What should scientists share?
Lenski has offered to share the bacteria used in his work.
Lenski's primary argument is that the data needed to evaluate his conclusions are in the paper. Having read the paper, it appears that Lenski is completely correct; some of the data is depicted in graphical form instead of the raw, underlying numbers, but this appears to be largely a matter of making the data easier to interpret. In his response to Conservapedia, Lenski states (accurately) that the underlying data are in the form of the bacteria themselves, which he has stored in freezers at Michigan State. If Schlafly wants those, he can go through the standard channels. He needs to demonstrate that he can store and use them properly and that his use would serve some scientific purpose. If those conditions are met, Schlafly can go through Michigan State's standard Material Transfer Agreement procedures.
The exchange actually touches on some of the issues relevant to the free exchange of scientific data and materials, although that surely wasn't Schlafly's intent. In general, most scientists would agree that the open exchange of ideas and reagents benefits the scientific community, and that the public has a right to the know about the research they've funded. For this reason, the NIH has requested that all papers that describe research it has funded be made open access within six months of their publication; Lenski's beaten that deadline by over five months.
But his second letter raises some significant limits to how far he'll go in handing out the raw materials of his research. In addition to the issues described above, Lenski also intends to make sure he fulfills his ethical obligations as a research mentor by ensuring that his grad students and post-docs who performed the hard work of maintaining the experiment are the ones who benefit by publishing a description of it. He also made no mention of sharing the preliminary data for what his paper explicitly stated was the next step: sequencing the genomes of the new bacteria and their ancestors.
In terms of the argument over public access to taxpayer-funded data, the situation is fairly straightforward. Organizing raw data for public exchange takes time and money, which taxpayers would also foot the bill for. It's generally most efficient for the data to be organized once the gathering stage is complete; taxpayers get a better value for their money this way. In the same manner, it makes no sense for taxpayers to foot the bill for the preparation and shipping of samples to someone like Schlafly, who lacks the facilities or knowledge to do scientific work with the material.
But there's often a large gap between organization and analysis of data and its publication. Here, the ethical concerns—ensuring that the people who did the work receive credit for it via publication—often conflicts with the principles of openness and rapid progress. It's possible some other lab would be able to analyze the sequence data Lenski is gathering more rapidly and thoroughly; by fulfilling his ethical obligations, Lenski may actually be slowing the progress of science. This has been a source of tension within the scientific community for decades, one that has only been exacerbated by the fact that more data is now in electronic form and easy to exchange. It's not something I expect to see resolved any time soon.
Lenski is keeping the genome data private
until his students can publish it.
Although he's brought up some interesting issues regarding the conduct of publicly funded scientific research, Schlafly appears to remain blissfully unaware of it. Schlafly only named specific data that he felt were missing on Friday, two weeks after the exchange of letters started; his comments in the discussion attached the letter exchange suggests he primarily questions Lenski's ability to recognize when bacterial contamination crops up in the experiment. Throughout the discussion, however, Schlafly has demonstrated a scientific illiteracy that undercuts his own arguments by demonstrating that any time Lenski or his coworkers spend accommodating Schlafly would truly represent a waste of taxpayer money.
Of course, that lack of understanding might be expected from someone who seems to believe that there are distinct conservative and liberal forms of science. Still, you can sense the beginnings of a response to the fact that the situation may be spiraling out of Conservapedia's control. When a contributor suggested the exchange was making the site look bad, the response indicated that the any problems could be dismissed as a case of biased perception: "What sort of Liberal defeatism are you bound up in, and why do you assume, without examining the facts of the matter, that this has not gone well?"
As to the longer-term prospect, that Lenski's genome sequencing will actually reveal the creative power of evolution in greater detail, that's apparently nothing that can't be handled by a post-hoc rationalization. "But how are we to know," one contributor asks, "if these traits weren’t 'potentiated' by the Creator when He designed the bacteria thousands of years ago, such that they would eventually reveal themselves when the time was right?"
How indeed? It's precisely the inability to test such a contention that led the scientific community to give up on supernatural explanations in the first place.