Sarah Palin's War on Science

[n2doc]

The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET


In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.


In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

more:
http://www.slate.com/id/2203120

[amdezurik]

1. so she never fed her kids milk while they were

growing up? And she is against nuke power too? (Madame Curie and Louis Pasture(sp?) were both French ;p )

[BOSSHOG]

2. Hey Sarah, the Statue of Liberty came from France

as a gift from a country which used to be our friend before you conservatives fucked up that relationship. I kid you not.

[whistle]

3. Sarah Palin is the Mom from Hell! However, she is not the concerned about rights

...for people with disabilities, only what is politically advantage to Palin's ambitions

[Wapsie B]

4. Since she doesn't believe in Science

I'm sure then that gravity won't show on her as she ages. :eyes:

[pokerfan]

5. "Now it's personal: Sarah Palin attacks my work"

Now with everybody and their grandmothers already blogging about the US presidential campaigns and this being a largely scientific blog based in Europe, it was easy to ignore US politics. It was easy despite having lived in Texas for almost four years, still traveling there several times a year and seeing how my friends in science over there suffer under the medieval, backwards and superstitious redneck administration they've had for the past eight years.

Everybody over there has been complaining about how the administration has been catering to the ignorance and inanity of their religious extremist backers. Yet, I was content ridiculing US politics in private circles, telling my friends overseas to keep their heads up and just stick these few years out. All this, after all, was none of my business, really. All of this has now changed, as Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, running mate of John McCain, has openly attacked my research in her very first policy speech.

http://bjoern.brembs.net/news.php?item.457.11

[TZ]

6. Groundbreaking work on HIV/AIDS originated in France

But since only people that god hates gets AIDS I guess that doesn't matter either:sarcasm:

What really adds to her unbelievable stupidity is that she has a child with a genetic defect (Downs Syndrome) and yet she doesn't know that fruit fly genetics are the basis for modern genetic studies. Unfuckingbelievable.