Today drone pilots operate thousands of miles away from the battlefield. They must manage vast amounts of data and video images during exceptionally intense workdays. They are scrutinized by superiors for signs of stress, and to reduce such stress the Air Force is attempting shift changes, less physical isolation on the job, and more opportunities for rest.

Yet even as this remarkable new form of war fighting is becoming more widely recognized, there are at least two more possible technological transitions on the horizon that have garnered far less public attention. One is using brain-machine interface technologies to give the remote pilot instantaneous control of the drone through his or her thoughts alone. The technology is not science fiction: Brain-machine interface systems are already being used to help patients with paralytic conditions interact with their environments, like controlling a cursor on a computer screen.

In a military context, a well-trained operator, instead of using a joystick for very complicated equipment, may be able to process and transmit a command much more rapidly and accurately through a veritable mind-meld with the machine.

There are enormous technical challenges to overcome. For example, how sure can we be that the system is not interpreting a fantasy as an intention? Even if such an error were rare it could be deadly and not worth the risk.

Yet there is a way to avoid the errors of brain-machine interface that could change warfare in still more fundamental and unpredictable ways: autonomous weapons systems combining the qualities of human intelligence that neuroscience has helped us understand with burgeoning information and communications technologies.

Even now there are defensive weapons systems on U.S. naval ships that routinely operate on their own, but with human monitoring. A new automated weapons system has been deployed at the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. This robot sentry is said to be the first that has integrated systems for surveillance, tracking, firing and voice-recognition. Reportedly it has an “automatic” mode that would allow it to fire without a human command, but that mode is not being used.

Robot warriors, proponents argue, would not be subject to the fatigue, fear and fury that often accompany the chaos of combat—emotions can result in accidental injuries to friends or even barbaric cruelties motivated by a thirst for revenge and a sense of power. Others say the proponents of robot warriors are naive: What would inhibit dictators or nonstate actors from developing robotic programs that ignored the laws of war?

Moreover, some security analysts already worry that remote control unacceptably lowers the bar for a technologically superior force to engage in conflict. And will their adversaries, frustrated by their lack of opportunity to confront an enemy in person, be more likely employ robotic terror attacks on soft targets in that enemy’s territory? Will this be the death knell of whatever ethos of honor remains in modern military conflict?

Another technology is even more radical. Neuroscientists and philosophers are exploring the parameters of “whole brain emulation,” which would involve uploading a mind from a brain into a non-biological substrate. It might be that Moore’s Law (the idea that computing capacity doubles about every two years) would have to persist for decades in order for a computer to be sufficiently powerful to receive an uploaded mind. Then again, the leap might come by means of the new science of quantum computing—machines that use atomic mechanical phenomena instead of transistors to manage vast amounts of information. Experiments with quantum computing are already being performed at a number of universities and national laboratories in the United States and elsewhere.

Robotic warriors whose computers are based on whole brain emulation raise a stark question: Would these devices even need human minders? Perhaps, if we’re not careful, these creatures could indeed inherit the Earth.

[...]

This article is excerpted from the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal Online subscribers can read the rest of the article here. A version of this article appeared May 12, 2012, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Robot Soldiers Will Be a Reality—and a Threat.

Dr. Moreno is a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress. He is the author of “Mind Wars: Brain Research and the Military in the 21st Century” (Bellevue, 2012). 

The Obama administration saw the opportunity early in its tenure to meet these needs and reform the management of federal science agencies to protect science. The March 2009 presidential memorandum asked the Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop guidelines to establish badly needed reforms, including protections for whistleblowers who witness abuses of science in agencies, guidelines for hiring based on scientific merit, and procedures to keep political appointees from interfering with agency scientists.

Thus began the long and ongoing process to implement a comprehensive and cohesive scientific integrity policy throughout the executive branch. (see the interactive timeline below for details) A story of broken deadlines, ensuing lawsuits, and overblown “scandals,” the process became controversial, at times even appearing to be at a halt. More than three years after President Obama issued the order, the vast majority of agencies that focus on science and technology have put in place strong new guidelines, some of which have had measureable impacts, but there remain a handful of agencies that have yet to finalize their policies and make them public.

The executive branch has 15 departments containing dozens of agencies, as well as dozens more independent agencies. Paring down which departments and agencies had science and technology as core parts of their mission and figuring out how to have uniformity across the departments while also allowing policies to adequately fit the needs of each different department or agency was a continually evolving process. The different internal organizations of the agencies—how they relate to outside research organizations, unions, and other stakeholders—made a one-size-fits-all policy impossible to imagine, much less implement.

