The anti-science party

There is one party which is determined to keep the products of science from doing anyone any good.

From my days as an official at the FDA during the ’80s and early ’90s, when the Democrats were in the congressional majority, I recall the incessant, uninformed, and highly politicized meddling by prominent members of Congress. They did incalculable damage to science and technology. And now they’re back.

A few examples:

In 1989, Sen. Patrick Leahy, then chairman of the Agriculture Committee, complained to the FDA commissioner about the agency’s supposedly cavalier, insufficiently rigorous review of an important veterinary drug called bovine somatotropin, or bST, which boosts the milk production of dairy cows.
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Largely as a result of the misguided efforts and bullying of Leahy and Conyers — and regulators’ fear of the two powerful congressmen — the FDA’s review of this excellent veterinary drug took nine years, while the evaluation of an almost identical product for injection into growth-hormone-deficient children had taken a mere 18 months.
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During the 1980s, Congressman John Dingell, then-chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, interfered constantly in federal agencies’ domestic policy-making, as well as their attempts to hammer out international agreements on the regulation of agricultural biotechnology under the auspices of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Dingell and his committee’s investigators harassed scientists from various regulatory agencies (of whom I was one), although they had no understanding of the subject area and were, in fact, lobbying against both a sound scientific approach and U.S. interests.

In carrying out the committee’s oversight role over the FDA, the imperious Dingell acted as a kind of self-appointed Grand Inquisitor. He and his staff continually summoned agency officials to humiliating and abusive hearings and demanded that they produce mountains of documents on unrealistically short deadlines. Committee staffers even appeared personally and unannounced at FDA headquarters and helped themselves to documents that the agency (and federal law) considered to be confidential business information and, therefore, off limits.

What seems to draw the most Democrat ire is those products that actually work, actually help people, and therefore might make their creators piles and piles of money.