Sciencegate: Science That Matters From the Editors of Seed Magazine

Last week, Carl Zimmer posted an excellent article on his excellent blog about the cognitive effects of toxoplasmosis in rats and humans. Toxoplasmosis (a.k.a. “litterbox disease”) is caused by a protozoan, Toxoplasma gondii, that lives in cats. According to recent research, the affliction apparently alters the behavior of infected rats and people. There’s no need to totally rehash Zimmer's well-written and thought-provoking post (you did read it, right?), but the lowdown is that hanging around cats can augment your social skills (if you're female), make you more territorial (if you're male), lower your reaction time and increase your risk for schizophrenia. Phew.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should reveal at this point that I am the proud owner of two cats.

I'm tired of seeing cats get kicked around. No pun intended – I've known far too many people perfectly willing to boot a cat across a room for next to no reason. And now, all those jackasses have Toxoplasma gondii as an excuse.

Naturally, I assumed Zimmer was a "dog person." Imagine my shock when I discovered he in fact owns a fine specimen of a cat named "Tino."

But before all you dog-lovers out there chortle and reach to pet your pooch, BEWARE! Having a cat would probably be safer. What parasite-host symbiosis could be more dangerous and destructive than a rabies-infected dog?

I kid, I kid... Cats can get rabies too, of course. It's just important to realize that despite the frantic and wild extrapolations people try to make from these toxoplasmosis findings ("CATS WILL DRIVE YOU CRAZY AND EAT YOUR SOUL," etc.), cats remain wonderful pets with well-documented health benefits. Owning and caring for a cat can make you mentally and physically healthier by decreasing your blood pressure, cholesterol and loneliness. Alright, alright, it's true; a pet dog can do the same thing. But do dogs hunt down and kill disease-carrying mice and rats? Nope. Not like cats.

Y'see, toxoplasmosis isn't that bad, really. You can make it work for you. Let’s run down the list:

• Infected women are slightly more outgoing and perhaps more promiscuous.

Sounds good – I'm all for it.

• Infected men display slightly more suspicion and jealousy.

Again, this isn't necessarily bad – for instance, being more suspicious can be useful if someone's trying to con you out of some money.

• Infection increases your risk for schizophrenia.

Well, this sounds bad. But there are lots of things out there that are known to increase schizophrenia risks, like living in a large urban area or being born in the winter or spring. Owning a cat probably carries as much schizophrenia risk as opening up the newspaper and reading Garfield.

Overall, it sounds like cats might be doing us a favor. Keep this privileged position in mind next time you're scooping out Kitty's litter box. Meanwhile, you dog-lovers might not have such an easy time with the deadly hantavirus you're liable to contract from an unchecked rodent infestation.

The notion that parasites can actually help host organisms seems pretty wild, but there's no reason I know of why this couldn't be abundantly true. After all, parasites are usually only noticed when they somehow damage their hosts. Does it stand to reason then that natural selection would favor parasites that actually benefited their hosts instead of being harmful or neutral? There's certainly room in the natural world for such creatures – according to some estimates, we have formally described and identified barely one percent of Earth’s microscopic organisms.

In a way, benefits from parasites aren’t really new – according to the Red Queen evolutionary theory, parasites are probably indirectly responsible for arguably humanity's most-adored activity: our habit of having sex to reproduce instead of using binary fission like amoebas. The idea is that the gene-swapping of sex keeps us one step ahead of our concurrently-evolving parasites, thus increasing our chances of survival. Though biologist Leigh van Valen first proposed this concept, science writer Matt Ridley popularized it and gave it a catchy moniker. The name references a character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass who, though she eternally runs, always stays in the same place. Why Ridley didn't simply call it the "Treadmill" theory, I'll never know.

So Ford is laying off 30000 workers. This follows on the heels of GM's significant downsizing in November. Were these people alive during the '70s?

I was 11 in 1979, but even I can remember the K car. The story went like this: Oil prices surged, and US car companies had a fleet of gas-guzzlers that suddenly didn't look too attractive to the American consumer. Japanese companies, who'd been selling their cars where gas was a lot more expensive than in North America, filled the gap. The Big Three (actually, it was the Big Four then-- remember AMC? It was the original Defense Dept. contractor for the Hummer-- the military version-- and was folded into Chrysler) needed years to retool their fleets and make smaller, more fuel-efficient cars that people wanted to buy, and had to lay off thousands to do it, and they've never regained their market share.

