But then I reviewed the photos I took at the hearing. Turns out Chu may have been a bit baffled after all:

The move, long sought by scientists and patient advocates and opposed by religious groups, would enable the National Institutes of Health to consider requests from scientists to study hundreds of lines of cells that have been developed since the limitations were put in place — lines that scientists and patient advocate say hold great hope for leading to cures for a host of major ailments. [...]

President Bush imposed the restriction on Aug. 9, 2001, limiting federal funding to studies of what turned out to be 21 cell lines that were already in existence as of that date to prevent tax dollars from encouraging the destruction of more embryos.

This is the low-hanging fruit.

From Bloomberg:

The pledges, made orally or in writing, are viewed by advocates as buttressing federally funded education programs that say avoiding pre-marital sex rather than using protection will curb pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. President George W. Bush’s administration more than doubled the budget for abstinence-only education programs since 1999 to $204 million this fiscal year. More than a dozen states have rejected federal money rather than limit what is taught.

“The results suggest that the virginity pledge does not change sexual behavior,” wrote author Janet Rosenbaum, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of population, family and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Clinicians should provide birth control information to all adolescents, especially abstinence-only sex education participants.”

A 2007 congressional study (PDF) found that abstinence-only programs have “no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence,” and students who participate in them become sexually active at the same age and have as many partners as students who participate in more comprehensive sex-ed programs. With Democrats set to control the presidency and both houses of Congress, these studies should spell the end for abstinence-only education.

Ironically, that could be good news for conservatives who are honest about their desire to decrease the number of abortions and curb the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases.

After President-elect Barack Obama fills out his cabinet appointments, he will turn to appointing new leadership for the government agencies with the power to regulate industry—a process that will likely bring an end to what has become known as the Bush administration’s “war on science.”

President Bush’s appointees at environmental and health regulatory agencies have let ideology trump scientific and statistical analysis, critics allege. His picks for top posts at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration have faced a steady stream of complaints from Democrats, public interest groups and scientists themselves.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Obama has signaled throughout the campaign season and during the transition that he plans to break from the Bush mold. In appointing Steven Chu, head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as energy secretary on Monday, Obama said, “His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science, we will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that the facts demand bold action.”

In response to a series of question from a grassroots organization called ScienceDebate2008, Obama, the presidential candidate, vowed to “restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials or political appointees.”

The group, whose members included Chu, is dedicated to raising awareness of science and technology policy issues.

Obama’s emphasis is understandable Examples of unscientific decision-making over the last eight years have not been hard to find.

EPA has lost several lawsuits because it has poorly controlled mercury, smog and other pollutants and refused to regulate emissions that contribute to global warming. Stephen Johnson, Bush’s third EPA chief, has ignored EPA scientists and, last year, he blocked California from enacting its own greenhouse gas motor vehicle emission standards. The state has sued EPA in federal court.

In 2007, the White House came under fire for editing a CDC report on the effect global warming would have on public health.

James Holsinger, Bush’s second-term nominee to become surgeon general, was blocked by the Senate because of a position paper he wrote for the United Methodist Church that he wrote arguing that male homosexuality was unnatural and unhealthy. “When the complementarity of the sexes is breached,” he wrote in 1990 “injuries and diseases may occur.”

Democrats have criticized the FDA under Bush for everything from salmonella outbreaks to lack of oversight of drug companies. Earlier this year, when FDA officials told Congress that Bush’s budget was sufficient even though Democrats were offering more money, House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) let FDA chief Andrew von Eschenbach have it.

“[Y]ou’re not the first fella I’ve had to skin for not doing his job and coming up here and defending an indefensible situation,” Dingell said. “I want to maintain my respect for you but I can’t maintain my respect for you if you keep toe dancing around the hard facts that curse you with the inability to do your job because you don’t have resources.”

So far among the science-oriented agencies, only a new EPA administrator has been chosen. On Monday, Obama announced he’d like the job to go to Lisa Jackson, chief of staff for New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and the state’s former top environmental official.

