Advocacy and policy advances are often essential to researchers’ work
Peter Foukal’s July 22 letter, “Scientific community brought Trump’s funding threat on itself,” asserts that President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget proposed changes to federal funding policies because scientific organizations forgot that “their mandate is science and not advancing a social agenda.” Foukal criticizes diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts specifically.
Foukal implies that science is unencumbered by the biases afflicting other activities. The discredited Tuskegee study that denied treatment to Black men suffering from syphilis, the segregation of health care facilities before Medicare, the eugenics movement, the longstanding exclusion of nonwhites and women from medical research, and the many well-documented health disparities based on race, gender, and sexuality all demonstrate the fallacy of that assumption.
Just last week, the Globe reprinted a New York Times article noting that the lack of DNA from people of non-European descent in the human genome database at the National Institutes of Health limits its utility in assessing disease risk in the missing populations (“Genetic tools fall short for many,” Page A6, July 21).
Further, research on the health and safety effects of tobacco and alcohol consumption, gun violence, and vaccines often leads to ideas for interventions and policies. Advocacy for such policies would seem to be an obligation of the scientific community. Trump’s proposal would substitute political, ideological, and religious considerations for scientific criteria. The OMB proposal will not advance science.
Renée M. Landers
Watertown
The writer is professor of law and faculty director of the Health and Biomedical Law Concentration at Suffolk University Law School. She has written on health disparities and is a member of the Massachusetts Health Equity Compact.
OMB rule changes would put decisions in the hands of political hacks
I’d like to respond to the letter from my former colleague, Peter Foukal, on the changes to funding decisions proposed by the Office of Management and Budget. Foukal focuses on the anti-DEI language in the proposal, but that is not what the rule changes are about. The changes are intended to take decisions out of the hands of scientists and put them into the hands of political hacks whose only interest is in pushing the ideology of the party in power.
Those not familiar with the story of Soviet bureaucrat Trofim Lysenko should check it out. In the 1940s Lysenko came up with an alternative to genetics that fit Communist ideology nicely and promised to double the crop yields. Instead, it led to massive crop failures and people being sent to prison camps.
The OMB is proposing to substitute baseless, politically motivated claims for facts. Conspiracy theories about vaccines and unsupported propaganda about global warming could be at the top of the list.
John Raymond
Melrose