Dr. Holdren, in an update on the White House’s science policy blog, noted: “Decisions had to be made about how to apply the new policies—whether, for example, they would cover contractors, grantees, and other categories of scientists and engineers not employed full time by the Federal government.” The daunting task at hand was to develop specific guidelines to which all agencies would be beholden but that were sufficiently flexible so each of the more than 20 federal agencies—from the Department of Agriculture to the Intelligence Community—could craft individual scientific integrity policies compliant with those requirements, yet customized to meet the unique organizational needs of each.

Drafting the initial guidelines

The ultimate goal President Obama declared was that “The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions.” First, the president set a deadline for Dr. Holdren to “recommend a plan to achieve that goal throughout the executive branch.” Science Progress reported in October 2011 on the slow speed of the process, which was under pressure from presidential orders, inaugural promises, and the previous administration’s fudging of science. More than a year into the process, Dr. Holdren admitted that the process to create guidelines “has been more laborious and time-consuming than expected at the outset,” but he defended the process as being an “unprecedentedly open, Web-based process [that has] accept[ed] detailed input from stakeholders inside and outside government.”

Some groups however, seem to disagree. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility was the first to begin making requests for more information, eventually suing the Office of Science and Technology Policy for the release of documents showing the progress on scientific integrity guidelines. The office encouraged and accepted input in the initial phase of creating the guidelines. The public comment window for office guidelines was from April 23, 2009, to May 13, 2009, but the guidelines were not released until December 17, 2010, more than 18 months after the comment date ended.

When the guidelines were finally released, agencies got to work on crafting individual policies. The guidelines were received with mixed fanfare from the science policy community but were overall touted as having what it takes to make real progress in cleaning up integrity issues. The guidelines set out a number of core assurances that all agencies must incorporate into their policies, including:

1. Political officials shall not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings.
2. Selection of candidates for scientific positions shall be based primarily on their scientific and technological knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity.
3. Data and research used to support policy decisions will undergo peer review by qualified experts as appropriate.
4. Federal scientists may speak to the media and the public about scientific and technological matters based on their work.
5. Whistleblower protections will be enforced.

Each agency went about incorporating these guidelines differently, and some were more open and expeditious than others. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, meticulously poured over more than 25,000 public comments to one of its draft policies, while the Department of Defense has yet to release a publicly available set of policies as of this writing. The Union of Concerned Scientists has persistently called for the interim drafts of all agencies to be made public. National Public Radio went so far as to request the policy from the Intelligence Community through a Freedom of Information Act request. The public’s clamoring for a transparent process is understandable, given the violations that went unpunished under the Bush administration and Obama’s inaugural promise to restore scientific integrity.

Putting the new policies to the test

The need for strong scientific integrity enforcement policies and codes of conduct was underscored by the Department of the Interior’s botched response to a false controversy about polar bears in 2011. Under pressure from climate science denial groups, the department suspended a staff climate scientist named Dr. Charles Monnett, though there was no real evidence of misconduct. In response, the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed a complaint using the Department of the Interior’s “newly minted” scientific integrity policy on Dr. Monnett’s behalf. As the first agency to implement a scientific integrity policy under the Obama administration, it would be a good test run.

Suspecting Dr. Monnett’s suspension had been for political rather than scientific reasons, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility requested that the agency either specify specific allegations of scientific misconduct or reinstate Dr. Monnett. After determining there was no evidence of scientific misconduct, the Department of the Interior reversed Dr. Monnett’s suspension. Though the entire process needlessly cast suspicion upon climate science and embarrassment upon Dr. Monnett—thanks to the department’s aggressive implementation of the Office of Science and Technology Policy scientific integrity guidelines—science ultimately trumped politics. The case demonstrated the real necessity to develop and institutionalize these scientific integrity policies in a way that lasts now and into the future.

The “FDA Nine” case is another example of the need for such policies. As President Obama was taking office, the “FDA Nine” sent a whistleblowing letter to John Podesta, then co-chair of Obama’s transition team, that made it clear that there was “corruption within the FDA device review process, managerial misconduct, dangers to public health, welfare and safety, and retaliation against whistleblowers.”

