“Physicists forced to alter data?” asked the flyers handed out by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to delegates today.

There is deep concern among scientists in the US that, under the current Bush administration, political appointees have interfered with the reporting of scientific findings. The issue has made it into the news more than once over recent months – when climate scientist James Hansen said he was stifled by NASA’s press office, for example, and after Nobel laureate David Baltimore spoke out at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St Louis.

I visited the UCS stall in the exhibition hall to find out what response they’d got from the physicists here.

Michael Halpern, from the Scientific Integrity Program of the UCS, said that at some meetings people come up to the UCS table and look both ways before recounting some experience of their own. This time, he said, they’d heard fewer personal tales.

“We weren’t necessarily here to uncover tales of manipulation of science,” he says. Many of the delegates at this meeting work in fields that are unlikely to be politically sensitive.

Halpern said the goal of the UCS in being at the APS is to raise awareness. “Our view is that the scientific community needs to be engaged in a persistent and active way,” he said.