Health & Medicine / Health Policy

Bush vs. Science: Is the White House Credible?

At first it seemed like another broadside from frequent White House critic Representative Henry Waxman, a liberal Democrat from Los Angeles. Early this August, at his request, the minority staff of the House Committee on Government Reform issued a 40-page report charging the Bush administration with misusing science to advance a conservative agenda. The study described “misleading statements by the President, inaccurate responses to Congress, altered web sites, suppressed agency reports, erroneous international communications and the gagging of scientists.”

Among Waxman’s charges:

APPOINTMENTS. The administration named “unqualified persons” with political agendas or industry ties to key policy posts or advisory committees, and it opposed qualified experts if they appeared to be anti-industry.

INFORMATION. Government agencies distorted or eliminated numerous postings on federal Web sites—especially those dealing with birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, and abortion. They also suppressed or distorted reports to Congress on global warming, missile defense, and wetlands protection, and the president included misleading information about stem cells in a national address.

RESEARCH. The administration suppressed studies on agricultural pollution, Arctic oil drilling, and global warming in government reports, and it blocked studies on air pollution. It created a restrictive atmosphere for HIV researchers studying gay men.

The press gave the Waxman report fleeting attention and, not surprisingly, the Bush administration dismisses it as partisan sniping. “The only one putting politics above science is Congressman Waxman, whose report is riddled with inaccuracies, distortions, and omissions,” says Kathryn Harrington, spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In the world of science, however, Waxman had a major impact, unleashing widespread anger from scientists in virtually every discipline—anger that had been simmering just below the surface. “There’s been a long record of elective use of science by the Bush administration,” says Glen Barry, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin. “My colleagues are very concerned about this.” Jeremy Symons of the National Wildlife Federation concurs: “Every scientist, regardless of whether he agrees or disagrees with the positions of the administration, is concerned that sound science isn’t being given due course,” he says.

One possible solution comes from Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists. He argues for the restoration of an agency like the Office of Technology Assessment, abolished by a Republican-controlled Congress in 1995. It was an independent body that helped congressmen and others assess technological and scientific issues. In the never-ending battle between science and politics, independence could be a good thing.

—Joseph D’Agnese

Ties With Drug Companies Bias Biomedical Research

Pervasive financial ties between universities and the pharmaceutical industry are tainting biomedical research, according to a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association last January. A research team led by Cary Gross of Yale University School of Medicine found that one-fourth of academic medical researchers receive funding from drug companies and that a large number of universities hold stock in start-up companies that perform research at the same institution. Gross and his colleagues examined data from more than 1,100 biomedical studies conducted since 1980. They found that research backed by industry was three times more likely to arrive at proindustry conclusions than studies without such backing.

Alan Goldhammer, associate vice president for regulatory affairs of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, dismisses the Gross study as a “very narrow look” at the broad spectrum of research and accuses the Yale team of “impugning the integrity of the investigators who conducted the tests.” Goldhammer points out that all clinical trials are reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration and by the journals that publish them and that pharmaceutical companies require the researchers they support to state their sources of funding. But Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, says companies often structure research in a manner that is most likely to yield favorable conclusions—by comparing a medication against a placebo, for instance, instead of comparing it with its most effective competitors. Angell adds that the conduct of medical research has changed drastically in the past two decades, as teaching hospitals nationwide have seen their revenues squeezed.

At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry has enjoyed unprecedented profits and has become much more aggressive in controlling the research it sponsors. “It used to be that companies would give a grant to a university and then stand back,” Angell says. But today those companies often insist on participating in the design of the studies they sponsor and sometimes claim the right to suppress results they consider unfavorable. Nor is it uncommon for researchers to have lucrative consulting arrangements with the companies that fund them. Angell and many others warn that unless these current trends are reversed, the credibility of medical research could be eroded.

—Charles Hirshberg