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The Union of Concerned Scientists or UCS is an organization of scientists and citizens in the United States. One of the main purposes of the Union is to encourage activities that will enhance the ecological hospitably of the United States (and possibly other parts of the world, as well). The Union of Concerned Scientists is a non-profit organization which is generally considered to have a strongly pro-environmentalist bias.
There is question as to whether the name of the organization is overtly deceptive in that it continues to call itself the "Union of Concerned Scientists" when it is now a union of both scientists and non-scientists alike who share the views and support the agenda of the group. The name, however, is a holdover from the founding of the organization, when it was made up of students and faculty in science at MIT.
UCS was founded in 1969 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some of the policies that the Union endorses include controls on pollution, reduction of nuclear weapons, a ban on weapons in space, federal regulation of biotechnology, and the protection of endangered species. The Union also encourages research on renewable energy, low-pollution vehicles, and sustainable agriculture.
In 1997, the UCS circulated a petition named "A Call to Action". The petition, which called for the signing of a treaty on the Kyoto Protocol, was signed by 105 Nobel Prize-winning scientists, though most were not experts on climate change.
In February, 2004, the Union received a good deal of attention from the mass media by publishing a report titled "Scientific Integrity in Policymaking". This report criticized the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush for "politicizing" science. Some of the allegations include altering reports by the Environmental Protection Agency on global warming and choosing members of scientific advisory panels based on their political views rather than scientific experience. In July 2004, the Union released a addendum to the report in which they allege further abuses of science by the Bush administration including altering reports on West Virginia strip mining and choosing industry-friendly scientists over well-qualified nominees such as Nobel laureate Torsten Wiesel. Wiesel won his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for studying how sensory deprivation affects the development of the visual system in kittens, a discovery that had a great impact on the study of sensory systems.
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