The Anti-Science President

The news just gets worse about how politics has trumped science throughout the current White House administration's tenure. Pick a topic--embryonic stem cells, global warming, mercury levels in the environment--and on each one, this administration has denied science when it interfered with the president's ideology.

Now the former surgeon general, Richard Carmona, who held office from 2002 to 2006, is telling Congress in considerable detail how he was muzzled on everything from stem cells and sex education to a report on secondhand smoke. He was also told to mention President Bush at least three times on each page of every speech, and was directed to give speeches in support of Republican candidates.

According to a front-page article in Tuesday's New York Times,

On issue after issue, Dr. Carmona asserted, the Bush administration made decisions about important public health issues based solely on political considerations, not scientific ones.

"I was told to stay away from those because we've already decided which way we want to go," Dr. Carmona said.

He described attending a meeting of top officials in which the subject of global warming was discussed. The other officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause and dismissed it, he said.

Politicians have always tried to manipulate facts to suit their agendas, and they will again, though the scale attempted by this administration is truly astonishing. So is the hubris that somehow people wouldn't notice that the administration's ideology contradicted facts and empirical proof.

Inevitably, facts have a nasty habit of being, well, real--for example, the fact that abortions do not cause breast cancer, despite a government website that kept making this claim against all scientific evidence. Or that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rapidly rising. Or that most Americans support embryonic stem-cell research.

Yet there is a curious twist here in the sheer breadth and audacity of the effort. Most presidents manipulate science, or try to, but they keep quiet about it, following T. S. Eliot's observation that "Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow." This White House did not hide in the shadows with its science policies. It stayed firmly in the spotlight.

Almost from the beginning--certainly in August 2001, when President Bush announced his restrictive policy on stem-cell research--George W. Bush made little effort to hide his disregard for science that didn't agree with his ideology. This is what is revealing about Carmona's testimony to the Senate yesterday, which paints a picture of a surgeon general who was essentially told to ignore reality on many issues. For instance, he was simply told not to mention scientific studies that questioned a sex-education policy that relies solely on abstinence.

In an area I'm more familiar with, embryonic stem-cell research, the administration's policies disregarded reality on two issues. First, the president's core constituency was quite vocal about its wish to ban the use of embryonic stem cells for research and its hope that their use could be criminalized. This is despite the fact that the science is readily accessible to trained scientists around the world and that most Americans want the potential treatments and cures promised by stem-cell research. Second, the president's policy to allow research only on stem-cell lines created before August 2001 was problematic because the lines in question were fewer than promised and mostly unusable.

Despite the president's anti-science stances during his first term, George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, in part because science is seldom a determining factor in election outcomes. In 2004, the electorate was more concerned about the threat of terrorism, the war in Iraq, and other front-burner issues.

Perhaps Americans in 2004 should have paid a bit more attention to the science policies of the Bush administration. One can only hope that in 2008 science and facts have a bit more influence with both the candidates and the electorate.

216 Million Americans Are Scientifically Illiterate (Part II)

See Part I of this miniseries on science literacy, posted on February 21, 2007.

Now it's the media's turn to star in my ongoing miniseries about why people in the United States and elsewhere seem to know so little about science.

As I reported in Part I, recent findings by Michigan State University's Jon D. Miller suggest that 72 percent of Americans can't read a newspaper article about science and understand it. This is far better than the findings in a similar study from 1988, which claimed that 90 percent of Americans were scientifically illiterate. We can be very pleased about this progress, although this still leaves some 216 million people who apparently struggle with concepts such as DNA and climate change--one can surmise from Miller's findings. In a few days, Part III of this miniseries will address scientists' role in this astonishing level of scientific illiteracy.

We live in the best of times and the worst of times for science journalism. Some of the finest science writing ever penned (or typed) is splashing across the pages of magazines, newspapers, and books. It's written by outstanding writers such as Richard Preston, Carl Zimmer, Michael Specter, and John Horgan. Like Roger Angell and others who elevated sports writing to a high-art form, certain science writers are capturing the awe, the fears, and the possibilities of our era of near-revolutionary advances that are either here now or will be coming soon in science and technology.

But before I get accused of sucking up to my friends and colleagues, let's talk in very general terms about how science journalism might be contributing to science ignorance. I can only scratch the surface here, but I'll provide a couple of quick thoughts.

First, science writing has a steep learning curve. It takes time to understand the basics of this "beat," and too often nonscientists making their way through the ranks at media outlets dip into science and science business reporting before moving on to some other topic. This is a nice way of saying that some science reporting is predictable, dry, and just plain bad.

Beyond this, the media too frequently report science in one of two ways: "Cancer cure around the corner" or "They're killing our babies" stories. Both screaming headlines may attract readers and viewers, but I think that overall, they add to the eye-glazing effect: the public has heard these stories so many times that they lack credibility. There's a "crying wolf" impact, and when real breakthroughs occur, they are drowned out by the hype. Industry and, increasingly, universities and medical centers out to sell intellectual property or their services also contribute to the crying-wolf phenomenon.

When a reporter is inundated daily with claims of fabulous products and discoveries that will revolutionize health care and make us skinny and beautiful and disease-free and give us great sex, it's difficult for even writers trained as scientists to sort it all out. Worse, the ranks of skeptics and referees--my name for the hopefully objective experts who can comment on new discoveries in order to provide perspective--are increasingly involved in promoting their own businesses, universities, or other entities.

