April 24, 2008	Thursday	Rabi-us-Sani 17, 1429

WASHINGTON, April 23: Hundreds of US government scientists complain they have been victims of political interference and pressure from superiors to skew their findings, according to a survey released on Wednesday by an advocacy group.

The Union of Concerned Scientists said that more than half of the nearly 1,600 Environmental Protection Agency staff scientists who responded online to a detailed questionnaire reported they had experienced incidents of political interference in their work.

EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar on Wednesday attributed some of the discontent to the ‘passion’ scientists have toward their work. He said EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, as a longtime career scientist at the EPA himself, ‘weighs heavily the science given to him by the staff in making policy decisions.’

But Francesca Grifo, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Scientific Integrity Program, said the survey results revealed ‘an agency in crisis’ with low morale, especially among scientists involved in risk assessment and drawing up regulations.

“The investigation shows researchers are generally continuing to do their work, but their scientific findings are tossed aside when it comes time to write regulations,” said Grifo.

The group sent an online questionnaire to 5,500 EPA scientists and received 1,586 responses, a majority of them senior scientists who have worked for the agency for 10 years or more. The survey included chemists, toxicologists, engineers, geologists and experts in the life and environmental sciences.The report said that 60 per cent of those responding, or 889 scientists, reported personally experiencing what they viewed as political interference in their work over the last five years. Four in 10 scientists who have worked at the agency for more than a decade said they believe such interference has been more prevalent in the last five years than the previous five years.

Timothy Donaghy, one of the report’s co-authors, acknowledged that a large number of scientists did not respond to the survey and said the findings should not be viewed as a random sample of EPA scientists.

Nevertheless, said Donaghy, ‘we have hundreds of scientists saying there is a problem’ with assuring scientific integrity within the federal government’s principal environmental regulatory agency.—AP