Science & Politics

When bureaucracy interferes with research

The San Diego Union-Tribune

April 5, 2002

Put it this way: In a defense budget request of $396 billion, why would the Pentagon seek to eliminate $1.5 million for JASON, the elite group of distinguished scientists who have contributed so much to American security over the years?

Have Lysenko politics seeped into American science? You remember Trofim Lysenko, Stalin's favorite geneticist, a fraud elevated to the highest councils of Soviet science because his ideas served the bureaucracy.

It seems that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which administers the Pentagon's 42-year-old contract with JASON, would like to add some of its own people to JASON. But JASON elects its own members based on achievement, not on Pentagon orders, and isn't about to change.

Snubbed, DARPA threatened to cut off funding for JASON, throwing in the implied criticism that its members, many of the nation's most distinguished scientists, were out of touch - not "responsive to DARPA's current needs," as a DARPA spokesman put it.

JASON, started in 1959 by a group of physicists working at the national weapons laboratories, has expanded in recent years to include scientists from many disciplines. It has included many Nobel prize winner over the years.

When politics seeks to bend science, as Stalin bent Lysenko, it needs to be exposed. Even as the JASON story was coming to light, the Bush administration indicated its opposition to yet another distinguished scientist whose views it sees as politically incorrect.

Atmospheric chemist Robert T. Watson, who has served as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1996, believes - as do most scientists - that fossil-fuel burning contributes to global warming.

The administration, strongly influenced by energy companies, doesn't like that conclusion.

One of many letters of support for Watson came from Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist who is chancellor of UC Irvine. Last year, Cicerone chaired the National Academy of Sciences committee that was assembled at the administration's request. The NAS group reached the same conclusion as the Intergovernmental Panel: Fossil fuels are the likely cause of global warming.

Science must be independent of politics. DARPA's threat to cut off JASON research funds is being opposed by several other departments and agencies that have benefited from JASON's work over the years, including the Department of Energy, the intelligence agencies and the NAVY.

DARPA's opposition means it no longer can administer the contract. But to withdraw the Pentagon's $1.5 million contribution (which also would cut off another $2.25 million from other federal agencies) to JASON because the scientists won't dilute its membership is to put political patronage ahead of science. It would not serve the nation's interests.