Bush Administration

Today, the Nobel Committee announced the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, equally shared between Elizabeth Blackburn of UCSF, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins, and Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School--all three American. This year's prize was awarded for the discovery of telomeres, the repeated sequences of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that protect the integrity of the chromosomal DNA, and for the discovery of telomerase, the enzyme that builds the telomeres. This prize recognizes seminal work in molecular genetics and biology that unlocked some of the basic…

About a week ago, the NIH announced its draft guidelines covering the funding of human embryonic stem cell research. You can read the draft guidelines here and my post on the topic here. As these are draft guidelines, they are open to a month-long period of public comment before the final guidelines are released, and an online system for accepting comments has just been opened up. Comments must be received by 11:00 pm EST on May 26, 2009, and you can enter your comments here. Below, I have pasted the comments I submitted: To Whom It May Concern: These comments are in response to the Draft…

Arguably the biggest news story of the week was the release by the Obama Administration of four Justice Department memos from 2002 and 2005 that were used to justify CIA torture of detainees. An analysis by Jeffrey Smith in today's Washington Post tries to explain the context and the mindset that led to the twisted logic found in these memos: The four Justice Department memos to the CIA's top lawyer that were released last week reflect an effort by Bush administration appointees to create finely tuned justifications for harsh interrogation techniques, all under a blanket of secrecy covering…

Today was a great day for science in the Executive Branch. Firstly, President Barack Obama (finally!) lifted George W. Bush's August 2001 restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research in an executive order entitled "Removing Barriers to Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells": The purpose of this order is to remove these limitations on scientific inquiry, to expand NIH support for the exploration of human stem cell research, and in so doing to enhance the contribution of America's scientists to important new discoveries and new therapies for the…

As the day's inauguration festivities approach their finale, if you're anything like me the whole experience still feels a bit surreal. However, thinking back to Obama's inauguration address, the one part that really stands out in my mind came from the middle, when he spoke about national security and civil liberties. Specifically, the following paragraph, which begins at the 9-minute mark in the video below: As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure…

Clearly, I owe my readers some true post-election analysis--something that has been slowed down by the insanely busy schedule I've been keeping in the lab and the totally overwhelming implications of the fantastic and historic recent election of Barack Obama. In the meantime, though, I'd like to point out a particularly insidious aspect of the Bush legacy that has so far gone underreported, although it has been publicized by AAAS president James McCarthy and was recently reported in The Washington Post: The president of the nation's largest general science organization yesterday sharply…

Apparently, the Bush Administration has adopted a sophisticated new strategy for not dealing with global warming. From The New York Times: White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency's conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week. The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.'s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court…

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a case regarding the Navy conducting sonar training exercises in the proximity of marine mammals--some of which are threatened or endangered species. A large body of evidence indicates that these sorts of sonar exercises--which generate extremely loud underwater sounds--damage the hearing of these animals and disrupt their behavior, often leading to beached whales. And, at their worst, these exercises have been linked to scores of whale deaths--likely from decompression sickness as the whales panicked…

A report by the NASA inspector general released earlier this week acknowledged that political appointees in the NASA press office censored climate scientists from 2004 to 2006. That would have been interesting news... about two years ago. Yawn. What caught my eye, though, were these claims in an article by The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin: The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters. James E. Hansen…

A week after a major report found widespread Bush Administration political interference with science in the EPA, the Chicago Tribune reported late this week that the Administration has forced the resignation of Mary Gade, head of the EPA's Midwest office: SAGINAW, Mich. - The battle over dioxin contamination in this economically stressed region had been raging for years when a top Bush administration official turned up the pressure on Dow Chemical to clean it up. On Thursday, following months of internal bickering over Mary Gade's interactions with Dow, the administration forced her to quit…

