After almost three years on the project, your humble managing editor will be moving on to join Teach for America’s teacher training program. It’s been a pleasure, an honor, and a remarkable educational experience bringing to you, our readers, progressive ideas about how science strengthens the United States, and vice versa. Thank you all. —Andrew Pratt

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act directed an additional one-time stimulus of $10 billion to NIH last year, a sum that helped offset the flat funding for the agency from 2004 to 2008. But “flat” actually meant that the NIH saw the purchasing power of its inflation-adjust budget dip 13 percent over that period.

In the letter, the governors point out that their states received $19 billion in grants from NIH last year, and funding from the agency directly supports 350,000 jobs around the country.

But most importantly, the governors write that the “greatest contribution NIH makes is to the health and well-being of Americans.” The agency funds research on everything from vaccines to cancer therapies—from investigations into the genetic roots of disease to the traumatic brain injuries suffered by U.S. combat troops.

Shortly after the White House released its budget request in February, leaders of United for Medical Research, a coalition of research universities and advocacy groups, explained here at Science Progress that every $1 of NIH investment produces more than $2 of economic benefits. Moreover, they described how the basic biomedical research NIH supports leads to innovations that drive leading U.S. industries: 50 percent of respondents in a recent biotech industry poll reported that their companies were founded on licensed ideas generated by these technologies.

In short, an investment in NIH is an investment in the health, wealth, and security of the whole nation.

A little more than half, or 54 percent, of U.S. weathercasters accept that climate change is happening. And in many local television newsrooms, weathercasters have become the de facto science reporters at their station. Edward Maibach, who headed a recent study surveying professionals in the field, sees this as an opportunity for enhancing their role as informal science educators.

Previous public surveys demonstrate that weathercasters are the second-most trusted source of information on climate change. For Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, that finding was unexpected. The first is climate scientists themselves, and running a distant third are “friends and family.” “That clued us into the fact that our nation’s weathercasters are a potentially important source of informal education about climate change,” he said in an interview with Science Progress. He spoke about his new research with Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress focusing on international energy policy, and the director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason. (The podcast audio is accessible above.)

The latest study from the Center for Climate Change Communication is the largest and most representative survey of TV weathercasters to date, and its findings on how this group of professionals thinks about climate change science and news generated significant media attention, including a front-page story at The New York Times. Coverage like that is hard to earn, and Maibach is grateful for it, though he disagrees with the conclusions. Much of the media attention has been on the 25 percent of respondents who said that global warming isn’t happening at all. But as Maibach points out, the idea that this group is “a hotbed of climate change skepticism turned out to not be the case.”

“We see this as a ‘glass already half full’ finding,” he said, referring to the majority of weathercasters who accept global warming. “To the extend to which they were not currently acting as climate change educators, we wanted to identify the path to cultivate them as an important source of education for the public.”

Maibach says the data points to that opportunity, as two out of three survey respondents said they were interested in educating their viewers about the relationship between local weather and the changing global climate.

Weathercasters as informal science educators

The latest survey confirms other findings on the small fraction of dedicated science reporting at local outlets. The study reached almost 1,400 weathercasters who belong to the two major professional associations, the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association. Almost all, or 94 percent of the 571 respondents, said they are the only full-time staffer covering science or environmental issues at their station. Some 79 percent embraced this role, a fact the American Meteorological Society already recognizes. The organization, Maibach says, sees an opportunity to embrace weathercasters as “station scientists” and is pursuing educational programs to support them.

Moreover, weathercasters share their professional expertise not just on air, but at local school and adult education events. Almost 70 percent of the respondents do between one and three speaking events each month, building loyalty that helps draw viewers to their broadcasts. According to the survey, a small proportion of these weathercasters are incorporating climate change information into their broadcasts, but a large proportion of them are finding ways to address the issue in their community presentations.

For Maibach, the “Ah-ha!” moment of the study came from looking at the responses from those participants who said they were interested in communicating more information on climate change. Ninety percent of that group indicated that a variety of relatively simple resources would help them do their jobs more effectively. They needed access to peer-reviewed journal articles, which are typically locked behind paywalls. They need to be able to interview media-savvy climate scientists. Most valuable, they said, are high-quality graphics and animations explaining key concepts of climate science. His group is now working with climate science communication experts to produce these resources.

Andrew Light pointed out that federal government already plays an important role supplying these types of resources, as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration produce a wealth of climate science information. As well, he suggested that a move within NOAA to create a National Climate Service will further ramp up the amount of accessible information. Administrator Jane Lubchenco is particularly interested in filling this information gap, he said.

Meteorological myths

While about four out of five weathercasters are men, there is a diversity of professional and educational backgrounds within the community. Previous research shows that about half of the practicing weathercasters in the United States are meteorologists, certified by the AMS or the NWA. Some hold scientific degrees, some have journalism backgrounds, and some simply come to the role through experience in broadcasting.

But the survey results also dispel the notion that there is a rift between weathercasters and professional climate scientists, who tend to be academic researchers. “Approximately three out of four of our respondents look at climate scientists as a trustworthy source of information about climate change,” said Maibach. “That’s good news.”

The myth of this “culture gap” between meteorologists and climatologists, he said, rests on an assumption that forecasters, who struggle to model weather a few days into the future, consider it hubris to claim that they should trust climate models that are decades in scope. But the trust meteorologists say they have in climate scientists doesn’t support this idea, said Maibach.

Light suggested that the immediate media response to the survey may have rested upon this explanation, which he called “seat-of-the-pants sociology—of the working class meteorologists who ‘don’t get no respect.’” In that context, the survey fit into a particular storyline about the the continuing fallout of the overhyped “Climategate” incident, in which computer hackers stole emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The content of the years of private correspondence revealed scientists besieged by freedom of information requests from climate skeptics, and global warming deniers said the information undermined climate science itself. A recent inquiry of the British House of Commons found no basis for either that claim, nor others leveled against the Climate Research Unit at the University, its director, Phil Jones, and the research on historical climate data the group manages.

“None of that has changed any of the overwhelming consensus on the causes of anthropogenic global warming and what are the necessary solutions,” said Light.

In the present media climate, the release of the survey data did create the opportunity for “talking head debates” on cable news, said Light, pitting high-profile weathercasters who deny climate change against scientists who accept the facts.

Setting up the discussion as a debate reinforces the notion that there is disagreement within the scientific community, said Maibach. “And that’s a totally erroneous notion.” Approximately 97 percent of climate scientists who are active researchers say that climate change is real and human-caused. “So this notion that there is still disagreement out there in the scientific community about climate change is fundamentally wrong.”

Climate change as a public health hazard

Maibach’s goal for future projects supported by this research is to enable “local weathercasters to make the connection between the conditions we are living with here, in our community, and the changing global climate.” People have a sense that climate change is “happening somewhere else,” he said, “We understand there is a problem, but it isn’t our problem.”

“The way in which the climate change story has been framed historically is as an environmental problem,” he explains, and it is unquestionably an immense environmental problem. But it is also a public health problem, and before turning to climate change research in 2007, Maibach’s career focused on public health communications. “As a result of 25 or more years in the field, I’m absolutely convinced that for the American people, health is right up along with baseball, mom, and apple pie,” he said—it is something of immense social value. He aims to engage citizens “at a fundamentally deeper, more values-based level” by magnifying research on the public health impacts of climate change.

The Obama administration focuses its discussion of climate change on jobs in clean energy industries and energy security, Light points out. Because it takes time to train scientists to communicate on the expanding set of issues, including the public health threats, it could be effective to provide that information to weathercasters in the near term.

Maibach reports that he is already working with small group of 18 weathercasters who are actively using their platform to talk about climate change as informal science education.

He is also collaborating with the weather team at WLTX, the CBS affiliate in Columbia, South Carolina, headed by Jim Gandy, to become “climate change educators in their community.” Climate Central, a nonprofit that provides scientific information on the issue, will develop graphics, and for the next year, the station will try to help its viewers better understand climate change science and the impacts the global phenomenon has on the local area. If the effort is effective, then Maibach’s group will have a strong case for scaling it.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor for Science Progress.

Most importantly, the commitment to including leading minds from “bioethics, science, medicine, technology, engineering, law, philosophy, theology,” and the social sciences underscores President Obama’s desire to craft ethical scientific policies that are pragmatic and solve real problems facing U.S. citizens. They will address questions that knit together policies for expanding scientific innovation, expanding access to quality health care, and protecting citizens from harm.

The president issued the EO initiating the commission last November. At that time, the president did announce the chair and vice chair, whose credentials signaled the practical focus of the group. Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania and a political theorist, is the chair, and James W. Wagner, president of Emory University and an engineer, is the vice chair.

Notably, the EO made it explicit that no more then three members could be bioethicists or scientists from within government, signaling the president’s intention to recruit public servants. The nominees filling those spots are: Christine Grady, the Acting Chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, Alexander Garza, the Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs and Chief Medical Officer for the Department of Homeland Security, and Nelson Michael, the director of the Division of Retrovirology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the director of the U.S. Military HIV Research program. All will bring with them expertise in the mechanics of federal policymaking.

The other appointees are: Lonnie Ali, wife of Muhammad Ali and an advocate for Parkinson’s and biomedical research funding; Anita Allen, a professor of law and philosophy and a dean at the University of Pennsylvania Law School; Barbara Atkinson, the executive vice chancellor of the University of Kansas Medical Center and executive dean of the University of Kansas School of Medicine; Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Vanderbilt University; Stephen Hauser, a professor and chair of the Department of Neurology at the University of California—San Francisco; Raju Kucherlapati, a professor in the Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Daniel Sulmasy, a Franciscan Friar who is a professor of medical ethics in the Department of Medicine and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.

It remains up to the president to determine the commission’s first assignment, but some of the potential topics laid out in the executive order have grabbed recent headlines, including “intellectual property issues involving genetic screening.” This is a timely matter in light of the recent invalidation of gene patents linked to breast cancer by a federal court in New York.

As Jonathan Moreno explained last month, ethical policies require a careful process, and the NIH implementation of the administration’s rules for human embryonic stem cell research are a case in point. While some scientists have chaffed at the time it takes for an advisory board to vet new cell lines for research, the deliberate steps for approval pay careful attention to the latest science and core bioethical questions concerning informed consent for tissue donors. In contrast, the policy recommended by President George W. Bush’s bioethics council was to draw an arbitrary line in time—lines derived before were considered acceptable, those after were not. While the rule was expedient, it was neither attentive to the science nor an ethical proposal.

The full announcement, as well as bios for the nominees, are available at the commission’s website, bioethics.gov.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor for Science Progress.

Yet quality of the information in these state-level databases is not the only urgent issue in the field. Natalie Ram presented original research last year indicating widespread variation in state rules for “partial” match searches. A partial match refers two genetic profiles that share some, though not all, of the markers used for connecting a crime-scene sample with a stored profile in the database. A partial match, Ram explains, can implicate a previous offender’s immediate family: “In effect, reporting partial matches implicitly incorporates offenders’ close genetic relatives into existing offender databases, even though these relatives have never been convicted of, or arrested for, an offense qualifying them for database inclusion.” Some states allow these searches, some states prohibit them, and for some it is unclear what the policy is at all.

She goes on to recommend that the federal government create rules for partial match searching, as well as that states make their policies explicit and publicly accessible.

In both cases, the authors argue that improved transparency will lead to better science, more effective law enforcement, and just outcomes.

The full implications of the surprise decision are not yet clear, but gene patents are a contentious intellectual property issue both because they underpin significant investments in the biotechnology industry and because they might pose barriers to increasingly complex genomic research. The ruling is also noteworthy because it invalidates both the patents on the genes themselves and patents for the methods of analyzing and comparing genes to identify mutations in the genetic material.

Some of the patents in question are for the sequences of DNA that make up the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Mutations on these genes are linked to 3 to 5 percent of breast cancer in the United States and 10 to 15 percent of ovarian cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But for women with a family history of cancer, genetic testing can be an important medical decision, as BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations carry a 60 percent lifetime risk of breast cancer and up to a 40 percent risk of ovarian cancer.

Myriad holds patents on the genes along with the University of Utah Research Foundation. As a result, Myriad is the only company that can market a test for the mutations, and it charges as much as $3,000.

