The First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Scientists

According to a University of California, Berkeley study in the February issue of Political Psychology, when people learn about research findings that run counter to their own political beliefs, they doubt the conclusions. (That's to be expected.) What surprised the UC researchers is that people—particularly politically conservative people—often also question the researcher's objectivity. In the study, survey participants with conservative beliefs tended to attribute scientific data resulting in liberal findings to a researcher's liberalism. At the same time, they were less likely to conclude that conservative findings were due to a researcher's conservatism.

So that could explain why the Republican Congress was so slow to act on Global Warming, and why they got so explosively red in the face when they were accused of nattering on pig-headedly about the whole thing. It could also explain why Bush's White House self-righteously muzzled scientists in general on many issues, and smiled when they did so. And it also may shed light on a more recent hairy tussle between The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Attorney General of Connecticut. From the Abstract of "Science, Politics, and Values: The Politicization of Professional Practice Guidelines" in Journal of the American Medical Association (Feb 11, vol. 301, #6):

"The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) issued updated clinical practice guidelines in 2006 for the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease.1 Within days, the Connecticut attorney general launched an investigation, alleging IDSA had violated state antitrust law by recommending against the use of long-term antibiotics to treat 'chronic Lyme disease (CLD),' a label applied by advocates to a variety of nonspecific symptoms for which frequently no evidence suggests the etiologic agent of Lyme disease is responsible. The IDSA was forced to settle the claim to avoid exorbitant litigation costs, even though the society's guidelines were based on sound science. The case exemplifies the politicization of health policy, with elected officials advocating for health policies against the weight of scientific evidence. [Emphasis mine.]

Unlike Bush, Obama "gets" global warming. He also gets the need to put scientists in charge of the national debates on health, energy, and technology policy. But will Republican Senators and Representatives reflexively gridlock progress if and when scientists like our new Nobel-laureate Energy Secretary, with full transparency, lead the nation in ways that run counter to conservative political beliefs? Should we expect conservatives to assume that the nation's most eminent scientists are unscientific?

Maybe.

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Leader of My Pack

Let me begin by assuring you that my dog mended, though she still has a huge hitch in her walk, and her back legs go faster now than her front ones, giving her a John Wayne lope.

Jeanette is a miniature beagle, bred, I'm told, to ride in the saddlebags of horses on the hunt. Her "saddlebag equivalent," she thinks, is the front passenger seat of my Subaru.

For 12 years now, whenever my kids and I have driven away without her, her brain has seized with compulsion to join the hunt. Jeanette has chewed through her crate and a fancy French door in her efforts to reach us. She digs under fences. She wriggles out of leads.

On a hot day one summer back in her third year, I didn't put Jeanette in her crate when we all left for the town pool. I knew she'd chew through it anyway, so I left her outside. When she looked like she wanted to follow, I sternly said "No," put pedal to metal, and tried to outrun her with my car. Long after I thought we'd left her behind, we all felt a big bump.

“What was that?” the kids asked when I slowed the car to a stop.

With my eyes glued on the rear-view mirror, where I could see a small tri-color mass lying in the middle of the road, I blurted out, "I killed the dog". Well, not quite. I almost killed the dog. But with my pre-emptive announcement I did throw the children into a frenzy.

When I loaded Jeanette into my wayback, she was jerking her head, voiceless, an accusing jitter in her eyes. The children were not at all able to follow my suggestions that they not look and that they please quiet down and think wonderful thoughts to give Jeanette some peace. Kora, our 7-year-old friend, saved my sanity by suggesting that we all say, "Good girl, Jeanette." Ben, my 6-year-old, sobbed the phrase like a mantra. Katie, my 10-year-old, wailed it angrily. The vet’s office down the road was closed. I raced into town, through a senseless traffic jam, and on, frantically searching for someone who could help.

And as I drove, I heard Kora tell Jeanette that her white light was getting brighter. And then Jeanette started to whimper. Softly. Then loudly. The dog that I thought had seconds to live had some animation by the time we reached a vet. Soon enough she was home from a week-long stay in an ICU. By Week Two she had full control of the left side of her body and was gaining some control of the right.