Another issue is the media's own boredom with science stories--the "Africa effect" that I learned about as a correspondent in Africa. This is when publications say, "Hey, we already did a story on Africa this month." The same thing happens with science: "Hey, we did a story on cloning last May. Why should we do one again?"

Most editors and writers are nonscientists and are themselves impacted by the media's cycle of hype and fear mongering, which creates a situation in which editors think they have heard it all and that there is seldom anything really new or interesting to report. I have had several interesting discussions with my friend and editor Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, about this. He believes that many biotech and life-sciences stories are all variations on themes that we have heard again and again, and that life sciences in fact moves so slowly and incrementally that it defies the popular press's need to have headlines that inform and attract readers.

I don't entirely disagree with Chris, but I believe that he is missing something here: that life-sciences reporting should cover the incremental changes in areas such as longevity, stem cells, and the like, just as journalists cover the ongoing intricacies of Washington politics and foreign policy. The inner workings (the personalities, politics, mechanics of the science) beyond the golly-gee-whiz factor are fascinating if the writing is good for the 74 million Americans who can read and understand a science article. The idea that science writing should always be about breathless breakthroughs seems outdated and unhelpful.

Of course, education is the key here, and there are a number of schools that offer courses and programs in science journalism. Science journalism is suffering from the same crisis that the rest of journalism is: it spends too little money chasing complex stories, and there are too many cases of hype stories and passive recitations of industry and university press releases. But the effort must be made, in my view, to help as many citizens as possible understand science and technology that does or will deeply impact them and their children.

Call me hopelessly ideological, but the good news in Miller's work is the increase in science literacy. Against all odds, perhaps the media can help reduce the illiteracy rate from 72 percent to 71 percent. (This is assuming that Miller's work is valid--an assumption that perhaps should be scrutinized by a reporter.) Or maybe there is just a threshold of how many people want to know, and even if every article is a blend of William Shakespeare, H. L. Mencken, and Oliver Sacks, we still won't break through.

216 Million Americans Are Scientifically Illiterate (Part I)

"Ignorance feeds on ignorance." - Carl Sagan

Let's start by focusing on the positive. In just 17 years, over 50 million people have been added to the rolls of Americans who can understand a newspaper story about science or technology, according to findings presented last weekend at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in San Francisco.

Michigan State University political scientist Jon D. Miller, who conducted the study, attributed some of the increase in science literacy to colleges, many of which in recent years have required that students take at least one science course. Miller says people have also added to their understanding through informal learning: reading articles and watching science reports on television.

Okay, now let's talk (dare I say rant?) about the 200 million Americans out there who cannot read a simple story in, say, Technology Review or the New York Times science section and understand even the basics of DNA or microchips or global warming.

This level of science illiteracy may explain why over 40 percent of Americans do not believe in evolution and about 20 percent, when asked if the earth orbits the sun or vice versa, say it's the sun that does the orbiting--placing these people in the same camp as the Inquisition that punished Galileo almost 400 years ago. It also explains the extraordinary disconnect between scientists and much of the public over issues the scientists think were settled long ago--never mind newer discoveries and research on topics such as the use of chimeras to study cancer, or pills that may extend life span by 30 or 40 percent.

As Carl Sagan eloquently wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, ignorance reigns in our society at a moment when science is on the cusp of doing amazing and wonderful things, but also dangerous things. Ignorance, said Sagan, is not an option.

Indeed, given that we live in a culture based on science and technology, this situation is dangerous. It conjures the specter of a society in which a cadre of elites knows and understands the essentials of the science that underpins our civilization, while everyone else uses and depends on that science without having a clue. This scenario is troubling in a democracy that assumes a baseline of citizen knowledge. The outcome could be that the illiterates become so fearful of science and technology, so resentful of the exalted position of the elites, that they try to slow down the progress of science, or stop it altogether. Or the opposite could happen: the scientifically elite may grow frustrated with the illiterates and try to co-opt or even control them.

The forces of ignorance have squelched science across history, from the mob in ancient Alexandria, which chased the astronomer Aristarchus out of town for suggesting that the earth moved around the sun, to the present restrictions on federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research.

Elites' exploiting their scientific knowledge for power is also not new. Mayan elites, for instance, used their extraordinary knowledge of mathematics, engineering, and astronomy to build great cities and temples--and sumptuous palaces for themselves--and to awe and control the masses through a religion that included ripping the hearts out of sacrificial victims. Europeans during the colonial era leveraged their advanced guns and ships into global empires at the expense of so-called "ignorant savages."

One of Miller's findings that may surprise many Americans is that Europeans and Japanese actually rate slightly lower in science literacy. To be sure, these same populations also have a much higher percentage of people who accept evolution and other basic scientific theories. America's large population of conservative religious believers may be one reason for this discrepancy, although clearly there are hundreds of millions of people in the developed world who need education.

Perhaps we should launch a scientific literacy campaign like the mid-20th-century drive that nearly tripled the rate of basic literacy worldwide. The question is, does the public really want to know how gadgets run and how organisms work? And are scientists and those who control scientific knowledge willing to share--that is, to take the time, and perhaps give up some of their influence and access to knowledge?

In other words, is this seemingly global dilemma of science illiteracy fixable or not?

In the next few days look for:
Part II: What is the media's role in science illiteracy?
Part III: Are scientists helping or hindering science literacy?