Filmmaker Johanna Rudnick spoke with Science Progress in 2008 about her documentary, In the Family, which chronicles her own discovery at age 27 that she carries a mutation on the BRCA1 gene. “There is no other, cheaper test that you could go get in another laboratory, because they have the exclusive patent,” she explained, adding that Myriad also controls the efficacy of the test—there is no other company to turn to for a second opinion.

There are about 40,000 patents that currently protect some 20 percent of the human genome. Last year, a federal advisory panel recommended exceptions from patent infringement liability for genetic research. The proposal came from the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health, and Society, known as SACGHS, at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But Timothy Caulfield at the University of Alberta argued here at Science Progress that there is little data to back up the claim the gene patents inhibit reserach. “A 2005 study done for the National Academy of Sciences found only 1 percent of the scientists surveyed reported suffering a project delay of more than 1 month due to patents,” he wrote.

Patents are designed to foster innovation, not stand in the way. That’s why patents are public documents that detail the inner workings of a new invention, exposing the idea for anyone to see and understand. Inventors are protected for the life the patent, currently 20 years, from anyone else copying their idea, but in exchange, they share their technology with the rest of the world, advancing knowledge.

Yet the District Court ruling does not hinge on claims about the impact of the patents on research. It deals instead with whether or not the genes and the processes for analyzing them are patentable in the first place.

An analysis of the ruling posted at Genomics Law Report makes it clear that the decision presents DNA as pure information—whether it is part of a complete genome or isolated in the form protected by Myriad’s patents. From the judgment itself:

DNA represents the physical embodiment of biological information, distinct in its essential characteristics from any other chemical found in nature. It is concluded that DNA’s existence in an ‘isolated’ form alters neither this fundamental quality as it exists in the body not the information it encodes (pp. 3-4).

That is, patents on the chemicals that make up specific sequences of DNA are no different from the information they encode in the human genome. And this naturally occurring information is not eligible for patent protection.

The decision in this trial court for the Southern District of New York is not binding precedent for other trial courts, though it could influence thinking elsewhere. But Myriad has the right to appeal the case the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and has indicated it will do just that. This process could take more than a year, and ultimately, if the case proceeded to the Supreme Court, the justices there would have the final say on the matter.

The implications for the biotech industry and medical research are uncertain at the moment. “We do not foresee this decision producing any radical changes in commercial, clinical or other activity surrounding Myriad’s BRCA patents, or gene patents more broadly,” write the lawyers at Genomics Law Report. The New York Times quotes Bryan Roberts, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who suggests that the work of discovering genes and developing the accompanying diagnostic tests will move to university laboratories: “The government is going to become the funder for content discovery because it’s going to be very hard to justify it outside of academia.”

But the ruling did not merely invalidate the patents on the gene sequences themselves. It went even further and invalidated the method patents on the processes for analyzing the genes. The Supreme Court is currently considering a case involving method patents, and that ruling could have implications for the appeal on yesterday’s decision. The case, referred to as Bilski, focuses on a business method patent on a process for hedging commodities risks.

The current rule for testing method patents laid out by the Federal Circuit in Bilski requires that the process be connected to a particular machine or device or that the process transform an article or piece of matter into something else. In yesterday’s ruling, Judge Sweet found that the Myriad patents fail this test, writing, “because the claimed comparisons of DNA sequences are abstract mental processes, they also constitute unpatentable subject matter” (p. 4).

The Supreme Court’s decision could uphold the test or propose a new set of rules that would become the legal precedent. This, in turn, could shape not just Myriad’s appeal, but future decisions on intellectual property involving innovative biotech processes.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor for Science Progress.

The findings challenge the assumption that the impacts of carbon dioxide pollution are the same regardless of location. The human-caused emissions of the heat-trapping gas are the leading cause of global climate change, but “domes” of CO₂ accumulate over cities, leading to additional health impacts on top of those related to global warming.

The author, Mark Z. Jacobson, concludes the domes of CO₂ have fundamentally local consequences. Cutting local emissions, he argues, would reduce the related premature deaths in that area:

“If locally emitted CO₂ increases local air pollution, then cities, counties, states, and small countries can reduce air pollution health problems by reducing their own CO₂ emissions, regardless of whether other air pollutants are reduced locally or whether other locations reduce CO₂.”

Of course, climate change also brings warmer temperatures and significant health consequences from heat waves. The Chicago heat wave of 1995 killed more than 700 people, and under lower emissions scenarios, similar heat waves are projected to happen every other year by the middle of the century. So reducing emissions is good for the health of cities in the short term and the long term.

These new policies ensure that scientists, engineers, and taxpayers alike get the most out of those federal investments in basic research and development by taking what researchers know about the process of moving ideas from the lab to the market and linking universities, businesses, and the government in an effort to grow regional economies. The first steps begin on Wednesday, when the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation of the House Science and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on “Supporting Innovation in the 21^st Century Economy.” Then on Thursday, the full committee will markup bills authorizing the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, R&D programs within the DOE Office of Science, and DOE’s Energy Innovation Hubs program.

This isn’t just a matter of pouring more money into R&D—though additional resources are important. The Hubs program in particular contains an experiment just underway that will create a new “Energy Regional Innovation Cluster,” or  E-RIC, which will develop technologies for energy efficient buildings. Grant recipients for this cluster will be announced this summer, pending funding, and Congress should ensure that money is available for FY 2011 to realize the potential of this project.

With $130 million in financing over five years, the E-RIC project is a partnership between seven federal agencies that will help build the regional cluster, advancing research, development, and commercialization of energy efficiency technologies and creating high quality jobs. Applicants for the grants must self organize themselves in regional groups to bid for the funds, promoting bottom-up collaboration to ensure the best ideas and best practices combine for the best outcomes. DOE is in the process of setting up two additional Hubs: one that focuses on Fuels from Sunlight, where researchers will investigate methods to produce clean fuels directly from solar energy, and another on Modeling & Simulation for Nuclear Reactors.

The E-RIC embraces the idea that sustained and targeted efforts can help grow “innovation clusters,” or geographic regions where dynamic interactions between university-based scientists and engineers, local businesses, and public sector institutions generate new technologies and economic growth. The approach aligns with proposals laid out in the Science Progress report, “The Geography of Innovation,” which argued that federal policy should support cluster building that both aligns with national priorities in areas like energy efficiency, but that also leaves leadership to regional communities. The agencies hosted an information session in Washington, D.C. in February to explain the application process in detail to the interested consortia from around the nation.

Cultivating new clusters around the country is an important component of the Obama administration’s strategy for boosting innovation in the United States and maintaining our competitiveness in the global marketplace. In 2010, for example, Chinese government investment in science and technology is expected to increase 8 percent, according to reports in Science. Our nation must meet this challenge.

The E-RIC project is the first pilot of the Interagency Regional Innovation Clusters Taskforce and brings together the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration and National Institute of Standards and Technology/Manufacturing Extension Partnership, the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

Collaboration on the issue of building efficiency is a national priority because buildings consume almost 40 percent of the energy produced in the United States and account for some 40 percent of carbon emissions. Energy efficiency deployment is the low-hanging fruit of greenhouse gas reduction strategies, but expanding efficient technologies for commercial and residential building design and operation will reduce energy consumption and energy bills for citizens and businesses alike.

The regional anchor for this effort will be a new Energy Innovation Hub located at a university, a DOE national laboratory, a nonprofit organization, or a private firm. The hub will receive a $22 million grant in its first year from DOE, with up to $25 million a year for up to four years afterwards. Department of Commerce and EDA funding for economic development and economic adjustment assistance can total $5 million for up to five years. Along with additional funds from NIST/MEP and the SBA, the interagency partnership is significant because it will be the first such coordinated federal regional innovation effort. As the authors explain in “The Geography of Innovation”:

Never before has the U.S. government devoted a single penny to a comprehensive national program specifically dedicated to supporting regional innovation clusters and business incubators that fuse the geographically shared resources of universities and other research organizations, companies, research centers, governments, and workers.

The benefits of this approach can be manifold, which is why it is important that the proposal is a collaboration between seven federal agencies with dovetailing expertise. Research is the basic fuel of an innovation cluster, but like a car engine, there are many complicated moving parts necessary to capture the full ignition energy of those new ideas. Technology transfer offices within universities help scientists patent the most promising concepts and commercialize it by licensing the work to companies that use it to design new products. A regional cluster forms when those companies spring up in the vicinity of those research institutions, taking advantage of not only the intellectual property, but the talented workforce.

Building those businesses requires money and talent. In the most well known U.S. innovation clusters—places like Silicon Valley and metro Boston area—there is a wealth of skilled workers and investment capital. But in regions that lack that pre-existing pool of expertise, cash, and ready business leadership, economic development organizations can help forge relationships and lay the foundations for new enterprises. For instance, institutions can provide low-cost office space and legal assistance to start-up companies. Last year the National Economic Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy explained in a strategy report:

In various regions of the U.S., entrepreneurs are collaborating with local researchers, educators and industry leaders to foster specialized knowledge, technical expertise, and cutting-edge products. This will help American businesses retain and achieve new levels of competitiveness.

The result is a virtuous circle that feeds new ideas, products, jobs, and economic growth.

Moreover, the federal investment in the cluster will not be the only money flowing in to support the effort. Instead, the federal money will support state-level economic development work that has suffered under the precipitous decline in revenues. It will also leverage private investments in the commercialization process. The process of developing new products that solve national problems in building system efficiency will further capitalize on some of the billions of dollars the government pours into basic energy research every year.

The congressional hearings this week on applied innovation through the new multi-departmental E-RIC program could be just the beginning of this new bottom-up federal funding model for innovative regional economic development. We at Science Progress would argue that it’s about time.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor for Science Progress.

Some six decades later, cigarette smoking causes about 443,000 deaths every year in this country, about 20 percent of the U.S. population smokes, and every day 1,000 young people pick up the habit.

That’s why the Food and Drug Administration issued new rules today banning cigarette company marketing tactics designed for getting their product into the hands of youth. The FDA authority comes from legislation passed last year that for the first time allowed the agency to regulate “unregulated drug delivery systems.”

The intellectual heirs of this strategy to defend corporate interests by assaulting science are the polluter-driven deniers of climate change research. And at the moment, climate scientists are under heavy assault.

The hopeful lesson from the new FDA rules is that no amount of corporate funding can suffocate the science indefinitely. But we shouldn’t have to wait 60 years to act on what we know about climate change. The impacts are already very real.

The founders of the United States of America were all well acquainted with the experimental nature of science, and they applied the same methods to their new political enterprise. “They always described the formation of the country itself as an experiment,” says Timothy Ferris, “And what isn’t widely understood is that the way that democracies work is by constant experiment.” Each election, each passage of a new law is, after all, a procedure designed to test a hypothesis about how to make constant improvements to a government.

The Christian Science Monitor called Ferris “the best popular science writer in the English language today,” and his new book is The Science of Liberty. In it, he tells the story of the intimate connections between the scientific advances that expanded the frontiers of human knowledge and the democratic experiments that expanded the frontiers of human liberty. He recently joined Science Progress editor-in-chief Jonathan Moreno for a podcast interview to discuss how science rescued generations of humanity from subsistence living and brought freedom to nations around the world.

In the opening pages, Ferris lays down his bold claim: “The democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution, and that science continues to empower democratic freedom today.” Dissatisfied with existing histories of the Enlightenment, he set out to ascertain more specifically what exactly was new about the period bookended by the English Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789. It wasn’t simply the embrace of reason, Ferris said, because after all, individuals can reason their way into all sorts of conclusions that don’t have anything to do with the nature of reality.

“Science was what was the new ingredient,” Ferris said, “And science isn’t just reason—it’s experimentation. The more I studied it, the more it seemed to me that this experimental approach is also the basis of liberal democracy.”

For this reason, Ferris likes to focus on a key event in the year preceding the 1688 installation of parliamentary rule in England. In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia, the foundational text for classical mechanics and the laws of motion familiar to high school physics students. From this difficult book describing universal gravitation, Ferris drew a vector to the nascent idea of liberal democracy. “That book really sealed the deal,” he said, as it established the “tremendous predictive power of science.”

“Here was this new way of studying nature that disproved ancient authorities. It didn’t matter how great the authorities were,” he explained, “Aristotle could have said it—but you could conduct experiments that showed that Aristotle was wrong. And from that, it’s not much of a leap to say that, well, other forms of authority may be illegitimate as well.” Authorities like kings, as Thomas Paine would later point out in the run up to the American Revolution. Citizens of nations around the world owe their freedom to these scientific ways of thinking, which helped erode the legitimacy of monarchies.