GM blamed its recent ills on being essentially the largest HMO in the world-- the company has to provide health insurance for all present and past employees, and its cost per current employee is six times Toyota's. (While the health insurance non-system we have is wildly overpriced, this is not a fair comparison as GM has a ton more former employees it has to pay for than does Toyota, which ratchets up this ratio. Sorry for getting a little off-topic here.) But do you think GM would be bitching about benefits if it was selling six times as many vehicles? Selling more cars means needing more employees means no layoffs. GM's and Ford's numbers--particularly their SUV sales-- have been going down since oil started going up.

So GM's-- and Ford's-- problem is the same as it was in the '70s. I don't pretend to have any Deep Throats on the inside at either company, but evidence suggests they thought cheap oil would last forever. The first time this happened, it was the first time, so they might be forgiven for not listening to any Chicken Littles foreseeing an oil shortage brought on by politics (which is what it was). But the second time, these companies got drunk on the profits of SUVs, which (a) can be sold for more than cars but are hardly more expensive to produce-- most SUVs use car frames so assembly lines don't have to be retooled, which is a waste of time, and the extra steel for the larger vehicles amounts to pennies per car-- yet their sticker price is on average much higher; and (b) have lower expenses due to their lower fuel-efficiency requirements. (Thank you, Congress.)

Of course, being able to sell lots of SUVs required gas to remain cheap. This is exactly what happened in the '70s. The difference is that this time (a) they already knew it could happen and (b) the cause for oil being expensive is systemic, not just political. Sure, there is a ~10% premium because of Iraq & al Qaeda & the rest, but the reason oil costs more is because of the oil production peak, not because of 9/11 or the war.

The British Energy Institute-- formerly the British Petroleum Institute, a lobby and think tank funded by BP-- has been publicly wise to this for at least a year and a half. In mid-2004, I produced a discussion program on public radio about Hubbert's peak on which I had a representative from BEI & one from the American Petroleum Institute, which is funded by the US oil companies. The Brit was saying the peak is real; the API guy was sticking his head in the sand. Apparently GM & Ford missed this program.

The sad thing is that it's not the myopic executives who made these decisions who are getting canned, it's the workers who had nothing to do with it. Not to get all Marxist on you & all, but that's a fact: A third of its hourly employees are getting pink slips, but only 10 percent of salarymen. What about the guy who said, "You know what we need? A luxury SUV! I present-- the Lincoln Navigator!" Or the guy who said, "What we need is a slightly smaller, equally inefficient SUV! I present-- the Lincoln Aviator!" Or the guy who said, "We can make more money if we put truck bodies on passenger car frames." And the guy who said, "Forget a competitor to the Corolla-- these Escalades are the #1 carjacking target in Southern California!" Are they getting shown the door?

I'd like to make a preemptive correction to an article in the upcoming issue of the magazine. There's a piece in it on the attempts of several small biotech firms to introduce ex-Soviet bacteriophage therapies in the U.S. as an eventual answer to increasing rates of antibiotic resistance.

The article says that antibiotics were used in the clinic starting at the beginning of the 20th century. And of course that's not true. It was intended to say they were “developed in the early 20th Century.” Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, in 1928. Its utility as a drug was realized in the 1930s. The first attempts to mass manufacture it began in England in 1938. And it wasn’t until the 1940s that it became widely available to soldiers on the battlefield.

I'm not terribly proud of the error, to say the least, but these things inevitably happen from time to time when you’re editing a magazine. At any rate, the introduction of penicillin during World War II is one of the most famous events in medical history, and this gives me a chance to talk a little about it.

When it was introduced around 1943, penicillin was available only in limited quantities. During the war the government and private industry went to great effort and expense to build new drug factories and increase the available amount of the drug. But rationing was inevitable. So how do you ration a drug during wartime?

The government carefully considered the matter. They examined different populations that might benefit from the drug. Among them were (a) children and adults suffering from bacterial infections on the home front, (b) soldiers suffering from infected wounds, and (c) soldiers afflicted by venereal diseases.