All but two of the “FDA Nine” have been fired, presumably in retaliation for their whistleblowing. Six of the fired nine have since filed a lawsuit, claiming their private email was hacked so that allegedly corrupt Food and Drug Administration officials could spy on them and subsequently fire them in retaliation for whistleblowing. The Food and Drug Administration released its scientific integrity policy a week after the lawsuit was filed. While this case has yet to be decided, it makes all the more clear the need for permanent, consistent, and institutionalized scientific integrity policies.

The slow but real progress of scientific integrity policies

Coordinating the interests of agencies with diverse functions and management structures, the scientific community, the labor unions that represent federal science workers, and outside interest groups to produce a unified set of policies in every federal agency is a daunting task. But notwithstanding some criticism leveled at the process, the Office of Science and Technology Policy did offer a chance for the public to give input on what the guidelines should include and further encouraged the agencies to invite public comments on their draft policies. The Department of the Interior quickly released a draft policy for the public to comment on and soon after, the National Science Foundation, National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, and National Institute of Standards and Technology all followed.

Under the hot lights of subsiding scandals without resolution, concerned citizens were drawn to the idea that science could be used as a guide for smart policy and not as a political cudgel. And though the process has been messy, the task was immense. It has been made no easier by a political environment in which the very idea of scientific integrity itself has been co-opted by those who wish to promote an ideological agenda or make money through the exploitation of science. For instance, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA)—who chairs the subcommittee on investigation for the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology—used the slow pace of the initial process to send politically fueled letters to the Office of Science and Technology Policy asking for progress updates while awkwardly attempting to link the Obama administration to “climate gate.” In one of the letters, Rep. Broun “commend[ed] the President for taking proactive steps to ensure scientific integrity and transparency in the government,” but then went on to inappropriately link Obama administration policies with the hacked emails stolen from climate scientists in the United Kingdom.

Ultimately, though progress has been slow, history will judge the scientific integrity policies, not by the speed with which they were developed but by their quality and the lasting impact that they make. As of this writing, nearly every agency has publicly released finalized scientific integrity policies using the guidelines developed at the White House.

As President Obama declared more than three years ago, “It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda—and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

With the important role science plays in so many public policy decisions, keeping the scientific process above the fray is important. Considering the seeming ease with which science or scientists can be enveloped in conspiracy and the relative difficulty in undoing disinformation or damage wrought by kneejerk reactions, stakes for strong scientific integrity policies have never been higher.

Jason Thomas is an Intern with Science Progress and will be attending the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona in the fall. Image courtesy Michael Stebbins/SEforA.org.

Marian was one of many young women to attend the science fair, where young scientists of both genders showed off their science and engineering projects to President Barack Obama and members of the White House staff. This past Tuesday, the White House Council on Women and Girls released a video highlighting the young female scientists’ projects at an event featuring accomplished female science leaders. The event and video are small examples of the Obama administration’s continued support for the advancement of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, careers.

As President Obama said in remarks at the event, America “belong[s] at the cutting edge of innovation,” and innovation in science, engineering, and technology has been a historical driver of our nation’s economic success. It’s therefore critical to address the gender gap in STEM jobs, not only to advance equality and provide more career opportunities for women but also to maintain our competitive advantage with other countries in an increasingly globalized world. If half of American students feel discouraged from entering STEM careers, then economic competiveness becomes a whole lot harder. As the White House stated in a press release, “increasing the number of women engaged in … (STEM) fields is critical to our Nation’s ability to out-build, out-educate, and out-innovate future competitors.” Marian’s project is a prime example.

Public support for women in STEM careers is particularly important in light of a recent report showing that the timeline for STEM career advancement often harshly conflicts with women’s family goals. Early career advancements that are crucial for later success often take place when scientists are in their late 20s and early 30s, a time when many women are seeking to start their families. Generally, women’s disproportionate role in family caregiving puts them at a disadvantage compared to their male colleagues. As we noted in an earlier post, this leads to “smaller salaries and lab spaces on average, scanter resources, and stunted advancement through the STEM career pipeline.”

While women in STEM fields earn 33 percent more than their female counterparts in non-STEM careers, the lack of workplace flexibility remains a major barrier to women’s entrance and advancement in the field. To build upon their support of STEM women and ensure America’s continued global competitiveness in science and technology, the Obama administration must advocate for policies that allow women to balance their career goals with their family lives.

