Undermining Science by Seth Shulman

[Guest guest]

Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush

Administration by Seth Shulman, 2005 Dibner Science Writer Fellow at

MIT. (Berkeley: U of California, 2007).

" Exhaustively sourced and researched, Shulman's book leaves no doubt

that the integrity of government research is under attack. . . . A

work of timely muckraking. " " —Discover Magazine

" A concise, straightforward case history of the politicization of

science. " —Nature

" Combining thorough research with lucid prose and a sense of mounting

outrage, [shulman] charges that the president's appointees and

advisers are not only threatening the scientific enterprise but also

American democracy itself. . . . Shulman's consolidation of these

tales of manipulation, intimidation and deception makes for

disquieting reading. " —Publishers Weekly

" We can only expect the best decisions from our leaders in government

when they use the best factual information they can receive from

science. Shulman outlines how the current administration has

systematically blocked the input of scientists in favor of ideology

and favors to special interest groups. " — H. Schlesinger, Dean,

School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University

" In a free society, no separation of powers is more fundamentally

important than that between the power of science in informing debate,

and the power of politicians in implementing policy. Seth Shulman's

remarkably well-documented litany of abuses should serve as a wake-up

call not only to society, but also to political leaders, who cannot

govern for long without independent scientific expertise grounded in

unquestioned integrity. " —Simon Levin, Center for BioComplexity,

Princeton University

" In this disturbing and important book, Seth Shulman has uncovered the

myriad ways W. Bush and his anti-science administration have

distorted—almost beyond recognition—the accomplishments that have

elevated America to its position as one of the greatest scientific and

technological nations in history. That status is now being undermined.

But thanks to investigators like Shulman, the gig is up, just in time

for us to do something about it. " — Shermer, Publisher Skeptic

magazine, monthly columnist Scientific American, author of The Science

of Good and Evil

" Seth Shulman's Undermining Science forcefully makes the case that in

the Bush administration ideology trumps fact, political expediency

trumps science. The extraordinary claims made by Shulman are

persuasive because they are based on concrete and fully documented

events. The blow-by-blow narrative is eminently readable, as well as

enlightening, even fascinating. " —Francisco J. Ayala, Professor of

Biological Sciences, U.C. Irvine, 2002 recipient of the National Medal

of Science

Description

This vitally important exposé shows how the Bush administration has

systematically misled Americans on a wide range of scientific issues

affecting public health, foreign policy, and the environment by

ignoring, suppressing, manipulating, or even distorting scientific

research. It is the first book to focus exclusively on how this

explosive issue has played out during the Presidency of W. Bush

and the first to comprehensively document his administration's abuses

of science.

In 2001, a group of eminent American scientists affiliated with the

Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) contacted Seth Shulman, an

experienced investigative journalist, to look into charges of serious

mishandling of scientific information in the current administration.

Shulman's investigation resulted in the groundbreaking report

" Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making, " which served as the

basis for a highly publicized UCS scientists' statement accusing the

Bush administration of a misuse of science that was signed by dozens

of Nobel laureates, National Medal of Science recipients, and members

of the National Academy of Sciences. To date, more than 8,000

scientists across the country have signed the statement based upon

Shulman's reporting. This book, drawing upon scores of interviews and

including never-released information, goes beyond the UCS report to

document the Bush administration's suppression and distortion of

science, bringing this issue to a wider audience.

Undermining Science covers:

* The Bush administration's abuse and misuse of science in areas

including stem cell research, AIDS prevention, environmental

protection, the Iraq war, the teaching of evolution, and global warming;

* The administration's use of political litmus tests in selecting

administrators for science-based agencies and in selecting scientists

on federal advisory committees;

* The dangerous consequences of the Bush administration's war on

science for the caliber and integrity of the nation's scientific research.

Shulman explains that, by knowingly misrepresenting and suppressing

the truth, the Bush administration broke its covenant with its

constituents in the most fundamental way possible, with consequences

that reach far beyond the scientific community.

Contents

Preface

1. Facts Matter

2. " Icing " the Data on Climate Change

3. Doctoring Evidence about Your Health

4. Abstaining from the Truth on Abstinence and AIDS

5. Clear Skies? Healthy Forests? Understanding Bush's Real

Environmental Policy

6. When Good Science Is the Endangered Species

7. Burying More Than Intelligence on Our Security

8. Stacking the Deck against Science

9. Stem Cells and Monkey Trials

10. Restoring Scientific Integrity

Notes Index

About The Author

Seth Shulman is an award-winning journalist and author who has written

for many magazines, including Nature, sonian, the Atlantic,

Discover, Rolling Stone, Parade, and Popular Science; and for

newspapers including, the Times of London, the Boston Globe, and the

Los Angeles Times. He is the author of books including The Threat at

Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the U.S. Military. For the

2004-2005 academic year, he was the first-ever Dibner Science Writer

Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10546.php

***

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 98 : 4 (2007) 877

Seth Shulman. Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the

Bush Administration. xix 202 pp., index. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2006. $24.95 (cloth).

