Tony Reichhardt, WashingtonUS government agencies are scrambling tocraft policies that will guarantee the qualityof the data they produce, in compliancewith a little-noticed law that was passedover a year ago.

The White House Office of Managementand Budget (OMB) has given governmentagencies until 1 May to come up with guidelines for how they will implement thelaw, which many observers say will make iteasier for industry and other affected groupsto challenge federal regulations on scientificgrounds.

Even though the new law (Public Law 106-554) does not come into force until October,the industry-backed Center for RegulatoryEffectiveness (CRE) has already invoked it.The centre asked the White House scienceoffice to stop disseminating the National Climate Assessment, which synthesizes scientific thinking about the consequences ofclimate change, on the grounds that it relieson “inaccurate” computer models.

The CRE, whose advisory board includesseveral former OMB officials, helped to draftthe data-quality provision of the law, a

mammoth spending bill covering manyagencies that moved through Congress justbefore Christmas 2000.

The law directs agencies to find pro-cedures for “ensuring and maximizing thequality, objectivity, utility, and integrity ofinformation” that they disseminate, and tocome up with mechanisms allowing “affected

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persons to seek and obtain correction” of suchinformation where necessary.

A wide range of information publishedby the government may be affected by thelaw, including lists of endangered species andresearch that supports the regulation of pollutants, such as arsenic or airborne soot.All will now have to meet new standards set

Concern mounts as US agenciesface challenges to data quality

Intelligent debateScientists hit out at creationism inschools

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Dioxin damageUS and Vietnam tocooperate over legacyof Agent Orange

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Election promiseFrench socialistcandidate sets sightson science

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Dead ringerJoke name fordinosaur fails toraise a smile

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Bryon MacWilliams, MoscowRussian president Vladimir Putin hasresponded to mounting complaints aboutthe dire state of the country’s science byoffering a new grant scheme to youngscientists and their supervisors.

In an announcement on 13 March, Putinsaid that 600 scientists under 35 years of agewill receive supplementary grants of 24,000rubles (US$770), with their supervisorsreceiving the same amount. The recipientswill be selected through competition.

Putin hopes that the grants will help toslow the exodus of young scientists fromRussia, and of young people from Russianscience. The average scientist in Russia isnow 52 years old, according to governmentstatistics.

Although many researchers have deridedthe size of the grants — which arenonetheless worth as much as a typicalRussian researcher’s salary — others havewelcomed the fact that Putin has at leastacknowledged the problem.

Russian politicians are slowly turningtheir attention to the collapse of science inthe country. For example, Sergei Mironov,speaker of the upper house of the Russianparliament, is backing a budget proposalthat would more than double federalfunding for science, from less than 2% of the country’s total budget to about 4%.

“If the government doesn’t focusattention on the fundamental sciences, theywill soon die out,” Mironov told an Earthsciences meeting in St Petersburg on 5 March.

Boris Kagarlitsky, a sociologist at theInstitute of Comparative Politics in theRussian Academy of Sciences, warns that thenew grants could undermine research stillfurther, if they are awarded in lieu of a long-term strategy of investment in research.

And some scientists commenting onLenta.ru, a discussion website, have deridedthe grants as insufficient. “The governmentdoes not have any money, and should findthe strength to admit it,” one anonymouscorrespondent said. “To pompously proposesuch small grants is hypocritical.” However,others said that the grants are better thannothing, and would be helpful to researcherssuch as mathematicians, theoreticalphysicists and economists, who do not needexpensive equipment. ■

Grants for youth aim to revive ‘dying’ Russian science

Climate change may be taking its toll in Alaska, but a law could suppress an assessment of its impact.

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by each agency as to what constitutes“quality” research.

In the year since the law was passed,the OMB has published draft guidelinesthat question whether peer review is, initself, sufficient to guarantee quality. TheOMB originally argued that it was not,citing “cases where flawed science hasbeen published in respected journals”.

In some cases, the OMB said, resultsmust be “substantially reproducible” topass muster. That raised eyebrows insome quarters, such as the NationalAcademy of Sciences, whose presidentBruce Alberts wrote in a public commentthat reproducibility sets a “new andunreasonable standard” for disseminat-ing scientific information.

The OMB backed off, but not entirely:“It is not OMB’s intent that each agencymust reproduce each analytic resultbefore it is disseminated,” the agency saidin its final guidelines last month. But the data and methods used should betransparent enough for someone else toreproduce them.

