Article: At the Center of the Storm Over Bush And Science

[John Jacobus <crispy_bird@YAHOO.COM>]

I thought this would be of interest as we all have

concerns about science and formulation of government

policy. 



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At the Center of the Storm Over Bush And Science



March 30, 2004

 By JAMES GLANZ 



WASHINGTON - The average scientific dispute is a joust

in obscurity, a clash over technical matters that few

but the immediate combatants grasp or are even aware

of. 



Dr. John H. Marburger III, President Bush's science

adviser, might relish a dose of that obscurity right

now. Instead, he has become the first line of defense

against accusations that the Bush administration has

systematically distorted scientific fact and stacked

technical advisory committees to advance favored

policies on the environment, on biomedical research

and on other areas like the search for unconventional

weapons in Iraq. 



Dr. Marburger says that pattern is illusory, a product

of stringing together a few unrelated incidents within

the vast canvas of government science, most of which

is working just fine. 



"From all the evidence I can find," he said, "it's

certainly not true that science is being manipulated

by

this administration to suit its policy. It's simply

not the case." 



But to a degree not seen in previous administrations,

a wide range of influential scientists - even many who

say they like Dr. Marburger personally and respect him

professionally - express dismay at White House science

policy. 



"I think this is as bad as it's ever been," said

Wolfgang H. K. Panofsky, a retired Stanford physicist

who has advised the government on science and national

security since the Eisenhower administration. "This is

an extremely serious issue. I believe it is true that

there is such a thing as objective scientific reality,

and if you ignore that or try to misrepresent it in

formulating policy, you do so at peril to the

country." 



Other experts have been blunter. In a recent interview

on National Public Radio, Dr. Howard Gardner, a

cognitive psychologist at Harvard, said, "I actually

feel very sorry for Marburger, because I think he

probably is enough of a scientist to realize that he

basically has become a prostitute." 



Later, in an interview with The New York Times, Dr.

Gardner said he had made the reference but added, "I

wish I'd used it as a verb rather than as a noun." 



An intent graying physicist and woodworking enthusiast

who once built an entire harpsichord from scratch, Dr.

Marburger, 63, is so unassuming that he routinely

melted into the backdrop at announcements of

scientific

discoveries while working at the Brookhaven National

Laboratory in Upton on Long Island. He was director of

the laboratory before moving to Washington in October

2001. 



But just as in the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't world

of quantum phenomena that Dr. Marburger, who is also

director of the Office of Science and Technology

Policy at the White House, has spent much of his life

studying, appearances may be beside the point. Widely

believed to be excluded from the president's inner

circle - he surprised many people by declaring soon

after his nomination that he was a lifelong Democrat -

Dr. Marburger is said by White House officials to have

Mr. Bush's ear on all important technical matters. The

president who is supposedly so antagonistic to science

enjoys Dr. Marburger's explanatory style, the

officials

say. 



In fact, Dr. Marburger, who has recently endured

speculation that he might resign, may be just what

fellow scientists have always longed for in the White

House, an expert with deep knowledge of the technical

issues, a bureaucrat's ease in palace politics, a

ready turn of phrase and even a modest dose of

mystique. 



"He is closer to the pulse in the White House than any

of his predecessors, to my knowledge," said Andrew H.

Card Jr., the White House chief of staff who also

worked for Mr. Bush's father and Ronald Reagan. Not

only does Dr. Marburger typically attend each morning

meeting for the senior staff in the Roosevelt Room,

Mr. Card said, but also "the president enjoys Jack

Marburger." 



"He's a little bit of a character, which is fun," Mr.

Card said. 



Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management

and Budget, said that Dr. Marburger was "either at or

near the top of the list of those who participate most

actively in the budget process, in my experience." 



To colleagues and friends who suggest that Dr.

Marburger could not possibly agree with many of the

administration's science policies - for example,

limits on embryonic stem cell research that many

scientists have said hamper potentially therapeutic

applications - he has a simple answer. "No one will

know my personal positions on issues as long as I am

in this job," Dr. Marburger said in an interview. "I

am here to make sure that the science input to policy

making is sound, and that the executive branch

functions properly with respect to its science and

technology missions." 



Stem cells, for instance, "offer great promise for

addressing previously incurable diseases and

afflictions," Dr. Marburger said. "But I can't tell

when a fertilized egg becomes sacred. That's not my

job. That's not a science issue. And so whatever I

think about reproductive technology or choice or

whatever is irrelevant for my job as a science

adviser." 



That is the approach he took as chairman of Gov. Mario

M. Cuomo's fact-finding commission on the Shoreham

nuclear power plant on Long Island in 1983. Dr.

Marburger later made it clear that he did not agree

with everything in the consensus report on the

reactor, which found that the plant probably should

never have been built and would bring few if any

benefits if it opened. The reactor never went into

full operation. 



"The governor didn't want my opinion," Dr. Marburger

said. "He told me that. The governor wanted to know

what the situation was. And I delivered that." 



That was not the only contentious issue that he

handled smoothly before going to Washington. When he

took over as director of Brookhaven in 1998, there was

widespread outrage over disclosures of a leak of

radioactive tritium from a research reactor. Dr.

Marburger was credited with creating policies and a

dialogue that quelled the outrage. He finally presided

over the shutdown of the reactor, a move that the

Energy Department ordered. Dr. Marburger said he did

not support that decision. 



