Saturday, April 19, 2003

Bad Science

It seems these days that scientific research, which is supposed to be all about finding the truth, no matter what it is, is being bent to the political agenda of the Bush regime. They don’t want to have anything found that doesn’t support their narrow view of the world. As an example I’ve previously noted before, when 15 of the 18 members of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Health Center for Environmental Health were replaced last year. This committee assesses the health impact of exposure to environmental chemicals. Among the new members are representatives of the chemical industry. Can you say “conflict of interest”? I knew you could.

I’ve got a personal interest in good science and objectivity, as do we all. I may have been exposed to DES - a synthetic estrogen, before I was born. It was touted as a “miracle drug” that would supposedly prevent miscarriage of a pregnancy. As my mother had a miscarriage before she became pregnant with me in 1953, she spent half of the pregnancy flat on her back, and may have been given DES. I’m in the process of trying to access her medical records. 30 years ago, she mentioned such a treatment to me but now can’t remember exactly what she was given 50 years ago. However, most of the clinical studies of DES usage were done in the hospitals in the area where I was born, and 1953 was the peak year of it’s use. 

The typical dosage given was equivalent to about 700 birth-control pills a day! Millions of children born between about 1947 and 1971 were exposed to this, with sometimes profound physical and psychological effects, ranging from cancers to birth defects and gender issues. Obviously, there is a huge potential here for future litigation, which the pharmaceutical manufacturers will do anything to head off.

In the case of DES daughters, many were infertile due to reproductive abnormalities, and many died from a rare form of vaginal cancer, which led to the cessation of its use in 1971. Now it appears that the effects may possibly go on into the 3rd generation. DES sons aren’t as well documented, but there is a very high percentage (as high as 90%) of mental genders being in variance with the physical, gynecomastia (male breast development) and a heightened risk of reproductive cancers and abnormalities.

Up until now, the government hasn’t interfered in getting out information about this. Go to the CDC DES Update site to see some background on DES. But I’m afraid this may change, and I’m not comforted by the “foxes in charge of the henhouse” attitude of this administration.  Good or bad, I want to know the truth, not have it held hostage to some corporation’s profit imperative. And in particular, I don’t want the government conspiring with the corporations to suppress the truth.

About anything.

And a little aside, after some more research - studies into DES and it’s effects suddenly dried up a year or so into the Reagan administration. Was it a coincidence that the former CEO of Lilly (the largest manufacturer of DES) was George H.W. Bush, who stepped down to become Vice President and later President?

Like father, like son:

Certain Words Can Trip Up AIDS Grants, Scientists Say
April 18, 2003
By ERICA GOODE

Scientists who study AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases say they have been warned by federal health officials that their research may come under unusual scrutiny by the Department of Health and Human Services or by members of Congress, because the topics are politically controversial.

The scientists, who spoke on condition they not be identified, say they have been advised they can avoid unfavorable attention by keeping certain “key words” out of their applications for grants from the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those words include “sex workers,” “men who sleep with men,” “anal sex” and “needle exchange,” the scientists said.

Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the health and human services department, said the department does not screen grant applications for politically delicate content. He said that when the department singles out grants it is usually to send out a news release about them. But an official at the National Institutes of Health, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said project officers at the agency, the people who deal with grant applicants and recipients, were telling researchers at meetings and in telephone conversations to avoid so-called sensitive language. But the official added, “You won’t find any paper or anything that advises people to do this.”

The official said researchers had long been advised to avoid phrases that might mark their work as controversial. But the degree of scrutiny under the Bush administration was “much worse and more intense,” the official said.

Dr. Alfred Sommer, the dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, said a researcher at his institution had been advised by a project officer at N.I.H. to change the term “sex worker” to something more euphemistic in a grant proposal for a study of H.I.V. prevention among prostitutes. He said the idea that grants might be subject to political surveillance was creating a “pernicious sense of insecurity” among researchers.

Dr. Sommer said that if researchers feared that federal support for their work might be affected by politics, whether it was true or untrue, it could take a toll. “If people feel intimidated and start clouding the language they use, then your mind starts to get cloudy and the science gets cloudy,” he said, adding that the federal financing of medical research had traditionally been free from political influence.

At the National Institutes of Health, for example, grant applications are evaluated and rated by a panel of independent reviewers. The grant application is then given a score.

In another example of the scrutiny the scientists described, a researcher at the University of California said he had been advised by an N.I.H. project officer that the abstract of a grant application he was submitting “should be “cleansed” and should not contain any contentious wording like “gay” or “homosexual” or “transgender.”

The researcher said the project officer told him that grants that included those words were “being screened out and targeted for more intense scrutiny.”

He said he was now struggling with how to write the grant proposal, which dealt with a study of gay men and H.I.V. testing. When the subjects were gay men, he said, “It’s hard not to mention them in your abstract.”

The titles and abstracts of federally financed grants are available to the public on a computer database maintained by the national institutes. The database, called CRISP, is also frequently read by Congressional staff members on the lookout for research on topics that are of concern to the politicians they work for. Over the years, studies on cloning, abortion, animal rights, needle-exchange programs and various types of AIDS research have been criticized by members of Congress.

But researchers said they feared that the concerns of individual members of Congress were now being taken more seriously by the health and human services department.

John Burklow, a spokesman for the N.I.H., said project directors at the agency were responsible for “providing advice and guidance on myriad issues related to grant applications,” but he did not confirm or deny that the project officers were cautioning researchers about the language they used.

He said that the health and human services department “from a management perspective has a right to oversee N.I.H. affairs” but that department officials “have not interfered with the awarding or renewing of any N.I.H. grant.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/18/national/18GRAN.html?ex=1051683149&ei=1&en=bea77f345a3374cf