With religious conservatives and corporate right-wingers clamoring for blood, scientific advisory committees are being cleansed and discarded, producing an administration devoid of scientific advise.
By Frederick Sweet

In 1633, the Catholic Church put Galileo under house arrest because he dared to contradict their ancient earth-centered dogma of the universe. Similarly, because their scientific or ethical views clash with President George W. Bush's radical religious right wingers and corporate supporters, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is purging at least two and possibly more expert scientific committees.

One committee, studying federal protections for human research subjects, angered Bush's radical religious supporters. Another committee charged with helping to protect public health has been jettisoned by Bush because it recommended that the Food and Drug Administration expand its regulation of the increasingly lucrative genetic testing industry, which had previously been free of oversight.

Yet another scientific advisory committee, for which Bush will replace nearly all of its members, was responsible for assessing the harmful effects of environmental chemicals on human health. Some of the replacements will be people with direct links to industries tht have a history of polluting the environment with harmful chemicals such as chromium. For example, Dennis Paustenbach, one of the newly appointed Bush committee members, is the California scientist who helped defend Pacific Gas and Electric Company. against the real-life Erin Brockovich!

As reported by Science magazine last September, several of the new appointees to the scientific committee dealing with environmental health are well known for their connections to the chemical industry. The previous committee's major activities had been to assess the health effects of low-level exposures to environmental chemicals. Now, that's all going to change.

The new Bush administration's appointees include Lois Swirsky Gold, a University of California risk-assessment specialist whose career had been made by opposing scientific claims of links between environmental pollutants and cancer; Roger McClellan, former president of the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology, a North Carolina research firm supported by several chemical companies; and Becky Norton Dunlop, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation who vigorously fought against environmental regulation as Virginia's secretary of natural resources.

The committee that deals with policies pertaining to medical research on newborn and infant children ran afoul of religious conservatives because it would not submit to the Bush administration's campaign to include fetuses for federal regulation. Officials at HHS told the Washington Post that they'd heard the department intends to replace the committee with members willing to include human fetuses and even embryos when it reviews policies on human research. This change is part of Bush's agenda to bring rights to the unborn on behalf of his radical right religious supporters.

The HHS officials revealed that they plan to name Mildred Jefferson to the reconstituted human studies committee that the pediatric department plans to create. Jefferson is a medical doctor who helped to create the National Right to Life Committee, serving three times as its president. She will no doubt aggressively include fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses while reviewing policies for medical research on newborns and infants.

Another committee dealing with human experimentation has angered the pharmaceutical industry and other research enterprises. Several Washington Post sources suggested this is because the committee had recommended tightening up conflict-of-interest rules and imposing new restrictions on research involving the mentally ill.

"It's very frustrating," said Paul Gelsinger, who joined the committee after his son, Jesse, died in a Pennsylvania gene therapy experiment that was later found to have broken basic safety rules. "It's always been my view that money is running the research show," he said. "So with this [Bush] administration's ties to industry, I'm not surprised" to see the committee killed.

Another example of recent purges by the Bush administration of scientific advisors is the [HHS] Secretary's Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing. The Committee had been created during the Clinton administration after a major federal report concluded that the public was at risk for being harmed by the emerging gene-testing industry.

Among the important topics tackled by the genetic testing committee was how to deal with the proliferation of so-called home-brew genetic tests, offered by a growing number of companies and doctors. Blood tests can detect DNA variations that may increase a person's odds of getting a disease or affect a patient's response to medicines.

"This is a real turnaround. It's bad. It's terrible," said Neil Holtzman, an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins University who chaired the HHS task force that led to the committee's creation.

Although the Food and Drug Administration has long asserted its authority to regulate these tests, in part because of a lack of resources it has opted not to do so. Companies are now free to market these expensive tests for genes even if they cannot detect anyone's susceptibility to disease or are otherwise completely useless. Yet a growing number of companies are selling gene tests, often needlessly alarming people with meaningless results. In other cases, the tests offer false reassurances.

The FDA was developing rules for gene tests when the Bush administration took over. The previous scientific committee convinced the Agency to use its authority for overseeing the marketing of these tests. Then, suddenly, the FDA's stance changed: the agency was no longer certain it had the regulatory authority so oversight plans stalled. HHS spokesman William Pierce told the Post, the FDA is still mulling over whether or not it has authority; in September, members of the scientific advisory committee studying the gene tests learned that the committee's charter expired and will not be renewed.

Wylie Burke chairs the department of medical history and ethics at the University of Washington. A member of the committee, Burke said government oversight of commercial genetic testing is needed now more than ever because companies are starting to advertise tests directly to consumers and are even offering questionable services over the Internet. "People need to know what they're getting," Burke said. "We were making real headway with informed-consent issues and with categorizing levels of risk. It would be a shame if that does not get completed."

The new Bush administration appointees are less competent and have lower ethical standards than the purged government scientific advisors. Based on personal experience, I am convinced that the kinds of recent changes at HHS, as described above, can become catastrophic for the United States.

In 1961, after graduating from Brooklyn College with a degree in chemistry, I worked as a GS-7 laboratory analyst for the Food and Drug Administration at its giant facility on Varrick Street in New York City. During some six months of my working there, I was impressed that the FDA very directly protects America's public health by carefully monitoring its food, drugs, and cosmetics.

A 1960s FDA museum of horrors in its Varrick Street building had contained tangible evidence of the harmful materials and devices that its investigators had confiscated from unscrupulous businessmen: candy coated tape worm eggs sold as diet pills; counterfeit "antibiotics" that were actually sugar pills; children's aspirin contaminated with steroids intended for birth control pills; an ordinary spot light in a mysterious looking box from which colored lights were emitted, which claimed to cure everything from cancer to diabetes. Without the government's vigilant protection with good scientific and medical advisors, these are the kinds of wretched things that could have been foisted upon the public.

Indeed, while I was working for the FDA, it had just banned the importation and distribution of thalidomide. The fear was the drug would harm pregnant women based on studies of abnormal offspring in test rabbits. The eventual outbreak of thalidomide deformed babies had not yet begun in Europe. Resisting political pressures from the giant U.S. pharmaceutical industry, the FDA stood its ground on banning thalidomide. I am tempted to guess that the present Bush administration would have given in to the drug companies, resulting in hundreds of thousands of American thalidomide babies.

Today's charlatans and environmental polluters are far more sophisticated, bigger and more ominous than their counterparts in the 1960s. And now Bush is weakening the HHS by replacing competent and highly principled scientific advisors with those smiled upon by his radical religious right and corporate supporters. Unless we soon have a "regime change" of our own in the forthcoming elections, we are bound to be dragged by the Bush administration into a new Dark Age.

Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Posted Thursday, Oct. 10, 2002

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