"I regret it," he said. "I thought it was a good

reactor, and it still had years of life left in it." 



Those episodes may afford a clue to the mind of the

elusive Dr. Marburger, who was also president of the

State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1980

to 1994 and before that was dean at the California

Institute of Technology. He was born on Staten Island

and grew up in Maryland near Washington before

studying at Princeton and Stanford, where he received

his Ph.D. in 1967. 



However adroitly Dr. Marburger's credibility and

communications skills helped him handle those crises,

he is discovering that the forces of discontent

focused on Washington are far less easily tamed. Many

influential scientists remain convinced that Dr.

Marburger has simply disappeared at the White House,

after arriving 10 months into the administration,

because of Mr. Bush's delay in appointing him. Even

then, Dr. Marburger did not receive the prestigious

title "assistant to the president" that some of his

predecessors had, but instead reports directly to Mr.

Card. 



In the view of some scientists with decades of

experience in advising the government, all those

factors have helped open the way to widespread

political interference in the technical advisory

process across numerous agencies. 



"I don't believe there's any precedent for it, I

really don't, at least since World War II," said Dr.

Lewis M. Branscomb, a physicist who is an emeritus

professor of public policy and corporate management at

the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Dr. Branscomb was director of the National Bureau of

Standards under President Richard M. Nixon and was

also on high-level advisory panels for four other

presidents, dating from John F. Kennedy. 



Speaking directly about Dr. Marburger, Dr. Branscomb

added, "I have a great deal of sympathy for his

position, because I don't believe he has the

authority, the power, to go back into all the agencies

and unearth all the facts about all these cases." 



Discontent among scientists has recently verged on

insurrection. In late February, more than 60

influential scientists, including more than 20 Nobel

laureates, signed a statement saying the

administration had disbanded scientific advisory

committees, placed unqualified people on other panels

and censored reports by others when their scientific

conclusions conflicted with administration policies. 



"Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in

such practices, but not so systematically nor on so

wide a front," the letter said. 



That letter and a highly critical, detailed report by

the Union of Concerned Scientists that was released at

the same time pointed to, among other problems, what

it called tampering in June 2003 with a draft report

by the Environmental Protection Agency on climate

change. Dr. Marburger voiced respect for the letter's

signers, and he has asked them to discuss their

concerns with him. But uncharacteristically, he also

flashed rhetorical steel in responding to the

criticisms in the two documents. He said that although

a few isolated incidents might have "ruffled

feathers," the effort to argue that they constituted a

pattern had produced a "conspiracy theory report." 



Even some scientists who are strongly sympathetic to

his position suggest that this counterattack might

have been hasty. 



"I think it would have been better to say, `Well, it

raises some serious allegations; I will look into

them,' " Dr. Bruce Alberts, president of the National

Academy of Sciences, said. "That would have been a

more appropriate response and probably would not have

hurt him at all with anybody, including the

administration." 



Some scientists, though, said Dr. Marburger's quick

reaction was understandable, given what they say are

flaws in the report by the Union of Concerned

Scientists. 



"It was really a generalization of a lot of individual

things that might have happened or might not have

happened," said Erich Bloch, a principal at the

Washington Advisory Group, which does for-profit

consulting on technical issues. "I'm not so sure that

one should interpret that as being the majority

opinion of the scientific community," said Mr. Bloch,

who directed the National Science Foundation from 1984

to 1990 and is on the President's Council of Advisers

on Science and Technology. 



Still, Dr. Richard L. Garwin, a physicist who has

advised the government since the mid-1950's and who

signed the letter, said he was satisfied that the

report showed "political influence in order to make

the science come out right for preconceived notions." 



A recent day spent following Dr. Marburger on his

rounds in Washington provided some insights into his

schedule but little into his own views on science

policy. He gave an early-morning speech to a

conference on the future of aging, presided over a

staff meeting in his sixth-floor office on

Pennsylvania Avenue, lunched at the Bombay Club with

an official from the National Institutes of Health and

gave another speech, this time before young scientists

whom the government is courting for military research.





Along the way he offered a few conjectures about the

reasons for the attacks by some scientists. "I know

that we are in the early stages of a very bitter

political campaign," he said. "I don't think it is

appropriate for people who are concerned about their

country to act with such bitterness. But it's a fact."





In response to a report in the journal Nature on the

speculation that he might resign, he said he was not

considering it. But when asked whether he would accept

a second four-year term as science adviser if Mr. Bush

is re-elected, he demurred. "I'm focused on this

term," Dr. Marburger said. "I haven't, honestly, given

a thought to what I would do next." 



Dr. Charles M. Vest, president of the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, said, "If I were seeking

science advice, I would be very glad to receive it

from Jack."  



But even Dr. Vest, who said he did not believe that

the Bush administration was much different from others

in its use of science, cautioned against "a very

long-term trend toward selective use of scientific

information driven by a political and ideological

motivations." 



He added, "I think it's been going on for far too

long."





http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/30/science/30ADVI.html?ex=1081753641&ei=1&en=95be01d15cb8be00





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Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company





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""A fanatic is one who cannot change his mind and won't change the subject."  Winston Churchill



-- John

John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist

e-mail:  crispy_bird@yahoo.com



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