News Tip: Concerns About Administration's Impartiality on Scientific Research

The dismissal of two members of the President's Council on Bioethics and other recent developments involving stem cells raise legitimate concerns about the Bush Administration's impartiality regarding scientific research, say two Duke University professors.

Duke's Lauren Dame said she is concerned about the possible "stacking" by the White House of the council, which advises the president on stem cells, cloning and other biological science issues. Dame is associate director of the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy's Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy (GELP) at Duke.

"The replacement of these two council members appears to lend support to charges made in a recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists that the Bush Administration is misusing science for political ends," said Dame, who is also a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law School. "While politics will play a role in the final policy-making stages, the council's role as an advisory body should be to consider all sides of these very complex bioethical issues."

Alex Rosenberg, the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke, said the replacement of two council members with three other appointees, two of whom are viewed as conservative, "reflects the degree to which the Bush administration has not merely politicized but deformed the policy process."

Rosenberg, a faculty member in Duke's Center for Philosophy of Biology, said he is also concerned about the Bush Administration's policy on stem cell research. In 2001, Bush restricted the use of federal research funding to a limited number of existing embryonic stem cell "lines," calling such research "morally questionable." News last week out of Harvard reported that a privately funded scientist and his colleagues have cultivated 17 new stem cells lines and plan to make them available to other researchers.

"The Harvard researchers' litany of difficulties in securing access to existing lines prior to establishing their own shows the essential hypocrisy of the policy which Bush adopted as a matter of expediency three years ago," Rosenberg said.

Ethicists from across the country sent an open letter to the president protesting his decision not to re-appoint two members of the panel, and Rosenberg said he agrees with the sentiments in the letter. "This pattern of suppression of inconvenient findings has now reached the extent of discharging experts and appointing non-entities and yes-persons to the President's Council on Bioethics," Rosenberg said.

It is feared these appointments will not only skew policy, but also engender mistrust, said Dame. "It will be easy to lose the public's trust in science, and much more difficult to get it back," she said.

Rosenberg can be reached for additional comment at (919) 660-3047 or by email at alexrose@duke.edu. Dame can be reached at (919) 668-0792 or by email at dame@law.duke.edu.