The other day I asked veteran venture capitalist Brook Byers of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for his thoughts about biotech in 2008. He told me that recent breakthroughs in stem cell research will lead to more commercial interest and that genetics applied to individual diagnoses for disease will continue to be huge.

He mentioned a few other predictions, but it was his final assertion that really resonated: that we need "a new president of the U.S. who will embrace science and stop the assault on reason"—borrowing the last four words from Al Gore's book of that title.

These are strong words coming from Byers, a thoughtful biotech investor for 30 years. He usually applies his soft Georgia accent to talk about technology and scientific discoveries, not politics.

Such is the frustration and weariness with the current administration, even out here in faraway Silicon Valley, which has gone through various phases in dealing with the current occupant of the White House.

There was, for example, dismay at such policies as the 2001 restriction of federal funding for stem cell research. Then there was an attempt to work with the president on a compromise. Then, finally, a decision to go around him—most famously with the successful California referendum of 2004 that will raise $3 billion over 10 years to fund stem cell research, circumventing federal restrictions.

As 2008 begins, many bio folk in Silicon Valley have started counting the days until Bush leaves office. Lassitude about the president, however, should not stop us from perhaps the most crucial takeaway from these past seven years: that even in a civilization built on technology the process of maintaining a healthy scientific establishment can be precarious when leaders become either hostile to science or prone to neglecting it. In the case of President Bush, we got both.

These past seven years might be termed a Galileo moment—a hopefully brief interlude in which the priorities of leaders shifted from a respect for science and facts (convenient or inconvenient) to one in which science was ignored—or denied—if it interfered with policies, politics, or ideology.

A similar situation occurred in 17th-century Italy. Galileo Galilei‘s support of a heliocentric universe, as proposed by Nicolas Copernicus, ran afoul of the Roman Catholic Church. Earlier, during the Renaissance, the church had embraced scientific discovery but had then returned to strict interpretations of ideology and dogma as it fought a bitter feud against Protestant reformers.

Church officials declared that the earth is the center of the universe, despite evidence to the contrary—and forced Galileo to recant his views under threat of torture.

The papacy's denial of science caused technological development in Southern Europe to languish while momentum for progress grew in the north and west.

History is repeating itself to some extent during the waning days of the Bush regime as research momentum in some fields has shifted overseas—not only to Western and Northern Europe but also to China, India, and elsewhere.

This diversification was happening anyway and is quite healthy for science and for the global economy. Yet a retrenchment in America's role as the world leader in scientific discovery—and a slowdown in federal funding for the sciences, the engine of innovation for industry—was unnecessary. It decelerated research, not only in controversial fields such as embryonic stem cells, but also in mainstream pursuits like understanding and finding cures for cancer, diabetes, and other major diseases.

I therefore submit my greatest hits of bio missteps and setbacks (in no particular order) under George W. Bush:

• National Institutes of Health: In five years under President Bill Clinton, the N.I.H.'s budget doubled by 1997. Since 2002, the N.I.H. budget increases have been so small that the new projects and facilities created by the five-year surge, along with the new scientists hired, are being squeezed. Last month, Congress, in a compromise with Bush, reduced the N.I.H. budget increase for 2008 to a mere 1 percent—not enough to cover inflation.
  
  
• The Food and Drug Administration: The Bush administration has allowed this agency, which oversees 25 percent of the goods bought by Americans, to drift, with recent studies from respected agencies and an independent panel commissioned by the F.D.A. itself stridently claiming that the agency is underfunded, lacking in key personnel, and falling behind in keeping sufficiently abreast of the latest scientific developments to do its job. Congress is also to blame for this problem--and the new federal budget for 2008 does little to fix things.
  
  
• Embryonic Stem Cells: Since 2001, federal restrictions placed on stem cell research are a classic example of what happens when the few, committed to a certain ideology, try to impede a new field in life sciences. The debate promulgated by the ban was useful as a discussion in American society about thorny ethical questions, but the dialogue quickly became a politicized distraction that wasted valuable time and resources.
  
  
• The Evolution Wars: Has there ever been a more useless exercise? Evolution is called a theory, but the proof is so overwhelming. Even Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher and the new darling of the religious right, believes that evolution should be taught in U.S. schools. Yet a poll taken in 2006 by Michigan State University political scientist Jon Miller found that 40 percent of Americans do not believe in evolution.
  
  
• Global Warming: This environmental issue is slightly outside the strict purview of this column, but the Bush administration's denial, for most of the past seven years, of the assertion that human activity has contributed to the warming of the planet certainly has implications for the life sciences industry and for the health of humans and all life.
  
  

I don't advocate that all science should be embraced by business and by society without careful thought and discussion. This is where Byers' (and Gore's) use of the word reason and its corollary, reasonableness, come in.

I hope the new president will use more of both than our current leader has.