Who do you think got the drug? If you guessed (c) soldiers with venereal diseases, you’re right. I know, it’s not glamorous, but in wartime the government decided that the rules of triage medicine would apply.

The primary goal in war is to achieve your military objectives, and that means the primary goal of military medicine is to put the best fighting force possible on the field. As callous as it sounds, that means if you’re an army physician with only one round of shots and you have a choice between giving it to an able bodied soldier with gonorrhea who can go back to the field and fire a rifle and another soldier who’s just lost an arm, the guy with the clap is getting the shots.

None of this is to say that penicillin wasn’t administered to sick children in Nebraska or soldiers with amputated limbs. But the government did set priorities for administering it that were a harsh reminder of the realities of warfare.

In fact, much of contemporary bioethics grew out of ethical dilemmas surrounding rationing medical care. The next famous example would come decades later when organ transplants became available. And it’s still a hot topic today. In 2006, we have plenty of penicillin, but not nearly enough livers to go around.

In countries with socialized medicine, rationing healthcare is a fact of life. And if you think draconian rationing measures are a thing of the past, wait for the next influenza pandemic.

Not that this hasn't already been properly addressed by PZ, but here's the article the Times did on ScienceBlogs.

Let me just say that, as a content guy, I'd much rather we'd been written up not in the business section.

But let me also say that, as a content guy, there's no such thing as bad publicity - and even though this article is all about making buck$ from scienceblogs - it's garnered a lot of attention in general, and the volume of e-mails I'm receiving about the site has gone up significantly.

(For those of you who e-mailed me about blogging with us - I'm on it - just busy! - and I hope to get back to all of you within a week.)

My own take on all this, as a professional journalist whose livelihood depends on advertising, is that part of my job is actually to be slightly (and sometimes more than slightly) antagonistic to the business end of this organization. In other words, part of my job as editor of our web properties is to make sure that our need to make this a sustainable business never interferes with our ability to generate quality content - otherwise no one will pay attention to what we're doing and we all may as well hang up our hats and go home.

So anyway, for the bloggers on scienceblogs and the readers of this site, know that just 'cause we're trying to load up on sponsors doesn't mean anything is going to change in terms of content. Buy Pepsi. Or editorial tone. Pizza Hut. Because that would never - ING Financial - ever happen around here.

Many people have been requesting a combined RSS feed for the homepage of ScienceBlogs (so they can get all the posts from all our bloggers in one big gulp). We haven't made this accessible on the main site yet, but for those of you intrepid enough to try it in beta, here it is:

http://scienceblogs.com/sample/combined.xml

Well, we finally went and did it - that is, launched ScienceBlogs.com. (Though if you're here, you probably already know about it.) We've taken folks like PZ Myers (Pharyngula), Ed Brayton (Dispatches From the Culture Wars) Greta and Dave Munger (Cognitive Daily) and GrrlScientist (Living the Scientific Life) not to mention many others, and rolled them all into one giant sweet delicious spliff o' wisdom weed.

And even though we just got started, we're already looking to expand. So tell your mother and your sister and your sister's mother - and don't be surprised if your favorite blog up and moves to fancier digs sometime soon.

Our experience on Seedmagazine.com is that, our ostensibly erudite youngish science-savvy audience aside, sex and violence sells. Just check out our "top-grossing" articles ever, on humans' response to monkey porn and those awards they give to people who died in horrible ways. (To be fair, there was that one high-falutin' one, on incompetent design.)

Anyway, it's interesting to see that, as reported by the Boston Globe, Newscientist.com has had a similar experience:

ACCORDING TO New Scientist, the popular science weekly published in London and Cambridge (Mass.), in 2005 the stories most often downloaded from its website were ''a stimulating mix of mystery, brain work, climate change, weaponry, and sex." More terrifying than stimulating, some might say-particularly those concerned that the Enlightenment is in eclipse these days.

There is something alarming about the prevalence of stories about sex and violence on the New Scientist's Top Ten list.

...continued here

Lockheed is protesting the decision by the Department of Energy to give the lab contract to the UC/Bechtel partnership. A good play for Lockheed, if the government decides to reconsider the contract award. And a really bad one if the DOE sticks to its guns.