The way we live now is virtually indistinguishable from the way people lived prior to the scientific revolution—life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” as Moreno said, describing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s vision of the “state of nature” without government. He explained that people alive during the middle ages had no perception that living standards could get better, in part because there was no progress in technology. “People did not have the notion that there could be change and improvement,” Moreno said.

The difference between that world and our current one is immense, Ferris emphasized. Moreover, science has continued to accelerate improvements in standards of living.

“The United States, at the time of its founding, was what would be called a third world country today,” Ferris said. “When the United States first started being called an ‘affluent society’ in the 1950s, Americans had less than half the money that they have now.” In the larger scheme of human history, we’ve come a long way in a very short time.

But in spite of all the knowledge, wealth, and freedom that flows from science, critics remain.

“Dogma ruled the world before science came along and it is still the preference of the majority of people in almost every country, and certainly here in the United States,” said Ferris.

But democracy is not a dogma. It is a method. “It is the most successful method of governance ever hit upon by humans, just as science is the most effective method of learning that’s ever been found,” he said.

In their discussion, Moreno and Ferris also explored the postmodern intellectual movement of the 1980s and 90s, which engulfed humanities departments at many universities, but unfortunately misinterpreted science and the democratic systems it supported. At its root, postmodernism is a critique of capitalism and its related economic, political, and cultural systems.

Ferris traces this problem to the two World Wars and the Cold War that followed. The European thinkers emerging from that crucible, he argues, sometimes turned away from democracy and toward socialism and a skeptical view about the power of science.

“What it appears to have done to European intellectuals, by and large, is to have persuaded them that the scientific, democratic world that had seemed to being doing so well going into the 20^th century had been proved to be a failure and even a sham and led to this hideous violence,” he said. Ferris is quick to point out that this is not true: “Prior to the rise of liberal democracy, the average person was less safe at home in bed in his little village than was the average resident of Western Europe during World War II.”

Moreover, Ferris said, there is a common misperception embedded in many threads of academic education that totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were particularly good at science. “The widespread claim that socialist systems generally—and even their communist, fascist varieties—were more efficient than democracies is not true,” he emphasized—the evidence just doesn’t support the claim. A careful study of Italian train records, for instance, revealed that Mussolini did not, in fact, make them run on time.

Postmodern rhetoric can sound at times like the claims of the intelligent design movement, Moreno said, saying that each rejects scientific expertise.

“The anti-science movement in this country, which includes the religious right and the radical left and many other elements,” replied Ferris, “Its program is simply to seize on any weakness it can find in the interface between science and society.” The recent embrace of global warming skepticism by creationists fits this pattern, with its denial of “belief” in climate change.

But standing up for the simple facts of our own history as a great democratic experiment doesn’t require belief in anything, Ferris contends. “It just requires an acquaintance with the historical facts of how we got to where we are now.”

Interview by Jonathan Moreno; summary and production by Andrew Plemmons Pratt.

The coordination is an important move that will ideally shape a faster approval process for certain life-saving treatments, while also ensuring that therapies are safe and effective when they reach the marketplace. Moreover, this sort of tighter coordination is necessary for integrating personalized medicine into the health care system, as Michael Rugnetta and Whitney Kramer explained in a report last year.

The collaboration consists of three components:

• NIH and FDA will form a Joint Leadership Council, chaired by NIH Director Francis Collins and FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. Six additional members drawn from senior leadership at each agency will complete the membership. The council will share information in order to promote “the translation of basic and clinical research findings into medical products and therapies,” according to the council charter.

• The two agencies will make available $6.75 million over three years to fund projects that advance regulatory science—$2 million per year from NIH and $250,000 from FDA. The notice of the funding opportunity was issued today and is likely to support from two to four projects. Example projects mentioned in the announcement include: development of new methods for identifying adverse effects from drugs and devices; crafting new clinical trial designs, particularly for rare diseases that affect small populations; building new assessment tools for emerging fields, including RNAi therapy, nanomedicine, and personalized medicine.

• NIH and FDA will hold a public meeting this spring to solicit additional input on how to improve regulatory science and translational research. Results from that event may point the way to further public outreach.

“The need for such collaboration has never been more pressing,” said Collins, acknowledging that in the past, NIH may not have always brought FDA into the research process early enough, as well as that FDA may have lacked sufficient scientific knowledge of certain emerging technologies.

Human activity generates heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide that are warming the planet and changing the climate. In framing the conversation, Romm summarized an MIT study concluding that on our current emissions path, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will more than double from pre-industrial levels and the median temperature increase at the Earth’s surface in the 2090s could be 5.2˚C, or nearly 10˚F. “We’re talking about a completely different planet,” he said.

MacCracken emphasized during his panel presentation that our understanding of the fundamental physical science behind climate change is sound and has been for decades. In fact, the idea that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide could warm the planet is more than a century old—the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius explained the concept in 1896. The first official report submitted to a U.S. president on the impact of atmospheric carbon dioxide arrived on Lyndon B. Johnson’s desk in 1965.

Human-generated emissions enhance the natural greenhouse effect and disrupt the planet’s carbon cycle, MacCracken explained. Observations of carbon dioxide levels since the middle of the 20th century show a clear annual oscillation: concentrations of the gas go up and down with the “seasonal breathing” of the biosphere. Part of that cycle is plants absorbing carbon from the air during spring and summer and releasing it during the fall and winter; part of it is ocean absorption. But increasing human emissions mean that the cycle is no longer balanced, and the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere is climbing steadily. “We’ve had a huge subsidy for our carbon,” Field said, because so much of it absorbed by “sinks” on land and in the water.

When sunlight strikes the atmosphere, MacCracken explained, some of its energy is reflected back into space, and some of it passes through, warming the surface of the planet. A small portion of that surface heat radiates back into space again, but greenhouses gases absorb most of it, recirculating the energy back to land and the lower atmosphere. As concentrations of carbon dioxide and other gases increase, more of that heat stays within the atmosphere, leading to a warmer and warmer planet.

Moreover, the warming effects of carbon dioxide in particular are long lasting and the increased concentrations already in the air would continue to warm the Earth for decades to come, even if emissions were immediately reduced to zero. That’s why it is the most important emissions product under consideration by governments around the world.

Surface temperatures and ocean temperatures are rising, MacCracken said, summarizing multiple lines of evidence that confirm the climate is changing now. Sea ice is shrinking, glacier and permafrost are melting, and snow lines are creeping toward mountain peaks. Consequently, sea levels are rising, and increased amounts of evaporated water in the air lead to more intense precipitation where rain falls. And plant and animal species are retreating toward the poles as their original habitats get warmer.

Field reemphasized the importance of focusing on carbon dioxide as the leading cause of these changes because it is intimately linked to human prosperity. “We haven’t figured out how to make people rich without associating that with a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. Historical data indicates that there is a linear relationship between national wealth and carbon emissions. The question, he said, is how to move from an environment where this relationship is strong to one that breaks that link, creating the “opportunity for more economic activity with lower carbon emissions.”

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that the global “warming is unequivocal,” and Field emphasized that analyses cannot look selectively at merely a few years or even a single decade within the climate record to see this trend. It requires a longer view, but multiple independent temperature records confirm the fact that the planet is getting warmer.

In explaining the process that generates these massive reports on climate science, Field said that, “The IPCC is the most ambitious, thorough, and successful assessment of anything that I think has ever been done.” The process is designed to keep errors to a minimum, but he spoke from personal experience in describing the particular frame it creates for presenting information.

Author teams draw scientists from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and from countries all over the world; they then absorb and synthesize a huge amount of information. For the chapter Field worked on for the last IPCC report, two rounds of expert review each produced 250 pages of notes.

Representatives from all of the United Nations countries later approve, line by line, the IPCC summary chapters for policymakers that synthesize the scientific reports. Field described displaying sentences on a board for a room of participants and being unable to proceed before there was total consensus on the characterization of the science. This produces a “very tight boundary” around what appears in the final summaries, and the characterizations of the science are therefore very measured, not extreme.

MacCracken said that some critics of the process have suggested that scientists simply give policymakers the original research and leave the interpretation up to them. He compared the folly of that approach to giving a cancer patient all of the available medical research on his or her condition, expecting them to make a decision independent of a doctor’s advice. The IPCC summaries are the record of a conversation in clear terms, he said, between scientists and government policymakers.

Most recently, the IPCC came under fire for erroneous projections published in a scientific chapter on the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers are melting. The dubious information originated from a piece of “gray literature,” that is, a report that did not come from a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Addressing the use of gray literature in the IPCC process, Field explained the value of this information in understanding the impact and implications of climate change. These sources include insurance company research, unpublished scientific work, observations of impacts in various publications, and industrial and corporate reports. It is hard to imagine how the IPCC could tackle the range of subjects it is tasked with understanding without access to this gray literature, he said.

Video: “The Science of Climate Change” (Download presentations)

Video: Interview with Christopher Field, Ph.D. “Climate Change Is a Clear and Present Danger”

Video: Interview with Michael MacCracken, Ph.D. “How We Know Humans Are Changing the Climate”

Fortunately, the budget request for fiscal year 2011 that the Obama administration released on Monday includes foundational investments that will help the United States remain the leader among innovative nations. Congressional leaders should support the president’s vision by adopting these investments in their budget later this year.

In keeping with the president’s pledge to freeze domestic discretionary spending, the overall increase in research and development is only a modest 0.2 percent increase over FY2010, but by trimming defense-related research, the budget requests a 5.9 percent boost for non-defense R&D for a total $147.7 billion for federal R&D. This is an important step toward investing 3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in public and private R&D—a goal President Obama laid out in a speech last spring to the National Academy of Sciences.

This also continues the about-face in funding trends begun last year. The Bush administration allowed the federal R&D investment to decline in real dollars after FY2004. Some sectors were hit harder by this neglect than others. Flat funding for the National Institutes of Health from 2004 through 2008 led to a situation in which the purchasing power for the inflation-adjusted budget actually declined 13 percent over the course of those five years. In addition to the two-year, $10 billion boost the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act directed to NIH last year, the president’s budget calls for a $1 billion bump in annual funding, for a total of $32.1 billion.

The budget expands support for R&D over the next fiscal year, but it also continues laying the foundation for sustained advances in science and technology by moving along the path to double the budgets for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Commerce Department’s National Institutes of Standards and Technology. The Center for American Progress advocated this doubling effort in the 2007 report, “A National Innovation Agenda.”

To that end, the request expands the DOE Office of Science budget by 4.6 percent to a total of $5.1 billion. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy would receive $300 million to fund high-risk, high-return research. ARPA-E funds blue-sky projects in advanced energy technologies, and is modeled on the fabled Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where bold thinkers have the resources to “aim for the fences.” The DOE budget also includes $107 million for the three existing Energy Innovation Hubs, and adds a fourth Hub focused on batteries and energy storage.

Jonathan Sallet, Ed Paisley, and Justin Masterman noted in their Science Progress report, “The Geography of Innovation,” that the hubs will help “spur the development of the innovation clusters that will help solve our national energy challenges, create jobs, and promote widespread economic growth.” Targeted regional innovation support is also a focus of president’s budget for the Economic Development Agency, with $75 million to support innovation clusters that leverage local competitive strengths. The “Geography of Innovation” authors explain wisdom of this place-specific approach, writing that “regions that are bound together by a network of shared advantages create virtuous cycles of innovation that succeed by emphasizing the key strengths of the local businesses, universities and other research and development institutions, and non-profit organizations.”

“One of the changes that I would like to see,” the president told an audience at Georgetown University just a few months into his administration, “is once again seeing our best and our brightest commit themselves to making things—engineers, scientists, innovators.” This budget pours more resources into that goal, with $3.7 billion for science, technology, engineering, and math education. This builds on the administration’s public-private Educate to Innovate partnership that will enhance STEM education in schools across the country.

The NSF budget would also support the next generation of scientists by increasing the number of Graduate Research Fellowships. An 8 percent increase in the requested NSF budget, totaling $7.4 billion, maintains its doubling trajectory.

