Author Posts Archive:
Andrew Plemmons Pratt
Today, the Center for American Progress Action Fund posted a new slate of chapters from
Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President online for free download, including
Science Progress adviser Tom Kalil’s overview on science, technology, and innovation. Kalil looks back over the history of successful government-backed research and lays out principles for the future. Here are some of his recommendations.
The Science Progress blog and email team will be taking a break next week, but we will have fresh feature content that includes: Rick Weiss on the science posts to fill in the new administration; Chris Mooney on Michael Crichton’s influence on the cultural image of science; Neal Lane and George Abbey on the future of the space program; and Denise Caruso on proper governance for synthetic biology.
The servers are obviously having a tough time handling the traffic load (I’ve gotten a few errors throughout the day), but President-elect Obama’s transition project has already hit the ground running with a box of web 2.0 tools to organize the next administration at change.gov.
Open access publishing is great, but what if you can’t capture your research in words? Over at the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, Jeffery Young reports that in order to expand the reach and accessibility of their historical elections mapping project, digital historians at the University of Richmond moved their data from an in-house system to two platforms familiar to many web surfers: Google Maps and Google Earth.
In the waning days of the Bush administration, there’s a final rush to implement a slate of polluter-friendly rules, as The Washington Post reported on Halloween.
Yesterday, the Science Board Subcommittee on Food Contact Applications of BPA released its report on the Food and Drug Adminstration’s draft assessment of bisphenol A, a chemical used to strengthen all manner of plastic containers, the most damaging example being baby bottles. This story has been brewing for months, and the public health bloggers who smelled a regulatory proposal baked with industry-authored research are slamming the FDA.
Rick Weiss wrote Monday about scientific work in genetics, forensics, and satellite imaging that has helped nongovernmental organizations combat genocide and human rights abuses and bring war criminals to justice. This week also brings news from the tech sphere about an initiative to ensure the human rights to freedom of expression and privacy.
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According to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, from 10 to 20 percent of Iraq war vets, or between 150,000 and 300,000 soldiers, have suffered a traumatic brain injury. Developing better ways to diagnose and treat TBI is important, but preventing it in the first place would be even better. Recent research from scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory investigates the mechanics of how blasts affect the brain and may provide an answer.
There’s no shortage of good researchers with groundbreaking, unfunded ideas. So the Gates Foundation will dole out $100,000 to 104 scientists around the world with the aim of cultivating novel new preventive methods or cures for treating a variety of diseases, including HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.
The flat-funding of the NIH since 2004 hasn’t really been flat. In fact, Weiss reminds readers that “the NIH research budget has actually now dipped to an inflation-adjusted level about 13 percent less than it was five years ago,” according to the AAAS. And to top it all off, the extreme difficultly of securing a first-time research grant is sending young scientists packing for jobs in other sectors.
Nutritious Rice for the World runs out of the University of Washington, but pieces of the research work could be unfolding on a desktop near you. That’s because the research is one of five projects currently part of IBM’s World Community Grid. The grid allows volunteer computer users to run a small program that takes advantage of unused processing power to predict the structure of desirable rice proteins.
The Earth Policy Institute offers a rosy update on the booming wind and solar industries in every corner of the country. To get a real sense of the intense grow in these sectors, words alone don’t really do the job.
Earlier this week, Complete Genomics announced that it will offer complete human genome sequencing for the low, low price of $5000. But as the blog Genetic Future points out, in this industry, profits will to flow to companies that can offer the best interpretation of genetic information, not just the fastest and cheapest sequencing.
Writing at the Switchboard blog, Nathanael Green is pleased with the conclusions of 23 scientists who co-authored the Policy Forum in Friday’s issue of Science, “Sustainable Biofuels Redux.” And just today, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that tomorrow they will release a new plan for accelerating the development of the sustainable biofuels industry.
The AAU recommendations straddle the sciences and the humanities, but the item at the top of the group’s list is the very same as the top recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences: elevate the role of the president’s science adviser to a cabinet-level position, and appoint a highly qualified person to that position quickly.
If Congress resumes Thursday and passes a financial rescue plan, it will have a significant impact on discretionary spending next year. Yesterday,
Science and
National Geographic both reported on the potential effect a budget crunch will have on federal science funding. (But unless we solve the unfolding financial crisis, there won’t be enough money to fund much of anything.)
The impact of Hurricane Ike on the research labs in the storm’s path is generating a small number of headlines. At the end of last week,
Science reported on the state of things at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Fortunately, the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Biocontainment BSL-4 Lab at UTMB suffered minimal damage.
