Ethics

Science and the Bush Legacy

By Ed Brayton

Never before has science been so highly politicized as during the Bush administration. As Chris Mooney so aptly demonstrated in The Republican War on Science, on issue after issue the Bush administration distorted, ignored or stifled science in the service of political aims. Emily Badger has an excellent review of the Bush administration and a look forward at how Obama can fix some of the problems.

Barack Obama received a relatively quiet endorsement on Aug. 23 from 61 of the country's Nobel laureates in physics, medicine and chemistry -- scientific heavyweights who used the occasion to both call for a scientific renewal in America and critique the state of American science at the end of the Bush era.

"During the administration of George W. Bush," their open letter charged, "vital parts of our country's scientific enterprise have been damaged by stagnant or declining federal support. The government's scientific advisory process has been distorted by political considerations. As a result, our once dominant position in the scientific world has been shaken and our prosperity has been placed at risk."

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 14, 2008 (boomark / email).