The three way debate/discussion on science and politics hosted by the Smith Family Foundation on Tuesday night was an interesting event, to say the least. It was in some ways a difficult discussion for me, because the other participants, Ronald Bailey and Wesley Smith, are much more inclined than I to mix it up about the ethics of different kinds of research, especially when it comes to future biomedical advances and whether they should go forward without restriction. I, on the other hand, simply take the stance that while ethical viewpoints may differ, that's no excuse for either side to distort the science.
So the approaches of the panelists were sort of orthogonal, with Bailey being the person most versatile when it came to crossing over into areas covered by the other two speakers. Thus, I didn't really wind up differing or sparring to any significant degree with the other panelists. The aim of this post (so lengthy that I'm going to do it in two installments) is to begin to remedy that defect.
Bailey and I, I suspect, have some differences about global warming, though he is certainly no skeptic these days when it comes to basic human causation of climate change. So our differences would probably be small or at least manageable. Bailey still seems hooked on an argument that I'm not convinced by: That although global warming is happening, the changes will likely be small. I just don't see how you get there. It depends on a particular reading of the models, I suppose, rather than simply accepting the full range of possibilities presented by the models. I'm not comfortable picking and choosing in this way. There's way too much uncertainty, particularly about feedbacks in the system.
There were also a couple of comments by Bailey at the debate with which I differed. He made a broad "when was science ever not politicized?" argument, with which I agree to an extent. But I also think the situation is much worse now than it has been in the past in American politics, and Bailey's attempts to suggest otherwise didn't impress me much. For example, he used a couple of case studies of alleged science politicization from the Clinton administration. Because I didn't get precise notes of what Bailey argued at the event, here's how he made the same basic point (with the same examples) in Reason magazine:
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the Bush administration has done all that UCS accuses it of doing. This problem is not particular to Republican administrations--the very linkage of government and science almost guarantees some chicanery. Let's recall the halcyon days of the Clinton administration. In 1993, Princeton University physicist William Happer was fired from the Department of Energy because he disagreed with Vice President Al Gore's views on stratospheric ozone depletion. In 1994, President Bill Clinton rejected the finding from the Embryo Research Panel of the National Institutes of Health which declared that the intentional creation of human embryos for genetic research was ethical. Clinton simply banned any federal funding for such research.
For the sake of argument, let's grant the validity of the Happer story (though I bet some Clinton people would protest this). Bailey's second example, Clinton's rejection of the findings by the Embryo Research Panel, seems to involve an ethical/political disagreement, not an interference with scientists or the scientific process. So it's not a misuse or abuse of science and doesn't really count in this context. In any case, one or two case studies do not a comprehensive indictment make, and the Bush administration has been comprehensively indicted (by myself and others) for systematically misusing science across a range of areas. It follows that our argument cannot be undermined by simply providing one or two Clinton administration counterexamples. I fully grant that these exist.
As for Wesley Smith: He's at the Discovery Institute, but not part of the organization's official "intelligent design" push. Instead, he's largely interested in bioethics, where he advances a strong pro-life position. Politically, though, he's unorthodox, to say the least, because he has strong ties to Ralph Nader and said at the debate that he does not introduce religious arguments into the public square. I suspect that Smith and I would find a lot of ground when it comes to something like the radical animal rights movement: I think they abuse science, and so does he. And I think their attacks on researchers are appalling.
So where do I specifically differ with Smith? Well, although we did not discuss this at the debate, I think Smith's characterizations of embryonic stem cell science go beyond a mere matter of differing ethical opinions. Unfortunately, they attack and sometimes distort the science. Because I reviewed Smith's writings in anticipation of the debate, I have a couple of examples handy that I'd like to share.
First, consider Smith's recent Weekly Standard piece about the South Korean therapeutic cloning scandal (which has gotten even worse, if that's possible, since the article appeared). Smith tries to use the scandal to question peer review:
Hwang somehow convinced one of the world's most prestigious journals--and through it, the world--that he was a historic figure in science...This debacle raises several interesting questions: What does it tell us about the thoroughness of the peer review process? Why were younger South Korean scientists able to discover Hwang's missteps when the presumably more seasoned peer reviewers for Science failed?
