Bush does science no favours
Howard Burton
November 8, 2004
The world of science had high hopes when U.S. President George W. Bush first appointed John Marburger III (above) as science adviser. But optimism has turned to cynicism.
	U.S. President George W. Bush

As the American political pundits scramble for their versions on why the exit polls were so wrong and speculate on who might be key players in a second George W. Bush administration, it is fitting to consider what Bush's re-election might mean for the scientific community, both inside and outside of the United States.

President Bush has not, to put it mildly, had a ringing endorsement from the American scientific community. Many researchers were cautiously optimistic when Bush named John Marburger III, a respected physicist (director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island) and self-professed "lifelong Democrat," as his science adviser in the fall of 2001. But in the intervening years, the situation has gone from bad to worse, with many feeling that Marburger has been steadily losing influence or worse.

Matters came to a head this past February with a report issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a scientific advocacy group, and endorsed by 60 highly influential scientists including 20 Nobel laureates. The report accused the Bush administration of systematically distorting scientific fact and deliberately assembling sympathetic technical advisory committees to promote favoured political agendas of the administration.

Marburger was unswayed by the findings: "From all the evidence I can find," he said, "it's certainly not true that science is being manipulated by this administration to suit its policy. It's simply not the case."

This response, as one might expect, hardly quieted the enraged scientists. Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychologist, exclaimed in an interview on National Public Radio: "I actually feel very sorry for Marburger, because I think he probably is enough of a scientist to realize that he basically has become a prostitute."

Many scientists stopped short of saying this explicitly, but there was no mistaking the widespread concern among many eminent members of the national scientific community that something was very much amiss.

Most seemed to feel sorry for Marburger personally, regarding him as potentially the right man at the wrong time -- tasked with an impossible job of fronting an administration that had no real interest in science or research other than as an occasional justification for its own policies.

The fact that Marburger was not, like some of his predecessors, "assistant to the president" but instead reported directly to Andrew H. Card, the White House chief of staff, was viewed by many as further proof of the general lack of interest that Bush had for an external, objective scientific voice in his administration.

Be that as it may, the time for politicking is clearly over. What can America's scientific community reasonably expect from a second Bush mandate?

Bush's record on scientific research is not all negative. Funding for a variety of research and development initiatives, including basic research, is up considerably (44 per cent) since he took office. But dig deeper, and one finds that the lion's share of this additional spending went towards military and domestic security matters. In the Clinton administration, the Pentagon's dominance of federal research dollars was scaled back to 50 per cent of the total. That figure now rests at 57 per cent, and is scheduled to rise.

On specific scientific issues, such as energy, the environment, space exploration and stem cell research, the Bush administration has consistently infuriated large sectors of the scientific and environmental community. This includes everything from drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and reversing environmental protections put in place by the Clinton administration to banning money for new stem cell research.

John Kerry had a strikingly different rhetoric. "Our country needs a renewed commitment to investment in basic research and the hard sciences, such as physics and chemistry," said Kerry on his campaign website. Earlier in the year, he had declared that, if elected, he would be "a president for science."

Well, maybe. Candidates are, of course, predisposed to saying a great many bold statements about what they would do if elected, without the dispiriting pressures of having to explicitly figure out exactly how to pay for all of their promises. Kerry's scientific policy would doubtless have been appreciatively different from that of Bush, but just how different is a question that we will likely never know the answer to.

It will be interesting to see what will happen to the American research culture over the next four years, not only in terms of concrete measures of scientific achievement (papers published, patents awarded and so forth), but also in more general terms of mindset.

The majority of academics at top research universities in the United States are growing increasingly frustrated that their values and lifestyle are not at all supported by this administration. A quick glance at the electoral college map of Nov. 2 shows that virtually all of the premier research institutions are in states won by Kerry and not Bush.

America is split and its scientists are feeling despondent and marginalized. While that may auger well for recruitment for foreign institutions in the short run, in the long run we will all suffer.