The frauds, distortions, when science turns political

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THE POLITICALLY INCORRECT GUIDE TO SCIENCE

By Tom Bethell

Regnery, $19.95, 270 pages

REVIEWED BY BRENDAN CONWAY

This week's news that Dr. Hwang Woo-suk fabricated all his human stem-cell research seems likely to go down with Piltdown Man and cold fusion among the great scientific frauds of the last hundred years. If Tom Bethell is right, however, this could one day look like small potatoes. Mr. Bethell claims he has spotted significant scientific fraud in subjects ranging from global warming and AIDS in Africa to intelligent design and cancer. Most unusually, he places political motivations and biases at the heart of each.

Mr. Bethell is the author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science," a layman's tour of scientific controversies for the conservative reader. "Liberals have hijacked science for long enough," reads the book's cover. "It's time to set the record straight."

The softcover book looks much like a high-school text, complete with sidebars and pullquotes -- and could probably be marketed as such. It is identifiably "conservative" in its approach to science, however, at least insofar as it covers subjects familiar to conservatives and tends to blame liberals for many distortions.

The somewhat predictable observation about a conservative's guide to science is that it contains distortions of its own, whatever the merits of some of Mr. Bethell's arguments. Not every scientific distortion can be boiled down to political differences or government malfeasance, and sometimes scientific controversies -- like Dr. Hwang's stem-cell research -- take turns that no one no matter their persuasion could have predicted.

That said, there is much to recommend in this book. The five chapters on global warming, nuclear power, radiation, dioxin, and DTT -- the first five chapters, coincidentally -- are incisive and deserve a much wider readership than a conservative's guide to science could ever attract.