“several individuals and organizations have expressed their grave concerns that some of the speakers have, in the past, made comments that have been seen to be anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic.”

Independent of the accuracy of these claims (the ScienceInsider article notes only two speakers have withdrawn over the issue, and neither are Israeli), there’s plenty wrong with why this would be a valid reason to re-do the peer review.   There doesn’t appear to be a claim that the possible bias of these speakers has influenced the work that would be presented (and supported).  In other words, no clear indication or suggestion of bad research that was missed by the review process.  This was a political request to change scientific procedures for non-scientific reasons.

There’s a lot of qualification over the alleged biases.  The claim isn’t that the speakers are anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic.  It isn’t even that the minister thinks the speakers have said things that were anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic.  It’s that some individuals and/or groups complained to the minister that the speakers said things that could be perceived as anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic.  For this the minister asks a research council for a re-do.  However, replacing speakers, which would likely solve the kerfuffle, ordinarily does not require a new review.  The council is reviewing how this grant was handled to ensure it met their policies and procedures.

The science minister handled this badly.  If there are legitimate concerns about the view of individuals at the conference, and an independent review panel felt the workshop was worth supporting, there are other means by which someone in the Canadian government could have taken action.  The U.S. is fond of barring entry to people for all sorts of reasons, independent of whether or not they were invited to a conference.  If that wasn’t possible, the aggrieved groups are certainly free to protest the event.  Political objections ought to be handled by political means.  By asking for an additional research review without concerns about the underlying science, the minister injected politics into the process.  I am not trying to say that peer review is apolitical, just that the injection of politics here isn’t warranted.

UPDATE – 6/6/09 – Apparently Nature did neglect the comma, but given how it’s absent from the Department logo, but not the announcement, I can understand the confusion.

Original Post – I’d encourage any of our readers closer to this to provide additional details, but I found it interesting this speculation from Nature News that the troubles in the government of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown could affect the organization of science policy in that country.  The Prime Minister reshuffled his cabinet in light of recent resignations, promoting the current head of the Department on Universities, Innovation and Skills (DIUS) to a Cabinet position.  DIUS was created by PM Brown in 2007 to put universities and innovation issues in the same place.  Previously innovation concerns were handled in a department focused on business interests.  The Nature report reflects concerns that things will return to where they were before.

Couple this with the fallout of the scandal over misused expense money of Members of Parliament – one UK science advocate will not be able to run for re-election – and the squabbling over the recent research evaluation and I can see why science advocates may be concerned.  However, nothing definitive has happened yet with respect to DIUS, and it’s likely far down the list of concerns for the embattled Labour government, which looks to take losses in the current European Parliamentary elections.

“The SPC at my request is inventorying all our guidelines and policies that relate to scientific integrity to look for gaps and possible areas for improvement. One SPC focus, for example, will be updating and reaffirming EPA’s Peer Review Handbook and recommending how we can improve implementation of our peer review policies across our programs and regions. I also have asked the SPC to work the National Partnership Council to reaffirm the Agency’s Principles of Scientific Integrity and update the Principles of Scientific Integrity online training.”

It’s also important to note the parts of this memo that are open to misleading interpretation.  Some will read them and think the EPA will only accept policy outcomes dictated by science (whatever that means).  What the language means is that the desired policy outcomes of the EPA will be supported by science that is conducted under current accepted community standards.

“While the laws that EPA implements leave room for policy judgments, the scientific findings on which these judgments are based should be arrived at independently using well-established scientific methods, including peer review, to assure rigor, accuracy, and impartiality. This means that policymakers must respect the expertise and independence of the Agency’s career scientists and independent advisors while insisting that the Agency’s scientific processes meet the highest standards of rigor, quality, and integrity.”

The most important part of the above paragraph is the language that understands the science is the support of policy decisions, not the determinant of those decisions.  Judgment is still king, and judgments will be made on many criteria, not just science.  The EPA Administrator recognizes that there will be conflicts:

“Able scientists may not always agree on what methodologies should be employed or how studies should be interpreted. I am committed to fostering a culture of robust scientific debate and discussion within the Agency, recognizing that in the end senior scientists must take responsibility for resolving differences of opinions using established science policies and their best professional judgment. I intend to work with our science leadership, unions, and career staff to make sure that we respect and encourage free and honest discussion among our scientists while bringing to closure issues that we must resolve to support decision making.”

Now this will not stop anyone, on any side of any issue, from trying to close off debates by appealing to the science.  Those that would suggest new standards of scientific integrity support such actions aren’t reading memos like this closely enough.