Jackson and the rest of Obama’s environmental team won wide praise among scientists and liberal bloggers for the pick.

“Today’s appointments suggest a new dawn for America’s role as a leader in research and innovation to address the world’s great challenges,” wrote Shawn Lawrence Otto, the CEO of ScienceDebate2008, a grassroots group that tried to inject discussion of science policy in the election. “We were founded by scientist-statesmen, their voice is what has always made us great, and frankly, it’s good to see it back in the policy process,” he wrote.

Some advocates want Obama to elevate his science advisor, the appointee who will head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to cabinet rank much like the national security advisor. In past administrations, this position has gone to physicists, and whether Obama departs from that mold remains to be seen.

“Having that person at place at the table will signal to the public that science is back in the process rather than sidelined and that’s been a theme that Obama has sounded during the campaign,” Mary Woolley, the president of Research America, a research advocacy group, said.

Centers for Disease Control
The Washington Post reported last month that Obama is unlikely to keep Julie Gerberding, the embattled CDC chief. Several names have been floated to take Gerberding’s place.

They include Jeffrey Koplan, a member of Obama’s transition team charged with reviewing the Department of Health and Human Services; Bill Corr, the executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids; and Nicole Lurie, a public health expert at the RAND Corporation. Corr has worked on Capitol Hill and served as chief of staff at HHS. Lurie served as the deputy assistant secretary for health at HHS from 1998 to 2001.

For science advocates, the most important criterion for the next CDC chief is that he or she restore intellectual rigor to the policy-making process and insert the agency into the administration’s internal debates about how to combat climate change.

“We need CDC to become engaged in the federal climate science program,” said Rick Piltz, the founder of Climate Science Watch. “They’ve never been a player as it pertains to how public health is affected by climate change. [CDC needs] a focused program of research and assessment.”

Food and Drug Administration

Last week, a leading House Democrat encouraged Obama to clean house at the FDA.

“The current FDA senior management blocked clinical trials, drove dedicated medical professionals out of the agency, and lined their pockets with outrageous bonuses,” Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) wrote to Obama last week. “A new Commissioner or Interim Commissioner must bring the Agency back to the forefront of science, integrity, and transparency.”

During the campaign, Obama vowed to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco. Giving the FDA new authority to regulate tobacco would vastly expand its power. While Stupak severely criticized Bush’s FDA chief, von Eschenbach, a spokesman from Stupak’s office said he had not pressed Obama to nominate anyone in particular.

The candidate’s FDA administrators, according to news reports, include Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Steve Nissen and Joshua Sharfstein, the chief of Baltimore’s publichealth department.

Another possibility is Harold Varmus, the former National Institute of Health director and a Nobel Prize winner. He is now the CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and a member of the Obama transition team.

The biggest challenge for the next FDA administrator “is regaining the public’s trust,” said Rick Weiss, a former Washington Post science reporter who is now with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Weiss says that FDA has lost the public’s confidence during the past several years after drug related scandals and food safety crises.

One avenue Obama could take, Wisee suggested, is to depart from the tradition that the FDA chief is a medical doctor.

“Obama could break that mold with someone who doesn’t have a conventional background that might be more relevant to the modern FDA,” Weiss said, adding that a candidate might have expertise in the law or food safety issues.

Surgeon General

The surgeon general spot is rife with potential for missteps. President Ronald Reagan’s appointee, C. Everett Koop, was controversial among liberals at first for his views on homosexuality but eventually won their grudging respect and alienated some on the right for waging war on HIV-AIDS and smoking. President Bill Clinton appointed Joycelyn Elders, whose off-hand comment about masturbation drew heaps of criticism from Capitol Hill and forced her resignation.

Under the Bush administration, the surgeon general has been relegated to a bit player in public health debates, especially in Bush’s second term. Not only does the office not have a permanent occupant, but former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a heart surgeon by training, became the White House’s chief health advisor.

The office can elevate its stature in an Obama administration depending on who is appointed to the job, but Woolley would like to see more resources directed to the nation’s top doctor.

