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Published online 18 November 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1234
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Scientists self-censor after political attack
Researchers avoid contentious language and issues in grants and papers.
Scientists whose work came under scrutiny during a political debate about work funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, censored their own later work, a new study has found1.
In July 2003, former congressman Patrick Toomey (Republican, Pennsylvania) argued that NIH grants funding studies on certain types of sexual behaviour were less worthy of taxpayer dollars than those on devastating diseases.
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Slightly perverse that this report emerges in connection with self-censorship under a critique from the right, when the vast majority of political pressure is from the liberal-left, and has been for decades. When can we expect a study detailing the scientific tacking and trimming undertaken to avoid conclusions challenging to the nostrums of race equality?
So the NIH, funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars, is "supposed to be insulated from political interference"? As a taxpayer myself, I disagree. Nature appears to support scientists "changing the language of their grants and papers to disguise aspects of their research". while criticizing those taxpayers who disagree with funding those research projects.