The emerging clean energy economy market is an excellent place for the Obama administration to push for flexible, family-friendly policies. As the Center for American Progress reported earlier, the Clean Energy Education and Empowerment initiative—of which the United States, Australia, Denmark, Mexico, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom are members—seeks to “encourage women to join clean energy disciplines” through a variety of means. This past week the initiative announced a new partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which will delve into the details of how the partnership would work. The joint MIT-Clean Energy Education and Empowerment program will sponsor senior female energy ambassadors, create awards to recognize female leadership and innovation in clean energy, and host a symposium at MIT in September. Hopefully, this initiative can be a model for ways to support and advance women’s careers in STEM professions and help keep the United States on the cutting edge of the global innovation economy.

Alexandra Scheeler is the Special Assistant for K-12 Education Policy at American Progress.

What lesson can be gleaned from these seemingly disparate story lines? One is this: science is asking more precise questions but the answers are harder to get.

A core concept of the Enlightenment was that the more that reasoning is based on experimentation the more we can learn about the world. Manipulation of variables, recommended in the 17th century by Francis Bacon, proved to be a turning point in the history of science. By uncovering previously invisible truths and giving human beings novel and effective ways to manage their environment, the scientific method gave the idea of progress a whole new meaning. Until then it wasn’t at all clear that civilization wasn’t in some kind of steady state, or even that we weren’t in decline from some “golden age.” But it turned out that the golden age was still ahead of us, if we were smart enough to invest in it and wise enough not to misuse the knowledge being gained.

By the late 19th century, some philosophers theorized that, given enough time and money, the scientific community would be able to come up with a unified system of knowledge of the whole of reality. That end point may never actually come, of course, but it was the product of a thought experiment about the demonstrated power of actual experiments, a kind of ideal terminus of knowledge. Certainly the Darwinian revolution gave reason to believe this could be done in the biological world, and even today physicists are aiming for a unified theory of the cosmos.

But what we seem to be discovering is that, as we dig into the weeds of the nature of reality, reality is ever more stubborn about giving up its secrets. Nowhere is this recalcitrance more apparent than in genetics and neuroscience. The more we’ve learned about the human genome the more important proteins have turned out to be, and the more we’ve learned about brain cells the more we’ve realized how important the connections between brain cells are (something the philosopher and psychologist William James told us in 1890!).

In a way, we’ve already plucked much of the low-hanging fruit. Though it took tens of thousands of years to get on track, once we got there, we learned fast. How low-hanging the fruit of new knowledge is depends in part on how we approach it. We seem to be in a transitional period from a marvelously rich era of discovery in the last 30 years to an era in which new concepts and methods will be required to gain access to another range of powerful discoveries.

However, this transitional period is frustrating. Just to take the case of neurological disorders like autism, it’s quite clear that like cancer the conditions brought under that large rubric have diverse biological roots. A couple of years ago a well-known geneticist told me that he is sure Asperger’s Syndrome is genetically quite distinct from the spectrum of autism disorders, for example. So, again, it’s often the case that the next step gets harder and more expensive. At the same time, the external variables that can cause multiple genetic switches to be turned on and off are so numerous, subtle and hard to control that few disease risks can be confidently predicted. Even “designer babies” wouldn’t change that.

Now we come to the heart of the problem: the basic science is more promising than ever but the opportunities to monetize the value of that science are, for the moment at least, fewer than they were even 20 years ago. The headwinds into which investors must now sail are not simply due to easy answers like “over regulation” but reflect the nature of the science waiting to be done. America is out of the new supercollider business. The pharmaceutical pipeline is running dry, and especially in neurological disease the big players are leaving the field.

All is not lost. Government agencies like the National Institutes of Health are developing new models for data collection and empirical studies. Regulatory reforms are in process. Industry is looking to smaller and more flexible corporate arrangements. Gradually, drug testing will be liberated from the limitations of animal models by more in vitro processes, analytical devices will be improved and more powerful computers will develop superior algorithms.

But in an increasingly competitive international science marketplace, who will take the lead? For the United States’ future in medical research, this set of factors calls on a virtue that is not prominent in the American character: patience. Our famous “can do” attitude has tended to devolve to a “do it now” culture. Investors and corporate boards have come to expect annual, semi-annual, or even quarterly rewards. The political system—and perhaps crucially the national security science establishment—will have to play a key role in providing leadership and incentives to keep this country in the front ranks of discovery. As the nation that can most readily lay claim to be the child of the Enlightenment, this will be an especially provocative challenge.

