President's Panel Skewed Facts, 2 Scientists Say

"It is clear that the administration has no respect for science."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/030704H.shtml

    President's Panel Skewed Facts, 2 Scientists Say
    By Gareth Cook
    The Boston Globe

    Saturday 06 March 2004

     Two scientists from President Bush's top advisory board on cutting-edge
medical research yesterday published a detailed criticism of the board's own
reports, and said the board skewed scientific facts in service of a political
and ideological cause.

     The authors -- one is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics
and the other was fired from the council over a week ago -- have accused the
council's chairman, Dr. Leon R. Kass, of ignoring their scientific advice and
refusing to include in the board's last report some information that would
challenge Bush's restrictions on stem cell research.

     Their allegations mark the sharpest public split yet within the council,
formed in 2001 to guide US policy through the increasingly difficult ethical
terrain of such fields as cloning, in-vitro fertilization, and embryonic
stem-cell research.

     The authors of the critique published yesterday were two of only three
full-time scientists on the council. They said the council's last report,
"Monitoring Stem Cell Research," did not make clear that a wave of recent
scientific research has cast doubt on the potential of adult stem cells -- a
type of cell that Bush held up as a promising alternative when he announced
his restrictions on the use of embryonic cells.

     Although the council is supposed to provide impartial advice to Bush, one
of the scientists said yesterday that its reports seemed to be driven by a
preexisting agenda and did not accurately portray the scientific underpinnings
of the ethical issues the council was grappling with.

     "There is always this strong implication [in the reports] that medical
research is not what God intended, that there is something unnatural about
it," said Elizabeth H. Blackburn, a highly regarded biologist who was fired
from the panel last Friday. "We had a great many comments on the report, and
they would just make a little changes that didn't fully address them."

     A spokesperson for Kass said that he had no comment on the allegations
and that the scientific comments of Blackburn and Janet Rowley, a University
of Chicago biologist who cowrote the critique, are adequately represented in
the council's reports.

     Their critique was published online yesterday by the journal PLoS
Biology. It adds to growing criticism from scientists that the Bush
administration is manipulating the scientific advice it receives on
politically charged issues, ranging from climate change to mercury
contamination. Last month, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a
statement, signed by more that 60 Nobel laureates, that alleged the
administration has manipulated scientific findings to a degree unprecedented
in recent White House history.

     The critique also adds to the drama of what is becoming a cause for some
biologists: the firing of Blackburn. Blackburn, a member of the National
Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, is often mentioned as a
likely candidate for the Nobel Prize for her work in cell biology. But eight
days ago, she was told the council had new priorities and she was abruptly
fired by a White House official. Kass, the council's chairman, did not tell
her she was going to be asked to leave and has not spoken with her since,
Blackburn said yesterday.

     But shortly before she was fired, she showed him the text of yesterday's
critique and told him she had submitted it for publication. At the same time
Blackburn was fired, another council member was asked to leave, medical
ethicist William F. May of Southern Methodist University.

     The firing has drawn attention in the scientific community and has been
criticized by some politicians.

     "We have diseases that can be cured, and we have a president who has
kicked two people off the commission because they happen to think we ought to
be doing stem cell research and other kinds of research, and he doesn't want
that outcome," said Senator John F. Kerry yesterday through a spokesman. "It
is clear that the administration has no respect for science."

     The critique published yesterday focuses on two reports issued by the
council, one issued in October titled "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the
Pursuit of Happiness," and another issued in January titled "Monitoring Stem
Cell Research."

     The two scientists' critique, entitled "Reason as Our Guide," alleges
that the "Beyond Therapy" report unfairly characterizes research into
prolonging healthy life as being dominated by scientists who are driven by the
goal of immortality. The report, they write, "falls short of explaining the
serious challenge of preventing and curing age-related disease to extend
health -- very different from attempting immortality."

     Blackburn, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco,
said that she had submitted a letter to the journal Science, outlining the
problems with that report, but that Kass ordered her to withdraw the letter,
which she did.

     In another section of their critique, Blackburn and Rowley list a series
of problems with the stem cell report. The cumulative effect of the problems,
Blackburn said, is to overstate the current research promise of adult stem
cells and play down the potential of embryonic stem cells, which are created
by destroying a human embryo when it has reached a ball of about 100 cells. To
its critics, embryonic stem-cell research amounts to taking a human life -- an
objection that does not apply to the adult cells, which can be extracted from
a person's body without harm. In 2001, Bush declared that the federal
government would not fund research using human embryonic cell lines that had
not been created before his statement. Michael S. Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist
at Dartmouth College who is the only other full-time scientist on the council,
said yesterday that he was "very disheartened" that Blackburn had been fired,
but that he had no plans to quit the panel. Asked about the new critique by
Blackburn and Rowley, he said, "I 100 percent support what they are trying to
do," but declined to elaborate.

     The report published yesterday is available at www.plosbiology.org.

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