Culminating its 13-year legislative gestation, The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), was signed by President George W. Bush on May 21, 2008. GINA is the first major federal law to come out of the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) portion of the Human Genome Project. The passage of GINA has been widely celebrated. For the genetic research community, the act was sought...

During the George W. Bush administration, intense debate focused on the administration’s interference with the work of government scientists. In this study, analyzing a May/June 2009 survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), we evaluate the factors during this period that influenced scientists’ awareness of political interference and their media outrea...

Less than two weeks into his presidency, George W. Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI), designed to increase the involvement of “faith-based” religious groups in federal social services and to aid these religious groups in receiving federal grants.1 On the same day, he also created centers within various executive agencies to further these goals....

The George W. Bush jr administration explicitly declared its aim to spread democracy militarily. Is such an intention legal under current international law, norms and institutions? If one proves it to be at odds with the criterion of legality – since it clearly contradicts one of the main pillars of the UN Charter, i.e. the principle of non-interference –, can it be justified with recourse to t...

Despite widespread political conspiracy theories about Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, a majority of partisans continue to distance themselves from such beliefs. Even so, the ideological biases that drive conspiratorial thinking may be hard to overcome. In this study, we examine the unintentional endorsement of conspiratorial beliefs as revealed in movement dynamics. We track the cu...

In the summer of 2000, perfectly timed to shape the election debate over education reform, came a new RAND study that claimed to contradict the conventional research wisdom on the connection between school expenditures and class size on the one hand and student achievement on the other. “Our results certainly challenge the traditional view of public education as ‘unreformable,’” the study’s dir...

Since 1996, state legislators, members of the U.S. Congress, and more recently President George W. Bush, have called for the protection of monogamous, heterosexual marriage and the promotion of marriage among poor women. The thrust of this policy making is directed at African American families, among which female headship doubled between 1965 and 1990. This doubling is temporally associated wit...

Political scientists have approached the administration of George W. Bush from the perspectives of his foreign policy, tax plan, and entitlement reform proposals. One overlooked facet of Bush’s presidency was his commitment to overhauling the social welfare system. This commitment provided the basis for his first campaign speech in 1999, “The Duty of Hope,” as well as his first and second execu...

Fifty years ago, humans harboured the hubristic idea that they could alter the weather and climate to their advantage, perhaps to prevent future ice ages or to induce rainfall in drought-stricken regions. these high-flying hopes were eventually doused by reality; today, we have the more humble objective of merely keeping the climate stable—in particular, mitigating the impact of greenhouse gase...

For the first time in the history of the United States, Congress met in a special emergency session on Sunday, March 20, to pass legislation aimed at the medical care of one patient — Terri Schiavo. President George W. Bush encouraged the legislation and flew back to Washington, D.C., from his vacation in Crawford, Texas, so that he could be on hand to sign it immediately. In a statement issued...