The unspoken premise of the paper, of course, is that prior to the Evil AntiScience Administration, none of this ever happened. There are, of course, no controls on this survey to check that. It would be very interesting to have taken this same survey ten years ago, or twenty, in areas of government science that were controversial back then.

I submit that when you take government money to do science, politics is almost inevitably dragged into it. You can't have been following NASA as long as you have without knowing that.

I also submit that the responses were largely self-selected, similar to online polls rather than, say, a telephone poll. The (anonymous) response rate was 19 percent overall of all the surveys mailed out. The rest read the survey, learned what it was about, and tossed it in the trash can. While certainly some were just too busy, I can't help but get the impression that eight out of ten scientists approached did not consider this a vital issue, while many of those who did respond did so because they already had a problem in this area. How does that change the percentages?

You also know as well as I do, given the two well-known commissioners of the survey, that this was fully intended as a political weapon, and Waxman and others are indeed having a field day with it. I suspect if Exxon had commissioned the survey, you wouldn't have even bothered to look at it.

Science and politics don't mix well coming from either direction, or they shouldn't.