And the answer is “both.” If we try.

Jonathan D. Moreno is a the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics at The University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., and the editor-in-chief of Science Progress.This article was republished from Psychology Today with permission of the author.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA, has asked for comments on what issues should be addressed through a privacy multistakeholder process. Based on my experience in privacy law and policy, I believe an early and prominent candidate should be the definition of what counts as “de-identified” information. As discussed below this topic has multiple advantages, including heightened protection for consumers, positive effects on innovation and the broader economy, and likelihood of concrete, enforceable success for the process itself.

These comments provide background for the discussion and then explain the importance of the topic of de-identified data. The comments explain how the recent Federal Trade Commission privacy report provides a new and useful set of proposals for how to handle de-identified data, and concludes with an analysis of why the topic of de-identified data is a good candidate for early consideration in a multistakeholder process.

Background

As background for these comments, I am the C. William O’Neill Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law of the Ohio State University, and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Future of Privacy Forum. Under President Bill Clinton I served as chief counselor for privacy in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Under President Barack Obama I was special assistant to the president for economic policy in 2009 and 2010. Further information is available at www.peterswire.net.

This February the administration issued its white paper, “Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World: A Framework for Protecting Privacy and Promoting Innovation in the Global Digital Economy.” This privacy framework defined a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. To implement this bill of rights, the framework called on the Department of Commerce to foster the development of enforceable codes of conduct for consumer privacy. These codes of conduct will be developed through multistakeholder processes, so that the range of relevant stakeholders can convene and develop codes of conduct even in the absence of binding legislation or regulation. Consumer privacy legislation has been difficult to enact in the United States, so consumer protection will advance more quickly through initiatives, such as the multistakeholder process, that do not depend on passage of such legislation.

Along with the administration’s framework, the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, has continued its vital role in U.S. privacy policy and enforcement. On March 26, 2012, the FTC issued “Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: Recommendations for Businesses and Policymakers.” This report reflected intensive FTC efforts on a wide range of privacy topics. The comments here, building on a short previous statement, focus on the FTC’s recommendations about how to approach the important issue of de-identified data.

The importance of de-identified data

The title of the administration’s white paper reflects two principal goals for policy concerning the data of individual consumers: “A Framework for Protecting Privacy and Promoting Innovation.” This title reflects the risks to individuals if privacy is not protected effectively. It also reflects the importance of creating good information rules in order to foster innovation and growth in our information economy.

The issue of de-identified data creates a vital opportunity to meet both goals—use data for innovation and growth while also protecting privacy. At least in theory, de-identified data allows us to have our cake and eat it, too. With de-identified data, we strip out the name and other information that reveals identity, but we nonetheless can process the data, do research, discover patterns, and innovate in how we respond to the information.

In any statute or other legal obligation, such as a company’s enforceable promise to protect privacy, the most important definition is what counts as covered by the law or obligation. Defining what counts as “de-identified” is crucial because it draws the line between what data is covered by privacy protections (still “identified”) and what data is not (“de-identified”).

In U.S. law de-identified data was first defined as part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, medical privacy rule drafted in the late 1990s. I was very involved in drafting the proposed and final HIPAA rule and paid particular attention to defining what counted as “de-identified.” In HIPAA “identified” data is considered personal health information, subject to the full range of privacy protections. If the data is scrubbed hard enough, however, then it becomes de-identified data and no longer subject to the regulatory requirements.

The final HIPAA medical privacy rule provided two ways to show that data was de-identified. First, the holder of the data could remove a list of at least 17 data fields that could identify a person, such as name, address, or Social Security number. Second, a statistical expert could certify that the risk is very small that the information could be used, alone or in combination with other reasonable available information, to re-identify the individual. Since HIPAA went into effect nearly a decade ago, health care entities have been able to publicly release health data if it has been scrubbed well enough to meet the regulatory requirements for de-identification.

Finding a Goldilocks solution for de-identified data

Since the HIPAA de-identification provisions were proposed in 1999, we have learned a lot about when and how it is possible to “re-identify” data—to link a person’s name with the supposedly de-identified data. Two big trends have made it harder to keep information de-identified. First, search on the Web has gotten much better. Google was not incorporated until 1998, and today’s search engines let anyone link together tidbits from previously hard-to-link data sources. Second, the amount of information on the Web about a typical person has grown astronomically, including all of the personal details on a person’s blog or Facebook page.

