It's getting harder and harder to be a scientist in America these days -- especially if you work for, or work with the federal government, or if you cross one of the favored companies of our political leaders. We encountered this first-hand as we tried to investigate the BP oil spill and its aftermath here in the Gulf. Scientific experts who dared contradict the rosiest scenarios came in for a rough time. Back in September 2010, two of the outstanding scientists who did research on behalf of my law firm -- Dr. William Sawyer, a Florida-based toxicologist, and Marco Kaltofen, the head of Boston Chemical Data in Massachusetts -- started receiving unsettling calls from government attorneys after they reported finding disturbing levels of potentially toxic hydrocarbons in seafood. Instead of embracing their research, lawyers from the National Oil Spill Commission suggested they'd performed the research without proper permits; one said he was acting on a complaint from a major seafood distributor. The lawyers backed off after the calls were reported in the media, but the episode certainly suggested a government more interested in appeasing the powerful than in independent, untainted science. That was hardly an isolated ...
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