TheMillerCircle.org

I seem to be clearing out some of the older messages composed during an earlier phase of the Bush presidency. As we welcome the transition to a future government, unencumbered by the faulty, un-American perceptions of a president who seemed to be suffering from Little Man’s Disease, the dark deeds of this passing administration will take a long boil for all to fully reach the surface of the pot. For the first time in our history, it seems one of our main missions is to unravel what Bush has raveled for eight, seemingly endless years. I can’t wait to get started.

The imminent end of the Bush/Cheney partnership in national and international crime, leaves us a bit weary, more so than anything we might have imagined when the Bush presidency began eight years ago. To say that he exceeded our lowest expectations, doesn’t quite describe the full panoply of his destructive short history. What a nightmare! 9/11 was horrific enough, but to see that horror compounded time and time again, with invasions, torture, Katrina, hyperbaric incompetency, illegal invasions of our privacy  and now, a state of financial collapse is, well, the unnatural fodder of unending national nightmares whose visual impact could replace the need to watch TV. But, beyond the palpable, many of Bush’s most damaging actions were ones which largely remain underneath the public radar screen; we will only slowly hear about them as the years go by, primarily because they don’t have a force field within the mainstream media. You have to dig deep for these stories and you have to read an uncommon literature.  Some of Bush’s most damaging effects on our culture have to do with his policies against science and scientists. His austere budget cuts, his suppression of scientific discussions, his pursuit of scientists whose opinions differed from his policies, his inventions such as “real science” to replace true science, which he labeled as “junk science” all add up to a mountain of damages, most of which are not easily recognized and many of which can never be fixed, because new constituencies have been created. New fissures in our culture have erupted.  We lost eight years in getting something worthwhile going on global climate change and Bush leaves behind a party still infiltrated with the concept of global warming as a hoax propagated by the liberals. A hoax perpetrated by junk science.

It was as if some hidden consulting firm hired Bush to destroy American Science just as a hobby for extra income during his presidency. No administration in American history ever had such a complete disregard and hostility towards its own science and scientists. From stem cells to global warming, Bush and his Republican Party colleagues forced the country backwards and in some cases, irreversibly damaged the future prospects of American science as a major force in certain areas of research and creative scientific thought. Since a component of Bush’s hostility towards science was motivated to keep his evangelical supporters fed with the proper dose of anti-science medication, it seems fitting to look at Bush, as one might look upon a previous iteration of a Catholic Pope, one who also suppressed free exchange of scientific information and, in so doing, changed the course of the history of science in his own country, as he ruled from the city-state of Rome.

Although their actions were separated in time by more than 350  years,  Pope Urban VIII and George W. Bush have one thing in common: their interference with free scientific inquiry precipitated a decline in the vitality of science in their country or region of influence.  For Pope Urban VIII, the event took place in  1633.  Under his papal reign, he brought Galileo Galilee, the most celebrated scientist in Italy,  before the Inquisition for blasphemy against the Church, for advocating  that the earth revolves around the sun. He was put on trial by the Inquisition and given a prison sentence that was commuted to house arrest, a state in which he remained until his death in 1643.

While Galileo was not the first to propose that the planets move around the sun (that was Nicolaus Copernicus 1473 – 1543), he provided direct evidence for this concept derived from the use of his improved telescopes, and his identification of the moons of Jupiter, confirming that they rotated around the planet, not around earth as Biblical interpreters wanted to believe. Galileo was a deeply religious Catholic and his reading of the Bible told him that he could pursue his studies and draw his own conclusions about the planets, since planetary motions were not specifically addressed in the Bible.  He thought he was safe. Galileo’s observations and the genius behind his work, had made him a celebrity throughout the world and his  influence had ignited a generation of bright, young, Italian scientists, eager to follow in his footsteps in math, physics and astronomy. He had in fact, opened the doorway to modern science, based on observation, hypothesis formation and the willingness to take on all comers who had other ideas or explanations. Galileo used a Socratic argumentative style to take on all those who had alternative opinions and his execution and brilliance of style, attracted a huge following. More than any other scientist before him, Galileo popularized science and astronomy.

