Euros concerned for US science

Some European scientists are growing increasingly concerned at the potential wider ramifications of what they see as political interference with scientific freedom in the US.Scientists interviewed by The Scientist in recent days said they believed that continued political interference from the Bush administration would not only have a negative impact on the quality of US science, but eventually on global science.Carl Johan Sundberg, vice president of Euroscience, told The Scientist that in the short-term Europe would benefit from a politicized atmosphere in the US by attracting promising young scientists from the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe, who in the past have gravitated to the US. But he worries that in the long term, Europe and the rest the whole world would lose if the dynamic quality of US science deteriorates."The US is the most important country in the world when it comes to science,” he said. "What happens in the US is extremely important to the global scientific community." Criticism of the Bush administration's scientific policies is not new. Last year, a group of Congressional Democrats released a report charging that the administration had repeatedly manipulated the scientific process and distorted or suppressed scientific findings to advance political and ideological interests. The Union of Concerned Scientists and other US scientists have started to publicly protest in recent weeks against what they perceive as political interference from the Bush administration. They allege that the White House has distorted scientific facts to support its policies on the environment, public health and biomedical research.The protest became louder on February 27, when President Bush dismissed two members of his President's Council on Bioethics, a move that some U.S. scientists believe was done to increase the number of conservatives on the council. The council is charged with studying stem cell policy, among other issues.Sundberg, who is head of Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said of the current US scientific environment: "When committees are stacked with people who have the correct type of political background--I think that is very bad."He said American scientists have told him they are appalled about what is going on."All I hear when I speak to people, especially in the U.S., is that the whole environment is politicized at a level they have never seen," he said. "They feel there is an agenda out there and that some things are okay and some things are not. The chairman of the president's council responded to criticisms in an editorial in the Washington Post, saying charges of stacking the council were “unfounded.”Eva-Maria Streier, spokeswoman for the German Research Foundation, declined to comment directly on alleged political interference within the US, but said: "Basic science should be independent of political influence." Seeking comment from the Biosciences Federation in the UK, The Scientist was referred to Michael J. Rennie of the University of Nottingham's School of Biomedical Sciences."Many people in the Bush Administration seem to hold right-wing political views that are not compatible with science," said Rennie, a council member of The Physiological Society.A British citizen, Rennie studied in the 1970s at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where two of his three children were born with dual US citizenship. "I speak as someone who is very pro-American," he said. "I have very strong feelings of loyalty to the US."But he believes the Bush administration is not acting in the best interests of science. "Politics should not intrude on science," he said. He agreed with Sundberg that Europe already has begun to benefit from "brain gain," with young scientists from around the world seeing Europe as now having a "generally freer atmosphere and intellectual environment" than the US. Such young scientists in the past had been the "lifeblood of American science," he said.If Bush is re-elected in November, he believes, more US scientists will follow the example of Roger Pedersen, who after three decades of stem cell research at the University of California, San Francisco, moved overseas for a position at Cambridge University.

Euros concerned for US science

Scientists worried that politics is damaging science in the US-and the world

Mar 8, 2004

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