Does George Bush even know what science is?

A new political advocacy organization, Scientists and Engineers for Change, is pretty sure the answer is no. And so they're going on the warpath.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Sep 30, 2004 | The Bush administration is dead set on encouraging American citizens to believe that having an abortion can lead to breast cancer, that abstinence is the only way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, and that the verdict is still out on global warming.

These are just a few of the notions that the Bush administration has promoted by stripping out facts that disprove those theories from documents produced by such federally funded agencies as the National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

If this kind of ideological takeover of public policy makes you see red, imagine how the nation's scientists feel. Bush hasn't just figuratively kicked them out of the Oval Office, he's literally done it: demoting his own top science advisor and moving the Office of Science and Technology right out of the White House.

Politicians have always been choosy about what they want to believe, for purposes of playing to their constituencies, but this administration has set a new standard, says Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D. Having worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations, Hamburg has served in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and was the commissioner of health for the city of New York.

"We've seen the intrusion of ideology much more forcefully into policies and programs," she says. "In biomedical research, healthcare services, public health, but also across a range of other domains -- environment, agriculture, education, missile defense -- you can see this intrusion of political philosophy into the evaluation and application of science."

For four years, scientists in the United States have become increasingly outraged. Now with just weeks to go before the election, one group is fighting back, launching a political advocacy and fund-raising organization called Scientists and Engineers for Change.

On Tuesday, the organization marked its creation by kicking off a speaking tour at the University of Oregon in Eugene headlined by Douglas Osheroff, a Stanford physics professor who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics. Osheroff was also one of the first recipients of the prestigious MacArthur "genius" award and is among the 48 Nobel laureates who've endorsed Kerry.

Osheroff, whose usually devotes himself to the study of quantum fluids and solids, told Salon why he felt compelled to go out on the stump to speak out against Bush.

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