It's a horrible embarrassment for the journal involved when published results are exposed as fraudulent. I'm sure the people at Science are feeling the pain right now, and engaging in plenty of woulda-coulda-shouldas about what they might have done to prevent this. However, the scientific peer review process is generally not designed to detect outright fraud. It's not an audit process. There is a presumption of honesty in the reporting of research results.
Moreover, in a broader sense, science worked in this case. The "research" of Woo Suk Hwang was exposed for what it really was. If anything, this case highlights the strengths of the scientific process, when conceived not simply as a narrow process of peer review by a single journal, but rather as broader process involving all types of scrutiny of new work by peers and colleagues.
Smith also uses the Korean scandal to lobby for adult stem cell research, a frequent theme in his writings:
More to the point, will the adult/umbilical cord blood stem cell successes that have emerged one after the other in recent years finally receive the attention they deserve in the mainstream press, which has been so intoxicated with embryonic research as virtually to ignore nonembryonic breakthroughs?
First, it's wrong to assert that the press ignores (or "virtually" ignores) non-embryonic breakthroughs. Recently I did a Lexis Nexis search for New York Times articles by just one reporter, Nicholas Wade (who happened to be the moderator of the Smith Family Foundation event), covering research using adult stem cells. In the last four years, I found 7 such articles by Wade, including one front page story. Remember, this is just one reporter.
More generally, no one is saying that adult stem cells lack research promise. But those, like Smith, who try to use research in this area to denigrate embryonic work--or to create a contrived opposition between two ongoing fields of research that does not actually exist in the minds of scientists--are in my view misusing science.
Scientists want to understand the attributes of both adult and embryonic stem cells, to increase basic knowledge and (hopefully) to achieve cures. At the end of the day, it may well be that different kinds of stem cells are effective in treating different kinds of conditions. But we don't know yet--and scientists aren't interested in shutting down avenues of research before they've been fully pursued. That's just not the scientific mindset...
[TO BE CONTINUED IN A LATER POST]
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Hi Chris: Good talking with you. Regarding global warming, I explain in the article to which you linked that all of the actual temperature records show warming at the low end of the climate models. This is why I a bit more skeptical of GW catastrophes. Second, in other articles I deal with the problem that climate models are necessarily economic and demographic projections (how else does one project emissions after all?) and that these have tremendous problems as well.
Regarding my citation of Clinton's rejection of the NIH panels' recommendation in favor of federal funding of embryo research in 1994, you're correct that it is not a "misuse" of science. It is a political overruling of scientific advice, but that's what government often does. I will not defend Bush's decision to limit embryonic stem cell funding to lines derived before August 2001 (after all I'm pretty clearly on record as being a full steam ahead stem cell research guy), but I think that Bush used what he thought was the "best scientific information" at the time to make his decision. Specifically, his advisors told him that 70 or so suitable stem cell lines were available for research. Bush then made his "political" decision to allow funding for only those lines, just like Clinton made his "political" decision to forbid any federal funding of embryo research.
I agree with you that the Bush administration engaged in later distortions about stem cell research, but I think that the initial decision was very similar in to Clinton's earlier decision.
Anyway, it was good to mix it up with you on Tuesday.
Thanks Ron. On the models, I agree that they have to include emissions scenarios and there's lots of uncertainty here. But of course, there's no other way you could hope to do it except by including emissions scenarios in some form or other. I'm not sure we can extrapolate just from current temperature records, due to the problem of feedbacks.
I really still disagree with you about the Clinton v. Bush comparison. In my book I explain that Bush did not simply use the best scientific information available when it came to the "more than 60" lines. He significantly misstated that information. The NIH figure (the original source for the info) didn't refer to ESC lines; it referred to less developed derivations, which may never turn into lines. Somehow this rather huge distinction was lost in the translation between the NIH and the White House.
We can speculate about whether or not this was intentional or just incompetent. But the president went before the nation and misinformed us by making a very elementary mistake, one that competent science advice should have caught--and one that has not since been apologized for. Should we just shrug and say, well, he made a mistake? I don't think so, or at least, I have much higher expectations than that for POTUS.
