Salon: Thou Shalt Not Make Scientific Progress [View All]

[kskiska]

Medical research is poised to make a quantum leap that will benefit sufferers from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, diabetes and other diseases. But George W. Bush's religious convictions stand in its way.

Late in the afternoon on the last Friday in February, Elizabeth Blackburn received a surprise phone call from an aide in the personnel office of the White House. Since early 2002, Blackburn, a distinguished cell biologist at the University of California at San Francisco, had served on the President's Council on Bioethics, the panel President Bush convened to explore the charged boundaries between ethics and cutting-edge biomedical science. On the council, Blackburn was sometimes critical of the Bush administration's restrictive policies on embryonic stem cell research; now, the White House staffer told Blackburn, the council was letting her go. The aide gave no explanation for the decision.

Blackburn was not technically "fired" from the bioethics council -- she was just not reappointed for the council's new term. But Blackburn was one of only two members on the 17-person panel to suffer that fate -- and it turned out that the other member not asked back, William May, an emeritus professor of ethics at Southern Methodist University, had been planning to retire anyway. For Blackburn, the cause of the abrupt dismissal was obvious. "I think this is Bush stacking the council with the compliant," she told the Washington Post that afternoon, the first of many instances over the next few weeks in which she publicly accused Bush and the bioethics council of playing politics with science.

To critics of the Bush administration, Blackburn's analysis of the situation sounded unimpeachable. George W. Bush's unhappy relationship with science has been well documented. Indeed, just a week before Blackburn was let go, 60 prominent scientists -- including 20 Nobel laureates -- accused the president of routinely mangling scientific fact in the service of "partisan political ends." So just about everyone concluded that Elizabeth Blackburn was the latest victim of the Bush administration's partisan attacks on science. The story line was simple and compelling: Blackburn was a proponent of embryonic stem cell research, while Bush -- and his most ardent supporters -- was not. During a campaign stop shortly after Blackburn's dismissal, likely Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry told reporters, "A scientific panel ought to be chosen on the basis of science and on the basis of reputation, not politics."

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http://salon.com/tech/feature/2004/03/25/stem_cells/index.html