Science and the English Language
Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, the former Director of the Centers for Disease Control, announced that seven words should not be used in CDC budget requests. She was trying to help CDC staff escape the surveillance of budgeters. Dr. Fitzgerald just resigned because of a problem with her tobacco stock, but her greater sin was toying with the English language. Such comical censorship always summons the genie and genius of George Orwell. She should have read his 1950 essay “Politics and the English Language”.
The trigger words were: fetus, vulnerable, science-based, transgender, diversity, evidence-based, and entitlement. My colleague Dick Ahles wrote about banning these words several weeks ago in these pages. In an essay entitled To Be, or Not to Be, the New Yorker writer Masha Gessen used each of these words to describe a chapter in her life as a Russian and American writer. Her essay is in the February 8, 2018 issue of the New York Review of Books. Russian writers have a keen appreciation for Orwell, although they often have to leave Russia to tell us about it.
This column spent considerable time covering the Zika and Ebola virus crises so, in that context, here my effort to use the seven words in a constructive way:
“During pregnancy, a human fetus is vulnerable to Zika virus. Science-based surveys predict that Aedes aegypti, the carrier of Zika, is migrating north due to climate change. One hope to stop the spread of disease is to create transgender mosquitos, designed to spread through the population and kill it. Evidence, based on release of such mosquitos on islands, has shown that genetic diversity of native mosquitos does not interfere, a result that entitles cautious optimism.”
According to the Washington Post and other publications, CDC suggested that: “science-based” or “evidence-based,” might be stated as: “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.” What does this mean? That kids don’t need measles or whooping cough vaccines to go to school if there is objection in the community?
The new Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control is Dr. Ann Schuchat. The Public Health Service is a uniformed service, and she is a Rear Admiral. She is a respiratory disease expert, epidemiologist and civil servant who managed the H1N1 flu epidemic of 2010. Dr. Schuchat will probably ignore the seven-word edict. The CDC has more important problems—they are set for a cut of $1.2 billion, a reduction of almost 17%. Whole programs have been deleted—some perhaps reasonably, but many not. There will be fewer disease detectives, who are sent to outbreaks all over the world to learn what caused them. A few years ago I went to a packed seminar at Columbia where a CDC scientist described how his team solved a case of epidemic lethal pneumonia in the American Southwest. It took them a day and a half to determine that Hanta virus carried on dust was the culprit—and to stop the epidemic.
The events at CDC are part of a withering lack of interest in science in Washington. For example, The Office of Science and Technology Policy is a cabinet level agency that advises the President. It has no Director and no names have been submitted. The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology has 53 staffers. The Democratic staff has competent scientists, but the Republicans have none on their staff. The same withdrawal of expertise has taken place in administrative departments, notably The EPA, and The Department of Energy and The Department of Agriculture.
Government investment in basic and applied research that came after the Second World War fueled the American economy, giving us advances in communications, electronics, biomedicine and pharmaceuticals. Thanks to basic research we are now treating genetic diseases and cancers that p were once hopeless. President Roosevelt and his science advisor, Dr. Vannevar Bush of MIT, made sure that support would continue when the war was over. Dr. Bush convinced Roosevelt that basic research is The Endless Frontier—the title of a book he wrote that energized the country’s universities and industry after the war.
This current administration has lost sight of the role of science in driving the American economy. The issue used to be bipartisan and I can’t explain the change except as another victim of toxic politics. Before we slow our scientific research we should remember that other countries are not so foolish.
A funny thing about scientific discoveries is that they require us to make choices and these are often inconvenient and expensive: rising oceans, changing climate, new epidemics, vaccines, cyber-security and many more. Perhaps one reason that science is currently under attack is that facts and the disasters that arise from ignoring them interrupt the narrative of podium pounders. Scientists and other natural skeptics never trust anyone who ends a sentence with “BELIEVE ME!”.
Richard Kessin, PhD is Professor Emeritus of Pathology an Cell Biology at Columbia University. He lives in Norfolk and can be reached at Richard.Kessin@gmail.com.