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Delve

Being ill on a three-day weekend isn't all bad. You get a little light reading done.

A gem:

Peer Review Plan Draws Criticism: Under Bush Proposal, OMB Would Evaluate Science Before New Rules Take Effect, by Rick Weiss, Washington Post

My mother sent me the above article... she usually sends me anything "remotely science" - and especially when politics are interwoven. Now, I'm not much of a scientist. At best, I'd call myself a "meddler," rather than an investigator. But woe to the government that dabbles with the scientific method. I'm wary of any move that would seek to politicize science - the two just aren't practically compatible. With the White House stepping in as a "peer review" system to screen scientific data before public policies based on these data are implemented, I greatly fear that biased parties (politicians and lobbyists) or other groups unfamiliar with the scientific method will look at the data under consideration and say, "Oh, well these results aren't certain... we must have 100% confidence before we can sculpt these global climate statistics into public policy..." I use global climate statistics as an example - one could easily substitute phrases such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria and industrial misuse of antibiotics correlational reports or net carbon dioxide industrial output reports or rapid thinning of the Arctic Ice Sheets or HIV-1 integrase inhibitors or prokaryotic lateral gene transfer... the list goes on and on.

But what I fear these parties won't understand (or will conveniently forget) is that precious little in science is 100% certain. That is why we have more "theories" (The Theory of Continental Drift, The Theory of Global Warming, The Theory of Relativity... or "things-that-have-not-yet-been-disproven") than "laws" (The Three Laws of Theormodynamics, for example). Hampered by being sexually-charged primates with clumbsy hands, a poor sense of smell, and the damnable "flight-or-fight" mammalian instinct, we aren't the best at delving - and I mean really delving - into the nuts and bolts of our environment. We need technology - damned expensive, precise technological tools to help us (hell, to do the work for us). To see the smallest atom - to pick a point of black sky and peer at it for so long that we can look further and further back into time to the Big Bang - to see the fetus in a mother's womb - to see the clogged artery, the speeding bullet, the influenza virus, the black hole.

What I press for everyone to understand here is that, even with our "great technological feats" and our (supposedly sound) scientific method, we can seldom look at one study - one data set - and say, "Yes, Mr. So-and-So-from-the-White-House-Office-of-Management-and-Budget, these data are 100% sound." Instead, we get terms like "trend" and "tendency" and "results point to" and "further studies needed" - and I fear those phrases will send politicans to assert that no difinitive conclusions were reached from a particular study, or a group of studies. But this is far from the truth. Science, by nature (and by our limited powers of observation - see the above disadvantages of being a clumbsy primate), is often indirect. But politicians, as far as I can tell, want nothing but the Direct.

If we sat around waiting and waiting, and delaying policy (or omitting it altogether) until the (unattainable) 100% results are available, then I suppose...

1...we could not use antibiotics right now - even almost a century after they were "discovered" by Alexander Fleming. After all (as we are learning now), they are far from 100% sound. Delete every single antibiotic you've ever taken from your personal medical history.

2...we could not assert that DNA is the "genetic material" passed from cell-to-cell. Nor could we claim to know its structure. At least, not until the last decade, or so, when Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Atomic Froce Microscopy techniques were developed to actually see DNA. If these O.M.B. rules had existed when James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin had made their proposals on the molecular structure of DNA, I wonder if the White House would've rejected their hypothesis, since, after all, it was all indirect. If that turned out to be the case, then delete 99% of our medical breakthroughs for the last half century.

DNA ("the stuff of life"), in the same structure proposed by Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin in the 1950s. Now, thanks to Scanning Tunneling Microscopy perfected in the last decade, the O.M.B. can see it and believe it.

I fear these new rules will stifle scientific progress... or at least, stifle the progress in which new discoveries can be implemented into public policy. And, worse yet (pay attention here), it will allow special interest groups friendly with the Administration (Bush or any administration - any party) to influence which data are refuted and which are accepted and sculpted into policy. And the extent to which the policies are really, truly effective would again be dependent on special interest groups.

Don't get me wrong; I'm a huge fan of peer review. A devoted fan. But this is anything BUT peer review. It has the guise of peer review, but the stench of "the ol' Potomac two-step" - the game of politics. Some supporters of this move point to the absurd level of "interal politics" in science. Oh, I'll agree with you there - there's competition, gossip, back-stabbing, petty theft - the whole ball-of-wax. But all of that is confined within the realm of science - particularly within specific fields (you'll never see a nuclear physicist and a yeast biochemist fighting for the same NIH grant). It may hamper productivity to an extent - we aren't as efficient as we could be. But, it does not hamper discovery. It does not hinder the acquisition of sound, quality data - or the interpretations of said data. It is the best system we have. And now, I fear, the results of this system will never see public eye, or will never be implemented into sound laws and policies, unless they don't politically rock-the-boat.

Science is about rocking-the-boat; I don't know about you, but I can swim.

Posted by James at January 18, 2004 04:51 PM