An 18.3 percent increase over FY2010 in NASA’s R&D portfolio would bring the total to $11 billion. Writing last year in Science Progress, former presidential science adviser Neal Lane and former Director of the NASA Johnson Space Center George Abbey advised reversing a trend of neglect for the agency’s scientific work. They recommended that scientific research, including earth observations, should be a top priority for NASA. This budget embraces the same priorities, reflecting the administration’s commitment to “to deploy a global climate change research and monitoring system.” As well, a 21 percent increase (for total of $2.6 billion) for U.S. Global Change Research Program, which spans 13 agencies, will advance our understanding of global warming and enhance our ability to adapt to a changing climate.

In short, as Science Progress editor-in-chief Jonathan D. Moreno points out today on the main website of the Center for American Progress, “We observed in Science Progress on several occasions that the founders of our country appreciated the new nation’s need for strength in science, oftentimes more than some of their benighted successors in government. That’s why it is encouraging that we have a president and an administration with a vision in the founders’ spirit. Now Congress needs to do its job to ensure that the United States of Science rescues America—and perhaps the assumptions behind the global stability on which we depend—from a decade of financial mismanagement.”

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor for Science Progress.

The administration is asking for $75 million “to support the creation of regional innovation clusters that leverage regions’ competitive strengths to boost job creation and economic growth,” a goal Jonathan Sallet, Ed Paisley, and Justin Masterman championed in the Science Progress report, “The Geography of Innovation.” Part of the key to this approach is that is allows policymakers to pay close attention to regional strengths. As the report authors explain: “Geographic regions that are bound together by a network of shared advantages create virtuous cycles of innovation that succeed by emphasizing the key strengths of the local businesses, universities and other research and development institutions, and non-profit organizations.”

As well, the Department of Energy budget includes substantial investments in research and development to spur clean energy innovation. That includes $107 million for three existing and one proposed Energy Innovation Hub. The Hubs, as the full DOE request says, “establish larger, highly integrated teams working to solve priority technology challenges that span work from basic research to engineering development to commercialization readiness.” These hubs, write the “Geography of Innovation” authors, are forward-thinking centers that will “spur the development of the innovation clusters that will help solve our national energy challenges, create jobs, and promote widespread economic growth.”

The Science of Climate Change
February 3, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:30pm

An overwhelming quantity of direct observations and analyses published by scientists in various disciplines around the world demonstrates that human activity has warmed the planet and altered the climate. The severity of the projected impacts of continuing on our current greenhouse gas emissions path has only increased in recent years.

Please join the Center for American Progress for an educational event featuring two respected scientists who have both helped author reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr. Michael MacCracken and Dr. Christopher Field will explain the IPCC’s assessment process, how we know what we know about human-caused climate change, what we have learned since the 2007 IPCC report, and why the science must inform public policy in the United States.

Featured Speakers:

Christopher Field, Director, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University, and a coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment

Michael MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs, Climate Institute, and co-author/contributing author for various chapters in the IPCC assessment reports

Moderated by:

Joseph Romm, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

Click here to get more information.

Watch a live stream of the event.

Timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research
One of our most popular features ever, this interactive timeline marked key moments, beginning the in the 1970s, from the interrelated stories of human embryonic stem cell research and the policy governing that work. The piece collects research featured in the Center for American Progress report, “A Life Sciences Crucible: Stem Cell Research and Innovation Done Responsibly and Ethically.” The Obama administration’s final stem cell policy closely resembled the one recommended in the paper.

Dude, Where’s My War on Science?
By Chris Mooney
Conservatives tried to expose what they claim was a case of science suppression by the Obama administration—and in the process demonstrated how little they know about science in the first place. The attack on EPA’s policy process, Mooney explained, fails peer review.

The George Will Scandal
By Chris Mooney
When The Washington Post ran a column by Will rife with errors on climate science, Mooney asked: If a major media outlet can’t even correct facts about global warming, is it still socially relevant?

What Does This Generation Think it Means to be a “Scientist”?
By Chris Mooney
Many students don’t see a life of academic specialization as the best way to employ their scientific talents. They want to do something more to bring science to the rest of America. Changing definitions could entail a changing relationship between science and society, wrote Mooney.

How the Global Warming Story Changed—Disastrously
By Chris Mooney
Skeptics didn’t need good science to make another attack on climate change research. Their strength has always been in communication tactics anyway, and not scientific exactitude or rigor, wrote Mooney, examining the fallout from the “ClimateGate” scandal. And the U.S. public, never overwhelmingly sure about climate change, has long been susceptible to their smokescreens and misinformation campaigns.

Throwing the Baby Out With the Amniotic Fluid
By Michelle N. Meyer
One important distinction that is not made often or clearly enough by either ethicists or lawyers is that between decisions to procreate and decisions not to procreate. Witness, for instance, the reaction to Nadya OctoMom™ Suleman.

Hold Off On Holdren (Again)
By Chris Mooney
Conservatives found another ludicrous charge to hurl against the president’s science adviser. It was just the latest attempt to distract from actual science policy.

Autonomous Contraception
By Lisa Campo-Engelstein
A recent discovery, wrote Campo-Engelstein, might open the door to an effective male contraceptive drug, a technology that could have been developed decades ago, were it not for social factors that enable women but not men to effectively regulate their fertility outside of sexual activity and without their partner’s participation or knowledge.

Regional Centers of Innovation 101
Regional centers such as Silicon Valley and Boston cultivate technology-based economic development through a dynamic mix of researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and infrastructure. Drawing lessons from their success can help revitalize the U.S. economy. This feature marked the beginning of our ongoing project developing policies that support innovation clusters around the country.

The restoration of the program is an apt example of the scientific and intelligence communities working together. Not only can the tools for satellite reconnaissance support critical scientific Earth observations, officials recognize that climate change and national security are interrelated policy issues. As Dr. Christopher Tucker argued here at Science Progress, an effective Earth observation strategy is crucial to confronting issues in both arenas:

A comprehensive approach to developing, deploying, and utilizing our eyes in the sky can ensure more effective and efficient use of precious intellectual and financial resources as we struggle to address traditional national security challenges, the array of transnational threats that plague us, as well as the complex, looming menace posed by global climate change. But this will require significant attention paid to national security reform, the governance of Earth science, a fundamental rethinking of the programming and budgeting process, and—not least of all—leadership.

Reviving the Medea program is a low-cost step in the right direction, as it merely re-purposes images already gathered for intelligence purposes. The pictures are degraded before they are released in order to mask the capabilities of the satellites.

I believe that the federal government can maximize the benefits of science and research parks, an integral part of sparking innovation and creating jobs in the US, by supporting regional innovation clusters to promote a comprehensive, long-term economic growth and development plans across regions in the United States.

My recommendation is that regional innovation clusters should become the centerpiece of a reauthorized Economic Development Administration (EDA), empowering the agency to work with businesses, universities, community colleges, state and local governments and community leaders to foster regional competitiveness strategies. This will help boost job creation and business growth by spurring the creation and growth of successful regional ecosystems, striking exactly the right balance between federal leadership and local responsibility and between the private and public sectors. Science parks and regional innovation clusters are two vital parts to a long-term solution – science parks will drive the clusters forward while the regional innovation cluster will strengthen and support the local framework in which the park can thrive. This broader effort will be the most effective and sustainable.

Read Sallet’s full testimony (pdf).

Speaking today with reporters during a press call organized by the Center for American progress, Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, emphasized that despite the uproar, nothing changes about the scientific conclusions on climate change:

From my point of view, the most important issue is whether anything has been added to or subtracted from the scientific picture of global warming that’s emerged gradually over several decades of careful analysis by thousands of experts. The answer is simple. From a scientific point of view, nothing has changed. It remains true that Earth has warmed more than 1 degree Fahrenheit  over last century largely due to the buildup of human-made greenhouse gases…it remains the case that the projections of future climate change are every bit as discouraging as they were before the recent flap began. [Full audio and a transcript of the call are available here.]

Denialist arguments like the one offered in the WSJ are remarkable in that they ignore basic measurable facts about how climate change is altering the planet at this very moment. Global warming is currently melting 18,000 Himalayan glaciers. Wildfires stoked by increased temperatures are burning 7 million acres of the American west every year. Changes in precipitation patterns in the continental United States caused up to $8 billion in agricultural loses last year.

Simply put, we don’t need to wait and see if our planet’s climate will change as a result of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. The change is already happening. As Chris Mooney put it in June, when the United States Global Change Research Program released its updated assessment of the impact of climate change on the country: “We have every reason to expect that these regionally variable changes will steadily worsen, with resulting severe threats to coastal communities, water supplies, agriculture, human health, and more.”

Henninger’s claim that “science is dying” is merely the latest iteration in the continuing conservative war on science, in which naysayers trash the research enterprise without engaging the scientific facts or mounting any credible response to the avalanche of evidence from multiple fields that underpins the work on climate change. As the editors of the journal Nature wrote yesterday:

Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

As for other facts of recent and distant history, Henninger dismisses the significance of 2007 Nobel Prize writing that it “was bestowed (on a politician),” neglecting to mention that the other half of the prize went to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body comprising 2,000 scientists from around the world. He goes on to compare the exchanges in the hacked emails to the Catholic church’s attempt to silence Galileo. Alas, as Mooney points out, the comparison is off-base: “The people who dissented in the history of science, but were overwhelmingly wrong, tend to be forgotten. Galileo dissented and he happened to be overwhelmingly right.” Moreover, like today’s climate change deniers, it was the Catholic church that rejected scientific facts that didn’t fit into its worldview.

The WSJ editorial section would like you to believe that “science is dying,” but the claim proves only one thing: that in the face of climate change science, some conservatives will continue their efforts to ensure the death of reason itself.

What GINA does not do is require insurers to pay for care that a genetic test indicates would clearly be beneficial. Thus, there are no guarantees that patients will be able to access or afford therapies and screenings that could reduce their risks. Without further reform efforts to ensure that preventive strategies are within reach, GINA’s protections from discrimination will ring hollow.

This is a gap that health reform legislation can close, she argues. But not only can genetic testing help individuals make important health care decisions, she explains, it can help those patients and their families understand and plan for financial risks that might arise from devastating illnesses. In these instances, people may be particularly interested in buying long-term care, disability, or life insurance—three markets that are not covered by GINA’s protections.

Ideally, GINA will also help advance biomedical science. Prior to the law, Rick Weiss explained, “people were likely to balk at requests to participate in genetic research, which depends on large-scale participation by diverse populations to make new biomedical discoveries about propensities to diseases and other aspects of inheritance.” As Steven Greenhouse reports at the New York Times: “In a nationwide survey, 63 percent of respondents said they would not have genetic testing if employers could see the results.” Whether the protections will encourage more participation in research remains to be seen, but in this instance, what’s good for civil rights may also be good for science.

A right-wing attack on presidential science adviser John Holdren earlier this year scratched the surface of a long-running conversation about population and the environment. After the Senate confirmed Holdren for his dual post as the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, conservative bloggers, pundits, and the Washington Times railed on him over sections of a 1977 textbook, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment, for which Holdren was the third author, with Paul and Anne Ehrlich.

The critics focused on portions of one chapter in the 1051-page book describing various population control measures tried or proposed around the world—some of them extreme and coercive. Cherry picking language from the text, they claimed that Holdren’s aim was to corral population growth through forced abortions or mass sterilization. As Chris Mooney explained after retrieving a copy of the book from a university library, describing such measures does, of course, not amount to endorsing them. Moreover, the authors in fact concluded that the best way to slow population growth was to increase access to family planning resources like birth control. Just as he did during his confirmation hearing, Holdren explained in response to the attacks that he rejects the idea of government-enforced population controls. In fact, what he said during the hearing was this: “When you provide health care for women, opportunities for women, education, people tend to have smaller families on average,” and in reference to global climate change, “it ends up being easier to solve some of our other problems when that occurs.”

The attacks on Holdren eventually dissipated, but the whole kerfuffle did raise the question of how best to talk about the complex relation between population and environmental sustainability. According to Shira Saperstein, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Deputy Director and Program Director for Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health at the Moriah Fund, many debates over the issue since the 1960s have been simplistic. She summarizes the thrust of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, as “more people equals more damage—and the answer to that is fewer people,” a conclusion she rejects. There is a relationship between population and environment she says, “but it is far more complex than people have acknowledged in the past. I think partly because we looked at these simplistically in the past, we made a lot of mistakes.”

