While Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews and other rock stars sing on a "Vote for Change" concert tour, another disgruntled group -- this one of scientists -- will crisscross the well-worn landscape of battleground states over the next month, giving lectures that will argue that the Bush administration has ignored and misused science.
The group, Scientists and Engineers for Change, another addition to the flood of so-called 527 advocacy groups that have filled this year's election discourse, announced its existence and plans on Monday in a telephone news conference. At least 25 scientists will give talks in 10 contested states.
Among the headlining lecturers are 10 Nobel Prize winners, including Douglas Osheroff, a professor of physics at Stanford; Peter Agre, a professor of biological chemistry at Johns Hopkins and Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health.
Compared with more prominent 527s, like MoveOn PAC and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the scientists' group will operate on a modest budget of US$100,000, which will mainly pay for travel expenses.
The group has no direct ties to the campaign of Senator John Kerry but nine members were among 48 Nobel laureates who signed a June 21 letter endorsing Kerry. Several of the scientists have also signed a statement from the Union of Concerned Scientists that accuses the Bush administration of manipulating scientific findings to support its policies. The union opposes the administration on numerous issues.
At the conference, Vinton Cerf, one of the architects of the Internet in the 1960s and 1970s and chairman of the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, said, "Science counts, and it has not counted sufficiently in this administration."
Cerf said that he was a registered Republican, but that he joined the group "in the hope that we bring debate, science and technology, into the political debate so that the electorate understands the importance that it has in our society."
Cerf said the US was "at risk of losing the edge" in technology because the Bush administration was cutting basic research budgets at the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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