And Doug Roberts, the retired lab employee who has kept a much-visited, oft-quoted blog for lab employees has announced he will be shutting down his site later this year, following the management changover at the lab.

The Times began a series on Diabetes today - don't switch off yet - that claims the following astonishing facts:

1 in 3 American children born in the past 5 years will develop diabetes in their lifetimes
1 in 2 Latinos of the same cohort will develop diabetes in their lifetimes
1 in 8 New Yorkers currently has diabetes
Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in the aged
As many war veterans lost lower limbs last year to the disease as American soldiers did to combat injuries in the entire Vietnam War.

Is it any wonder that the sugar industry is currently moving to block the possibility of their ever being a Big Tobacco style lawsuit against their industry?

Slate asked a bunch of big-heads to name the most significant cultural event of the year. Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair picked Judge Jones' decision in the Dover schoolboard Intelligent Design trial. (If you haven't read the juicier excerpts of that decision yet, you should - in addition to being an elegant refutation of all that Creationism / ID advocates stand for, at least in terms of getting their witchcraft into the classroom, it's also a fine piece of literature.) Hitchens' account is worth quoting in full:

At the opening of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh wrote of hearing one sweet and civilized word, and of the effect it had—as if a fatuous, bawling voice on a loudspeaker had been suddenly switched off. The judge's highly literate and elegant ruling in the Dover, Pa., intelligent-design case has had precisely that effect upon me. Just for once—for once—the raucous, boring, bullying noise of the religious morons is turned off, and one can hear the lucid tones of reason, detachment, culture, and irony. That the voters of the same town should have firmly retired the demagogues and dolts of their school board, and that both they and the judge should have been of a Republican tendency, only adds to my sense that the resources of civilization are not yet exhausted, and that we have wells of real intelligence upon which to draw. Please don't wake me up.

I figure once Seed receives incoherent letters from creationists like this one we'll finally be able to say we made it to the big-time. Which reminds me - send us letters to the editor!

via Pharyngula

The University of California has won its bid to retain control over Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sort of. Actually, the new contractor will be a limited liability corporation called Los Alamos National Security, or LANS, LLC.

But you'll read all about that in the news.

Of interest in the press conference held by the Department of Energy to announce the new contractor, was a bit of discussion about what would have happened if Lockheed had won the contract. Lockheed already runs Sandia National Laboratories, which create all the mechanisms in a nuclear weapon aside from the actual "nuclear package" - the core of the warhead. And a lot of these non-nuclear components are tres sophisticated and classified. If Lockheed had managed Los Alamos as well, it would also have been building nuclear components. The company would have been in a unique position - unique at least since the nuclear labs split into subsidiary operations decades ago - of working with designs for entire nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, Lockheed is part of the cooperative that builds nuclear weapons for the UK. So according to some, this would have given Lockheed a bit of a monopoly on nuclear weapons design and manufacture. According to the DOE officials, this wasn't taken into consideration in deciding the contract - they were working from a defined set of standards put forward before specific bidders even stepped up to the plate.

But had Lockheed/University of Texas won its bid to manage Los Alamos, there would then have been an additional round of discussion on what sort of checks and balances to implement as part of the contract to avoid the unique conflicts of interest that would come with a Lockheed contract.

There was no suggestion at any point during the press conference that Lockheed had ulterior motives for bidding on Los Alamos, nor am I positing any. For all I know, there could have been a round of talks on potential issues with a LANS, LLC contract. But I do think the Lockheed question yielded a nice discussion, presciently illustrating a point that will continue to come up in the next months:

The contract award is just the beginning of the story at Los Alamos.

The Senate blocked ANWR drilling again today. It had previously been defeated as part of the 2006 budget. Ted Stevens, the Republican senator from Alaska, in an incredibly controversial move wrote Alaskan oil drilling into the 2006 defense spending bill. That meant that in order for the Senate to approve needed items for U.S. troops - bullets, body armor, etc. - they also had to approve drilling in Alaska. It was a move that various senators called obscene, disgusting and desperate. And they didn't bite.

Long story short, the Democrats filibustered, the Republicans didn't get the 60 votes they needed to break the filibuster, and now the House will begin revising the bill into something that might actually pass after the holidays.