Saperstein spoke with Science Progress about a new framework for thinking about population and sustainability based on social justice in a recent podcast conversation. Joining her were Laurie Mazur, director of the Population Justice Project and editor of the new book, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge, and Brian O’Neill, a scientist with the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “So much of the resistance to talking about population issues comes from a fear of where it’s headed,” Mazur acknowledges, “So many people are legitimacy concerned that concern about the global environment will take us back to the bad old days of population control.” For a full recording of the conversation, please see the audio available at the top of the page.

Population programs of the past, Saperstein says, “were too often focused on demographic targets, on limited births, on controlling population, rather than empowering women to make their own autonomous choices.” The worst programs following this logic resulted in sterilization campaigns in India and policies for forced abortions in China. The proper approach, the three experts say, is to realize that there is a significant unmet demand for family planning and reproductive health services around the world. Providing women with the opportunity and resources to make meaningful decisions about when and how many children to have gives them more control over their economic future while protecting their human rights. Given those choices, women tend to have smaller families. And over the next century, a secondary result of slower global population growth could be a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the three experts explain.

“Population matters,” says O’Neill, “It is not the largest impact on emissions—it’s not zero either.” He admits that while that sounds like a wishy-washy middle-ground conclusion, it’s important because of long-running debates between those arguing that population is the most important consideration for evaluating human impact on the environment and those who say it has nothing to do with it at all. “You’re not going to solve he climate problem—or probably any other environmental problem—just by slowing population growth,” he says. But development pathways and the nature of economic growth around the world provide the context in which societies must address climate change. As Mazur and Saperstein explained in a recent column, “In developing countries, urbanization is associated with rising per-capita emissions; as populations age, their per-capita emissions decline.” So population is one part of that social context.

Explaining the scientific research on the relationship between population and environment is one thing, O’Neill says, but the context for these conversations is equally important. A growing body of technical research helps, but he emphasizes that experts must understand the history and the legitimate concerns that people have about raising the issue of population-related policy as a means to environmental or even other development ends. “I think that a lot of time scientists get in trouble on this issue—and these are scientists who don’t work on population and environment,” he says, “because for some reason they feel free to talk about it as if they know what they’re talking about when they actually don’t.”

O’Neill says this is incongruous because in the case of climate change, “Someone who studies sea level rise would be pretty careful talking about ecosystem change because they know they’re not an ecologist and maybe they don’t exactly know what they’re talking about. But all of a sudden it’s a population issue and they feel free to say anything that comes into their head.”

Scientists, he says, are learning that an informed conversation more attuned to the social justice goals of population advocates is important. “Population, demographic change, does have consequences for emissions—and it’s okay to raise that,” he says, “It does not mean necessarily that it follows that demographically related policies are the best way to respond to climate change.”

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.

In the early 1980s, Andrew Feenberg did some work for French telephone company, which introduced him to county’s Teletel network. Built to utilize the existing phone lines, the system, launched in 1982, was one of the first large-scale precursors to the modern Internet. In a decision that helped ensure the computers’ widespread adoption and the success of the network, France Telecom gave away some 6 million Minitel terminals to subscribers. Users could place online orders for mail-order products, buy train or airline tickets, and access news and information services. Charges for visiting commercial sites appeared on users’ monthly phone bills, and the telco passed along a portion of the proceeds to the other businesses.

Engineers originally envisioned the network for mostly passive information gathering: subscribers would use sites like they would a catalog or telephone directory. But that changed, Feenberg explains, when hackers broke into a commercial site and used it to send messages to visiting users. Although alarmed at first, the business owners realized the potential for profit from a user-to-user communication system. The result was one of the first commercial instant-messaging platforms.

Feenberg is a professor of the philosophy of technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and he recently joined Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Andrew Light for a podcast discussion about the democratic power of online communities. What happened next in France, Feenberg says, illustrates an important lesson about the evolution of digital communication.

The Minitel computers were developed, Feenberg says, “in order to modernized French society along the lines of a highly rational, efficient, technically sophisticated society.” But rational efficiency was not what a lot of citizens had on their minds. “It turned out that what most people wanted to do with instant messaging was get dates,” Feenberg explains. “It went from cold to hot all of a sudden in the space of a few months. The meaning of the computer was transformed because instead of being an information system it became a communication system.”

This re-imagining of the network as an interpersonal communications tool (or specifically, a dial-up dating service) was an example of what Feenberg describes as “democratic rationalization.” The term “rationalization” refers to modern processes used to improve how people manage and control resources through measurement and incremental adjustment. Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line, where humans and machines work together in a carefully calibrated ballet, is an iconic example. Rationalization in this sense is hierarchical, top-down innovation.

“When you make elaborate plans to rationalize something, it usually doesn’t work exactly the way you intended,” Feenberg explains, and management theorists have understood for a long time that initiatives from the bottom could play an important role in the innovation process. He calls large-scale, bottom-up innovation like the user-generated communication on the Minitel network “democratic rationalization.” This process is non-hierarchical and participants may share different values from top-down innovators, but these distributed users brought together by the network are also very good at getting things done. “Without a lot of input from below, you don’t get anywhere. You don’t have innovation and creativity,” he says. “Even though you could make fun of the French for seeking dates…the idea of human communication on computer networks is extremely important for us today.”

Trained as a philosopher, Feenberg eventually found himself working in applied ethics at an experimental medical center focused on treating neurological diseases. His work expanded into investigating questions about the relations between science, technology, and society, and this led to pioneering work in the field of online education. From there, connections in the personal computing industry bloomed. In 1983, the vice president of the Digital Equipment Corporation, the innovative company behind many of the most popular minicomputers of the 1970s and 80s, invited Feenberg to lunch.

“What do you think the future of the personal computer will be?” the executive asked. “I had this sudden revelation,” Feenberg recalls, “Here I was, a student of Herbert Marcuse, this obscure German Marxist radical philosopher, being asked about the future of technology by somebody who was going to make that future.” It dawned on him that he was now involved in something big and important, and he set out from there to develop his own philosophy of technology.

In the early 1990s, he won grants from the National Science Foundation to study nascent online communities, exploring the groups users formed around shared interests, like hobby enthusiasts, or through shared illnesses—without the support or direction of large corporations or government projects. The trends he observed are now entirely familiar to citizens of a networked world, but this was in the early days of the Internet when subscribers dialed in to far less complex services like Prodigy.

This grassroots community building, Feenberg says, was possible because “the networks didn’t really know what they were for. They didn’t have a fully dedicated purpose yet. They were waiting to see what people would make of them, and that gave opportunities for innovation to ordinary people.”

He also says that these democratic features of open networks are important in the current discussions of rules the Federal Communication Commission is considering to protect net neutrality in the mobile phone industry. Feenberg contends that if the wireless business continues on its present development path, with more people accessing the Internet on mobile devices, then large portions of the network will become proprietary, “And the space for innovation and creation that characterized the Internet in its early phases will disappear.”

The FCC decision on net neutrality is important, he says, because the design and configuration of technology constitutes the “framework of our lives.” “If it is not democratized, at least to some degree…then i think it will become a very oppressive environment.”

Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.

In a press release, AUTM recognized that the institutions “have relatively little influence over companies’ decisions about the pricing and distribution of drugs, vaccines, devices, and other medical technologies in developing countries. However, they are committed to make every effort to ensure that their intellectual property does not become a barrier to access.”

The statement of principles commits the signatories to “make vigorous efforts to develop creative and effective licensing strategies that help to promote global access to health-related technologies,” affirming that “intellectual property should not become a barrier to essential health-related technologies needed by patients in developing countries.” It goes on to say that the institutions should negotiate agreements that promote access through, for instance, non-exclusive licensing or tiered pricing. It also outlines a commitment to investing in research and development on diseases that affect poor countries.

The document also contains a commitment to developing metrics on the impact of the policies and to revisiting the statement biennially.

Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a student group backed by the Ford Foundation, has been pressuring the schools to change their technology transfer rules since 2001. In its press release, the group heralded the victory, but said it “sees this document as a floor for future policies rather than a ceiling and we hope that other universities will go further still.”

Since Monday, the National Institutes of Health, the University of Illinois Chicago, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have also endorsed the principles.

When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was “when is a good time to have a baby?” For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.

In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39. “So it’s increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure,” she says. Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, “Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences,” co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline. Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between Ph.D. and tenured positions. “The leak is almost entirely, or at least due primarily to family formation,” said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.

To discuss the report and the choices facing women scientists along their professional pathways, Mason, Goulden, who is Director of Data Initiatives in Academic Affairs at Berkeley, and Association of American Universities President Robert Berdahl joined Science Progress for a podcast conversation.

These decisions, influenced by the family-unfriendly policies at many research institutions, account for the fact that while women now receive more than half of the Ph.D.s in science and engineering fields, they are under-represented in comparison to men at in the faculty level of their academic fields. According to the report women comprised “63 percent and 54 percent of NIH and NSF’s predoctoral awards in 2007, respectively, but just 25 percent and 23 percent of the competitive faculty grants awarded in the same year.”

But both women and men agree that research positions at universities are the most family-unfriendly career choices among a range of options for scientists. “We have a process in which a large number of very talented scientists… are discouraged about a career in science because of some of the demands that it puts upon them,” said Berdahl.

The Obama administration has made investment in science an administration priority, and as Mason points out, losing those women scientists who are so far along the career pathway represents a significant loss of federal grant funding. Training for a young scientist from graduate school through a postdoc can total close to $500,000.

For those women who do decided to start families while moving through the career pipeline, their odds of winning tenure are significantly diminished in comparison to their male counterparts. Married women with Ph.D.s who have young children are 35 percent less likely to get a tenure-track position than men with young children. The necessary time off those mothers need for childcare responsibilities can put principal investigators in charge of research grants in tough positions. “They’re definitely caught between a rock and a hard place on this issue,” explains Goulden, “because if their researchers have children and go on leave, that results in a loss of productivity to their grant. And as it stands, for the most part, they receive no additional supplemental funding in that situation.”

So it’s the responsibility of both federal grant-making agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as research universities, to develop and share policies that remove the tension in hiring decisions for PIs and create family-friendly environments for scientists aiming for the top of their profession who also want to start families. The report suggests policies that provide responsive benefits for all classes of researchers, from graduate students up through full professors; supplemental funding to offset productivity losses when scientists go on family leave; and flexibility in the lock-step timing of the academic science career path.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.

The suit claims that “genes cannot be patented because they exist as naturally occurring products of nature,” an argument David Koepsell made here at Science Progress, writing that “patenting unmodified genes rewards discovery, not invention.”

But Timothy Caulfield argued at SP just last week that despite the claims that gene patents impede upstream basic research, there just isn’t data to back up the charge.

One potential way to ensure that a future push to generate massive quantities of vaccine will meet its projections is to invest in cell-based vaccine research. “For decades, most experts have agreed that the process of manufacturing influenza vaccine through hens’ eggs is archaic and needs to be improved,” explains Ricardo Rossello in a recent Science Progress feature. Growing the vaccines in cell cultures rather than eggs means manufacturers are not at the mercy of hen egg-laying cycles, nor would there be a need for extra precautions to ensure that egg-grown doses are free of bacterial contamination. In short, research into cell-based vaccine production could potentially build a system better able to meet the surge capacity of pandemics like the one we currently face.

Significantly, the policy includes a uniform disclosure form that authors submitting manuscripts to all of the journals represented by the committee’s editors will use. The form covers everything from grants to consulting fees, gifts, and stock options that researchers might receive as support from outside groups for their scientific work; it also requests information on other significant relationships outside institutions might have with an author’s family members.

As Vivian Cheng explains in her SP feature on “Financial Conflicts of Interest 101,” disclosing potential conflicts is particularly important in biomedical research because they can influence study results or clinical trials. “In some cases, such conflicts may result in experimental data that favors a particular commercial product,” she writes, “in others, they may shape unnecessary or dangerous risks for trial participants.”

Moreover, as Patti Tereskerz of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Virginia School of Medicine explains, protecting research integrity by mitigating the influence of conflicts supports the basic principle of trust, what she called “the crown jewel of the research enterprise.”

This new policy is of course not the final word on conflicts of interest in the medical research world—the committee editors explain as much by calling the first five months of the policy a “period of beta testing.” But streamlining the process of disclosure across many influential outlets will light the way for future policies to maintain objectivity in health science.

