The Anti Science President

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.

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