Dear Governor Palin,

today you gave what your campaign called your first “policy speech” to an audience in Pittsburgh, PA, on the topic of the McCain-Palin ticket’s three broad reform proposals for addressing the issue of education and services for children with special needs. One of these proposals is the commitment to fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA: legislation signed into existence in 1975, but never backed by enough cold hard government cash to properly benefit those for whom it was written.

Let’s set aside the fact that John McCain has repeatedly voted against increasing federal funding for IDEA, shall we? (Barack Obama voted last year to raise funding for IDEA by over 44 billion dollars.) Let’s also set aside the fact that you personally have said you would, given the choice, oppose a 0.1% sales tax increase (that’s a one cent tax on every ten dollars spent) in order to fund programs for the developmentally disabled in Colorado.

Let’s just talk about how your speech today managed—somehow—to raise the display of your contempt for scientific inquiry to greater heights than ever before.

In lamenting the lack of federal funding for IDEA, Governor, you laid the blame squarely on one of your campaign’s favorite demons: earmark spending. Specifically, this is what you said:

We’ve got a three trillion dollar budget, and Congress spends some 18 billion dollars a year on earmarks for political pet projects. That’s more than the shortfall to fully fund the IDEA. And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good—things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Governor…when I heard you speak those words, it sent a cold chill through my body, let me tell you. I didn’t know quite how to react. But I’ll try, because what you said today betrayed not only an astonishing ignorance of nearly one hundred years of research in genetics, human development, and medicine, but also a stunning lack of understanding of the basic mechanisms of scientific study.

As many biology-taking high schoolers will be able to tell you, Governor, the humble drosophila melanogaster—besides being an incredibly annoying daily visitor in kitchens across the country—is also one of the most important and useful tools of biomedical research we have ever had. It helped us discover, for one thing, that genetic information is carried on chromosomes. The guy who figured that one out won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, actually. Imagine that. A Nobel Prize for fruit fly research.

Fruit flies also share almost 60% of our genetic code, and when it comes to genetic markers of disease, that number jumps to something a lot closer to 75%. That means it’s really easy to induce horrible human conditions in the tiny little buggers and try to figure out what causes those conditions, as well as how to fix them. Since a fruit fly is also very cheap to house and feed, and since its life cycle is short enough to make multi-generational studies very quick and feasible, drosophila’s been helping us make amazingly important discoveries about pathology and treatment for nigh on a century now.

In fact, Governor, to anyone who may have read a newspaper or two in the last several decades, your remarks this afternoon sounded as absurd as if you’d said, “And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good—things like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s research. Silly things like studying cancer and AIDS. And oh, yeah—don’t let me forget—it also goes to things like genetic research, science that enables us to better understand the origins of disorders like Down’s syndrome and autism.”

I. Kid. You. Not.

As a former teacher, Governor, and a person who now works extensively on producing educational materials, many designed for children with special needs, I applaud your devotion to improving services for this criminally underfunded population (although you might want to remember that children with special needs tend to grow into adults with special needs—who also need services). But your sunny, sarcastic, seemingly deliberate scientific illiteracy is an insult to scientists across this country and the world, the vast majority of whom work on tiny pieces of research that would probably seem worthless or irrelevant to you (stuff like investigating a tiny bit of fruit fly DNA, say). That is, they’d seem worthless until five, ten, or even twenty years went by, and some other scientist fit it together with another tiny piece of research, and suddenly there it was: a cure for cancer. Or a new kind of biofuel that could help this country become energy independent and escape the dark menace of your other favorite demon, foreign oil. Or even, Governor, a definitive answer about the causes of autism or Down’s syndrome.

There are those of us who would dearly love to be able to give you the benefit of the doubt, Governor. We would like to believe that even if you are not our choice for Vice President, you are still a competent and intelligent human being whose opinions are deserving of respect. We want to believe this because the alternative is far too depressing. The alternative is believing that someone who willfully and cheerfully dismisses the intrinsic worth of scientific research—someone who is so lacking in knowledge and education that she could make the kind of baseless and uninformed argument you did today—that a person like that is running for the second highest office in the land.

And we are letting her.

Very sincerely yours,
Me
(a permanent resident who is starting to wish with all her heart that she’d become a citizen before this election).