Read the full report (CAP)

Human rights advocates have made use of the latest technology, particularly communications tools, for hundreds of years. Eighteenth- and 19th-century abolitionists in the United States relied heavily on the advance of printing technologies to spread their message through newspapers, William Schulz points out. The world learned about the atrocities of the Holocaust through photographs and newsreels. And, Schulz explains, “If you look at the civil rights movement in this country, the images of Bull Connor’s dogs attacking the civil rights workers or the peaceful sit-ins in the south—those transformed the civil rights movement into a national movement and really made a difference.”

Schulz, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, was formerly the executive director of Amnesty International USA. He left the human rights organization in 2006, but during his tenure he witnessed rapid advances in communication tools that extended advocates’ capabilities through web technologies. “We were seeing remarkable expansion of our ability to reach literally tens and hundreds of thousands of people very, very quickly with the truth, with the messages, with the kind of activist inspiration that we wanted to provide,” he says.

But he also saw that communications tools were just one technology that could support human rights work. Geographers and geospatial researchers can use commercial satellite imagery to document the destruction of villages in conflict zones, and forensic scientists can exhume mass graves, identifying victims and preserving evidence for bringing war criminals to justice. Schulz, joined by former CAP researcher Sarah Dreier, sat down for a conversation with Science Progress to talk about science in the service of human rights, the topic of the new report from the Center, “New Tools for Old Traumas: Using 21st Century Technologies to Combat Human Rights Atrocities.”

Collaborations between scientists and human rights advocates have led to projects like the Eyes on Darfur campaign, which uses updated satellite imagery to keep watch over a group of villages threatened by violence in Sudan. In the 1990s, forensic scientists exhuming mass graves in the region surrounding Srebrenica in Bosnia collected key evidence used in the conviction of Serbian General Radislav Krstic for war crimes. More recent examples include the use of SMS technology for gathering election monitoring information and using satellite image analysis to document potential mass grave sites in Afghanistan.

Dreier and Schulz argue in their report that federal policy changes could facilitate this often difficult work. The Science and Human Rights program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science is one of the groups that provides geospatial analysis in collaboration with groups like Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights. But as Dreier explains, there are several hurdles to building a credible case for human rights violations based on satellite evidence, beginning with the fact that public place-name databases operated by the Department of Defense used for locating village coordinates in many remote conflict areas are not up to date. Once they have located a hot spot, scientists must procure current satellite imagery, which can be difficult if there are competing government demands for commercial satellite use. Moreover, NGOs are allowed access only to downgraded resolution images, which are still expensive, usually running $2,000 a piece.

Dreier explains that a review of satellite imagery policies could allow human rights groups access to higher-quality, timely information without compromising national security or intelligence interests. But she also points out that even the best science and technology are no panacea for stopping human rights abuses. “The final hurdle is the need to find political will to identify that this violence is going on and create some substantive change so that we can end these atrocities,” she says.

Read the full report: New Tools for Old Traumas (CAP)

If successful, the vaccine would be the first designed for use against an illegal drug. And as Mark Meier explained in an article last year at SP before the trial began, the project represents a novel scientific pathway built with novel sources of public-private funding. The National Institute on Drug Abuse supported the trial, run by Thomas Kosten, M.D., of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

The immune response triggered by the vaccine produces antibodies that attach themselves to the tiny cocaine molecules, neutralizing their ability to cross the blood-brain barrier. Unable to reach the brain, the drug cannot get the user high, severing the link between use and euphoria.

The president paid a visit to the NIH campus in Bethesda to announce what officials hinted at a few weeks ago: the agency has so far distributed $5 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds. As of today, that means that the ARRA has funded more than 12,000 projects, and 1,800 of those grants have gone to researchers who have never before gotten a major NIH award, according to Collins.

According to a video posted posted on the White House blog, NIH estimates that the $10.4 billion in Recovery Act funds will support approximately 50,000 jobs. In his speech today, Collins said the new funds have gone to “some of the most innovative and creative directions for research that I have seen in 16 years at NIH” and that the galaxy of new grants “is not just about ‘doubling the recipe.’”

Obama emphasized the dual benefits of the “the single largest boost to biomedical research in history”: advances in treatments for life-threatening diseases and job creation. He pointed specifically to projects aimed at cancer, heart disease, and autism research.

Remarks from the director and president are available via streaming video; the Washington Post has a transcript of the president’s speech. (HT: Jocelyn Kaiser at ScienceInsider)

So if citizens aren’t familiar with a technology that researchers currently use to create antimalarial drugs and that major players in the energy industry want to use to churn out biofuels, you just tell them more, right? As Huston Chronicle science reporter Eric Berger points out, not necessarily. “Surprisingly — and this should sober scientists in the field — when the poll respondents were told more about synthetic biology, they became more concerned,” he observes.

The approach explained in the survey report is what science communication experts call the “deficit model”: explain how a scientific process works and hope that people will get behind it when they know more. As Rick Borchelt and Kathy Hudson explained here at SP:

The basic assumption behind these models is that there is a linear progression from public education to public understanding to public support, and that this progression—if followed—inevitably cultivates a public wildly enthusiastic about research. But this model of scientific engagement with the public obviously isn’t working.

The survey doesn’t argue for generating public support for synthetic biology by pursuing a deficit model, but its findings, as Berger makes clear, demonstrate the problems with the approach. In fact, after hearing a short explanation about the potential benefits of synbio (treating disease and cancer, generating renewable energy, reducing pollution) and the risks (unknowns, potential pollutants bioweapons, and ethical concerns), listeners often decided that the risks will outweigh the benefits:

Looking at the survey and the recent New Yorker article on synbio side-by-side is a useful demonstration of how a concrete narrative can present the benefits of an emerging technology in an easy-to-grasp and positive light. Michael Specter ‘s story opens with a history of how scientists developed artificial artemisinin, a powerful treatment for malaria strains that are resistant to other drugs. The development of bacteria that manufacture the compound is considered the poster-child example of synbio benefits.

Specter then goes on to profile thoughtful scientists like Drew Endy, who are fully cognizant of the ethical implications of engineering life and want to engage policymakers and the public on the direction of research. This story highlights the fact that many brilliant people working on synethic biology are motivated by values—just as citizens concerned about the technology are motivated by values in forming their opinions of the work. Indeed 30 percent of respondents in the survey said that a top concern was that “it is morally wrong to create artificial life.”

So if values is a shared language, then it makes sense to tell more stories about the concrete achievements and real efforts to ensure the safety of advances in the field. In this case, talking about values in story is a lot easier than talking about values in a hypothesis.

It’s very hard for me to have a conversation about these issues, because people adopt incredibly defensive postures…The scientists on one side and civil-society organizations on the other. And, to be fair to those groups, science has often proceeded by skipping the dialogue. But some environmental groups will say, Let’s not permit any of this work to get out of a laboratory until we are sure it is all safe. And as a practical matter that is not the way science works. We can’t come back decades later with an answer. We need to develop solutions by doing them. The potential is great enough, I believe, to convince people it’s worth the risk.

That’s Drew Endy, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, talking to Michael Specter in the current issue of The New Yorker about synthetic biology. This is more than just another example of great narrative science reporting from the magazine. It’s a showcase of candid, effective, values-based discussions about the social implications of an emerging technology.

Not only is Endy’s conscientious take on the promise and peril of synbio a perfect counter to anyone who claims that scientists don’t care about ethical boundaries; he also draws attention to a conversational impasse that prevents clear thinking on how to design useful regulatory policies.

Synbio is special among other emerging technologies like neuroscience and nanotechnology in that it already promises solutions to planet-scale problems in public health and energy. Specter opens the article with the story of how Jay Keasling at UC Berkeley built a breed of E. Coli bacteria that can manufacture artemisinin, a powerful treatment for drug-resistant malaria. Researchers are also hard at work designing organisms that can churn out biofuels at industrial scales. But the same open-source genetic components that build a life-saving bug could, in the wrong hands, build terrible pathogens.

As CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light explained in a podcast on the ethics of emerging technologies, “The attitude is not to keep synbio from happening,” but rather to create and maintain public confidence in its benefits. Hearing clear, thoughtful messages from more scientists like Endy could go a long way to supporting that goal.

As Endy tells Specter, the reason many people recoil at the power to create synthetic life is “Because it’s scary as hell…It’s the coolest platform science has ever produced, but the questions it raises are the hardest to answer.”

One way the National Institutes of Health tries to keep members of the next generation of life science researchers from leaking out of the pipeline is by specifically channeling grants their way. But as Gardiner Harris reports in The New York Times today, those awards come at the expense of proposals that reviewers have deemed more scientifically meritorious:

Many of the favored recipients are “new investigators,” or scientists who had never before received a grant from the health institutes. By skipping projects submitted by older scientists and instead choosing to issue grants to projects from less experienced scientists, agency managers hope to use the scientific equivalent of affirmative action to encourage graduate students and newly minted professors to make careers in academia.

Part of the issue, as Kirshenbaum, Harris, and Beryl Benderly note, was the five years of flat funding for the NIH that followed a doubling of the agency’s budget. The increase grew the size of the research enterprise, as Benderly explained here at SP, without significantly expanding permanent career opportunities for scientists moving up the ladder.

The other reason for “skipping” some of the projects proposed by established scientists is to direct funding toward riskier new ideas—another important approach that federal funding agencies have strayed away from over the years.

Harris reports as well on pressure for greater oversight for the NIH to make sure that there are appropriate systems to monitor decisions to ignore reviewer recommendations and fund lower-ranked proposals. Improving accountability is certainly a good idea, and  might also improve assessments for how effective the policy is at retaining young scientists.

But increased accountability shouldn’t cut funds for researchers who swing for the fences with untried new ideas. Some of those will inevitably fail, and that’s okay. Scientists can learn a great deal from experiments that don’t work, and a commitment to biomedical innovation means a commitment to visionary, untested ideas.

The site is the next step in the implementation of the Obama administration’s stem cell policy, announced in March, which established ethical guidelines for this important research, which will allow the United States to remain a leader in the field of regenerative medicine.

Along with the site, NIH announced members of the new Working Group for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Eligibility Review, chaired by Jeffrey R. Botkin of the University of Utah School of Medicine. The panel will review lines submitted to ensure that they meet the guidelines finalized in July.

Hudson, who co-authored a popular SP article on how to engage the scientific community with the American public, was formerly head of the Johns Hopkins Genetics & Public Policy Center. She told The Scientist that talks were ongoing about how to manage the additional $10.4 billion dollars in NIH funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but the Institutes are wasting no time in getting money to researchers. “Five billion dollars are going out the door this month,” she said.

In talking to NEJM, Collins acknowledged the tension between supporting “big science” projects like the Human Genome Research Project and investigator-driven studies. He offered this synthesis: “The foundation of advances in biomedical research will continue to be the bright ideas of individual investigators, but if they are empowered by tools and databases and technologies that big science has made available, then we can go faster,” he said.

Collins also said that the question of what happens when the ARRA funds run out weighs heavy, saying: “There is much discussion about the NIH falling off a cliff. Scientific research is not a 100-yard dash. It is a marathon. Two years is way too short to take a cool idea and develop it to some sort of end point.”

Ensuring a smooth funding transition in 2010 should be a priority for Congress, and that process begins now, by ending the five-year streak of flat baseline funding for the NIH. There’s no shortage of good science to fund, and biomedical research creates good jobs as it improves the health of Americans and the economy.

According to Nature, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has required, since 2000, that authors submit trial information to databases like ClinicalTrials.gov in order to have their manuscripts published.

But one study, appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, examined published articles that relied on registered trials and found that only 45.5 percent were adequately registered—that is, researchers submitted data before the end of the trial and clearly specified the outcome.

Results from industry-sponsored trials registered at ClinicalTrials.gov lead to publications in only 40 percent of cases, according to another report appearing in PLoS Medicine. NGO-funded trial results saw publication 56 percent of the time, but government-funded trials only 47 percent.

Her hook is the quest of Amy Farber, who found out in 2005 that she had LAM, a rare and fatal disease affecting women that damages respiration and destroys a variety of bodily systems over time. Farber teamed up with George Demitri of Harvard Medical School and Frank Moss, director of the MIT Media Lab and the lab’s New Media Medicine group.

