[neact] Political Science

The following excerpts are from the following source:

 

Specter, Michael; Political Science: The Bush Administration's War on the 
Laboratory; The New Yorker; March 13, 2006; pp. 58-69.

 

.HPV [human papillomavirus] is the most common sexually transmitted disease in 
the United States; more than half of all Americans become infected at some 
point in their lives.  The virus is also the primary cause of cervical cancer, 
which kills nearly five thousand American women every year and hundreds of 
thousands more in the developing world..

Vaccinations for contagious diseases like measles and mumps are required before 
a child can enter public school.  That won't be the case with the HPV vaccine, 
however.  The Bush Administration, its allies on Capitol Hill, and the 
religious base of the Republican Party are opposed to mandatory HPV 
vaccinations.  They prefer to rely on education programs that promote 
abstinence from sexual activity, and see the HPV vaccine as a threat to that 
policy.  For years, conservatives have regarded the human papillomavirus as a 
kind of index of promiscuity.  Many abstinence supporters argue that 
eliminating the threat of infection would only encourage teenagers to have sex..

.the Bush Administration has been relentless in its opposition to any drug, 
vaccine, or initiative that could be interpreted as lessening the risks 
associated with premarital sex.  It has made every effort to diminish the use 
of condoms as a method of birth control in the United States and throughout the 
world..

From the start of his first term, George W. Bush seems to have been guided more 
by faith and ideology than by data in resolving scientific questions.  He is 
hardly the only President to ignore the advice of federal scientists.  To some 
degree, they all have..Yet George Bush, unlike Clinton and many other 
Presidents, appears to view science more as a political constituency than as an 
intellectual discipline or a way of life..

The Bush Administration has worked tirelessly to control the speech and 
movements of American scientists..

The problems facing American science have not been created by a single 
politician or party: they reflect a fissure in society which has grown wider as 
science has edged closer to the roots of life itself..

.In a recent commentary published in the journal Cell, Paul Nurse, a Nobel 
laureate and the president of Rockefeller University..turned to a much larger 
question, the future of American science: "Present politics are set to damage a 
whole generation of young research workers, and the negative impact on 
recruitment of the next generation of scientists will be seen for years to 
come."

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