Trump hates science. Sad!

Like many girls growing up in the late 1960s, I was intimidated by math and science throughout my school years and into college, where I avoided lab units in biology and chemistry whenever possible. But something happened that made me a late-blooming science fan. At age 57, cancer hit.

As I’ve written about before in the Los Angeles Times, I underwent the standard healthcare regimen for my condition (surgery, chemo and radiation), but the cancer metastasized anyway and I was given a “yearish” to live. Then, in July of 2015, I became a human science project, a participant in clinical trials at UC San Francisco, one of the top cancer research centers in the world. Today, I’m well past my overdue date, as are many of the other Stage 4 cancer patients, thanks to breakthroughs in immunotherapy and cutting-edge treatments that arrived courtesy of tenacious researchers, the lives of many mice and the evidence-based, peer-reviewed work of medical science.

All this is to explain my ever-increasing alarm at the level of scorn the findings of science now attract in the realm of public policy. President Trump and members of his revolving-door Cabinet have shown no let-up since 2017 in their disdain for scientific truths, mischaracterizing them as opinions that are somehow partisan in nature and expendable.

“The State of Science in the Trump Era,” just published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, says it all. “The administration is radically weakening processes that guide the use of science in policymaking,” it states. The report goes on to detail how U.S. scientists are being excluded from decision-making, removed from advisory committees at agencies such as OSHA, the FDA and the EPA, hampered in the collection of data and, generally, treated with hostility by leaders of the government. In the budgets Trump has proposed, he has asked for deep cuts in science, technology and health programs and research, especially at the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency; science fans in Congress, however, have prevailed.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-welsh-science-trump-administration-20190304-story.html