Managing Controversies over Science: The Case of Fetal Research

A portrait of Ben Franklin painted in Paris during the American Revolution carries the inscription "He wrested the lightning from the sky and the scepter from the Tyrants" (Piel 1979, 41). From the time of its founding our nation has valued science as both a source of knowledge and a guarantor of political freedom. Science, in this view, is inherently progressive and must not be contaminated by ideology and political passions (Proctor 1991, 4). But increasingly science is caught in ideological and political disputes. This article discusses the implications of science controversies for managing science policy and examines the twenty-year fetal research dispute. AN ERODING CONSENSUS Most scientists and most citizens believe that although the products of science can be used for good or evil, science itself is detached from and not responsible for the social consequences of its own discoveries. In this view, research on the structure of matter remains untarnished no matter how grotesque the results of an atom bomb detonation or how dangerous the storage of atomic waste. While government can and must regulate the products of research, it must keep its distance from research itself. This belief that research, although not its applications, is neutral, progressive, and must be protected constitutes the basic tenets of what Robert Proctor calls the political ideology of science (Proctor 1991, 269). As the power and stature of science has grown over the past two hundred years, this political ideology has become a cornerstone of the modern, liberal state and 'Presented at the National Public Management Research Conference, Robert M. La Follette Institute of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison, September 30-October 2, 1993. Portions of this article were taken from "The Fetal Research Dispute," in Controversy: Politics of Technical Decisions, 3d ed., Dorothy Nelkin, ed., Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992, and my forthcoming book, Fall from Grace: The Story of Fetal Research and Its Moral Politics, New York: St. Martin's. Many thanks to Marisa Kelly and Thelma Helyar for their comments on an earlier draft. J-PART, 5(1995):1:5-18 5IJournal of Public Administration Research and Theory This content downloaded from 157.55.39.163 on Wed, 23 Nov 2016 04:30:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Managing Controversies: Fetal Research the basis for the post-World War II consensus on the management of science policy. As with so much else in contemporary American government, World War II was a turning point. Before the war the federal government supported little scientific research; notable exceptions were the equipping of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the establishing of the Bureau of Standards. During the war, scientists in nearly all areas, from medicine to physics, abandoned their own research interests to work on war-related projects and discovered in the process that large-scale collaborations underwritten by the federal government led to rapid progress. After the war, government leaders and noted scientists pressed for a continued collaboration between science and government. This new vision of cooperation was expressed most coherently in Vannevar Bush's thirty-four-page policy memo, Science: The Endless Frontier, which he presented to President Truman in July 1945. Bush, who had been the war-time director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, proposed a radical departure for managing peace-time science. He argued that "our health, prosperity, and security" depended on the continuous flow of "new scientific knowledge" (Bush 1945, 12). To ensure progress, he advocated the creation of new federal science support agencies (these later would become the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health) that would provide support for a wide array of research but-and this is an essential "but"-would leave to the scientists the major decisions about which research would be funded. Government's role was to energetically support research and to set general social goals; it would neither direct nor regulate research. The management of science policy was to be assigned to a science subgovernment that would consist of scientists heading the newly created science agencies and fellow researchers in universities and private laboratories. Despite a general acceptance of its lofty ideals, this new approach to science policy was not without its critics. Some, such as the populist senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, feared the elitism inherent in prominent scientists from top universities dispensing grants to themselves; he thought this new system was another example of the rich getting richer. Others, such as President Truman, had serious misgivings about the creation of new government agencies that operated outside the established, if messy, norms of political accountability. Truman favored greater federal support for science but felt that the new science agencies should be similar to other cabinet agencies; therefore, he vetoed 6/J-PART, January 1995 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.163 on Wed, 23 Nov 2016 04:30:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Managing Controversies: Fetal Research the first NSF authorization bill in 1947, in part because it did not require Senate approval of the director. When NSF and NIH were created, during Eisenhower's administration, their political accountability was enhanced by Senate approval of the directors and by greater budgetary oversight. Nonetheless, these new science bureaucracies gave the scientific community unprecedented autonomy over the distribution of research money and the direction of science policy. Leading university researchers took turns, and still take turns, directing different study sections in the science agencies, and the directors of NIH and NSF often came from and returned to major research labs. In any other area of policy, this hand-in-glove management would have been condemned as a "revolving door" and agency capture, but the belief that science is above corruption protected it from such criticism. Although elected officials would at times call attention to scientific fraud or the funding of absurd-sounding research projects-these were favorite targets of Senator Proxmire's "Golden Fleece Awards"-elected officials rarely questioned science policy, assuming that science prospered best when left to scientists. Government leaders shared the scientists' beliefs that no one could anticipate, much less plan for, the next breakthrough and even the most esoteric project could lead to important advances. Science policy was built on the assumption that stringent accountability would impede progress, since restrictions, or even overly enthusiastic planning, were seen as stifling to scientific creativity. Science prospered and became a source of national pride and power. In the mid-1960s, McGeorge Bundy (1966, 431) wrote, I suggest that there is a wide, deep, and important coincidence between the temper and purpose of American national policy and the temper and purpose of American science. Our science and our society are deeply alike in the pragmatic, optimistic, energetic, and essentially cooperative view of the way in which useful things get done. This optimism would not survive the 1970s. Bundy and others did not foresee how science would become socially divisive or how moralistic disputes over science would halt research that scientists believed held great promise. Over the past twenty years, protests have erupted over the uses of science, such as nuclear power, and over the risks associated with advances, such as genetically altered food. A few years ago, the cold fusion scam showed scientists at their ambitious worst, and recent revelations of researchers faking Star Wars tests depict scientists as sycophants, not "speakers of truth to power." Recently the "don't 71J-PART, January 1995 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.163 on Wed, 23 Nov 2016 04:30:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Managing Controversies: Fetal Research mess with mother nature" theme became a box office hit in Jurassic Park. Ozone holes, endangered species, DNA testing, nutrition guidelines: The list of controversies grows almost weekly. Because of these and many other controversies, science and science policy are losing their special place in government; they have fallen from grace. Once protected from political intrusion, science is becoming just one more government program, and scientists increasingly are viewed in Congress as "just another selfish pressure group, not as the wizards of perpetual progress" (Price 1978, 75). The consensus at the foundation of science policy has begun to erode, raising new questions about how best to manage science policy in an era of skepticism and conflict. This article briefly examines the fetal research controversy and its implications for the management of science policy. THE FETAL RESEARCH CONTROVERSY On January 22, 1993, within a day of taking office, President Clinton rescinded President Bush's executive order of 1989 that banned federal funding for fetal tissue transplantation research-research that held promise of cures for such debilitating degenerative conditions as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. This executive order marks the end of the most recent stage in a twenty-year controversy over fetal research. To research supporters, the ban was a dangerous intrusion of politics into the almost sacred, if aseptic, preserve of science. To fetal research opponents, Clinton's order and the renewal of fetal research exemplify the relentless crushing of morals and traditional beliefs by the bulldozer of scientific progress. To those managing science policy, the order means a long-awaited return to business as usual after two decades of seemingly pointless