Even when you dislike the idea of drilling in ANWR, it's hard to feel great about the whole thing, when Congress begins using troops' salaries and supplies as bargaining chips in the debate.

The Department of Energy will announce the new manager of Los Alamos National Laboratory today. The nuclear weapons lab has been managed by the University of California since it was created during the Manhattan Project.

The contract will go either to a corporation started by Lockheed Martin and its university-partner, the University of Texas - or to a competing partnership between government contractor Bechtel and the University of California.

In the absence of hard information, who gets the contract has been the subject of much wild speculation in recent months. As it comes down to the wire, folks at the Los Alamos blog seem to have reached fever pitch, searching flightplans out of Austin, Sacramento and DC in an attempt to see which partnership might be flying in to claim the lab.

Is this the first sign of a new manager at Los Alamos?

We'll see at 2 p.m today. Or we could try reading tea leaves instead.

It’s not over, of course, and never will be. We commend Judge John Jones for accepting the mantle of history and penning a crystal-clear refutation of Intelligent Design’s claim to scientific credibility. His bold 139-page decision in the Dover school board case (PDF version here; seriously, it's a great read) is nothing less than a home run. But this evening I was standing in line at the corner grocery and there was a TV on, and I stood there watching aghast through my cold-fogged glasses as ABC News wrung any note of closure from the Dover verdict.

All the regular journalistic sins and crutches were there in spades: In big yellow text on the screen, evolution was doubtfully described once again as “A theory, and not a fact.” Twice during their story the anchor’s copy stressed that supporters of ID say their theory is “grounded in science." This claim was backed up by an absurd shot of someone puttering around what I suppose was a creationist “lab.” If there are test tubes it must be science, I guess. For color, or perhaps for an expert witness, ABC called up the clip of that oily grandpa Pat Robertson damning Dover to God’s wrath. There was also a highlight reel of those brave Kansans raising their hands amid a shower of flashbulbs to vote against the oppression of evolution in the classroom.

The anchor marched to her conclusion: “There is talk of healing in Dover tonight, but...” Cut to a map of the entire US, to warn us just how far the battle has spread. “Forty-something states have yadda yadda in favor of Intelligent Design in the classroom yadda yadda...” (Forgive the gaps here - I was digging for pocket change, and the store was piping in the Christmas music pretty heavy.) Even more striking than the stat was the graphic. The original image was a scientific-looking topographical map, an unusually detailed choice for the evening news, complete with the crinkly brown Rockies and all the low green coastlines. As she read her copy, all of the ID battleground states were suddenly ironed out into a flat, mustardy yellow. I grabbed my doubled-bagged ramen and milk and stepped out into the cold with Isaiah ringing in my ears: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain...”

I am stuck on a Bible verse here because on the night of science’s great triumph I have none of our own prophets to turn to. The ABC story gave us a clip of one of the plaintiff parents followed by a few words from a visibly exhausted and relieved Dover science teacher, who, bless her heart, looked about 12 years old. Neither can top Pat Robertson in a duel of sound bites, I’m afraid. We need to bring in our own venerable lions: We need Edward Wilson or Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett up there, roaring in victory, their incredibly wise and certain talking heads available for the evening news. Yes, of course they write books, but that’s sharpening spears in the midst of a firefight. We need press conferences. We need to fire off press releases.

This is just to emphasize a point Chris Mooney has been making for some time now: if science is to win over hearts and minds over in this country, its acolytes are going to have to get down off their lab stools and engage their detractors. Look at the first two quotes after Jones in the AP story. Eric Rothschild, the lawyer who has just nailed ID to the wall in federal court, says something nice but vague about “the parents who had the courage to stand up and say there was something wrong in their school district.” Meanwhile, Richard Thompson, head of the Thomas Moore Law Center, which backed Dover’s ID faction, stays right on message: “What this really looks like is an ad hominem attack on scientists who happen to believe in God.” Touchdown, ID.

