President's panel skewed facts, 2 scientists say
boston.com
By Gareth Cook
Boston Globe Staff
3/6/2004
Two scientists from President Bush's top advisory board on cutting-edge medical research yesterday published a detailed criticism of the board's own reports, and said the board skewed scientific facts in service of a political and ideological cause.
The authors -- one is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and the other was fired from the council over a week ago -- have accused the council's chairman, Dr. Leon R. Kass, of ignoring their scientific advice and refusing to include in the board's last report some information that would challenge Bush's restrictions on stem cell research.
Their allegations mark the sharpest public split yet within the council, formed in 2001 to guide US policy through the increasingly difficult ethical terrain of such fields as cloning, in-vitro fertilization, and embryonic stem-cell research.
The authors of the critique published yesterday were two of only three full-time scientists on the council. They said the council's last report, "Monitoring Stem Cell Research," did not make clear that a wave of recent scientific research has cast doubt on the potential of adult stem cells -- a type of cell that Bush held up as a promising alternative when he announced his restrictions on the use of embryonic cells.
Although the council is supposed to provide impartial advice to Bush, one of the scientists said yesterday that its reports seemed to be driven by a preexisting agenda and did not accurately portray the scientific underpinnings of the ethical issues the council was grappling with.
"There is always this strong implication [in the reports] that medical research is not what God intended, that there is something unnatural about it," said Elizabeth H. Blackburn, a highly regarded biologist who was fired from the panel last Friday. "We had a great many comments on the report, and they would just make a little changes that didn't fully address them."
A spokesperson for Kass said that he had no comment on the allegations and that the scientific comments of Blackburn and Janet Rowley, a University of Chicago biologist who cowrote the critique, are adequately represented in the council's reports.
Their critique was published online yesterday by the journal PLoS Biology. It adds to growing criticism from scientists that the Bush administration is manipulating the scientific advice it receives on politically charged issues, ranging from climate change to mercury contamination. Last month, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a statement, signed by more that 60 Nobel laureates, that alleged the administration has manipulated scientific findings to a degree unprecedented in recent White House history.
The critique also adds to the drama of what is becoming a cause for some biologists: the firing of Blackburn. Blackburn, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, is often mentioned as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize for her work in cell biology. But eight days ago, she was told the council had new priorities and she was abruptly fired by a White House official. Kass, the council's chairman, did not tell her she was going to be asked to leave and has not spoken with her since, Blackburn said yesterday.
But shortly before she was fired, she showed him the text of yesterday's critique and told him she had submitted it for publication. At the same time Blackburn was fired, another council member was asked to leave, medical ethicist William F. May of Southern Methodist University.
The firing has drawn attention in the scientific community and has been criticized by some politicians.
"We have diseases that can be cured, and we have a president who has kicked two people off the commission because they happen to think we ought to be doing stem cell research and other kinds of research, and he doesn't want that outcome," said Senator John F. Kerry yesterday through a spokesman. "It is clear that the administration has no respect for science."
The critique published yesterday focuses on two reports issued by the council, one issued in October titled "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness," and another issued in January titled "Monitoring Stem Cell Research."
The two scientists' critique, entitled "Reason as Our Guide," alleges that the "Beyond Therapy" report unfairly characterizes research into prolonging healthy life as being dominated by scientists who are driven by the goal of immortality. The report, they write, "falls short of explaining the serious challenge of preventing and curing age-related disease to extend health -- very different from attempting immortality."
Blackburn, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, said that she had submitted a letter to the journal Science, outlining the problems with that report, but that Kass ordered her to withdraw the letter, which she did.
In another section of their critique, Blackburn and Rowley list a series of problems with the stem cell report. The cumulative effect of the problems, Blackburn said, is to overstate the current research promise of adult stem cells and play down the potential of embryonic stem cells, which are created by destroying a human embryo when it has reached a ball of about 100 cells. To its critics, embryonic stem-cell research amounts to taking a human life -- an objection that does not apply to the adult cells, which can be extracted from a person's body without harm. In 2001, Bush declared that the federal government would not fund research using human embryonic cell lines that had not been created before his statement. Michael S. Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College who is the only other full-time scientist on the council, said yesterday that he was "very disheartened" that Blackburn had been fired, but that he had no plans to quit the panel. Asked about the new critique by Blackburn and Rowley, he said, "I 100 percent support what they are trying to do," but declined to elaborate.
The report published yesterday is available at www.plosbiology.org. |