The issue is the retroactive application of informed consent standards.  For reasons listed in the piece that are primarily legal/judicial in nature, the authors of the analysis consider retroactive regulations to be an unfair infringement, equivalent to an ex post facto law which is specifically proscribed in the Bill of Rights.  From a research perspective, such retroactive regulations are problematic where consent procedures are concerned because it is usually difficult, if not impossible, to conform old consent actions to new consent procedures without violating subject confidentiality (or anonymity), or the validity of the experiments in the research.  As a result, most current NIH grants in this area would have to be stopped.

Given that President Obama’s actions on stem cell research and scientific integrity were issued on the same day, I find it ironic that an effort to preserve one could serve to undercut change in another.  The comment period on the stem cell guidelines should close soon, and we will see whether or not the final regulations will manage to have a chilling effect on stem cell research that could rival the effect following President Bush’s 2001 limitations.  If this is the case, some comfort could be taken in the Obama Executive Order, which allows for the NIH to review and update the guidelines as appropriate.  This ought to be a lesson to those who thought the issue was resolved with the March Executive Order.

Many of the science and technology organizations in Washington are disciplinary in their focus, and are more concerned with advocacy than research.  While it certainly makes sense in supporting the interests of their members and their disciplines, it can lead to a diffusion of effort in support of science and technology.  the biological sciences and the engineering disciplines have umbrella organizations (FASEB and IEEE, respectively) that help alleviate some of this stovepiping, but the basic problem remains.  The organizations that are arguably for all of science and technology – AAAS and the National Academies -  are more involved with their research and service activities, and what advocacy they do is relatively mild.

The disciplinary societies focus on funding for their disciplines, and the general groups are more general in their money goals.  A main reason there is an emphasis on funding for physical science disciplines is to ‘make up’ for the doubling of the NIH budget.  Biomedical advocates are arguing for their dollars even before the physical sciences doubling finishes.  This zero-sum game ultimately does neither group any favors, and fails to acknowledge that the federal government may have research priorities independent of some general notions of balance.

Other organizations in Washington do a more thorough job of integrating their advocacy and research missions.  Traditional think tanks like Heritage, Brookings, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Center for Security and International Studies, and the Cato Institute fall in this category.  They each have their particular ideological and/or subject matter perspectives.  And while there are small outfits focused on science and technology in these think tank spaces (Science Progress and the New Atlantis), they are both smaller components of larger organizations.  Would something like an S&T focused Heritage or Brookings help take the knowledge generated from the science of science policy and transform it into new policies?  Possibly.  Absent an entity like it, or some kind of organization focused on that goal, it certainly seems a lot harder to convert useful science policy knowledge into useful science policy.

This probably leaves an odd taste in the mouths of some.  There may well be another way to get the knowledge generated about science and technology policy into the minds and hearts of policymakers without seeming like such a shill.  The trouble is in policy it’s not enough to simply write the paper with policy recommendations and get it printed.  There needs to be an effort to push the paper and its recommendations out into the world.  Policymakers get enough stuff thrown at them that they need to filter it.  A paper with nobody pushing it won’t get the same attention as one that has someone pushing it, regardless of the relative quality of the two.

The summary that follows is based on my notes and recollections.  Any misrepresentations are mine and mine alone.  If you were there and think I mischaracterized something, please comment or contact me off-blog.

Dr. Marburger came to the job from a notable research and research administration career, having served as President of SUNY-Stonybrook as well as Director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.  He acknowledged that taking the job opened his eyes to science policy beyond his narrow slice of the pie (physics, mostly).  Moving quickly from his background to an overview of science and technology policy, he used a series of charts to note two points that often need repeating.  First, the pattern of public support ($) for science is typically reactive to random, outside events.  Second, there is no apparent systematic approach to support for science and technology funding.  The latest evidence of this was the addition of $6.5 billion to the NIH stimulus bill funding by one senator.  In other words, narrow advantage trumps objective planning. These repeating themes prompted Marburger to respond as a scientist and attempt to place some order on the chaos.

This combination of scientific method and political optimism fed into Marburger’s proposal for a science of science policy that started in 2006.  He is convinced that rational policies can be implemented in the areas of science and technology.  While that seems wildly optimistic on its face, forming policies that are designed to achieve specific outcomes (or at least outputs) is not crazy.  The true challenge is in getting those policies implemented.  More on how the science of science policy might work on implementation tomorrow.

Marburger spent the last portion of his remarks describing the need for tools to better measure and assess science and technology policy phenomena.  For instance, while he is sympathetic to the recommendations made in the many workforce reports during the middle of this decade, he didn’t care for the arguments because they lack a foundation in models or analysis.  Another challenge towards finding better tools is the absence of an embedded or established community around these issues.  Now there is certainly a collection of research communities connected to these issues.