Why, indeed, would Americans buy science’s dry and exacting rules and methods when we've got ID and so many other glow-in-the-dark, faith-based trinkets to choose from? Because science is the truth? Ah, but truth is easy. Tonight on the ABC News website the Dover story was sitting right next to a link to an “ABC News Exclusive” entitled “Heaven: Where is it? How do we get there?” This country was built on the grand premise of believing whatever the hell you want to, and unfortunately that’s one freedom that science and its fearless objectivity can’t quite give us. The woman behind me in the checkout line couldn’t help but notice that I was staring open-mouthed at the TV. “It’s a crazy world today,” she says to me. I tried to agree, making frustrated noises and pointing at the screen. Stepping up to the register she looks back at me and says, “They should just leave you alone to make your own decisions.”

It's no surprise to Seed readers that science has long left the lab building -- it is, after all, the dominant force for change in the 21st century.

But what it's so far lacked is the kind of snarky observer/ombudsmen that already enliven the realms of media, politics and fashion.

So as a service to the loyal readership of ScienceGate, we've dug one up -- an irreverent-yet-invested science blog that, despite the occasional sting, the editors here secretly enjoy. If you think science deserves a bit more of the Maxim treatment, Check it out:

via Frinktank:

Aw, got no friends? Time for a play date....with science

SpaceCamp is For Losers Who Die

Science makes everything better--even Return of the Jedi

Unified Field Theory (of yammering) Achieved

ET Phone Rome

So, individualized medicines, tailored to you based on your genetics, are something people have been ranting about for awhile now. The field is called pharmacogenomics. But, the sort of idea they're selling - that your physician will prick your finger, sample your DNA with some GATTACA-style palm-pilot and print out a list of prescriptions for designer drugs to take to the pharmacy - well, that's mostly bull. For now, anyway.

We're a hell of a long way from being able to look at someone's genes, derive their physiology and use the information to formulate any specialized medication. We're even a long way from being able to locate genetic reasons for why a drug might be efficacious in one population and not in another.

Here's how pharmacogenomics is actually starting out: trial and error, quite literally. After the heart medication, BiDil failed in trials, Nitromed - the company developing the drug - decided to cut their losses and try a new drug trial in African Americans only, based on some preliminary evidence that it worked better in this population. Today it was reported, the same is happening with Xyotax. Cell Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company is going to start women-only trials of the lung cancer drug after initial trials failed.

These companies know nothing about the underlying genetic or environmental conditions that might make the drug more or less effective in different people - they're merely cutting their losses after trials fail by re-trying the drug in a unique subpopulation. And this is going to be an increasing trend, as companies realize that FDA approval doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing game. Eventually, through trial and error, they'll divide up the population into promising FDA trial groups and we may get to something approaching individualized medicine.

One day, they may begin to learn about the genetic and environmental conditions that make a drug efficacious, and then we might be a little closer to pharmacogenomics as advertised. But most of the time there's no real impetus to do even this. The FDA only requires safety and efficacy information. They don't care why a drug works. And most of the time we have no idea. We're not even sure how Tylenol works. But it does, and no one's dropping dead when they take it. So it's approved.

Linking genetic markers to drug efficacy is a really hard problem. I'm not saying pharmacogenomics won't eventually come around. But it's unlikely that we're going to see a bottom up approach of identifying genes, and designing drugs to match. It's much more likely we'll see a gradual subdivision of the drug market into increasingly specific groups, until separating patient groups by genetic markers becomes the next logical step.

With 2005 nearing its close, now is the time of list-making. We've seen lists rating the top discoveries of 2005, the top books, the top films. But I'm tired of lists of applause. I think it's time for some lists of scorn.

Political attacks on science have become a matter of increasing concern of late. But despite growing condemnation by the American scientific community, they have continued apace. So now, at the end of 2005, it's time to compile a list of the top political offenders against science this year--leaders who most emphatically do not make us proud.

I want to hear your suggestions below, but let me start off the process with a few nominations:

James Inhofe. Fresh from suggesting that global warming might be the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" in 2003, in late September the Environment and Public Works Committee chair followed up with a hearing in which sci-fi novelist Michael Crichton delivered expert testimony on global warming. Crichton promptly questioned "whether the methodology of climate science is sufficiently rigorous to yield a reliable result," making an entirely inapt comparison to the standards of proof that exist in a wildly different field: medical research. Crichton also suggested that widely used climate models that project future temperature change are of no use to policymakers. In response, Barbara Boxer of California commented of Crichton's testimony, "I think we have to focus on facts, not fiction." But thanks for the spectacle, Senator Inhofe.