When the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) last week released a report detailing widespread political interference in science at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), I almost didn't blog about it, since the fact that political interference runs rampant in the Bush Administration shouldn't be news to anyone. And, since this interference is occasionally motivated by political or religious ideology but much more often driven by the disproportionate protection of the business interests of the Administration's industry supporters, one would expect political interference at the EPA to be…

That could easily have been the shared title of a pair of articles in today's New York Times discussing the science and political implications of two very significant stem cell papers published online yesterday. The biggest offender was Sheryl Stolberg: It has been more than six years since President Bush, in the first major televised address of his presidency, drew a stark moral line against the destruction of human embryos in medical research. Since then, he has steadfastly maintained that scientists would come up with an alternative method of developing embryonic stem cells, one that did…

As promised, Bush vetoed the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) earlier today. As the AP notes (in an article with a glaring typo in its title), "The White House sought as little attention as possible, with the president wielding his veto behind closed doors without any fanfare or news coverage." Yeah. Duh. This is one of the more hardheaded and heartless things that the Administration has done yet, so it's not surprising that Bush would try to slip it in under the radar. Just tell that, though, to the 3.3 million kids who would have been added to SCHIP…

Congress appears to be on track for another major standoff with President Bush. The Washington Post reports today that the House and Senate have reconciled their differing versions of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP or CHIP) expansion and will be voting on it this coming week (Tuesday in the House, Thursday in the Senate). Predictably, President Bush still promises a veto of this bipartisan compromise legislation, a position he took long before the bill was voted on in either chamber. The current bill, which calls for a $35 billion expansion of SCHIP over the next five…

Is this what we've come to after six and a half years of a Bush White House? From a Wired Science blog post about Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns' resignation: But what the heck -- by all appearances, Johanns wasn't grossly corrupt, didn't hand out more corporate freebies than you'd expect from someone of his background and position, didn't break the law and pretend that it never happened. Given the science-skewing and dishonesty that's permeated policy in other parts of the Bush administration, this sort of old-fashioned malfeasance ("Yes, I don't like what you've done -- but at least…

Last year, I recounted my personal experience on September 11, 2001, and I offered some commentary about what that day--and the events of the ensuing year--meant to me and to American politics in general. I've reposted my 9/11 story again this year, below. (11 September 2006) When I was a freshman in college, at Texas A&M University, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings I had two classes back-to-back in the same lecture hall. Because of a weird scheduling fluke, these classes were about 45 minutes apart, though. During that break, sometimes I would go eat breakfast, other times I would do…

They're dropping like flies now. In another blow to the Bush Administration, The New York Times reports that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will announce his resignation later has announced his resignation (update) today... and it's about damn time. Senator Charles Schumer puts it lightly: Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who sits on the committee and has been calling for Mr. Gonzales's resignation for months, said this morning: "It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months…

Although the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP or CHIP) passed in both the House and the Senate earlier this month, the Bush Administration has once again decided that it prefers to preempt the Democratic process. President Bush had already promised to veto the legislation before it had even come up for a vote, but now it seems that the Administration can't even wait for the two chambers of Congress to reconcile their versions of the bill and has instead decided to carry out its agenda uninhibited while Congress is on recess. Last Friday, the Director of the…

This just in: even the devil incarnate has had enough. From Reuters: WASHINGTON - Karl Rove, a political adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush and a lightning rod for anger among Democrats, will leave the White House at the end of this month, Rove told the Wall Street Journal. "I just think it's time," Rove said in an interview with the newspaper published on Monday. "There's always something that can keep you here, and as much as I'd like to be here, I've got to do this for the sake of my family." And now we say goodbye, finally, to possibly the most cynical and shameless political…

Another example of Bush Administration political interference in science came out in October 2006, when it was discovered that Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks (a political appointee), had actively censored scientific information and inappropriately elevated industry concerns to prevent new additions to the Endangered Species list. MacDonald resigned in May 2007, and now the Interior Department is reviewing eight of her decisions. As The New York Times reports today, these are likely to be overturned: The Interior Department…