The result was LAMsight, a project that brings together patients from around the world who share knowledge and experience with doctors and researchers who can sift through that information to improve their understanding of the disease. Some of the people with the most knowledge of LAM are of course the patients, and the network can facilitate their access to clinical trials as treatments evolve. The effort brings patients in as collaborators in health research:

Patients’ everyday experiences in living with an illness are an enormous source of untapped data, [Moss] said; aggregated, those data could generate new hypotheses and avenues for research. “We’re really turning patients into scientists and changing the balance of power between clinicians and scientists and patients,” he said.

The site allows participants to remain entirely anonymous to other users if they so choose, but the article of course raises the issue of privacy concerns that surround many new web-enabled health projects, as well as the quality of data provided by small self-selecting communities.

In the case of LAMsight, participants are making an active decision to become a research participant. But Arnquist also points to commercial ventures such as 23andMe and PatientsLikeMe that are actively recruiting consumers to share genetic and health information that populates databases that may also prove useful for studying an array of health issues.

Stanford bioethicist Sandra Lee, who recently spoke with SP about direct-to-consumer genetic testing, discussed the policy tensions such DTC services create. On the one hand, they allow people who want to actively participate in research (or become scientists, as Moss might suggest) to do so—an empowering and potentially beneficial engagement with their health. On the other hand, some of those people may become unwitting research subjects, and the genetic information they share, Lee notes, is not just about them, but by virtue of familial bonds, is also about others who might not have consented to share that information with others.

The point of course is not to restrict health or genetic information sharing unnecessarily, but to finesse the balance for individual projects; protect privacy, safety, and autonomy; and create more hope for more patients.

As well, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released a report today examining administration preparations for handling the expected resurgence of H1N1 as flu season approaches. They also point to hand washing in their bevy of recommendations for how small individual actions help curb outbreaks and preserve public health. A press release introducing the report underscored that the novel virus is not more deadly than seasonal strains, but it can move quickly through the population because few people are immune to it. This in turn could push medical providers beyond capacity.

One of the key recommendations of the report is that the Department of Homeland Security invest in public health surveillance systems (a suggestion CAP also made last year). In addition, PCAST recommends that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to expand its new media outreach, noting that the CDCemergency Twitter account had 30,000 follows when the spring H1N1 outbreak began. This afternoon there are more than 762,000.

As Bryce Hall explained recently here at SP, CDC has worked with Google on other new media surveillance methods like search trend analysis. Search habits are very strongly correlated with viral outbreaks, and search data allow epidemiologists “to identify flu outbreaks two to six weeks faster than by using any other method,” he reported.

But it will take a mix of high- and low-tech innovation to slow the spread of flu as best we can. As Nelson Hernandez and David Brown report in the Post, DC officials recommend a simple timing device to make sure kids have spent long enough scrubbing their hands: “sing the Happy Birthday or Row, Row, Row Your Boat songs twice.“

“Many of the discoveries we make, we make together,” he said, but some staffers in his lab drew paychecks from a federal training grant, whereas the state stem cell funding could only support research, not their salaries. For them, working on cell lines outside the federal guidelines would constitute a misuse of federal funds.  “Uh-oh,” Civin remembers thinking, “can’t do that.” Unable to collaborate with others in their lab, the conundrum disrupted the traditional team-oriented approach to research.

His solution to the incongruous rules was to essentially divide the lab into two color-coded halves. On one side were “blue” staffers, on the other half, the “red” staffers, and each had corresponding red and blue media for culturing cells.

That solved a functional problem, but what was to happen at the next lab meeting if researcher working with Maryland-approved cells that didn’t meet the Bush guidelines said he or she has made a step forward and could use some help to develop the work? In traditional lab culture, a colleague’s instinct might be to say, “That sounds interesting, I can help.” But again, those with salaries funded by federal dollars couldn’t help. “This constrained our natural interactions,” Civin said, “In Maryland, it also constrained our interactions with colleagues at the National Institutes of Health.”

Fortunately, the straight jacket of Bush administration rules came off in July, as new NIH guidelines went into effect, paving the way for an expansion of the number of lines available. Civin joined Bernard Siegel, executive director of the Genetic Policy Institute, to talk with Science Progress about the state of stem cell research and the new possibilities opened up by the Obama administration rules. Both are co-chairs of the World Stem Cell Summit, which will come to Baltimore, Maryland September 21-23.

Siegal compared the constraining effect of the NIH guidelines under Bush on the field to an orchestra that lost its conductor just moments before a performance. “You can’t underestimate the difficulty and challenges that are the result of a paucity of funding on fundamental human embryonic stem cell research over the past eight years,” he said.

Enthusiastic about the new federal rules and advances in research, Siegal warned that fights over stem cell science are not over and will continue on the state level. “The foes of embryonic stem cell research did not disappear,” he said.

To listen to the podcast of the conversation, see the audio player in the sidebar, download the mp3, or subscribe via iTunes.

Join us in congratulating Chris as we bid him a temporary farewell.

Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity

Mooney, a Contributing Editor to Science Progress who will be a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT for the next academic year, and Kirshenbaum, a marine biologist at Duke University, advocate for a greater presence of science in the national dialogue in their new book. The authors joined Science Progress for a podcast discussion last week. No only should scientists should hone better communication skills to convey their messages, politicians should be more willing to learn the importance of science to public policy, and journalists should pay more attention to science policy news, the authors said. (To listen to the podcast of our conversation, see the audio player in the sidebar, download the mp3, or subscribe via iTunes.)

“I think a lot of scientists are very nervous to get involved, particularly in the political arena because they don’t want to ruffle any feathers. They just want to keep doing their research in the lab, and not necessarily have to go talk about it and lobby for money,” Kirshenbaum said. This is a problem because “it all trickles down to research dollars,” she explained.

Getting important groups to listen to significant science is difficult but important, Mooney added. Legislators are often reluctant to hear from scientists who show up at their offices even for a minute, “especially when the science is hard.”

Moreover, scientific outfits sometimes make the mistake of lobbying staffers and members of Congress without coordination, and “with different messages about the same issue,” Kirshenbaum, a former congressional staffer, said. On the other hand, the “pseudoscience side is very well organized, very well funded, and often has extremely articulate speakers with PhDs.”

“They know how to put on a good briefing. They know how to make people laugh; they serve food,” she explained, “And they have a unified message so a lot of the really valuable stuff that should be making it’s way to the Hill gets lost in all of the noise.” Lobbyists with pseudoscientific agendas may work to discredit the threat of climate change or ban vaccines, she said.

Moreover, for important research that addresses 21^st-century challenges to get necessary funding, “We’re going to have to get involved on the Hill and in discussions well beyond Washington, D.C.,” she said.

Both authors worked to get these issues on center stage during last year’s presidential election by helping found Science Debate 2008, an initiative to get the presidential candidates to talk about their science policy positions on national television.

Although Science Debate 2008’s supporters—which included Nobel laureates, government leaders, and universities—did not achieve their ultimate goal, they still made a lot of progress, according to Mooney. The effort was important, he said, because of two words: “science matters.” Science matters to policy and the economy, he said, and given that it is germane to what politicians do, “they should talk about it publicly and often.”

Kirshenbaum emphasized that the project galvanized the scientific establishment. The initiative, now simply called “Science Debate” is hoping to “push towards the next presidential election” and get people talking about science issues on the local level, she said. The ultimate goal is to move science from its “special interest status” into our “common culture,” she explained.

We need to employ scientists in more communication outlets so they can explain why science matters to the public, Mooney said. Cultivating more of those communicators will provide “a unique asset because they’re the small part of the public that not only knows why science matters, but is deeply engaged and has the technical ability” to correctly explain the science. And that, he would argue, is good for the United States.

Interview produced by Andrew Plemmons Pratt, managing editor for Science Progress, and Vivian Cheng, intern with Science Progress.

To explore these ethical approaches to emerging technologies Science Progress spoke with Gregory E. Kaebnick, editor of the Hastings Center Report and principal investigator on the Center’s “Ethical Issues in Synthetic Biology” project, and Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Because the field is advancing so rapidly, scientists, ethicists, and policymakers must address the social and ethical issues now, as it still matures, argue Kaenick’s colleagues, the authors of the new study. (To listen to the podcast of our conversation, see the audio player in the sidebar, download the mp3, or subscribe via iTunes.)

Synthetic biology, commonly referred to as “synbio,” is not one particular technology, but “more of an agenda” to use existing scientific tools to do rather than simply understand biological science, Kaebnick explained. Synbiologists “create and modify biological parts and organisms” using “a confluence of a variety of technologies” including DNA synthesis, information processing, and DNA sequencing, he said. The techniques can yield medicines, fuel, and industrial chemicals. Moreover, Light added that synbio shares many important concepts and jargon with information technology. Synthesizing DNA, for instance, is analogous in some ways to programming a machine to make it perform a specific task.

But what about the potential benefits promised by emerging technologies like synthetic biology and nanotech? One likely benefit, Light explained, may come from the intersection of nano and synbio energy research. Scientists in multiple U.S. labs are working to develop artificial photosynthesis, a process in which engineered cells turn water, sunlight, and carbon into biofuel. Light pointed to this as an important area of renewable energy research because it could help harness the 800 terawatts of solar energy striking the Earth at any given moment and transform it into useable resources. “This is at least one reason why I think we could see a big benefit if this technology develops in a responsible way,” he said.

Another important advance is in the artificial production of artemisinic acid, the precursor for artemisinin, an effective treatment for drug-resistant malaria. Kaebnick called it the “poster child for synbio,” as natural wormwood sources for the compound are expensive and rare.

Despite these potential benefits, synbio raises a number of concerns. One of the greatest risks is bioterrorism, Kaebnick said, as DNA synthesis techniques could be used to reproduce a variety of pathogens. For example, with the appropriate gene sequences, rogue scientists could recreate the polio virus or smallpox. They could even re-engineer smallpox so it is more deadly than the original disease, he explained.

Bioterrorism is a clear potential physical harm. In contrast, potential nonphysical harms present philosophical questions that range from “Are we over stepping our bounds as humans?” by engineering artificial life forms to “Who should have access to life-extending drugs?”

For example, Light suggested, if scientists develop a drug that radically extends the human lifespan, it may not be immediately accessible to the whole population although there would be “enormous pressure to invest in this technology,” he said.

A similar concern is creating whole organisms with synthetic DNA, Kaebnick said. Environmental preservation champions who believe “we ought to preserve biodiversity and rare organisms” even if it is “economically disadvantageous” to oppose such synbio research. He went on: “Down the road, we may have the ability to control our children’s development in utero,” using emerging technologies. Ethical issues in this area of synbio are similar to existing concerns raised by assisted reproductive technologies.

A number of regulations are already in place for synbio, Kaebnick said, as rules for biotechnology often spill over to technologies used in synbio. Regulations enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture, and other federal agencies may apply to emerging technologies as well, he explained. However, Light said there are still gaps left when considering synbio research, and due diligence will be necessary to prevent their exploitation. “The attitude is not to keep synbio from happening,” he said, but rather to create and maintain public confidence in its benefits.

Interview produced by Andrew Plemmons Pratt, managing editor for Science Progress, and Vivian Cheng, intern with Science Progress.

At issue is a chapter of the 1977 textbook Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, for which Holdren was the third author with environmental activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich. First of all, FoxNews gets the name of the man in question wrong in the opening line of the story, claiming the President’s science adviser is “Paul Holdren,” and referring to him as a “science czar,” a title suggesting that he was appointed without Congressional oversight. But after he testified before the Commerce, Science and Transportation committee, the Senate voted unanimously to confirm John Holdren as director of OSTP.

Mooney also pointed out that FoxNews commentator Sean Hannity is confused about how Holdren came to his post, claiming on air that “[Obama has] skirted the Senate confirmation process and has empowered individuals to see major offices now within the federal government, many of whom operate only under the supervision of the White House itself.” Again, for the benefit of the Fox researchers, here’s the video of the Senate testimony.

In Ecoscience, Holdren and the Ehrlichs explain that their section on overpopulation offers an overview of population control measures suggested by other writers, and some of these are extreme and coercive, including forced abortions and sterilization. But the text makes clear that Holdren does not support these measures, referring to the “obvious moral objections” on page 787 of the book. (Helpfully, Fox provides a .pdf of this very section.)

