Michael Crichton, Committee on Environment and Public Works, 28 September 2005
www.crichton-official.com/speeches/senate.html

Thank you Mr. Chairman, and members of the Committee. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss the important subject of politicization of research. In that regard, what I would like to emphasize to the committee today is the importance of independent verification to science.

Dr. Crichton’s full speech is at the above link or NZ Climate Truth 79

On the 5th October Dr. Crichton made the following brief comment on the ClimateAudit web site.

My testimony was intended to be an argument for transparency.

More broadly, I wanted to suggest that the US government needs stricter standards for many kinds of information it uses to set policy. The Vioxx story is one non-climate example.

In response to the Vioxx controversy, last month a dozen major medical journals published a joint editorial in which they called for a publicly-accessible database for trial results similar to the NIH clinicaltrials.gov, and they said they would not publish results of trials that had not been registered on the database.

It will be interesting to see if other fields of science follow this straightforward example.

After all, who opposes transparency?

(I won’t be commenting further. Thanks to all those who have taken the trouble to read my testimony carefully, and to spell my name correctly. )