A glowing report from Georgia

It may sound biased of me, but I think one thing should be an ironclad requirement for holding public office: an adequate understanding of science.

Yes, I know that politics doesn't always connect directly to science.  But I would respectfully submit that science as a means of knowledge, as a way of sorting fact from fiction, is such a critical capacity that no leader should be deficient in it.  Science teaches you a protocol for understanding evidence-based inference, which then can be applied to any area you like.

Add that to the fact that there are realms of policymaking that require an explicit understanding of science -- environmental, medical, and educational policy come to mind -- and this gives us a powerful reason to expect that our elected officials understand not only how science is done, but to have a basic grasp of its fundamental rules.

Instead, we have people like Georgia State RepresentativeTom Kirby (R-Loganville).

Kirby just introduced a bill into the Georgia House of Representatives that is specifically to prevent anyone from creating a glow-in-the-dark human/jellyfish hybrid.  Because evidently that's a thing that they do, down there in Georgia.  And not only do they do it, they do it often enough that Representative Kirby wants a law passed to put an end to the practice.

"We in Georgia are taking the lead on this issue," Kirby states on his website.  "Human life at all stages is precious including as an embryo.  We need to get out in front of the science and technology, before it becomes something no one wants.  The mixing of Human Embryos with Jellyfish cells to create a glow in the dark human, we say not in Georgia.  This bill is about protecting Human Life while maintaining good, valid research that does not destroy life."

What could have precipitated this?

My guess is that someone told Representative Kirby that researchers had experimented with inserting a gene for a jellyfish fluorescence protein into the embryos of cats, creating kittens with phosphorescent skin.

Glow kitties [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then, Kirby asked one of his aides, "But... could they do this with human embryos?"  And the aide said, "It's possible."  And Kirby said, "We've got to put a stop to this!"

What bugs me about this is that not only does Representative Kirby apparently have little understanding of how the process works (it has nothing to do with "mixing embryos with jellyfish cells"), he doesn't understand the point of making the glow cats in the first place.  It wasn't just to create demonic-looking cats (can you imagine waking up at night to see one of those staring at you?).  It also wasn't because scientists were thinking, "Ha ha!  Now we can create an army of Glowing Humans that will take over the world!"

The reason this research was done was primarily medical.  The problem with genetic modification is getting an inserted gene to express at the right time and place; so learning how to control the process, generating an animal that not only expressed the glowing protein, but expressed it in sufficient quantities and in one tissue only (the skin), showed that we can potentially do analogous procedures in humans.

Note that I say "analogous," not "identical."  This kind of targeted gene therapy could eliminate protein-deficiency genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency), and hemophilia.  It works on the same principle; insert the gene into human cells, along with a robust tissue-specific promoter that allows the gene to turn on in the right tissue type.  If all goes well, we could see life-threatening genetic disorders not simply treated, but eliminated.

Of course, I doubt that Representative Kirby understands that.  Anyone who is at the "human-jellyfish hybrid" stage of science comprehension is light years away from getting even the basics of how genetic research works.  

And Kirby himself admitted he didn't know what the hell he was talking about.  "I've had people tell me it is [possible], but I haven't verified that for sure," he told reporters.  "It's time we either get in front of it, or we're going to be chasing our tails."

Can I just ask you one question, Representative Kirby?  Why the fuck would you propose a bill regarding something you "haven't verified" and clearly don't have sufficient IQ to understand?

But members of Congress seldom let those sorts of considerations stand in their way.  So now we have a bill on the floor of congress in Georgia to prevent scientists from creating something that (1) they didn't intend to create anyhow, and (2) is impossible to do in the way the bill describes.  Good use of our policymakers' time and taxpayer dollars, isn't it?

I know it must be hard to be an elected official.  It's not only a job I would never want, but one for which I am clearly not qualified.  But I do have one thing going for me; when I don't know what I'm talking about, I generally shut the hell up.  

Not so, apparently, if you're in politics.  In politics, you're allowed to have an opinion about everything, whether or not you understand it.  And then you can use that opinion to craft legislation.  Once more convincing me of the necessity of demanding, as a nation, that our leaders have at least a basic comprehension of science before they start interfering with laws that govern how it's done.

Foxes in the henhouse

So that escalated quickly.

I commented just a couple of weeks ago on the fact that more and more science policy leadership positions in Congress are being filled by people who evidently have no regard whatsoever for science.  Further, with the recent elections, two more important positions seem likely to go that way -- the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to notoriously anti-science Senator James Inhofe, and the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space to the equally objectionable Senator Ted Cruz.

So it appears that both the House and the Senate are going to be looking at a long spell in which the advice of actual scientists is going to be roundly ignored.

What I didn't expect, however, is how quickly these clowns were going to act on their newfound majority.  "Strike while the iron is hot" appears to be advice they have taken to heart.  Which explains why House Resolution 1422 passed handily, 229-191.

Never heard of H.R. 1422?  This piece of legislation accomplishes two things: (1) it allows corporate interests to act as direct advisors on the Environmental Protection Agency's advisory board; and (2) it prevents scientists from participating in "advisory activities" regarding their own research, calling those activities "a conflict of interest."

Yes, you got it right.  Allowing corporations access to influencing policy so they can turn a profit is not a conflict of interest.  Allowing actual working scientists that same access, with respect to research on which they are the experts, is a conflict of interest.

Now, couple that with a second House bill that is currently in committee -- the "Secret Science Reform Act" -- which would "prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from proposing, finalizing or disseminating regulations or assessments based upon science that is not transparent or reproducible."

In other words: scientific research has to pass the evaluation of non-scientists in order to be considered valid.  Otherwise, it's "secret science."  None of them complicated climate models or fancy-pants math that us reg'lar folks can't understand.  Keep it nice and simple and obvious, like, "It's cold outside today, so global warming ain't real."

These two bills amount to a two-pronged end run that could hamstring sensible environmental policy for decades. But it's not like the move isn't completely transparent; the whole thing is about further discrediting climate change research, and (ultimately) dismantling the EPA.  Both of which are explicit goals of the current policymakers in Congress.

At least one Representative called it correctly -- Jim McGovern of Massachusetts said, upon the passage of H.R. 1422, "I get it, you don’t like science. And you don’t like science that interferes with the interests of your corporate clients.  But we need science to protect public health and the environment."  His views, however, appear to represent a minority of our current elected officials.

The whole thing is really the culmination of a leadership, and a citizenry, that is increasingly suspicious of science as a pursuit.  Anti-science media has characterized scientists as evil money-grubbers, supporting the party line so they can get lucrative grants, and thus bolstering the interests of "environmental extremists" or "godless anti-religion evolutionists" or "Big Pharma."  Research, therefore, is cast in the light of spin, and hard data as fundamentally biased (or outright falsehood).

And as we've seen before, when you can get people to distrust the facts, you can get them to believe anything.

So the situation is: we have foxes running the henhouse, a public that has been largely trained to distrust the scientific method, and corporate interests who are determined to become the drivers of science policy and science research in the United States.

Heaven help us all.