The Fragility of Science

Source: wikicommons

Given the tumult of criticism that the Trump administration has attracted in many quarters over the past 18 months, it is noteworthy that the President has still managed, not once but twice over the past two weeks, to anger many people further. The President’s unwillingness to have the United States join the other nations of the G-7 in their joint communique after their leaders’ recent meeting in Quebec and his personal attacks on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, on the one hand, and his administration’s choice, recently rescinded, to split up families not just of illegal immigrants but of asylum seekers at the Mexican border (its so-called “zero tolerance” policy), on the other, have provoked protests and scores of opinion pieces condemning these actions in newspapers around the country.

What has, by comparison, received much less attention is the Trump administration’s many less dramatic, but no less consequential steps for either limiting the influence of scientific research on government policies and initiatives or excluding it altogether. In a recent piece Coral Davenport reviews some of the more striking measures undertaken. Following is (1) a brief summary of some of the developments that she reports and (2) an observation about the fragility of science.

(1) Some Details

Davenport notes that Trump has no chief science advisor in place at the State Department or the Agriculture Department, as his proposed appointee for the latter position, a former talk show host, had no scientific credentials and withdrew. Even more surprising, given the impending nuclear talks with North Korea and the reemergence of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the past few weeks, Trump is the first president not to appoint a White House Science Advisor, since such a position was created in 1941. It is not just that particular positions remain unfilled. Entire science advisory committees at the Department of Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Food and Drug Administration have been eliminated.

The most acute problems appear to be at the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Last year the Interior Department eliminated funding for a study being carried out by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that was examining the impact on human health of coal dust in the water and air. Earlier this year most of the members of Interior’s National Parks System Advisory Board, at least half of whom, according to the National Park System’s website, must, by law, “have outstanding expertise in one or more of the fields of history, archaeology, anthropology, historical or landscape architecture, biology, ecology, geology, marine science, or social science,” resigned in protest over administration policies. Davenport quotes Tony Knowles, a former Board member, as claiming that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke “appears to have no interest in continuing the agenda of science... “

The charges of unethical conduct and corruption that have swirled around Scott Pruitt, the current EPA administrator, have overshadowed one of the more worrisome new regulations he has proposed. It would require that all data from scientific studies the EPA uses in its development of policies pertaining to air and water quality be publicly available. Condemning what he calls “secret science,” Pruitt holds that this enhances the openness of both the science and the EPA’s procedures. His critics suspect, however, that this is simply a means for rationalizing the EPA ignoring virtually all of the relevant medical research, since scientific institutions everywhere require, as a fundamental ethical requirement, that bio-medical scientists insure the confidentiality of study-participants’ individual health information.

Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

(2) An Endangered Institution?

I have argued elsewhere (2011) at length that, appearances often to the contrary notwithstanding, science is a fragile institution. Modern science and the institutions on which it relies, such as schools, universities, journals, professional organizations, research institutes, granting agencies, philanthropies, etc., are extremely expensive. The Trump administration’s budget cuts may stall or extinguish individual programs of scientific research, but its antagonistic approach to science generally and to particular scientific fields could devastate the prevailing American leadership in those and other sciences. Davenport, for example, reports that the French government has seized the opportunity, launching their (not coincidentally named) “Make Our Planet Great Again” initiative, which offers substantial research grants to lure prominent foreign scientists to France. Some American scientists have received such grants and are packing their bags.

Modern science also depends upon preserving open forums for the free criticism and assessment of both currently ascendant theories and new hypotheses. That requirement does not square with measures like the abolition of scientific advisory committees and the development of rules that exclude the vast majority of the relevant scientific research, let alone doing so by exploiting an ethical constraint on the conduct of that research.