Issues in Science and Technology.

The head of Bush's Office of Science and Technology Policy, former Brookhaven National Laboratory Director John Marburger, says nothing of the kind is happening. He accuses Bush's critics of patching miscellaneous incidents together to draw misleading conclusions and says his boss has boosted federal research and development funding by more than 40 percent since 2001.

"Agencies make rules in response to laws whose language is the result of compromises needed to get the bills passed," says Marburger. "Different parties to the compromise can have different understandings of what the words mean, and this leads to controversy during rulemaking. Laws like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act are not unambiguous, and can be interpreted differently by different regulatory personnel."

CONTINUED   1 | 2 | 3  Next