The subject of Seth Shulman's book is the overt

manipulation and abuse of science under the ad-

ministration of W. Bush, a topic that has

been much publicized over the last few years.

From the president's stance on stem-cell research,

to the administration's denial of global climate

change and refusal of the Kyoto Protocol, to many

instances of overtly political obstruction of public

health initiatives by government agencies (such

as the " Plan B " contraception fiasco), it has been

clear to many observers that the current regime

is fairly hostile toward science and scientists.

Shulman's book comes on the heels of Chris

Mooney's similar and very successful book The

Republican War on Science (Basic, 2005), and

comparisons between the two are inevitable.

Both authors are journalists, not academic his-

torians, and both cover essentially the same ter-

ritory in terms of cataloguing abuses by the Bush

administration. What sets the two apart initially

is that while Mooney's study covers the history

of science politicization from the Nixon years

forward, Shulman focuses only on the current

Bush administration and limits his analysis to a

series of case studies designed to illustrate a pat-

tern of abuse he argues has set a " new standard "

for " overt politicization " (p. xvi).

As a journalistand science writer, Shulman is

admirably qualified to write on this topic, and

his descriptions of scientific concepts and issues

are pithy and lucid (for example, his summary

of stem-cell science is among the best I've read).

He also tips his hat to historians by acknowledg-

ing the importance of establishing a historical

record of the Bush administration's policies and

actions—which he compares to Lysenkoism and

the McCarthy affair—for future study. But Shul-

man makes no bones about his intention to write

an exposé, not a detached account: in explaining

the motivation for the book, he confides that " as

a working journalist, I feel compelled to speak

out when the government lies to its citizenry " (p.

xvii). Indeed, the book itself began as a report

Shulman was commissioned to write for the sci-

ence advocacy group Union of Concerned Sci-

entists in 2004 for the express purpose of chal-

lenging the Bush administration in the political

arena.

Overall, Undermining Science does a fine job

of reporting many of the more spectacular in-

stances of manipulation, intimidation, suppres-

sion, and outright lying by Bush administration

officials and their political appointees across a

fairly wide spectrum of scientific and public

health issues. Some topics, like stem cells, global

warming, sexual abstinence, and prescription

drug protocols, will be familiar to many readers,

but others, including an eye-opening chapter on

manipulation of the Endangered Species Act,

bring to light important facts that have escaped

wider public attention. Shulman's intentions are

certainly laudable (at least from the perspective

of those readers who believe that science mat-

ters), and his journalistic skill is more than ad-

equate for his task, but I felt the composition of

the book left something to be desired. In the first

place, it is rather short (only 158 pages of actual

text), and the treatment of topics in each of the

book's ten chapters is necessarily fairly cursory.

Shulman does a fine job of convincing the reader

of the prevalence of abuses through the brief an-

ecdotes he recounts, but he doesn't provide the

kind of in-depth exposure of the start-to-finish

paper trail for each case that Mooney's longer

treatment of the same subject allows. Because of

this, the book at times feels like a didactic cata-

logue of sins that has the unfortunate effect of

leaving the reader numbed rather than outraged.

Perhaps this is in part due to the increasingly wide

coverage many of these topics have received in

the popular media and in other books—whichone

assumes Shulman would appreciate and for which

he can hardly be faulted—but in the end the book

struggles to find a consistent analytical or narra-

tive thread to make the reader keep turning the

pages.

Where the book has unquestionable value,

however, is in drawing parallels between the

Bush administration's abuse of the public trust

with regard to science and its handling of

broader domestic and foreign policy issues.

Shulman hones in on these connections in the

latter part of the book, where it becomes clear

that similarities between the administration's

handling of scientific expertise and, say, the Iraq

war or Justice Department dismissals are hardly

coincidental. In both instances the administra-

tion applied the same tactics: manipulating facts,

using political appointees as " gatekeepers " in os-

tensibly nonpolitical government agencies, ap-

plying political " litmus tests " to load agencies

with ideological soldiers, and intimidating and

silencing dissenters within the ranks. Histori-

cally speaking, this disastrously arrogant policy

may have consequences we are only beginning

to appreciate, but authors like Shulman deserve

our appreciation for taking the time and effort to

root out and expose the kinds of abuses that all

too often happen silently and outside of the pub-

lic view.

DAVID SEPKOSKI

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