Dr. Swamidass,
God bless you brother. I actually met one of your students at Dr. Sanford’s house April 2017, please extend my regards.
An invitation to speak on the NIH premises is not an endorsement of content anymore than when the NIH hosts vendor tables advertising the medical and bio tech appliances is an endorsement by the NIH for the vendor products.
The NIH has been a modest ID factory. Affiliated with the NIH has been Richard Sternberg (Staff scientist), Michael Behe (post Doc), David Abel (researcher), several others, many un-named. For that reason I suggested to John to have a PRIVATE meeting on the campus so he could meet individually with some of his supporters there. I was hoping this would lead to maybe some future strategy discussion, not so much to push ID at the NIH, but to raise interest in medical research into genetic deterioration which is a valid medical concern. Though his perspective on genetic deterioration is ID/creation/Young Life Creation friendly, it is a topic that has merit on its own in terms of medical science. Dr. Sanford, being a humanitarian, is profoundly concerned about this. As he opened his talk, Genetic Entropy was originally framed as problems for evolutionary theory, but then of late he has been concerned about its medical implications and the human condition.
We just needed a sponsor at the NIH to help us get approval to rent a room. I started to contact people I knew at the NIH who thought well of Dr. Sanford, and voila, it turned out Peter Leeds had about a year earlier formed an NIH-approved group that could invite discussion of topics relating to science and philosophy on the NIH campus and supported by NIH facility staff for Audio Visual, etc.
The Masur Auditorium where Dr. Sanford spoke was the same auditorium where Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and other dignitaries spoke. Such visits by dignitaries, for example should not be construed as an endorsement of Gates MS Windows 10 or Barack Obama’s politics, etc. But if the NIH allows such visits of people with certain viewpoints, it should allow other viewpoints as well. And because the NIH has hospitals and clinics, and patients may be terminally ill there, it also has a chapel where people can pray. So, in as much as the military has government paid chapels and chaplains, the NIH is granted similar leeway given the business they are in. Providentially, Dr. Sanford was given the Mazur Auditorium to deliver his presentation. Apparently he was viewed, rightly so, as a distinguished scientist with distinguished accomplishments and earned the right to be heard in the premier venue.
I first asked Peter Leeds if John’s foundation could rent a very small room, say for a few hundred dollars for a day or for an evening meeting. Instead, Leeds was enthusiastic and said he was thinking already of inviting such a distinguished scientist as Dr. Sanford to speak and he was grateful that I contacted him. There was no money that had to be paid out for the visit, the NIH, after a difficult approval process granted facility support, the Mazur Auditorium, and placed an announcement on the official NIH calendar and e-mail lists to about 34,000 NIH staff and affiliates.
Leeds was surprised that Dr. Sanford (in New York) actually had a research assistant (me) who was an onsite reporter at the NIH in Bethesda (I attend many of the NIHs publicly accessible events, such as ENCODE, WALS and FAES events).
The rest of the NIH mechanics I’m not privy to, but suffice to say, it had to go through a lot of hoops because Sanford is a known creationist. After some discussion and soul searching, Dr. Sanford decided to focus purely on accepted science to make his case, which he did. He did not want to imperil any of the NIH staff or possibly disgrace them by anything he said. So Sanford did not talk ID, did not talk creation.
Given that the NIH Nobel Laureate Hall has an inscription from the Gospel of John about the pool of Bethesda, and that the NIH has a chapel, I thought it was Ok for John to say in passing at the very end, “our hope is in heaven” since in that very building, building 10, people a terminally ill and dying. I mean, if someone says, “God bless you” on the NIH campus, is that grounds for a Federal case? That was the only sentence John provided that might be construed as non-scientific, and he was careful to qualify it as a personal opinion…
In that regard, I found it astonishing that there should be ANY pushback on what he said or for his visit. If there is something in error, it would be in the accepted publications he cited, not in something that didn’t go through proper peer review and scrutiny.