Heres what we actually lose when scientists cant talk to the public Popular Science POPULAR SCIE
by Kendra Pierre Louis at Popular Science
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/heres-what-we-actually-lose-when-scientists-cant-talk-to-the-public/
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And early this morning, Buzzfeed revealed that The US Department of Agriculture has banned scientists and other employees in its Agricultural Research Service division from sharing the results of its tax payer-funded research with the broader public. The ARS is the main research agency of the USDA and is tasked with “finding solutions to agricultural problems that affect Americans every day from field to table.”
The memo outlining these new rules has not been made public, but the ban reportedly includes everything from summaries of scientific papers to USDA-branded tweets. Scientists are still able to publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals, but they are unable to talk about that research without prior consent from their agency.
This is not the first time that public science has been hamstrung by a gag order. To this day, the quantity of oil spewed into the ocean during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil spill remains something of a mystery. Many of the scientists who worked on the spill were hired by BP and barred from speaking on it. But gag orders—while always troublesome—have usually been limited to one specific issue. Right now, the EPA and USDA have been forbidden to speak about all of their scientific research. It means that many of the kinds of stories we now cover will never see the light of day.
To understand what that means in practice, it helps to look to Canada, where government scientists faced censure under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. A study by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada found that, “nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of respondents had been directly asked to exclude or alter information for non-scientific reasons and that over one-third (37 percent) had been prevented in the past five years from responding to questions from the public and media.” Scientific inquiry is meant to produce hard facts that the world can rely on. But the easiest way to make science lie is to keep the public from interrogating it.
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