A group of 60 scientists recently signed an accusation that contends the Bush administration is distorting or ignoring science to achieve political goals. The group, which includes 20 Nobel Prize winners, lobbed some damning accusations, including the charge that the administration keeps scientists from speaking publicly.

But media reports of the scientists' claims, at least the ones I read, didn't mention another, more pervasive and ever bit as damning point: These scientists put their vocation at risk by ambitiously turning to politics. Some national media reports mentioned that several of the scientists joined in a confabulation sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists, neglecting to mention that the union is a partisan pressure group.

And so it is, in 2004, that we've finally arrived at a bleak scientific cul-de-sac. Even as technology and discovery (the real-world progeny of science) drive our lives like never before, we head toward the dead end of politically driven science. It is now my science versus your science.

We needn't hunt far for examples. The debate on global warming, perhaps the most obvious, is the scientific version of a sordid he-said/she-said lover's quarrel, where he who grabs the battle's moral high ground speeds toward victory.

Then there is the Endangered Species Act.

You've probably never heard of the Hoover's woolly-star. It's a cute-enough little plant that grows in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Federal regulators there, after conducting surveys during a drought, determined that the annual herb was threatened. So it was listed as such via the ESA in 1990. As a result, for 13 years, landowners in the valley were entangled in ESA species-protection provisions dictated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Then it rained. The woolly-star duly revealed that it needs a drink now and again. It flourished. The feds found more populations of the plant over a much larger geographical area than they had originally claimed as its habitat. In time, it became obvious the Hoover's woolly-star had to be de-listed.

But time is what hurt the landowners affected by the listing--more than a decade of ESA restrictions on land rights.

A release from U.S. Fish and Wildlife that explained the decision to de-list was a telling document. It offered clues as to who had been adversely affected by the Hoover's woolly-star ESA status:

"The species also appears to be more resilient and less vulnerable to impacts from oil and gas development than the Service had determined at the time of the listing. Furthermore, threats from grazing and off-highway vehicles now appear to be less significant than previously thought."

All-powerful, bureaucratically administered laws like the ESA play into the politicalization of science and dash the hope of objective solutions to all sorts of problems. Land rights should no more be hijacked by incomplete and partisan science than landowners should destroy, with impunity, the natural resources in their possession.

When we can no longer depend on science as a tool of objective discovery, it becomes a tool of politics, with any faction able to make its own claims.

We haven't yet fallen off the precipice of scientific/political relativism, but each time a group of scientists takes a political charge or a lumbering federal program makes a fool of itself, we get closer.

We'll still attach our fate to science. Yet we know it is a fate that will sometimes be abused by political motivations--like the ESA bludgeon that was finally turned away in the San Joaquin Valley.