More importantly, Holdren stated during the Senate hearing that he does not support or endorse these ideas. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) asked him: “You think determining optimal population is a proper role of government?” to which Holdren replied: “No, Senator, I do not.” The exchange begins at 122:30 here; transcript here. As well, three months passed between the President’s announcement that he intended to nominate Holdren and the hearing itself—ample time to investigate his past and raise any salient concerns.

Mooney goes on in refuting the current criticism:

But wait, you may be wondering: How do I know that the Ehrlichs are right about the their 1977 text, and not the conservatives? Well, because I walked over to the Engineering Library on the Princeton University campus, where I’m located, and got the book. And I can see how one could misread a text this old—from such a different time. But nevertheless, the criticism of Holdren today on this basis is exceedingly thin and stretched. The book is three decades old; Holdren isn’t its first author; it takes a stance against such policies; and neither Holdren nor the Ehrlichs support these policies today, either. Couldn’t we talk about something that’s actually important and contemporary?

Here’s one suggestion for an important and contemporary science policy issue in OSTP’s portfolio: the recently released administration report on how climate change is already threatening the health and livelihoods of Americans across the country. Maybe Fox could consider 1300 words on the implications of that text.

Image: flickr.com/nationalacademyofsciences

Organized by our friends at Scientists and Engineers for America, the messaging workshop will feature an award-winning reporter, a veteran policy maker, and an expert political strategist about effective communication. It’s tomorrow, Wednesday, July 22 from 6-8:30 pm at the AAAS headquarters.

Image: flickr.com/laughingsquid

More numbers from the poll here.

Current British law prohibits using the cells for reproductive purposes, and even after the years it may take to improve on the technique, serious safety questions about using them to fertilize a human egg would remain. Some biologists are also questioning whether what the team led by Professor Karim Nayernia have generated are really functional sperm, and others have yet to reproduce the experimental results. But none of this changes the fact that the moment to confront the implications of stem cell research for assisted reproduction is upon us. SP Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Moreno tackled this issue in Science Next, pointing out that conservatives who pushed induced pluripotent cells and reprogramming as alternatives to embryonic stem cells didn’t stop to think about the impact the work could have on procreation. As Moreno points out, coaxing stem cells into sperm may be the first step, but similar techniques might be able to turn stem cells into blastomeres, rendering every cell in the body a potential embryo. The analysis is worth quoting at length:

But scientists and bioethicists alike will have to confront the new possibilities for artificial human reproduction inherent in the rapidly advancing stem-cell biology. Already a British group has reported that it has coaxed human female embryonic stem cells to develop into cells with some of the essential qualities of sperm. Suppose one were to pursue an attempt to transform a diploid cell (a body cell with all forty-six chromosomes) into a haploid gamete (a sperm or egg cell with only twenty-three chromosomes). This might involve first expelling half the genetic complement (as has apparently already been done in mouse cells), and then treating the remainder with factors that are required for gametic processes.

It seems that opponents of embryonic stem-cell research who celebrated the advent of iPS cells have not grasped that the cellular reprogramming technique actually aggravates their greatest concerns about the power of modern biology. For if skin cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent and then differentiated into specific somatic cell types, they may also be differentiated into germ (sex) cells.

Since male iPS cells have both X and Y chromosomes, they could be reprogrammed to sperm and eggs. These iPS-derived sperm and eggs could then be used in standard in vitro fertilization procedures. Notably, couples with an infertile male partner may be able to obtain sperm that could then be transferred to the woman’s uterus. The resulting infant would have virtually the full complement of DNA of both members of the couple, though whether the male can be called the father in the traditional biological sense will be a matter of debate. Alternatively, it may be possible for a gay male couple to obtain an oocyte derived from the skin cell of one member of the couple, which could then be combined with the sperm from the second man and the embryo brought to term through the services of a gestational or surrogate mother. The resulting child would be genetically related to both men. Lacking a Y chromosome, a lesbian couple would not be able to reproduce in this way. However, if the genes sort differently during the formation of each of the gametes, there would be grave risks for any resulting embryo. It should not be necessary to elaborate on the extraordinary ethical and social questions that would be raised by such developments. In an overview of the issues raised by pluripotent stem cells, the Hinxton Group, an international consortium on stem-cell ethics and law, urged caution in any new regulatory regime that might be stimulated by these questions: “In the case of PSC-derived gametes, as with all science, it is important to target policy specifically to those dimensions of the research or its applications that have proved to be unacceptable, and that these policies be proportionate to the magnitude of what is morally at stake.”

But that is not the end of the story. If iPS-derived germ cells are in the offing, then so are blastomeres, the cells that constitute an embryo at its very earliest stages. To turn a diploid cell into a blastomere one might either use the induced germ cell in a process of parthenogenesis or spermatogenesis, or introduce factors that skip the gamete stage and turn the iPS cell directly into a blastomere. Thus will come to pass the most astonishing and disorienting result of all: modern stem-cell biology will at that point have made every cell of our body a potential embryo.

All of these scenarios tread the dangerous territory between science and science fiction. The genetic resorting that would take place through several steps of reprogramming from adult cells to iPS cells to gametic cells would almost surely make it too dangerous to attempt human reproduction, so as in the case of reproductive cloning, issues of risk would have to be dealt with before more profound ethical issues would need to be addressed. Yet how many stem-cell biologists, including Thomson and Yamanaka, predicted that reprogramming would be accomplished so quickly?

A more plausible scenario for the use of iPS cells to produce a genetic twin of the cell donor has already been demonstrated in mice by scientists at Advanced Cell Technology, a Worcester, Massachusetts, biotech company. “We now have a working technology whereby anyone, young or old, fertile or infertile, straight or gay can pass on their genes to a child by using just a few skin cells,” a company official said. Moreover, the official added, “the bizarre thing is that the Catholic Church and other traditional stem-cell opponents think this technology is great when in reality it could in the end become one of their biggest nightmares. . . . It is quite possible that the real legacy of this whole new programming technology is that it will be introducing the era of designer babies.”

Widespread appreciation of this technical reality could have profound effects on the divisive abortion debate, but in what directions? There seem to be at least several distinct possibilities, all of which may co-exist. The first and most likely short-term possibility is that prolife groups will split between those that wish to ban such procedures as antithetical to the natural process of conception and those that find it an acceptable alternative along the lines of in vitro fertilization. A second, more extreme, result and far less likely result would be that the human embryo in its early, disorganized state prior to, say, the appearance of the primitive streak (roughly around fourteen days) comes to be seen as no more than another clump of cells. Eventually, something like the traditional view still reflected in Islam, Judaism, and most Protestant denominations may once again be accepted even by those who once held a more elevated view of the early embryo. A third possible outcome of the advent of iPS-derived embryos, and one that is perhaps the most distant, is that a growing proportion of the public comes to view the tissues and organs that compose the human body as the remarkable systems they are, rich with life and the potential for independent life. Cults that worship every cell and even every sloughed cell can be imagined.

What is clear is that our society is unprepared for breakthroughs in the life sciences that we can foresee just over the horizon. For some, the new dawn of mastery over our own biology that will follow from the technology of induced pluripotency will seem like a cruel joke and confirm their worst fears. Some may even be reminded of the myth of Prometheus, whose punishment for stealing fire from the gods and sharing it with humans was to be tethered to a rock where his liver was consumed by an eagle. Thus we may conclude that, though humans may suffer for their knowledge, neither will it consume them, for the liver happens to be the only organ in the human body capable of complete regeneration, a definitive property of pluripotent cells.

(Jonathan Moreno, from “Stem Cells and the Betting of Moral Milestones” in Science Next)

But today the Associated Press has a story on the newly digitized Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh that presents a clear narrative of how computer-powered records work in real life, speeding diagnoses, preventing costly and dangerous errors, and helping administrators track effective techniques.

The boon to patient care and hospital bottom lines are compelling reasons to move to EHRs. The power to keep young children healthy is a good one too.

See also: Data Bank: Health Information Technology

More from CAP: “A Historic Opportunity: Wedding Health Information Technology to Care Delivery Innovation and Provider Payment Reform”

(HT: Kaiser Health News)

But a dearth of transformative work isn’t the only thing missing from the biomedical system in the United States. As Merrill Goozner reported here on Science Progress, there’s a lack of data-driven clinical trials that compare what works with what doesn’t.

Of course, the question of how to develop better cancer treatment’s isn’t either-or. We need both more transformative research and more evidence-based medicine. But as funding for the National Institutes of Health increases, a re-think of the grant review process will be necessary to get resources to promising but untried ideas and to the younger generation of scientists.

Lead author Kenneth Manton at Duke University and colleagues looked at four four significant causes of death over the period from 1950 to 2004: cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes. They estimate that investments in NIH funding helped avoid more than 35 million deaths over that period, and that for the first three ailments, death rates started dropping more rapidly about ten years after a significant increase in research investment.

NIH funding supports public health, they conclude, as well as workforce competitiveness:

Evaluation of the level of investment in research suggests that a significantly greater, and more prolonged, investment in NIH, and indeed all, federal research would provide a greater stimulus to U.S. economic growth.

Jocelyn Kaiser at ScienceInsider grabbed the study’s closing recommendation for her headline yesterday: “Need More U.S. Workers? Quadruple the NIH Budget.” Or as Manton et al. put it: “To compensate for the slower future growth of the U.S. labor force (e.g., from 1.2% per annum in 1996 to 2006 to 0.3% after 2017) on economic growth, the size of NIH expenditures relative to GDP should quadruple to about 1% ( $120 Billion) and be done sufficiently rapidly (10 years) to compensate for the slowing growth of the U.S. labor force.” Proponents of merely doubling the budget over ten years now have that proposal to consider.

Heidi Ledford, reporting for Nature, notes that the study was of course funded by a grant from the NIH. But she also spoke with Cary Gross at Yale’s School of Medicine, who points out that evidence that biomedical research improves public health and economic growth is important, but the conclusion should not allow observers to lose sight of the importance of basic research: “The opposite of that argument is that if scientific research does not directly relate to health, then it’s not important.”

The beauty of the NIH is that it supports both critical basic research and applied work on the interventions that help U.S. citizens live healthier lives.

Image: The NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland (NIH)

But even if the genome-wide association studies that form the basis for these genetic profiles are imprecise, don’t consumers still have a right to know about their own genes? Should they expect a certain level of validity for information they’re buying? For the moment DTC genetic testing falls, in Lee’s words, in a “regulatory no-man’s land, with little oversight by federal agencies.” And the question remains, do we need health professionals act as gatekeepers and help interpret this new information?

Lee, a medical anthropologist who works as a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, and her colleague LaVera Crawley, examined the expanding DTC industry and its implications for consumer health and privacy in an article that appears in the current issue of the American Journal of Bioethics.

Learning about the genes that give you brown eyes or make you lactose intolerant is one thing, but some services offer the ability to share your data with others through social networking tools. And not all genetic information is personal. “One of the special qualities of genetic information,” explains Lee, “is that it is information about the primary user; but it also information about others who may not have consented or agreed to have that information shared with other individuals.” For instance, a heritable trait increasing risk for breast cancer has implications for the person getting tested, as well as their children and grandchildren.

The Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act passed last year promises to protect citizens who might face unfair treatment on account of their DNA, but Lee warns that it’s also not yet clear how the legislation will treat the data shared through these social networks. And once an individual has made the decision to put information out there, it’s very hard to take it back.

Finally, some of these companies are taking consumer-generated genetic information and building commercial databases for research use. The vendors do require consent for this, but Lee says the process is hard to evaluate because in traditional clinical trials, scientists are required to make explicit all the potential uses of personal information. But because this sort of genetic research is still growing, it’s hard to say just what those future uses might be, so it constitutes what Lee calls a form of “open consent.”

So with these exciting new services comes a blurring of the line between consumer and research participant. This creates a tension, Lee says, between policies that allow people who want to actively participate in research to do so while still protecting people who may become unwitting research subjects. “Finessing this balance will be a central challenge as direct-to-consumer genomics expands,” she says.

And as with any expensive technology, there is a concern that the benefits may only be available to those that can afford it, as DTC tests currently run from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Yet the bigger divide, Lee suggests, may not be access to sequence information, but access to educational and interpretive information about genetic risk factors—for patients, consumers, and heath care providers alike.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor of Science Progress.