Everything happens for a reason, right? Well, no—but I am relieved to paraphrase Samuel Clemens. "The reports of Jeanette's death were greatly exaggerated." And I learned a lesson, for which I am deeply grateful. As a parent, I am the leader of a small pack--the children (Katie and Ben), and Jeanette, our dog. Jeanette has taught me that a difficult pack member only gets more difficult if the leader gives up and fails to follow through on reasonable restrictions. Jeanette was, for the rest of that summer, quite literally my constant and well-deserved burden. (I had to carry her around in a baby sling). Things turned out that way because I had failed to contain her the way she needed to be contained. But because I learned my lesson well enough, my sometimes difficult children—now in their mid and late teens--will never suffer the consequences of my failing to say "No", mean "No", and enforce "No” ... no matter how strongly they rebel.

Because Jeanette escapes crates, fences, and leads, more than one friend has suggested that I rename her "Houdini." I won't. I may actually rename her "Consequences," though. "Consequences"--as in "We reap exactly what we, in our equivocations, sew". In flights of fancy I stand on my back porch each night, gratefully calling my "Consequences" home.

This was originally part of the Vermont Public Radio "Commentary" series.

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In Discover this Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Television

In February's Discover Magazine:

1 Fade to black: On February 17, television stations will broadcast only digital signals, ending the run of the TV system used in the United States for the past 55 years.

2 The digital television signal can transmit pictures composed of up to 1,080 lines. That’s a long way from the first TV, demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1926. It used just 30 lines to create a coarse image.

3 Baird’s television looked like a peep-show device, held together with scrap wood, darning needles, string, and sealing wax. His invention was partly mechanical, relying on a spinning metal disk with a spiral of holes to chop up images for transmission.

See 4-20.

It's Cold Here

And weather is moving in.

What Vermont Looks Like

Private, tortured fall foliage.

In Discover this Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Genius

In October's Discover Magazine.

1 The latest winners of the Nobel Prize—the big kahuna of genius awards—will be announced this month. Were you nominated? To find out, you’ll have to either win or wait 50 years, which is how long the Nobel committee keeps secret the list of also-rans.

2 Nyah, nyah. William Shockley, who won the 1956 Nobel in physics for inventing the transistor, was excluded as a child from a long-term study of genius because his I.Q. score wasn’t high enough.

3 History repeated itself in 1968 when Luis Alvarez won a Nobel for his work on elementary particles. He had been excluded from the same research program as Shockley. Who set up that study, anyway?

See "things" 4-20.

New Beginnings

After I read an article suggesting that people could revive relationships by engaging together in exhilarating sports, I could have asked my husband to go skiing. But my marriage is not the only time-worn relationship I'm in. I have nearly grown children. Sure, our first years together had their passion, good and bad. But then things evened out--considerably.

A week or so after I read the article, I needed to make plans for my 15-year-old son's spring break. Did I want to spend it pestering him to clean his room? Did he want claim it's clean already? Or might we dispel our standoff and revive our relationship by, say, scuba diving?

Cut to: The Cayman Islands and a diving course that culminates in a descent to 120 feet.

Even I did not have "reviving our relationship" in mind as Ben and I began the final dive. I was wondering if my brain was going to explode, though at around 45 feet I remembered that "imploding" was the correct worry. But soon enough, I was swimming with Ben through a maze of coral as we descended to our record depth.

Emotion distorts memory. I remember seeing Ben shoot ahead, out of a cave, and hover over the 25,000 foot drop that is the renowned Cayman Trench. I remember holding my breath in fear. Ben has pointed out that it was the instructor who went first and that, if I had held my breath, I'd have died.

ANYWAY, we both agree that all the fish were behind us, grazing on the coral. Ahead and below was just blue. Without debris or life forms to define foreground from background, we couldn't tell if the blue was an inch thick or if it extended to the center of the earth.

When I was little I wanted to be the first person on the moon. When I was 15 Neil Armstrong was. Now, at the very age at which that early dream died, my son has experienced weightlessness and a sense of limitless space, and he's shared that space companionably with a range of aquatic animals, some of which we'd always thought would eat us. (What they actually do is swim lazily by, certain that we are not part of any food chain they recognize.)

Did a spring break of exhilarating sport give Ben and me a new beginning? On the way home he handled my luggage. I opened doors. We cheerfully survived a 2-hour wait at Immigration. And neither of us has mentioned the state of his room since our return.

All right. Days in our house bounce by as imperfectly as they do anywhere and, no, we can't afford to dive again soon. But I am sold as never before on the idea of families getting outside together when the going gets tough--or even when the going gets boring.

This was original part of Vermont Public Radio's "Commentary" series.

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