Another (more personal and ugly) attack on science is underway. The editor of a medical journal who dared to publish an article saying that fetuses do not feel pain until late in the pregnancy has been innundated with hate
(e)mail.
"Your license should be stripped,"
"You're hypocrisy,"
"You should get a real job,"
"Eternity will definitely bring justice for you,"
Critics of Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, the editor in chief of The Journal of the American Medical Association, called the article a:
..."politically motivated attack on proposed federal legislation that would require doctors to provide fetal pain information to women seeking abortions when fetuses are at least 20 weeks, and to offer women fetal anesthesia at that stage of the pregnancy.
I must say, people who push for this kind of guilt-inducing legislation would be quite familiar with politically motivated attacks...
DeAngelis said:
"There's nothing wrong with this article. This is not original research. This is a review article, based on data in dozens of medical articles by other researchers."
I would have preferred that she stopped there and allowed the science to stand for itself, but she was sucked into defending her religious credentials too, IMO:
DeAngelis said she attends Mass at least weekly and is also a Eucharistic minister, which allows her to administer communion to fellow Catholics.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the price of tea in China...but the bottomline is, if you don't like the science, attack it. It would be interesting to know if there was a coordinated letter writing campaign against Dr. DeAngelis.