This afternoon, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee will hold a hearing examining the Bush administration’s environmental record. Our Center for American Progress colleagues took a hard look at the president’s legacy on this issue earlier this year. Their conclusion? “Seven Years of Failure: Bush gets an F for the Earth.” While the interactive timeline they prepared only runs through May 2008, you still get a pretty clear picture.
The Department of Health and Human Services to propose a rule that would ostensibly protect healthcare workers who object to performing abortion and sterilization procedures. The catch is that there are already federal laws in place that do just that. The regulation would instead open the door to denying patients access to all sorts of potentially controversial health care services. The comment period closes tomorrow.
The MacArthur Foundation today announced its annual list of 25 fellows. Recipients of the award get $500,000 to spend over the next five years with no strings attached. Many of the fellows are distinguished scientists working in fields as diverse as plant genetics, astrophysics, and epidemiology. One neuroscientist, Sally Temple, works extensively with stem cells.
The National Academies have just offered a report detailing the most critical presidential science appointments in the executive branch and ways to streamline the process of getting new hires into their posts. Their first recommendation, however, is to hire the top science adviser at the level of assistant to the president.
In addition to a stumbling automotive industry, Michigan is home to some of the most restrictive regulations on stem cell research in the country. A new report from the Michigan Prospect calculates the scale of the negative economic impact of the hobbled biotech research on the state.
Early this morning, the new Minneapolis bridge on interstate 35W opened. What you can’t see in this CNN video is the network of electronic sensors that will monitor the bridge, allowing engineers to forestall major damage from future wear and prevent catastrophes like the bridge’s collpase that killed 13 people and injured 145 last August.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced today that Dr. Deborah Swackhamer will be the new chair of the EPA Science Advisory Board. Unfortunately, the only thing that may save the EPA is a new administration.
Art Caplan offered his “Six Easy Pieces” for improving medicine and life science in a recent column. But we’re not the only science publication looking forward to the possibilities of the next administration.
Federal dollars and leadership drive energy innovation in the United States. That was true in 1942, when Enrico Fermi’s team of physicists and engineers created the world’s first sustained nuclear reaction, and it is true today. One of the many things that U.S. government must do to move the economy towards a low-carbon future is to support research and development in energy technologies.
Good news this week from the Centers for Disease Control: the vast majority of children in the United States have received nearly all the recommended vaccines. CDC’s new report indicates that immunization rates are “at or near record levels.” The survey data landed just after a new study reinforcing the fact that the measles vaccine has no connection to autism.
In today’s NYT Science Times, Carl Zimmer profiles Will Wright’s latest game, Spore, which follows the evolution of new life forms from single-celled organisms to galaxy-hoping civilizations. Spore raises the possibility that video games could help illuminate for players the basic premises of the life sciences.
Science and tech commentary from around the web: climate change health impacts, the bioethics of voting technology, evolution teaching tools, the wind in NYC, the Clean Air Interstate Rule, scivee.tv, and Green Chemistry in CA.
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed a rule that cattle too sick to stand should not be turned into hamburgers. The move raises the opportunity to consider broader issues regarding federal food safety structures, which have been under scrutiny since this summer’s outbreak of
salmonella St. Paul, which was eventually traced to imported serrano peppers.
Harvard researchers report in the online version of Nature that they have developed a method to directly convert tissue cells in a living mouse from one type into another. The development will certainly spark the latest round of discussions over ethical questions involved in stem cell research, but despite the potential for work that builds on this discovery and iPS investigations, human embryonic stem cell research will likely still be an important component of the field for some time to come.
Bell Labs, birthplace of technological breakthroughs like the transistor, the laser, and communications satellites, may have arrived at the end of its storied history. Industry support of basic research has been on the wan for years, but federal policies can bolster public and private R&D.
Corporations typically underestimate their carbon footprints by an average of 75 percent, according to a new study from Carnegie Mellon researchers. One of the major blind spots is in calculating the total greenhouse gas emissions from myriad supply chain inputs, as opposed to the direct emissions involved in primary operations.
Yesterday, the CDC announced that more cases of measles have been reported in the Unites States thus far this year than in any year since 1996. Public health research demonstrates the immense benefits of vaccination, and armed with the best information, public health experts, doctors, and parents can help drive measles rates where they belong: down to zero.
Congress recently authorized the creation of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, a nonprofit organization that will support research, development, and adoption of digital learning technologies. Unfortunately, Congress neglected to provide sufficient funding for the center.
