Rescuing Science from Politics

Wendy Wagner is the Joe A. Worsham Centennial Professor at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, Texas. She received a master's degree in environmental studies from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, a law degree from Yale Law School, and clerked for the Honorable Judge Albert Engel, Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. Before entering academia, Wagner served as an honors attorney with the Environmental Enforcement section of the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the US Department of Justice in Washington DC and as the Pollution Control Coordinator in the Office of General Counsel, US Department of Agriculture. Wagner teaches courses in torts, environmental law, and regulation. Her research focuses on the law-science interface in environmental law and her articles have appeared in numerous journals including the Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin, and Yale Law Reviews. She is a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Regulation and chair of its Science Issue Group. Rena Steinzor is the Jacob A. France Research Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law and has a secondary appointment at the University's Medical School. She received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin and her J.D. from Columbia University. Professor Steinzor joined the faculty in 1994 from the Washington, DC law firm of Spiegel and McDiarmid. Prior to joining the firm, from 1983 to 1987, she was staff counsel to the US House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee with primary jurisdiction over the nation's laws regulating hazardous substances. From 1976 to 1983, Professor Steinzor was an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission serving in a variety of consumer protection positions. She is a founder, as well as a member of the Board and the Executive Committee of the Center for Progressive Reform and the editor of the Center's book, A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment. She has written extensively on environmental federalism, alternative designs of regulatory system, and law and science, publishing in the Minnesota Law Review, Harvard Environmental Law Review, Duke Journal of Law and Policy, Yale Journal on Regulation, Environmental Forum, and Environmental Law Review.

"These are difficult times for science in the zone where it converges with public policy. . . . [S]cience has been playing a critically important role in several areas that have become important exercises of government responsibility, including, but not limited to environmental quality regulations, litigation over damages associated with the external costs of private activity (toxic torts), and the legal responsibility of manufacturers for product harms. What has happened, in this more political contemporary environment, to science and the people who practice it? That is the subject of this book." From the Prologue by Dr. Donald Kennedy, Stanford University and Editor of Science

• Prologue Donald Kennedy; Introduction: principled science Wendy Wagner and Rena Steinzor; Part I. Freedom and Independence: 1. Defending clean science from dirty attacks Thomas McGarity; 2. Basic science at risk: protecting the independence of research Katherine S. Squibb; 3. Publication bas, data ownership and the funding effect in science: threats to the integrity of biomedical research Sheldon Krimsky; 4. Science and subpoenas: when do the courts become instruments of manipulation? Paul M. Fischer; Part II. Transparency and Honesty: 5. Smothering the future: the data quality act and adaptive governance Donald Hornstein; 6. The dual legacy of Daubert v. Merrell-Dow Pharmaceutical: trading junk science for junk science Carl Cranor; 7. Using science in a political world: the importance of transparency in natural resource regulation Holly Doremus; 8. Two models for scientific transparency in environmental law David Adelman; 9. The transformation of science into law: default reasoning in international trade disputes Vern R. Walker; Part III. Public Infrastructure: 10. Politicizing Peer Review: the scientific perspective David Michaels; 11. Politicizing peer review: the legal perspective Sidney Shapiro; 12. The government role in scientific research John S. Applegate; Part IV. Recommendations and conclusion Wendy Wagner, J.D. and Rena Steinzor, J.D.