NEW YORK CITY, May 28— During his Anniversary Discourse at the Academy’s Annual Spring Stated Meeting of the Fellows this week, Nobel laureate Dr. David Baltimore lambasted the Bush Administration for imposing restrictions on scientific research on the basis of morality and a conservative agenda.
The black-tie affair in the Academy Library was attended by 150 Fellows, friends and staff of the Academy, and three leaders in medical research and history were honored on this occasion for their contributions to science and the Academy. Baltimore’s impassioned remarks at the start of the evening drew sustained applause from the crowd of scientific leaders, elected officials and medical professionals.
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| A crowd of 150 Fellows, friends and staff gathered in the Academy library for the Academy's Annual Spring Stated Meeting of the Fellows black tie event. |
Baltimore said that the Administration is deliberately distorting scientific knowledge and thereby jeopardizing improvements and safeguards to human health and the environment. He was among 60 signatories on a powerful statement issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists that took the Administration to task for ignoring objective scientific analysis in policy decision-making. “When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions,” said the statement, which was published in February and widely reported by the media.
Baltimore explained that the Bush Administration has undermined scientific progress in a host of ways, including: placing people on scientific advisory committees despite their clear conflicts-of-interest; disbanding existing advisory committees; censoring and suppressing reports by the government’s own scientists; and, failing to seek independent scientific advice. Two supporters of therapeutic cloning were stricken last winter from the President’s Council on Bioethics, which has shaped the administration’s policy on cloning and stem cell research, leaving little scientific opposition to the conservative panel leader Leon Kass. Then earlier this month, the government ruled to prohibit over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception pills, ignoring an advisory panel’s advice, Baltimore explained.
The Administration also removed information about the efficacy of condom use for pregnancy prevention and AIDS transmission from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, replacing it with a statement emphasizing condom failure rates and the effectiveness of abstinence. “There is strong evidence that condoms work and we should be putting all our strength behind getting the world to understand this,” Baltimore said, calling the Administration’s activities on AIDS policy “abhorrent.”
Baltimore also lamented that the government’s immigration barriers, erected in the name of heightened national security, will hurt the nation’s position as a scientific leader by preventing international scientists from working here. “We must ask ourselves what actions actually lead to increased security, and what are merely gratuitous nuisances,” he said. There has been a huge drop in applicants for graduate school this year from abroad, he said, and the U.S. isn’t producing enough scientists from our own population.
“The government has been acting in ways that are clearly detrimental to the progress of American science and technology” and thus to economic development and even national security, Baltimore said. “Basic science is largely supported by the public, and therefore, government policies determine what science is done and how it is done. The bottom line here is that we need to bring evidence-based thinking back to government.”
Awards presented at the 157th Spring Stated Meeting are as follows:
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| From left: David A. Baltimore, Jeremiah A. Barondess, Julius B. Richmond, Mary Ellen Avery, Donald A.B. Lindberg, Irving L. Weissman, William H. Helfand, Jack D. Barchas. |
The Academy Medal for Distinguished Contributions in Biomedical Science was awarded to Irving L. Weissman, M.D., Director of the Institute for Cancer and Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. He was the first scientist to identify and isolate stem cells in any species, opening the field of stem cell research and paving the way for disease-fighting therapies to be developed.
William H. Helfand, Ph.D., was presented with the Academy Plaque for Exceptional Service to the Academy. He is an award-winning writer on the history of pharmacy and medicine, an accomplished collector of prints and ephemera from those fields, some of which he donated to the Academy, and a generous supporter of Academy historical medical programs.
Posted on 05/28/2004
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