“The new surgeon general [should be] equipped with a real office rather than just an assistant or two and an office [to have a] bigger impact,” she said.

In an interview with Fox Sports, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s incoming chief of staff, joked about naming Dr. J, the basketball star Julius Erving, as surgeon general. Obama is more likely to consider the Emanuel household for a highly qualified candidate for one of the government’s public health posts.

Emmanuel’s brother, Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the nation’s leading bio-ethicists, is an oft-mentioned candidate for a presidential appointment.

Another possibility is that a “Friend of Barack”, or FOB, could end up as the nation’s next surgeon general. Eric Whitaker was a graduate student at Harvard’s public health school when Obama attended the law school. Whitaker became the chief of the Illinois Department of Public Health and worked at the University of Chicago’s Hospital with Michelle Obama.

So far, Whitaker has let it be known that he wants to serve in the administration, but not just yet.

Another Chicagoan under consideration, according to the Chicago Tribune is, Dr. Gail Rosseau, Rosseau is chief of surgery at the Neurologic and Orthopedic Institute of Chicago and an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Rush University Medical Center.

Obama has plenty of allies in the scientific community, but political appointments requiring a background in science and medicine are among the toughest to fill.

“Among the biggest burdens with appointments in these fields are federal salaries. Many scientists are not personally wealthy and have to take pay cuts to work in government,” Cal Mackenzie, a political scientist at Colby College who is an expert in the appointment process, said.

Scientists are also less likely to go to Washington because of “the risk or fear of falling behind as basic science moves steadily forward,” he said.

But because these agencies have been under political and budgetary constraints for the past eight years, Mackenzie also said that the chance to turn the agencies around and be a part of the Obama administration could attract enough competent candidates to provide Obama with a choice.

On Monday, the governors of Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana and Rhode Island received these letters. All laboratory tests of the powder, which some feared would be anthrax or another biological or chemical agent, came back negative.

Over the course of the week, more states reported similar letters. Yesterday, another TWI affiliate, The New Mexico Independent reported that more than a dozen people who were exposed to the powder at Gov. Bill Richardson’s office were rushed to the hospital and quarantined until scientists determined today that the substance was harmless.

The report from Iowa brings the total number of states receiving these letters to 32.

A Chinese-American, Chu is a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California-Berkeley and has been the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004, where he has pushed aggressively for research into alternative energy as a way to combat global warming.

It is the oldest of the Energy Department’s national laboratories, but does only unclassified work and in recent years under Chu has been at the center of research into biofuels and solar technologies. Chu has been a strong advocate for the need to engage scientists in the search for ways to combat global warming by replacing fossil fuels with other energy sources such as biofuels and the sun.

If confirmed, Chu would be the second academic Obama has tapped from UC Berkeley, after Christina D. Romer, an economics professor picked to head Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

The choice would further confirm that Obama is serious about revolutionizing the nation’s energy policy, and he is willing to look outside of Washington to tap the nation’s top experts in their respective fields.

The strategy is not without risks, as being a good scientist does not necessarily make one a good policymaker. However, Chu’s position as the director of a prominent research laboratory suggests he has experience managing a bureaucracy.

Perhaps most important, the move would close the door on yet another tragic hallmark of the Bush era — in the Obama administration, science will direct America’s energy policy, not vice versa.

After eight years in which the Bush administration trashed science to favor a political agenda, these blogger are saying that Kennedy would be a most injudicious choice, since he’s just as liable to politicize science as the other guys did, only from the left.

The crassest example was Kennedy’s error- and slander-filled “investigative” article in Rolling Stone magazine, in which he voiced the discredited claim that the Centers for Disease Control and drug companies had conspired to poison American children with the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal in vaccines.

During the campaign, anti-vaccine advocates asked Obama and Sen. John McCain to comment on whether they thought parents should have the right to skip vaccines they feared. McCain hemmed and hawed, while Obama said he thought children should get all the recommended vaccines. Obama apparently was influenced on this by his senior adviser Michael Strautmanis, who reportedly has an autistic child. Sources in the autistic parents’ community say that Strautmanis set Obama straight about the lack of any link between vaccines and autism.