This week on the EPA’s Greenversations blog: “Why do you use a gasoline, electric, battery-operated, or push lawn mower?” It’s an apt question, as personal decisions about lawn grooming implements are connected to matters of climate and energy.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson announced today that the agency will deny the request of Texas Governor Rick Perry for a waiver that would reduce government ethanol production requirements.
College-age readers may be interested to know that the Center for American Progress is accepting applications to its internship program, which includes Science Progress. Other readers may know students interested in the program.
With the support of cigarette manufacturer Phillip Morris USA, the House voted Wednesday to approve legislation that would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco.
Former Time magazine-reporter-turned-environmental-policy-analyst Eric Roston will make his Colbert Report debut tonight talking about his new book, The Carbon Age.
Science Progress featured an interview with Roston earlier this month that ranged across the various scientific fields connected by the carbon atom.
Despite significant gains over the years in the number of young women pursuing science and engineering degrees, the upper echelons of scientific research are still a boy’s club. A piece in today’s Science Times explores new research into why women are underrepresented in certain scientific fields, along with a federal push to use Title IX to expand and ensure equity in research departments.
Carbon fuels evolutionary systems and climate change—and the story of this element cuts across a wide swath of scientific fields, underscoring much of the research that’s changing the way we think about everyday life.
Filmmaker Joanna Rudnick tested positive for a BRCA1 mutation at age 27. Staring down an almost certain risk of developing breast cancer, she set out to make a documentary of her own choices about prevention and to explore the impact of genetic testing and cancer on women across the country.
To produce biofuels that reduce carbon emissions and do not compete with food crops, biofuel producers need to scale up production of cellulosic biofuels, particularly those made from waste materials and crops that do not compete with food.
Kicking off an auspicious week at
Science Progress that will culminate in our first public event, the Center for American Progress just announced that former Post reporter Rick Weiss is joining CAP as a Senior Fellow.
Metropolitan areas are more energy-efficient than areas of less-dense development, according to a new analysis from the Brookings Institution; they also have smaller per-capita carbon emissions. Here’s a new mashup comparing the per-capita transportation emissions across the 100 metro areas in the study.
This week, Francis Collins stepped down from his post at NHGRI; members of Congress continued work on a supplemental funding bill that could include more money for R&D; the first World Science Festival kicked off in New York City.
David Michaels speaks at a Center for American Progress event to discuss his book,
Doubt Is Their Product, explaining the “tricks of the trade” used by cigarette makers, drug companies, and climate change deniers to delay regulation that would make Americans safer.
This week, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute stepped in with $600 million in grant funding to 56 biomedical researchers pursuing high-risk, high-return work. The federal government should also fund researchers who “swing for the fences.”
President Bush signed the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act into law on Wednesday, which will protect Americans from prejudicial treatment by employers or insurance companies based on their DNA. But this groundbreaking piece of legislation isn’t just important because it allays public concern.
In his new book,
Doubt Is Their Product, Michaels chronicles the “tricks of the trade” that mercenary scientists and product defense firms employ to delay or prevent regulation of chemicals that kill. Their tactics put them in the good company of cigarette companies and global warming deniers.
The global food crisis is the result of many intersecting factors, and alleviating the current hardships and preventing future crises will require a multi-pronged slate of solutions, including additional investment in agricultural research to increase food production yields in a safe and transparent manner.
“The future is likely to be very similar to the past, regardless of who the President is,” said Dr. John Marburger, the President’s science advisor at the AAAS S&T Policy Forum last Thursday. He was talking about funding, but let’s hope things are very different for scientific integrity under the next administration.
While cellulosic ethanol is not a silver bullet for solving the country’s need for sustainable transportation fuel, there is a sufficient supply of biofuel feedstocks that do not compete with food crops.
Vaccine safety has grabbed headlines in recent months, as some parents, fearing alleged links to autism, exempt their children from vaccinations. Multiple studies have demonstrated there is no such link, but there is more to understand about how vaccines keep kids safe, and how public health ensure the safety of vaccines.
The latest news on industry obfuscation of scientific research and government complicity is that the Food and Drug Administration relied on studies funded by trade groups in decisions on an unsafe compound in common plastic products.
Biofuel production has come under blistering attack as food prices around the world escalate, but we can’t make the right steps forward without looking at the full interplay of agricultural forces.
The Associated Press quickly picked up on a report released yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealing that 889 of nearly 1,600 staff scientists who responded to an online survey indicated that they experienced political interference with their work at some point in the last five years.
The U.S has no national innovation policy. To respond to the changing landscape of a global innovation economy, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the Brooking Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program released a report yesterday proposing the creation of a National Innovation Foundation.
