By JOHN STOSSEL
Syndicated columnist

Two weeks ago, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, spoke at an academic conference on women and minorities in science. He discussed possible reasons that fewer women than men attain top positions in science. He mentioned discrimination. He mentioned the demands of family life. And he said there might be innate differences between women and men. He called for more research.

The fury. Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out midway and so did not hear Summers' comment, later quoted in The Harvard Crimson, that he'd like to be proved wrong on the innate-differences theory. The New York Times has run a whole series of stories on how upset some women are about Summers' remarks. Google News has more than 300 items on the brouhaha. Summers has now apologized for what he said.

Please. Aren't science and scholarship supposed to ask questions and open our eyes to facts? I didn't think they were supposed to treat prevailing opinions as unquestionable and close the door on research that might challenge them.

Some scientists have already done research on gender differences. There was a study at the University of Rochester in New York, for example, where men and women were blindfolded and guided through tunnels under the campus. They were then asked to say where a particular building was. Men typically gave directions. Women typically couldn't.

For a study at York University in Toronto, Ont., students were asked to wait in a cluttered room and then were asked elsewhere about its contents. Women typically gave detailed answers. Men typically couldn't.

Even newborn boys and girls behave differently. June Reinisch, a psychologist and former director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, says differences can be seen even in the first 72 hours of life: "Males startle more than females. If you give a little puff of air on their abdomen, they startle much bigger and (are) much more likely to startle than females, and females rhythmically mouth, they suck on their tongues, they move their lips and so forth, more than males do." Is anyone going to tell me that 3-day-old infants have already been taught to conform to society's preconceived gender roles?

If not, why would sex make a difference? At conception, we begin life as the same clump of cells. Certain hormones must be added for that clump of cells to turn out male. Scientists now say that those same hormones make men's brains different. That could explain why our behavior is different.

In about one out of every 10,000 pregnancies, a genetic defect causes female babies to be exposed to a bath of androgen - male hormones. They're called CAH girls, short for congenital adrenal hyperplasia. The children are born female. If this is a sexist world, these CAH girls get all the sexist messages other girls get. Yet they don't act like the other girls. There's something in them that's innately male.

Psychologist Sheri Berenbaum studied CAH girls. "We found that the CAH girls played much more with the boys' toys than their sisters," she said, "and it showed that hormones affect sex differences and behavior, not just in rats, not just in monkeys, but in people also."

Gloria Steinem doesn't believe it. In fact, she says this research shouldn't even be done. "It's really the remnant of anti-American, crazy thinking to do this kind of research," she told me. "It's what's keeping us down, not what's helping us."

I shouldn't even be talking about it, said feminist lawyer Gloria Allred. "We take attacks from the media on our skills and our abilities and our talents and our dreams very seriously."

That sort of thinking has driven some scientists away from this research. One was refused a grant and told, "This work ought not to be done."

This is disgusting, suffocating censorship. And it's made worse when the president of America's oldest institution of higher learning endorses the intimidation by apologizing for suggesting an academic inquiry into a question of science.