Two points:
Chris's main point about the citation of Clinton's record on science was finessed by Ron Bailey in his comment above, namely that the Bush record on science is atrocious and distressingly comprehensive, far worse than previous administrations. Nearly all scientific funding and discussion under Bush is held up to a political litmus test and if it doesn't meet the standards of the reigning ideologues, it's ignored, rewritten, and sometimes papered over with lies-that-aren't-quite-lies, a rhetorical flim-flam the Bush administration has refined into high art.
No administration has a flawless record on science, but only one administration has made a fetish of political correctness to the detriment of science. And that is the Bush administration.
Secondly, Chris, in his main post, tries to minimize the embarassment of the Hwang debacle. But the truth is that it highlights egregious flaws in the peer review process at Science and, I suspect, heads will roll if they haven't already. And well they should.
The level of fraud Hwang committed makes one question whether this is the first time he was so deceitful. Frankly, I doubt it. If so, someone surely knew that Hwang was a phony and was anxious to let others know. Yes, of course, science must operate like many other fields under the presumption of professional honesty, but that is absolutely no reason to leave your street smarts behind when you examine a submission. I suspect that, if the full story comes out, we'll learn that serious oversights and lapses in standard review protocols occurred at Science. We may also learn that some folks tried to warn Science editors that Hwang was prone to fakery of data.
I am reminded of Sokal's notorious, hilarious, and brilliant hoax in Social Text. One of the points made by science savvy critics of the magazine - including Sokal himself, I believe - was that anyone even partly literate in physics would have realized that "Transgressing the Boundaries" was a parody, not to be taken seriously, and that similar hoaxes could not be perpetrated at science magazines.
Well...as Ricky said to Lucy, someone at Science has a lot of 'splainin' to do. This is an outrage and it should lead to major changes at Science Magazine, and fast.
Tristero,
You're assuming the existence of evidence which may not exist! After all, it appears that Snuppy the puppy was the real thing, so it's not as though Hwang was incapable of doing real cutting edge research in this area. It seems to me that if he could clone the world's first dog, he could certainly make it look like he knew what he was talking about in other paper submissions.
Chris, I understand. My only point is that when someone fakes as much as Hwang did, I begin to wonder if it's the first time. It could be, but does it not seem to you odd, given the fakery was so extensive, that no alarm bells were sounded along the process that led the article to print?
I do mean that as a serious question as I'm not a scientist and I honestly don't know the details of the review process works. I imagine, as there is on my wife's legal magazine, that there's back and forth between the magazine and the authors as questions are answered, perhaps quite a bit of back and forth in an important paper. During the process, the presentation is tightened up focusing on whether the interpretation of the data is adequately supported.
Assuming that's at least some of what happens, it seems reasonable that the discussion - phone calls, emails, however it takes place - would skirt very close to uncovering a spectacular fraud. Maybe it's very hard to smell a rat given the complications of the subject matter, but this one seems very large and very blatant. Given the stakes were so high, wouldn't reviewers be especially diligent?
What am I missing that makes it seem to me as if the editors at Science, or their outside reviewers, overlooked something pretty obvious? A presumption of honesty is one thing; this seems like Hwang was working under a presumption that the magazine wouldn't notice.
Sure, there's back and forth, but there are no lab inspections. Someone wanting to pull a fast one can certainly get away with it if they're clever enough.
"Moreover, in a broader sense, science worked in this case. The "research" of Woo Suk Hwang was exposed for what it really was. If anything, this case highlights the strengths of the scientific process, when conceived not simply as a narrow process of peer review by a single journal, but rather as broader process involving all types of scrutiny of new work by peers and colleagues."
I don't see what this has to do with Wesley's questions. The way you've written it you seem to suggest that Wesley is saying that science doesn't work. But he didn't do that. He wasn't questioning science. All he did was ask some (quite pertinent) questions about peer review. I'm sure there are plenty of journals that are asking themselves the same questions.
Macht,
The paragraph before that was a response to Smith's questions. Then I enlarged the issue.
It just confused me since you had said that these were examples of where you disagreed with Smith. But now that I think about it, what do you disagree with Smith about in that paragraph? Do you think those are bad questions to ask? As I said, I would bet that most journals are asking themselves the same things. Your sentence that begins "However, the scientific peer review ..." doesn't say what you disagree with, since even if you agree that peer review isn't meant to detect fraud, you could still ask the questions that Smith asked.