Art Caplan adds to the string of excoriating reviews of Ben Stein’s
Expelled in his most recent MSNBC column. He points out that if the creationist agenda of the film’s creators aims to attack the biological sciences, then other countries will gladly accept the torch as leaders in research.
Various companies now offer direct-to-consumer genetic counseling. Public concern about genetic discrimination is on the rise. The Senate may soon vote on the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. But there are many uncertainties to consider as genetic medicine gets increasingly personal.
The National Science Foundation issued a “Dear Colleague” letter earlier this month to education grant applicants about the sometimes-misunderstood “broader impacts” criteria used to evaluate grant proposals.
The organizers of Science Debate 2008 consider the impact of their campaign to convince the major party candidates to talk about science and technology in a national forum in the current issue of
Science.
The 2008 appropriations package included a provision requiring that any published articles emerging from research supported by the National Institutes of Health must be deposited in the PubMed Central database, where they will be available through open access, within 12 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
New research appearing in this week’s edition of
Science focuses on a wide variety of bacteria that have not simply evolved resistance to antibiotics, but can in fact survive entirely on a diet of compounds intended to kill them.
The Times Online offers a useful question-and-answer primer on the latest research news.
Rapid advances in genetic research are revealing mind-boggling amounts of information about how our DNA shapes who we are and how we get sick. The work will shape the future of medicine, but we still have a lot to learn.
Scientists at Newcastle University in the UK have announced the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos intended to provide stem cells for research. The intersection of embryonic stem cell and hybrid research could renew bioethical debates on this side of the pond.
Conference committee appointees are hashing through Senate and House versions of the 2007 Farm Bill, and there’s a significant risk that the legislation they pass on to the President will continue the misguided agricultural subsidies that thwart the development of advanced cellulosic biofuels.
Worldwide biofuel production is increasing so rapidly, according to a new analysis from Merrill Lynch, while other fuel sources cannot keep up with demand, that without the rising production, oil prices would be higher than they already are.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the analysis yesterday, which adds yet another variable to the already complex debate over biofuel policy.
In a briefing yesterday for Capitol Hill staffers, neuroscientist Martha Farah explained that new technologies that enhance the power of the brain also raise questions about safety, economic fairness, privacy, and personal freedom.
Last week’s stories about the future of grants for the younger generation of NIH investigators is just one piece of the larger puzzle over the state of funding biotech research. The Scientist offers a useful summary of the major stumbling blocks in pharmaceutical development and how they relate to financing questions in the drug industry, in university labs, at the NIH, and at start-up companies.
After steady increases from 1998 to 2003 that doubled the budget for the National Institutes of Health, five years of stagnant funding have reduced purchasing power at the NIH by 13 percent, according to a report released yesterday by a consortium of research universities.
The Washington Post reports that unions at the Environmental Protection Agency have broken with management over Administrator Stephen Johnson’s disregard for scientific integrity. The news comes only a two weeks after Johnson published the official explanation for the agency’s refusal to allow California’s emissions reduction standards, despite the fact that the ruling ignored the “unanimous recommendation of the EPA’s legal and technical staffs.”
In his most recent column, Chris Mooney traced the complexities of the the current debate over biofuels. One major concern is that increased demand for biofuels leads farmers to plant more feedstocks for ethanol and devote less land to growing food.
The New York Times tackled the issue of food crops yesterday, offering a substantial cover story on the growing gap between global grain production and soaring grain demand.
Collaborations between computer scientists and life science researchers facilitate new ways of doing science that could inform sound policy decisions. But current numbers indicate that the far fewer U.S. students are enrolling in computer science programs than they were at the beginning of the decade.
Provisions in the Lieberman-Warner bill would allow companies to meet some of their emissions targets by purchasing “offset” credits from reductions in emissions not covered under cap-and-trade. But current offsets markets are unregulated and unreliable. Hayes explains how to regulate offsets that will enable verifiable emissions cuts.
Two stories this week describe two different approaches to plant genetic resources. Tuesday, researchers from Washington University and Iowa State university announced a completed draft of the corn genome. The same day, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which will store seeds from around the world in the event of catastrophic loss, opened on a remote Norwegian island.
Communicating the importance and public good of scientific research is a responsibility of scientists and policy makers alike. To do so, we must draw clear connections between the policy issues that attract public attention and the technological innovation that underscores them.
A new paper published today in
Science describes advances from the Kyoto University iPS cell team, led by Shinya Yamanaka, facilitating production of pluipotent cells that are much less likely to form tumors than iPS cells created with previous methods.
