The moralizers are trying to muck with US science again. A flurry of activity over the past few weeks has followed the effort of a right-wing religious group to call into question almost 200 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants focusing on behavioral and social aspects of issues such as sexuality, HIV/AIDS transmission, and drug abuse (Science, 31 October 2003, p. 758). This incident could have been written off as noise by a fringe group had it not come almost on the heels of the near-passage in the House of Representatives last July of what came to be known as the “Toomey Amendment,” after its author Rep. Patrick Toomey (R-PA). By a vote of 212 to 210, the House just missed defunding four NIH research grants on sexual behavior that had already been through rigorous scientific peer review and approval by NIH Institute National Advisory Councils (Science, 18 July 2003, p. 289).

This is not the first time that the scientific enterprise has been threatened by political or ideological intervention, nor will it be the last. Many of us recall, for example, Sen. William Proxmire's grandstanding “Golden Fleece Awards” in the 1970s and 1980s. They were passed out with much media fanfare to research projects with titles Proxmire considered silly, and which were therefore ridiculed as a frivolous waste of the taxpayer's money. Of course, the Golden Fleece “awardees” often turned out later to be important and useful projects. One example is the study of the physical characteristics of flight attendants that ultimately led to the development of life-saving safety belt configurations for them.