If this is true, Kennedy would be a surprising choice.

Correction: The original version of this post should have listed Obama adviser Michael Strautmanis as having an autistic child, not David Axelrod. We regret the error.

Flickr: Goldmund100

“Just think about this: In four months — in just four months — we will have an administration that actually believes in science.”

That’s what former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner told a cheering crowd during his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. It was a not-so-subtle jab at what many scientists have called the Bush administration’s “war on science.”

For the past eight years, many scientists have accused the Bush administration of tampering with, suppressing or ignoring scientific findings that conflicted with its policies. They cite as evidence of politics trumping science: a regulator at the Environmental Protection Agency being fired after aggressively pursing the Dow Chemical Co. to clean up its contamination of a river watershed; partisan editing by a nonscientist of scientific findings on endangered species, and interference by political appointees in the scientific process.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

With the Bush administration leaving on Jan. 20, 2009, many scientists want to know what they can expect from the next president.

Unfortunately, neither Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential nominee, nor Sen. Barack Obama, his Democratic opponent, has made science a priority on the campaign trail, says Shawn Lawrence Otto, chief executive of ScienceDebate 2008.

The nonpartisan organization of roughly 38,000 scientists and engineers was formed last year to press the presidential candidates to articulate their views on the relationship between science and government. A central question is what the next president could do to restore scientific integrity.

“Both candidates,” Otto said, “have said that [scientific integrity is] a strong value of theirs. Both have talked about the need for fact-based decision- making…I think they have both heard, loud and clear, that scientists, in particular, and the American public, in general, are fed up with facts being doctored with to fit political dogma.”

Beyond that, Otto complained, neither McCain nor Obama have offered any real specifics on how to win back the faith of scientists and citizens. “Scientists are very concerned,” Otto said, “about the tendency of elected officials to deny facts in favor of political spin, which is placing the United States at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world. Both in terms of the quality of students we’re turning out; and in terms of our ability to draw new students [to the U.S.]”

But after eight years of science taking a back seat to the demands of politics and commercial interests, it won’t be so easy for the next president to reverse the course of the Bush administration.

That’s the view of Rick Piltz, director of the nonpartisan Climate Science Watch. For 10 years, Piltz worked for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, a joint project of 13 government agencies, where he says he saw firsthand the conflicts between the White House and government scientists. Piltz worked in an office that supports interagency leadership on climate science research — research that some federal employees have accused the Bush administration of distorting to achieve political goals.

One thing Piltz would like to see changed by the next president is the influence that political appointees have had over government scientists during the Bush administration. Many scientists have complained that their research findings were altered by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to avoid spending money on the problems the research raised.

Piltz says this situation can be corrected by requiring that communications between political appointees and agency scientists or managers be transparent.

“You should be able to see…the comments [to determine if they are] scientifically legitimate,” he said. “Because Congress doesn’t tell White House political appointees to make rules. It tells the EPA to make rules and then Congress funds them to make those rules.”

Piltz also recommends increasing the transparency of regulatory advisory panels at the EPA and the National Institutes for Health and the Centers for Disease Control, among others. For example, under the Bush administration, Piltz charges that there have been “remarkable examples of scientific experts getting kicked off a panel because their expected views…are not the views of the White House.”

One congressional investigation revealed that Deborah Rice, a Maine toxicologist, was fired from her position as chairwoman of an EPA chemical review panel at the request of the chemical industry simply because of her scientific expertise. The industry’s lobby group charged that Rice had a conflict of interest because she had previously given expert testimony to the state of Maine recommending a ban on a chemical, a flame retardant called deca, under review by the EPA panel.

According to Piltz, if advisory panel proceedings were more transparent, such “painstaking investigations and whistleblowing” by Congress could be avoided.

