The Right-Wing Attack On Science Reaches A Nadir, But It Could Get Worse
The tally from Trumpian attacks on science now includes billions of dollars in damage to farmers and ranchers and assaults on scientists’ freedom of speech.
Originally published on latimes.com
One of the rules I came to live by during my years of covering global trouble spots is: Never assume that things can’t get worse.
But it will be hard to find a worse display of shameful servility to the Trump administration by a scientific organization than the American Diabetes Assn. provided on Friday.
During the organization’s annual conference in New Orleans, five of its leading members — four former presidents and the current editor of Diabetes Care, its official journal — were distributing paper copies of an editorial from the journaldecrying the administration’s aggressive attack on scientific research and funding.
Suddenly they were confronted by security guards and New Orleans police and manhandled out of the hall. (A video is here, courtesy of MedPageToday.)
Their papers were confiscated. They were ordered to surrender their passes and were informed that if they tried to reenter the hall they would be arrested for trespassing.
“We printed 1,000 copies of the editorial, at my personal expense, and we hoped that 200 people who hadn’t seen it would read it,” Steven Kahn, director of the Diabetes Research Center at the University of Washington, editor of the journal and the lead author of the editorial, told me.
Instead, the editorial has become a must-read, with tens of thousands of page views and widespread condemnation of the conference organizers’ actions.
An open letter to the ADA started by David Nathan of Massachusetts General Hospital, titled “Shame on You” and stating that “the seeming endorsement by the ADA of the current administration’s approach to science and of its attacks on freedom of speech is unconscionable” has more than 6,400 signatories on change.org as of this writing.
The Diabetes Association implied in an official statement that the scientists had breached IRS regulations that include “maintaining a strictly nonpartisan environment at all organizational events.” On Wednesday, the organization said it would commission “a thorough independent review of the events that occurred.”
The organization’s action underscores one reason why the Trump administration’s wholesale attack on scientific research has reached a level that, as I’ve written, will have generational ramifications: It’s because some of our most august scientific organizations have failed to stand up for principle.
“It’s part of a larger systems failure among the academic medical centers, research universities, scientific and professional societies and the National Academies,” says Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine, a vaccine expert and veteran adversary of pseudoscience…