Although Galileo’s trial was one of great historical significance in the conflict between science and religion, it is often neglected that the most powerful impact of his trial and subsequent incarceration, was the destructive pall that it cast on the emergence of the new Italian science and its energetic followers, that Galileo had ignited. The scientific momentum he had created was extinguished by the Inquisition.  Less than half a century after Galileo’s death, the English genius Isaac Newton published his famous Principia (1687) in which he accounted for the planetary motions that Galileo had observed,  through the concept of gravity. Had it not been for Pope Urban VIII’s suppression of Galileo and his followers,  Isaac Newton’s concept of gravity  might have had an Italian origin and Italian science today  would be a more dominant force in the world. The country of Italy is still plagued by excessive beaurucratic infighting that prevents the country’s best scientists from reaching their full potential.

Advance the clock by some 368 years into the  Presidency of George W. Bush: He announced in 2001 that Federal Funding could not be used to support stem cell research on embryonic tissue, apart from the use of a limited number of cell lines that had already been established (he was not honest about the number and many of them turned out to be contaminated with mouse genes).   This restriction of scientific inquiry was the first limit to free inquiry  imposed by the US Government since it had begun investing in university research during and after the Second World War. The irony of this action is that the government that had done more than any other government in history  to  create modern biological sciences was now imposing a stop sign to its progress, with the same kind of motivation that Pope Urban had used in an earlier iteration of history.

Just as Pope Urban had used religious views of planetary motions to force Galileo to face the Inquisition, George Bush used religious views of fertilization to restrict research into embryonic stem cells.  With this announcement and its immediate impact throughout the world, George Bush sounded the beginning of the eclipse of American dominance in medical and biological research.  Today, our European and Asian colleagues are aggressively pursuing stem cell research, stimulated by the first major crack in the American scientific juggernaut. Only time will tell whether this crack will lead to a more open festering wound, or whether we can heal this misstep in the coming administration. A decade from now, we may look back on that single  event as the historic moment that initiated the transfer of American leadership in biological research to a multitude of other nations and institutions.  In a similar, but equally problematic act for American science, the cancellation of the Super Collider by Congress in 1993, led to the eclipse of U.S. leadership in the science of  particle physics. With the opening of the Large Haldron Collider and its construction by CERN, we are getting the first glimpse of how American physics was eclipsed by the Congressional decision to cancel funding in 1993. Today the American dominance of science that was prominent beginning at the close of WW II is coming to an end and George Bush has single-handedly accelerated our decline in biological science leadership. It is hard to know whether the Federal ban on research is the dawning of a new era in America, an  aberrant action of a science-challenged president, or if we are finally beginning to pay the price of our poor science education policies; none of these possibilities bode well for our future.

It is silly of course to compare Pope Urban with George Bush in terms of extinguishing science. What Pope Urban did to science in Italy, George Bush could not do to science in America.  Science is too well integrated into our culture and our daily lives, to have it extinguished by an illiterate president. But significant damage has been done because ever scince WW II, American science has depended almost exclusively on Federal funding. The once dominant Ford and Rockefeller Foundations pale in compairson to what the Federal government, through NIH and NSF provide for research. Yet, it is profoundly dissapointing and alarming that our patron of science in America turned against us in a destructive whimsical fashion, all through the drive for political power. This single episode places significant doubts on whether the relationship between scientists and our government can ever be restored–I for one believe that it cannot, that we must seek alternative sources of support if we are going to keep science objective rather than a politicized culture of obeyance to the current administration.  If science is going to be assured of an independent mode of survival and contribution to the needs of our society, we need a hundred Howard Huges Institutes and state budgets that have support for research. Among the many things that GW Bush has established, the one that stands our in my mind is how he demonstrated to those of us in the scientific community, that our government can no longer be relied upon as a consistent source of support.

On November 4 of this year, we threw out the would be successor to our anti-science President and his anti-science party, not for his policies about science, but because, among other issues, the entire fabric of the country was ripping at the seams created by the numerous follies of GWB and Dick Cheney.  If Galileo were alive today, he would know too well where the  science policies of GWB have taken us and where they will take us further if we don’t correct this huge error in setting the course for our future. If we are going to be a world leader in fixing the planet, we have to be a world leader in science and technology. Yet, the danger for science funding will be with us for a very long time. We now have a two party system, in which one party swears allegiance to the value of science and support of science in our culture, while the other party has not problem articulating the destruction of science for the political purposes of rallying the party’s base. Let us hope that we remember the campaign of 2008 as one in which the ugly head of anti-science was reared and cut off before it propagated too deeply into our culture.