Saturday’s New York Times had an interesting article (registration required) about scientific stuides finding possible health benefits of red wine, and the political constraints on the wine industry to advertise those benefits. Here is an excerpt from the article:

The wine industry certainly has welcomed the recent disclosures that a compound in red wine improves the health and endurance of laboratory mice. So why isn’t the industry crowing about it?

Because it can’t. The industry has long been handcuffed by state and federal laws that discourage promoting the benefits of wine, with some of those restrictions dating back to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.

“Yes, we’d all like to make hay of this, and we’ll do what we can, but we are very constrained,” said Michael Mondavi, founder and president of Folio Fine Wine Partners, a producer and importer of wines here.

As an industry that is closely regulated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, Mr. Mondavi said, “it is blatantly against the law for any alcoholic beverage producers to make any health claim regardless of the facts or the accuracy.”

“Until that regulation is changed or modified in some way so that we can talk about the positive health aspects that are proven,” said Mr. Mondavi, the older son of famed winemaker Robert Mondavi, “we have to sit on our hands and wait for others to pick up the story.”

Government regulation of alcohol advertising has a long history steeped in American cultural attitudes about drinking. In this regard this issue shares some obvious similarities with, say, medical marijuana or even differences in male-female aptitude (e.g., as raised by Harvard’s Larry Summers not long ago). In other words, political issues involving science are immersed in rich stew of societal values and preferences. It is only when these values are strongly contested in society that issues of science in political debate actually come to the fore — creating conditions for the pathological politicization of science. We tend to see these issues more starkly when political conflict exists and overlook them when conflict does not. Consisder the brouhaha over federal funding of stem research, yet there isn’t similar controversy on federal funding for human cloning research.

When values are widely shared, aspects of science in politics that raise hackles in other contexts go overlooked or are treated as amusing side notes, such as in the NYT article on the potential benefits of red wine. That all issues of science in politics are not treated equally should make the obvious inescapable – when science and politics meet, the values context always matters. There is no such thing as decisions driven by science. Decisions are always driven by values. How, if, and when we wish to consider science in making those decisions is of course where much of the action lies. But we should not pretend that science makes decisions. People make decisions.