Nothing is more American, more democratic, than the free expression of senseless emotions. Shrieking hyperbole uninformed by reality is the very soul of democracy. This is both its strength and its weakness.

Roger Pielke Jr. links an interesting article in The Scientist on the Bush Administration. It surveys the claims and counter claims that the Bush administration has meddled in science to an unprecedented degree, quoting Dan Sarewitz as well as Pielke, who both have taken positions a bit above the fray informed more by history than partisan bias, though neither are Bush supporters. It puts many of the most shrill claims in perspective and has some good information on funding levels - the ultimate cause of high levels on the shrill-o-meter - which have varied over time. We have spent less on physics in recent decades but more on life sciences, and under Bush this has been a tiny bit less pronounced - which is perceived by life scientists who grew up in fat city as a personal attack. The article is worth a read.

Read the comments too. I know, that's usually a disappointment, but I found this comment by Nigel M. de S. Cameron to be a useful extension of the article.

. . . on perhaps the hottest charge laid at the feet of the administration it is the critics who are ignorant. Few Americans (including few scientists and science writers) know that "therapeutic cloning" for stem cell research, which the president has been lambasted for opposing by editorialists ad nauseam, and which was featured before the last election in Ron Reagan, Jr.'s infamous speech to the Democratic convention, is a felony is most western countries - including "liberal" Canada (5 years' jail time) and secular France (7 years). Even on the more difficult ethical/policy question of embryonic stem cell research using so-called "spare" embryos, other western nations are divided down the middle - the Canadians allow it under certain circumstances, while the Germans (then under a socialist Chancellor, and at perhaps the lowest ebb of US-German relations since WWII) copied the exact principle of the 2001 Bush funding policy, though into criminal law. (The day after the President vetoed the effort to overturn his principled funding limitations, Germany asked the European Commission to halt ALL funding for embryonic stem cell research.)

Of course, ignorance as to facts starts closer to home: when scores of writers have condemned the administration for, variously, "restricting," or "banning," escr funding, the fact that President Bush liberalized research funding policy and was the first US president ever to fund such research is hard to keep in focus.

By all means let us have debate, sans hysteria, about science and technology policy. My own view is that it may well become the dominant theme of western politics in the next generation, with the prospect of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and the "converging technologies" idea offering untold benefits and equally untold threats to the human condition. But we need to start with the facts. We could make a good beginning by ensuring that Americans are aware that US biopolicy on stem cell research/"therapeutic" cloning lies midway between that of Canada and that of Germany. You don't have to agree with it, but these facts alone undermine the notion that it is the result of some "right-wing" conspiracy against science. And anyone with both a brain and a conscience should think long and hard before dismissing the German consensus. Science policy will always be about ethics, and woe betide us when we start to forget.

It's tempting to dismiss this view since it comes from an avowed Christian, but I think he makes an important point. It may be that the secular squick of European ersatz green sensibilities is no more defensible from a scientific perspective than the spiritual squick of various religious thinkers, but together they comprise a very, very large number of people who rightly insist that we remember that science policy is about ethics as well as technology. To demonize policy makers for including ethical considerations as well as scientific perspective is a blunder. The ethics can be debated, and should be, and policies that reflect that debate as well as science can be accepted with good grace if not applauded even when they are contrary to our personal views. Let the debates continue and perhaps be modified. An example of that from the article is relevant.

While some scientists may not be happy until Bush is out of the White House, others know that in the past, they have won many political battles, and with persistence, they can continue to do so, even in a contentious climate, says Kevles. In the 1970s, biologists dealt with public and political concerns about recombinant DNA technology, with critics suggesting that the technology could create powerful viruses or resistant bacteria, and also violated ethics by manipulating DNA. However, over years, scientists gradually helped craft a compromise that enabled them to conduct the research, eventually developing a series of life-saving medicines, such as recombinant insulin and erythropoietin.

This compromise is still far from universal, and though it is US policy for now it isn't so in other parts of the world. It's a bit tiresome to conduct such public debates over decades since the same ground is covered repeatedly with little or no new information, just new expressions of old information, but that's how democracies work, for better or worse.