Researchers fear that the law will beused unscrupulously by opponents ofregulation to challenge findings, in disciplines such as climate or ecology,that may be difficult to replicate indepen-dently, as in cases where the opportunityto collect fresh data has passed.

Each agency is responsible for comingup with its own procedures for guaran-teeing data quality and handling com-plaints. Jim Tozzi, a Washington-basedregulatory consultant and CRE adviser,who signed the letter requesting the withdrawal of the National ClimateAssessment, thinks the burden of proofwill be on challengers.

“You have to have real data” to make achallenge, Tozzi says. But he predicts thatif petitioners are not satisfied by anagency’s response, disputes will end up in the courts.

Most federal agencies are still feelingtheir way to understanding the full impli-cations of the law, according to Tozzi andothers. The Environmental ProtectionAgency declined to comment on how itwould draft its policies, and the WhiteHouse science office, which received theCRE’s complaint about the National Climate Assessment, says it is referringthe matter to White House lawyers.

But at the Environmental ProtectionAgency and elsewhere, the level of con-cern is rising as the May deadline nears.The agency is inviting public commentsonline on the subject this week, when theNational Academy of Sciences will alsohold the first of a series of workshops onthe law’s implications. ■

➧ www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg/

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Trisha Gura, ClevelandThe great debate on teaching evolution andcreationism in American schools is back —this time with an added twist.

The Ohio State Board of Education isbeing pressed to instruct teachers in themid-western state to include ‘intelligentdesign’ in their biology lessons, as a possiblealternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Proponents of ‘intelligent design’concede that evolution takes place, but arguethat its outcome is too complex to haveoccurred by chance and so must have beendesigned by some unseen hand. They told a rowdy public hearing of the board inColumbus on 11 March that including thetopic in the school curriculum would helpstudents to understand that scientifictheories are always open to challenge.

But many scientists regard ‘intelligentdesign’ as pseudoscience, and say that it isbeing used as a Trojan Horse to introducethe teaching of creationism into schools.

On the other side of the Atlantic,meanwhile, scientists were protestingbecause of reports that Emmanuel Collegein Gateshead — a Christian-run technicalcollege near Newcastle upon Tyne — isindoctrinating its students with creationistideas. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionarybiologist at the University of Oxford,accused the college of teaching “ludicrousfalsehoods” and called on the government’seducation department to investigate further.

In the United States, school curricula arecontrolled at the state level, and Ohio’seducation board is revising its standards inresponse to instructions from Bob Taft, itsRepublican governor. But at least threemembers of the 19-person board have takenexception to a draft of the standards,produced in consultation with scientists,because it fails to acknowledge ‘intelligentdesign’ as a rival theory to that of evolution.

In response to these concerns, asubcommittee of the board invited twoadvocates of ‘intelligent design’ — StephenMeyer and Jonathan Wells, both fellows ofthe Discovery Institute, a conservative thinktank based in Seattle, Washington — todebate the topic with two of its critics,theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of CaseWestern Reserve University in Cleveland andcell biologist Kenneth Miller of BrownUniversity in Providence, Rhode Island.

Around 1,500 people attended thesometimes-heated debate, in which Wellsand Meyer characterized Darwin’s theory asbeing under fire from within the scientificcommunity. Wells waved a list of what hedescribed as 40 peer-reviewed paperscriticizing darwinism, and Meyer asked theboard to “just permit teachers to teach theevolution controversy”.

Krauss said that there was no suchcontroversy. “ ‘Intelligent design’ is an idea,”he said. “It is not science, because it does not appear in any peer-reviewed literature.” Miller and Krauss bothdismissed ‘intelligent design’ as“creationism dressed up as science”.

A subcommittee of the board is due topresent standards for science, and othersubjects under review, to the full board by September. The board is expected toimplement the standards in December — justafter elections for six of the board members.

Some observers of Ohio politics say that— with the tacit backing of Taft — the statemight implement standards that will openthe door to the teaching of ‘intelligentdesign’. Biologists worry that such a movecould force the topic into biology textbooks— and open the way for change in Texas,which will discuss its standards next year.“Ohio is just a skirmish,” says Miller, a co-author of five biology textbooks. “But itis a rehearsal for what will happen later.” ■

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Creative thought: advocates and critics of ‘intelligent design’ cross swords in Columbus, Ohio.

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