A new paper released today from researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute offers data on the length of time cells must be exposed to reprogramming factors in order to induce the cells into behaving like stem cells. According to an email announcement from the HSCI, this allows scientists to “narrow the field of candidate chemicals and proteins that might be used to safely turn these processes on and off.”
Before we need more biofuels, writes Alex Farrell in an op-ed in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, we need better biofuels. He suggests reorienting our thinking about biofuel production to focus on how we use the land available, so that fuel does not compete with wilderness or food production.
The latest research on biofuel production suggests that previous studies failed to fully account for the role uncultivated lands play in keeping carbon out of the atmosphere. But with this new guidance, says Alex Farrell in an interview with
Science Progress, we see that while not all biofuels are created equal, growing them the right way can help stop global warming, keep food prices down, and preserve our forests.
Recently, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute announced the creation of the first synthetic genome. Deamer, a chemist at UC Santa Cruz, downplays concerns about the dangers of the research and explains that synthetic biology can teach us about the origins of life.
The recently unveiled blog at the new Scientists and Engineers for America Action Fund website has a column from Gerald Epstein questioning a $2 billion request in the FY2009 budget for the Department of Homeland Security.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration issued a report from the alternate reality of the Bush administration yesterday, cheering “the nation’s broadband success story.” Despite President Bush’s suggestion in 2004 that the United States should have “universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007,” we have nothing resembling this system.
The Bush Administration will likely withdraw its $1.5 billion in support for the FutureGen coal-fired power plant in Illinois. The plant was to be the flagship demonstration project for carbon capture and sequestration technology, which would divert carbon emissions from coal combustion and bury them underground.
An FDA study says that milk and meat from cloned animals is safe for human consumption. The news breaks close on the heels of reports that the E.U.’s European Food Safety Authority released similar findings that food from cloned livestock is “very unlikely” to harm consumers.
Economic research on the creative power of groups demonstrates that teams composed of smart people alone may not generate innovative solutions to technical problems. According to Scott Page, diversity within those groups leads to a diversity of problem-solving approaches and drives the power to innovate.
The Water Resources Development Act of 1986 grants the governors of the eight Great Lakes states the power to veto plans to divert water outside the Great Lakes Basin. But with drought conditions in the Southwest and Southeast showing no signs of abatement, talk of moving water to dry areas of the country has the lake states scrambling to better protect their resources.
The Navy must turn off its sonar around whales; Britain readies for new nuclear power plant construction; Illinois will host the first commercial carbon capture and sequestration project; the OPEN Government Act of 2007.
The National Academy of Sciences just released a new book,
Science, Evolution, and Creationism, which “provides information about the role that evolution plays in modern biology and the reasons why only scientifically based explanations should be included in public school science courses.”
Thirty-seven states, along with the District of Columbia, require businesses and institutions to publicly disclose incidents of data loss in which personal consumer information is compromised. But with tens of millions of records reported compromised each year, and incidents on the rise, the government and businesses need to do more to protect consumer information.
Under Article 76 of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, nations have rights to ocean floor on the continental shelf within 200 nautical miles of their shores. But countries can petition the commission that oversees the UNCLOS to extend that range based on “natural prolognations” of the continental shelf.
A cocaine vaccine; Navy sonar vs. the whales; racial gaps in ER painkiller prescriptions; Social Security Numbers available on the web; the EU’s Galileo geopositioning system.
Various outlets are lamenting the cuts and paltry increases to Federal science funding in the omnibus spending package passed by Congress and headed for the President’s desk. AAAS calculates that over all, “Federal funding for basic and applied research would decline in real terms for the fourth year in a row.”
Senator John Kerry compares the decision to address carbon emissions with economic and policy reforms to Pascal’s Wager. “If we’re wrong,” he explained this morning at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, “we still have global development, clean air, a stronger economy here at home, healthier citizens, and no more addiction to the foreign oil that funds despots and terrorists.”
Synthetic biology, which involves producing artificial life forms from genomes built on lab benches, promises to unleash a variety of chemical wonders, pose a slate of dual-use dangers, and ignite intellectual property battles over patents for the “software of life.”
The Minnesota legislature recently approved funding for biomonitoring research, which will track environmental contaminants found in the tissue of children and adult volunteers. In related news, the EPA eased reporting requirements for companies that dump toxic chemicals into the environment.
Drug-resistant staph, known as MRSA, began making headlines in October, when the CDC released a report indicating that many healthy citizens carry the bacteria, which kills more people each year in the U.S. than AIDS. Two recent stories, one on research on a possible MRSA treatment and another on the threat of the bacteria on factory farms, may put the “superbug” back under the public microscope.
