Some Congress
members have overstepped their legitimate role of overseeing federally funded
scientific research by threatening to cut off money for nearly 200 grants to
study sexual behavior. The funding is channeled through the National Institutes
of Health.
This month, pressure from House Republicans led
Northwestern University to proceed with an investigation into how one of its
professors had used taxpayer funds to study human sexual arousal. And last
month, a coalition of conservative church groups said it was asking the Justice
Department to investigate whether the NIH was wrong to fund a series of what the
coalition called "smarmy projects" aimed at documenting the behavior of
prostitutes, intravenous drug users and others at high risk of spreading
sexually transmitted diseases.
These attacks might be written off as
noise by fringe groups were they not coming on the heels of the near-passage in
the House four months ago of an amendment by Rep. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) that
would have yanked federal funding from four NIH research grants on sexual
behavior. Toomey's attempt to kill the grants failed, but just barely.
In
a bombshell of an editorial published in this week's edition of the usually
sedate Science, Alan I. Leshner, the journal's executive publisher and the CEO
of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, lashes out at "moralizers
who are trying to muck with U.S. science again." Legislators, Leshner believes,
have moved from "healthy scrutiny … to irresponsible attack."
"The moral
judges proposing the de-funding don't like the fact that HIV is spread through
sex and they believe that drug addicts have made bad personal choices that have
led to addiction," Leshner says. But, as Leshner reasonably asks, "Is their
disapproval of these behaviors a justification for stifling research on the
diseases that result? Do they suppose that some form of national denial will
make these problems go away?"
There's nothing wrong with Congress wanting
to hold scientists fully accountable to the taxpayers who fund their research.
Though the nation's haughtiest scientists might want to have nothing to do with
the hoi polloi, the fact is that science usually advances best because of, not
in spite of, public scrutiny.
The true concern of legislators now trying
to micromanage the NIH's budget is not the relatively tiny amount of taxpayer
money spent on this research. Rather, they are trying to impose ideologies and
religious doctrines on scientific research. It's reasonable to disapprove of the
behavior that leads to disease but dangerous to restrict the inquiry that leads
to health and science breakthroughs.
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