Science in the crosshairs

Interesting, disturbing Science Friday segment on "Science in the Crosshairs"... including those of TN Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn's investigative committee.

After furor erupted over a video seeming to imply that Planned Parenthood was selling fetal tissue to research institutions, the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce convened a select investigative panel to examine practices involving fetal tissue in late 2015. Since then, the panel, chaired by Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn, has issued subpoenas to more than 80 individual researchers, instutions, and companies involved in research on fetal tissue or its procurement.The scientific community has said these subpoenas threaten researchers’ time, energy, and reputations, and that other activities by the committee—such as making public the names and addresses of researchers who use fetal tissue—could endanger those researchers’ lives. In May, an editorial in Nature Biotechnology called this panel “a witchhunt” by the anti-abortion lobby.(Science Friday offered Representative Blackburn’s office a chance to respond to these criticisms. As of this article’s publication, we have not received a statement...

And:

Then, we take a look at other fields that have come into the crosshairs, particularly climate science, with a scientist who knows the problem well.
As a postgraduate researcher in 1999, climate scientist Michael Mann was a co-author on the paper that produced the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph. It indicated that global warming is happening faster than previously in history. That publication has given him attention and notoriety, not all of it good: He’s been compared to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky and been subjected to lawsuits, and the state of Virginia tried to obtain his academic correspondence through a large Freedom of Information Act request. He was also one of the scientists whose e-mails were hacked and released in the 2009 “Climategate.” What’s more, he’s received numerous e-mails and other communications that he considers harassment.

Man is also the co-author of a new book that discusses the challenges facing those who talk openly about climate research, and he says that lawsuits, subpoenas, and other scrutiny serve only to intimidate and exhaust scientists, such as the NOAA researchers who received subpoenas from House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas) in late 2015. Mann and Climate Science Legal Defense Fund executive director Lauren Kurtz share their experiences in the legal world of science and discuss how researchers can protect themselves from burdensome attention. 

Listen here.