Washington

Nearly two dozen Nobel laureates and 40 other leading researchers have signed an angry statement accusing the Bush administration of “misrepresenting and suppressing scientific knowledge”.

The statement, due to be released this week, accuses the administration of stacking scientific committees, censoring results and dissolving advisory panels.

“The systematic, pervasive nature of these practices is unprecedented,” says Kurt Gottfried, a particle physicist at Cornell University and chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which assembled the petition. “The very ethos of science is being challenged,” he says.

Signatories include David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology, Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Lewis Branscomb, professor of public policy at Harvard University and an adviser to both Republican and Democratic administrations.

http://www.ucsusa.org