On Monday President Obama released a memo on scientific integrity. It reads, in part,
Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security.It may seem obvious that "[p]olitical officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions," but after an administration in which Julie MacDonald served as deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Interior, in which Julie Gerberding had portions of her congressional testimony removed because they suggested a link between climate change and human health, and in which EPA removed Deborah Rice's comments on a report concerning risks posed by the fire retardant decabromobiphenyl ether (deca), it's nice to have it stated out loud in a presidential memo that "[p]olitical officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions."
The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions.
The Bipartisan Policy Center released recommendations for implementing Obama's order on Tuesday.
The report's premise is that "a critical goal of any new procedures for establishing regulatory policy must be to clarify which aspects of a regulatory issue are matters of science and which are matters of policy," such as economics and ethics. "The tendency, on all sides, to frame regulatory issues as debates solely about science, regardless of the actual subject in dispute, is at the root of the stalemate and acrimony all too present in the regulatory system today."Exactly! Obama's decision to reverse Bush's ban on federal funding of stem cell research is based on a different set of values, or if not a different set of values at least a different way of interpreting, weighing, and applying those values to formulating policy.
[It is] a shift away from one set of values, and toward another (though of course, it is not so black and white). It is not, by any means, a shift from politics toward science. (source)What is a shift towards science is that values will not "suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions". They will determine how those findings and conclusions are translated into policy choices. We will make policy from facts (or at least on solid evidence), not from fantasy.
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