Joe Barton. The chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee drew condemnations from the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and even his own Republican colleague Sherwood Boehlert (chair of the House Committee on Science) when he sent letters to a group of climate scientists over the summer, announcing an extensive and inappropriate data inquiry into the validity of their published work. As Science's CEO Alan Leshner put it in his letter to Barton, "Your letters…in their request for highly detailed information regarding not only the scientists’ recent studies but also their life's work, give the impression of a search for some basis on which to discredit these particular scientists and findings, rather than a search for understanding. With all respect, we question whether this approach is good for the processes by which scientific findings on topics relevant to public policy are generated and used."

Bill Frist, John McCain, George W. Bush. By my count, these are the three most prominent politicians this year to endorse the teaching of "intelligent design" alongside evolution (although McCain's real view is somewhat murky). For this--for undermining the very integrity of American science education--they too deserve our scorn.

These are my nominees, but I'd like to hear yours too. Fire away…..

I don't get any pleasure out of beating up on The Washington Post's Peter Whoriskey. After all, he recently did a great piece on hurricanes and global warming that should be required reading on the subject. But unfortunately, Whoriskey has now gone and ruined it with a single, terrible sentence in a recent feature story about the cultural divisions in Cobb County, Georgia:

Like others who adhere to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, Rogers, a lawyer, believes that Earth is several thousand years old, while most scientists, basing their estimates on the radioactive decay of rock samples, say the planet is billions of years old.

Aaarrrghhhh!!! This "balanced" journalistic framing reduces the age of the earth to a matter of opinion ("most scientists say…"). It is no such thing. It is a matter of well established scientific fact. Here's what Whoriskey should have written, with my changes in bold:

Like others who adhere to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, Rogers, a lawyer, believes that Earth is several thousand years old. That is incorrect. Scientists studying the radioactive decay of rock samples have demonstrated that the planet is billions of years old.

Why can't outright nonsense be accurately described as such by journalists? Why is this so difficult?

In Roll Call, Morton Kondracke has a very interesting column (subscription only) calling upon President Bush to lay out a science and research agenda in his next SOTU speech--"a major initiative to retain America’s threatened world leadership in science and technology." Knodracke notes that this idea has been going around in both Republican and Democratic circles, and the corresponding legislation would assuredly draw bipartisan support. Interesting to ponder where the money might come from, though; what's being discussed here is a $ 10 billion per year effort:

Encompassing 20 recommendations issued in October by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, the bill includes funding of 40,000 scholarships, changing immigration laws to attract and keep foreign science students, creating a Presidential Innovation Award to stimulate scientific advances and establishing a new Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Department of Energy.

If Bush were to pull something like this, I would certainly applaud the move--but with caveats. First, let's not forget that Bush's last attempt to be a scientific visionary--the Moon-Mars program--came out of nowhere and didn't really appear earnest to the public. It seemed more like a stage-managed attempt to walk in the shoes of JFK.

More generally, Bush has a serious credibility problem on science, and if he comes out with a program like this, I know that I and many others will immediately ask, "How can you launch an initiative to make the U.S. competitive scientifically even as your administration continues to restrict funding for embryonic stem cell research?" (Kondracke's column skips mentioning this little roadblock).

And it's not just the stem cell issue. It's the broader question of how a president who demotes his science adviser, who thinks "intelligent design" should be taught alongside evolution, and who selectively invokes uncertainty rather than coming clean with the public about climate change, can be taken seriously as a scientific visionary.

This is a perennial problem for today's GOP leaders. In The Republican War on Science, I consider the paradoxical figure of Newt Gingrich: A great supporter of federal funding of scientific research who nevertheless presided over the dismantling of the Office of Technology Assessment and increasing attacks on climate and ozone science in Congress. Sure, Gingrich championed scientific research. But he didn't necessarily want to listen to the results of science when they were politically inconvenient. If Bush does throw his weight behind a science competitiveness initiative, that would be a good thing. But he would immediately be vulnerable to the same criticism….