But the critical problem (one Marburger could do a better job in articulating) is the absence of a developed community in this area that has the same kind of institutional resources in policy that you find in international relations, tax, education and other policy areas.  Unfortunately, I don’t see any kind of critical mass forming to address this concern.  I watched Michael Crow, President of Arizona State, make the same basic arguments at a conference in 2004 – asking why aren’t science and technology policy researchers or practitioners as effective in Washington as their counterparts in tax policy or foreign policy.  His remarks might as well have been met with crickets.

Dr. Marburger has developed one part of this challenge – the need for better (and better coordinated) understanding of the effect of policies on innovative phenomena (and vice versa).  There are other parts of this challenge, like building community infrastructure and knowledge transfer mechanisms, that need work.  As Dr. Marburger is back to being a professor, there is a need for others (and I mean more than one person) to help expand the project if science and technology policies are going to change from reactive to proactive.  Tomorrow I’ll expand on this and other challenges facing the science of science policy project, which at the moment is an NSF funding program, an interagency task force, and a lot of wishful thinking.

Unfortunately, the interviewer asks a question that somehow completely confuses the problem of politicization in science.

Do you think controversial scientific questions, such as the use of human embryonic stem cells, can ever be removed from politics in the United States?

While Varmus appears to accept the premise and say that they can, a careful reading of his response demonstrates how questions involving ethics choices – like the use of human embryonic stem cells – always involve some level of politics.  He speaks of how the U.K. and the U.S. used different forms of regulation to control the use of human embryonic stem cells, and how an effective incorporation of scientific expertise in the political process would allow for effective rules on research to be established and used.

The comment period is brief – it ends at 5 p.m. Eastern time on May 13.  You can submit comments via email (scientificintegrity@ostp.gov), online (though I’d make sure they fixed the link on that page), or by mail (address is listed in the Federal Register notice).  Comments can also be made on the new OSTP Blog, with blog posts for each of the principles outlined below.  You will need to register in order to comment on the blog.

There is some guidance for the comments, which are after the jump:

Respondents are invited to suggest: (1) Recommendations that would be responsive to the aims of the President, (2) specific implementing strategies, and (3) data and empirical evidence related
to the effectiveness of strategies to promote scientific integrity. Comments submitted are encouraged to:

• Be as succinct as possible (1000 words or less recommended);

• Specify which of the prior six principles (a–f) are being addressed with each comment;

• Explain views and reasoning clearly; and

• Describe how the success of particular strategies might be evaluated or measured.

The specific principles mentioned above are:

(a) The selection and retention of candidates for science and technology positions in the executive branch should be based on the candidate’s knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity;

(b) Each agency should have appropriate rules and procedures to ensure the integrity of the scientific process within the agency;

(c) When scientific or technological information is considered in policy decisions, the information should be
subject to well-established scientific processes, including peer review where appropriate, and each agency should appropriately and accurately reflect that information in complying with and applying relevant statutory standards.

(d) Except for information that is properly restricted from disclosure under procedures established in accordance with statute, regulation, Executive Order, or Presidential Memorandum, each agency should make available to the public the scientific or technological findings or conclusions considered or relied on in policy decisions;

(e) Each agency should have in place procedures to identify and address instances in which the scientific process or the integrity of scientific and technological information may be compromised; and

(f) Each agency should adopt such additional procedures, including any appropriate whistleblower protections, as are necessary to ensure the integrity of scientific and technological information and processes on which the agency relies in its decision-making or otherwise uses or prepares.

I expect to submit comments, not the least of which will be to ask for a definition of what scientific integrity means.  While it might seem an obvious question to some, it’s absence in the Presidential Memorandum* seems to make implementation of any recommendations nearly meaningless.

* – I had previously misidentified this document as an Executive Order.

Cook-Deegan not only covers the book well, but does a fine job of placing its stories and Varmus into proper contexts.  The average review in a Sunday book review supplement wouldn’t necessarily take the time to compare Varmus’ memoir with that of his Nobel Prize-sharing colleague Michael Bishop, nor would it look into the future to see how Varmus and his past experiences could shape policy moving forward.  That reflects well on both Cook-Deegan and American Scientist.  A taste of the review, which hints at the value of the book.

Varmus still smarts from having occasionally been beaten to a discovery that a different scientific approach might have snared for him. Apparently even a Nobel Prize is only partial recompense for lost opportunities. Aspiring scientists will see the importance of scientific competition in Varmus’s story. His obvious competitiveness is complemented by his clear affection for others in the field, though. And he keeps his rhetoric in check, giving credit where credit is due. The book would be more piquant if it settled some scores, but Varmus turns his analytical firepower on his own mistakes rather than on the offenses of others.