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A Life in Public Service

Senator Edward M. Kennedy: April 13, 2007; Running Time: 55:00

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Senator Ted Kennedy delivers a scathing denunciation of the Bush Administration’s science and research agenda, accusing the government of “fighting a war on truth on many fronts.” He lashes out at people in power “who believe that political advantage and not scientific truth should inform public policy,” and who have developed a pattern and practice of “ignoring or manipulating facts to achieve a desired political result.”

Kennedy points in particular to the battle over stem cell research, where the administration “would have us believe their policy stems from moral concern.” Kennedy says this policy, which permits federal funding for stem cell lines created before August 9, 2001, merely “pays lip service to religious and moral opposition,” since the government has not sought to close down fertility clinics or prevent the disposal of eggs in laboratories. This is a “nonsensical” policy that panders to right-wing supporters, suggests Kennedy, while crippling medical research that offers hope to Americans, and leaving this nation at a competitive disadvantage.

He ridicules the FDA’s foot-dragging approval of the emergency contraceptive pill, Plan B, which the agency’s scientific advisors had recommended as safe and effective. The White house allowed a conservative base “to drown out the scientific consensus,” says Kennedy. The same kind of political slant led to the ban on federal funding of international family planning groups that offered contraception information, “despite its enormous potential to help lives in the developing world.”

Kennedy has only scorn for the Bush Administration’s response to global warming: “With the backing of cronies in the oil and gas industry, the Administration decided to create their own reality on global warming,” says Kennedy, and rewrote or ignored scientific conclusions that didn’t match their agenda. This comprehensive manipulation of government institutions for political gain, we now know, says Kennedy, also involved “officials busy collecting and twisting information” to support the decision to go to war in Iraq.

Promoting politics at the expense of all else “breeds cynicism and erodes trust, but also threatens the foundations of democracy,” believes Kennedy. Yet he sees an antidote to the last six, bleak years. Kennedy turns to institutions like MIT, which harbor “a questioning spirit that seeks to find and follow truth.” He has hope that in the near future, science and public policy will once again become partners.

Lecture Details

Location: 32-123

“The political leaders who founded this university embraced progress. They valued independent academic inquiry. They believed politics should be influenced and informed by science, not the other way around. They knew a strong society must be an educated society. They understood that the never-ending effort to form a more perfect union required a restless spirit that asked new questions and was unafraid of the answers. Ah, the good old days.”

Senator Edward M. Kennedy

About the Speaker

Senator Edward M. Kennedy

U.S. Senator
(D) Massachusetts

Senator Edward M. Kennedy has represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate for 43 years. He was elected in 1962 to finish the final two years of the Senate term of his brother, Senator John F. Kennedy, who was elected President in 1960.

Kennedy is currently the senior Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in the Senate. He also serves on the Judiciary Committee, where he is the senior Democrat on the Immigration Subcommittee, and on the Armed Services Committee, where he is the senior Democrat on the Seapower Subcommittee. He is also a member of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and the Congressional Friends of Ireland, and a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Kennedy received his B.S. from Harvard University in 1956, and attended the International Law School, The Hague, in 1958. He received an LL.B. from the University of Virginia, in 1959.