More gruesome details here:
"Consider the administration's handling of scientific advisory committees. In April, the president's science adviser, John H. Marburger III, issued a rebuttal to the February UCS [Union of Concerned Scientists] report, saying 'the accusation of a litmus test that must be met before someone can serve on an advisory panel is preposterous.' However, the new UCS report casts significant doubt on this assertion.
"For instance, Sharon Smith, chair of the University of Miami's marine biology department, informed UCS that she was summarily rejected for a position on the U.S. Arctic Research Commission 'after she gave a less-than-enthusiastic answer in response to a question from the White House personnel office about whether she supported President Bush.'
"Likewise, two recently appointed members of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research – Richard Myers of Stanford University and George Weinstock of Baylor College of Medicine – report that White House representatives asked inappropriate questions about their political views. Myers was initially denied a spot on the committee, apparently because he refused to discuss his opinion of President Bush, but was ultimately approved after a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health (where the committee is housed) intervened on his behalf. Weinstock told UCS that his answers regarding President Bush must have been 'innocuous enough to be palatable,' adding, 'There is no doubt in my mind that these questions represented a political litmus test.'
"Perhaps most dramatic, Gerald T. Keusch, who oversaw advisory committee appointments at a branch of NIH, recently reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that the Bush administration approved only seven of his 26 advisory-board nominations over three years. In one case, Bush officials explained to Keusch that they had rejected Torsten Wiesel, a Nobel laureate in medicine, 'because he had signed too many full-page letters in the New York Times critical of President Bush.'
"The administration has also shown no reluctance to shape scientific findings in service to its political agenda. In one case, Deputy Interior Secretary J. Stephen Griles, a former lobbyist for the mining industry, directed agency scientists and staff to drop any consideration of alternatives that could minimize environmental damage from mountaintop mining, which the administration was seeking to boost. 'We were flabbergasted and outraged,' one high-ranking staff scientist at the Fish and Wildlife Service told UCS."
Lysenko, anyone?
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