Following the 9/11 attacks, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy was moved from the Old Executive Office Building to what was thought to be safer quarters, across the street from the World Bank.

	Tony Tye, Post-Gazette John H. Marburger III.

And so it was that the director of the office, John H. Marburger III, looked out his office window last Monday to find hordes of police and news media responding to the orange-level terrorist alert issued after the World Bank was identified as a possible al-Qaeda target.

The science policy office moves to the New Executive Office Building in two weeks, but Marburger, the president's science adviser, is likely to remain a target, at least for critics of the administration's science policies.

And there are plenty of scientific critics during this election year.

In June, 48 Nobel Prize winners, including cancer researcher Harold Varmus, Caltech president David Baltimore and physicist Leon Lederman, released a letter claiming that the Bush administration has ignored unbiased scientific advice. The letter, which endorsed Democrat John Kerry, complained that Bush has, among other things, unnecessarily restricted embryonic stem cell research and ignored the scientific consensus supporting the global warming theory.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, an activist group generally regarded as liberal, also has accused the administration of distorting or suppressing scientific views it doesn't like. In February, the group issued a report alleging a litany of abuses, from attempting to weaken the Endangered Species Act to applying political litmus tests to scientists nominated to government advisory groups. Last month, it re-issued the report with additional charges.

Thus far, 4,800 scientists have endorsed the document, including such noted researchers as Lincoln Wolfenstein, a physicist at Carnegie Mellon University, and Dr. Herbert Needleman, who studies the health effects of lead at the University of Pittsburgh.

"It's so egregious what this administration is doing, particularly in regards to the environment," Needleman said. He has watched in dismay as membership of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's lead committee, which he once headed, has shifted to favor the lead industry. "And their whole approach to global warming has been ignorant and cynical."

This is an unusual level of political activity on the part of scientists, acknowledged Marburger, who was in Pittsburgh last week to speak at the SMART TechTrends conference. "Most scientists tend to be Democrats, as far as I can tell," said Marburger, who was director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory before being tapped three years ago to become President Bush's science adviser.

But Marburger maintained the activism among scientists this year isn't just partisan politics.

The sorts of issues that have gotten scientists riled -- embryonic stem cells, global warming, ballistic missile defense -- are by their nature hot button issues, where moral, ethical and economic concerns are as much at play as the science, Marburger said.

Global climate change is a real concern, Marburger acknowledged, and no one denies that the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels can cause temperatures to rise.

"We're putting an awful lot in the air ---- it can't be good," he said.

But addressing global warming involves economic issues that also have to be taken into account, he argued. Rather than focus on greater regulation of existing sources, the Bush administration has chosen to pursue new energy technologies that produce fewer emissions, such as next-generation clean coal technology and, eventually, hydrogen-powered fuel cells.

"I think that's a pragmatic approach," Marburger said. As for Bush's 2001 decision to oppose the Kyoto Protocol, an international accord to limit greenhouse gases, he maintained the agreement "was dead on arrival in this country."

Embryonic stem cells represent an ethical quandary for many Americans because creating human embryonic stem cell lines for study requires the destruction of embryos, Marburger said. Bush walked an ethical line three years ago, when he decided to allow federal funding of research involving human stem cell lines then in existence, but to oppose the creation of new lines.

"President Bush actually made it possible for federal funds to be spent on embryonic stem cell research," he said. Today, 19 stem cell lines are available for federally sponsored studies. That is far fewer than the 78 stem cell lines that Bush said were available at the time of his decision.

"The lack of availability of lines is at present not inhibiting the important research that has to be done," Marburger said. He wouldn't hazard a guess about what would justify expanding the number of cell lines, but noted animal studies thus far have not shown that embryonic stem cell therapy is necessarily a sure thing.

"Is there hype on stem cells? Absolutely," he added.

Marburger maintains that the Bush administration has a strong record of supporting scientific research, boosting research and development budgets by 44 percent since 2001.

But some scientists are worried that much of that extra money is pouring into military and homeland security research and that other areas are beginning to hurt.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, for instance, projects that non-defense R&D will decline over the next five years if Bush follows through on his promise to halve the deficit while continuing to increase defense and homeland security spending.

Last week, the AAAS released an analysis of the 2005 budget process and noted that National Institutes of Health research funding is the only nondefense area now slated for an increase in the House draft of the budget. And the 2.6 percent increase in NIH research funding is well below the 15 percent annual increases of a few years ago and even below the expected 3.5 percent inflation rate for biomedical research.

Even NASA is slated for a 6.2 percent cut in R&D funding in the House version of the 2005 budget, losing its new funding for human exploration of the moon and Mars.

The Defense Department budget includes a 7.1 percent increase in R&D funding.

Marburger, however, insists that the AAAS projections for the next five years are off the mark because they are based on general guidelines from the Office of Management and Budget and don't reflect the actual research priorities of the administration.

Some of the cuts made by Congress in the ongoing budget deliberations are regrettable, he said. And the greater emphasis on defense R&D does tend to shift more money into applied research and away from basic research.

But Marburger said the giant $70 billion defense R&D budget includes a significant amount of basic science research. Some areas, such as particle physics, are going to receive less money, he acknowledged, but the administration is continuing to invest in fields that are likely to yield economic dividends, such as nanotechnology and materials science.

For all the rough and tumble of national science politics, Marburger said he has no regrets about taking the science adviser position. But after his stints at Brookhaven, and, earlier, as the president of the the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he does think wistfully at times of returning to the lab.

"I've been telling people for 25 years, 'I'm really just a physicist.' It's the only thing I know," he said. "But people keep asking me to do these things and I'm not smart enough to say no."