Jan. 6, 2005

Still concerned about science

In response to Tom Bowles comment on my letter to the Reader's Forum, published Jan. 5 (excerpted below), I would like to remind Mr. Bowles that the orders in question came from the Director's Office. I refer, of course, to the the instructions to tell customers that "I am sorry, we cannot discuss programmatic issues; we are in a work shutdown mode," in the event that a customer called in the early weeks of the suspension of operations. So, I am interested in knowing if Mr. Bowles believes

1) the director should not have issued those instructions;
2) we staff should have ignored them; or
3) those orders were a figment of our imagination and we should not have given ourselves over to flights of fancy.

Excerpt from Bowles' letter:

Response to concerned about science

I appreciate Mr. Roberts' concern in his Nov. 12 submission to the Reader's Forum.

[...]

No Laboratory technical staff member should have been told to provide the response Mr. Roberts notes in his letter, and it is indeed unfortunate if such responses led to the Laboratory losing important scientific research.

--Doug Roberts