Piltz acknowledges that steps toward greater transparency are “complicated and don’t automatically fix” things, because they require restructuring of government agencies and the insertion of better checks and balances.

It’s no wonder, then, that McCain and Obama haven’t exactly taken the time to break these issues down for the public. “It’s way more than what you get just by asking [the candidates] a very general question, because they’ll all sound very good [answering that],” he said. “But we now have problems…that require vigilant follow-up by the media and the public-interest community and the scientists themselves.”

There are many ways to bolster scientific integrity that aren’t so complicated, contends Francesca Grifo, director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the non-partisan Union of Concerned Scientists.

For starters, her organization wants scientists who blow the whistle on government shenanigans to be protected from dismissal or demotion. With that protection, she says, scientists can “share information with someone, and they won’t have to give up their jobs to do that.”

Second, Grifo says scientists — as well as all government employees — need to be reassured about their First Amendment rights. The Union of Concerned Scientists is pushing for changes in the government’s media policies of science-related agencies that would allow scientists to speak freely with reporters.

“We’ve seen the fundamental rights of scientists to express their views…being disrupted,” Grifo told me. In a survey by the organization of more than 1,500 EPA employees, more than half said they could not speak openly with the news media. This presents a problem for taxpayers, Grifo said, who want to know what government employees are up to.

Finally, she continued, the next president and his political appointees need to be candid when policy considerations are deemed more important than the science. “If you want to take scientific information and ignore it, or only pay attention to half of it, that’s a policy decision and you need to be clear about it,” she said. “What we’ve seen [over the last eight years], is an administration not willing to take that step and [instead just] monkeying with the science.”

Some experts believe that the Bush administration’s record of politicizing science has so heightened public awareness of the problem that the next president won’t be able to pursue business-as-usual.

John Young is a retired federal biologist who worked 15 years at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and, before that, 15 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries. He says that the next administration should expect more vigilance from the public on matters related to science.

“The record of the past eight years,” said Young, “likely makes it more difficult for an upcoming administration to quash scientific information…However, the political appointees who will continue to run agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have tremendous influence on what science is applied and when it is applied.”

That’s why, he says, it’s up to the press and non-governmental organizations to “scrutinize the qualifications, affiliations and performance” of those political appointees.

Among government scientists, Young suspects, there’s a sense of skepticism and “cautious optimism” toward the next occupant of the White House.

“[W]ith politicians, you can never be sure if they will follow through on their many promises,” he said. “However, I don’t think either one as president could form an administration that would be more devious than the current one.”

While that may just be a hope — it’s one being echoed throughout the scientific community.

The nonpartisan, nonprofit group issued a “report card” grading 15 federal agencies on their communication policies. Some agencies, it found,  “stifle communication” even if their policies encourage free speech. Other agencies simply have weak policies regarding communication with the media.

The Centers for Disease Control, for example, was found to have the best media policy, one that allows scientists to state personal views and review press releases about their own research. But the agency poorly implemented the policy.

According to the study released today, the agencies with the best communication policies, and which most effectively implemented them, were NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). The Union of Concerned Scientists has commended NASA for improving its media policy after a political appointee in the agency reportedly censored leading climate scientist James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The agencies with the worst policies include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service (within the Dept. of Interior), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).

The report card is below. The full report can be found here (pdf).

The new project, called the Sustainable Aviation Fuels Users’ Group, says they are specifically committed to using biofuels from renewable sources that do not compete with the “agrifood sector,” do not interfere with drinking water and “improve the economic conditions of local populations.” (That means no corn ethanol, for one thing.) And, according to Air France, the airlines will factor in the “full life cycle” of the biofuels to assure that the overall impact of their usage yields fewer CO2 emissions.

Seems like a pretty bold proposition. We already know that aircrafts can fly on non-food-crop biofuels such as algae. But we also know that those green fuels have yet to be produced on a mass scale, largely because there’s a lack of funding for research and development. If the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users’ Group is serious about its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it may have to consider using airline resources to support building up sustainably produced biofuels.