The combination of efficient search tools and lots of data means that there is a higher likelihood today that a person’s medical or other records can be re-identified even if the name and other traditional identifiers are deleted. For instance, the de-identified medical record might state that a person in Ohio had minor hand surgery on April 3. In the past, it would have been difficult or impossible for an outsider to figure out the name. Today, online search might turn up a social network thread about the hand surgery—there are multiple such surgeries in Ohio each day, but not that many. A bit of follow-up research, using the rest of the supposedly de-identified information, might easily pinpoint the person who had the surgery.

As academics have analyzed these facts about re-identification, some have concluded that the entire effort to de-identify data has failed, because of the risk of linking information back to the individual. Others have emphasized the limited actual success of re-identification efforts in practice, and found that the benefits to research and innovation are so great that they outweigh the privacy risks.

The preliminary FTC report, issued in 2010, received strong criticisms from both of these perspectives. The earlier report would have applied privacy protections to “consumer data that can be reasonably linked to a specific consumer, computer, or other device.” The debate centered on what the FTC meant by “reasonably linked.” Consumer groups correctly emphasized that it is easier now to search on the Web and re-identify data, at risk to privacy. Researchers and other users of data focused on the problems that come with an over-broad definition of “reasonably linked,” which could extend privacy rules to an almost unlimited range of data processing, if enough effort is put into tracking down and re-identifying data.

Responding to these critiques, the FTC looked at the technical de-identification issues, and found what I believe is a Goldilocks solution for the problem of de-identified data. The FTC provides what amounts to a safe harbor where: “(1) a given data set is not reasonably identifiable; (2) the company publicly commits not to re-identify it, and (3) the company requires any downstream users of the data to keep it in de-identified form.”

The FTC approach responds to the technical experts who correctly say that it is easier today to find data on the Web that helps us re-identify data. To address the privacy concerns the FTC approach first requires a company to make a data set reasonably de-identified. We can think of this as “good but not foolproof de-identification.” Then, in addition, the FTC requires administrative protections. The company has to commit publicly that it won’t re-identify the data. The company also has to get similar promises from anybody downstream who receives the data. These promises are enforceable because Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits deceptive practices, such as broken privacy promises. Privacy is protected through the combination of technical measures, having reasonably de-identified data, and backup administrative measures, so that the only people who receive the data have made binding promises not to re-identify.

The FTC approach also responds to those who want to study data for research, innovation, and related purposes. Data must be scrubbed pretty hard but not incredibly hard—the dataset need merely not be “reasonably identifiable.” That data should still often be detailed enough to be useful for a variety of purposes, protected by the enforceable promises not to re-identify.

I have long believed that technical controls alone are not enough to protect consumers against possible re-identification, as shown in a 2009 report by the Center for Democracy and Technology and my December talk on de-identified data. The best path is to have reasonably strong technical protections, supplemented by the sorts of enforceable promises that the FTC report supports.

You can read more about why defining de-identified data is a good fit for the multistakeholder process in the full comments at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Peter Swire is the C. William O’Neill Professor of Law at Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University, and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Further reading

Neither the state board of education, nor any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or any public elementary or secondary school principal or administrator shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.

Although the bill is written to seem benign, as it neither specifically authorizes the teaching of creationism nor permits teachers to do more than criticize scientific theories “in an objective matter,” the practical impact of this bill will be to intimidate all but the heartiest of school administrators against disciplining teachers who preach the most outlandish junk science in their classrooms. Because the bill provides little guidance as to what constitutes an “objective” criticism of a scientific theory, any principal who reigns in teachers who force creationism or Pastafarianism upon their students risks finding themselves on the wrong side of the law.

In reality, of course, there are few, if any, “objectively” valid objections to the theory of evolution (or, for that matter, to global warming). Rather, as Travis Waldron explained when this bill passed a legislative committee nearly a year ago, “Scientists have reached a consensus that evolution is ‘one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science,’ and as such, it is ‘a core element in science education.’”

This post was originally published at Think Progress.

The findings of a recent survey confirm the argument of my book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, that America has entered a new and unprecedented era of politicized science. University of North Carolina health services researcher Gordon Gauchat has found that trust in science among American conservatives has plummeted since 1974. The issues that divide us are familiar. Among them are planetary and human origins, climate change and the remarkable advances of the new biology.

Importantly, Gauchat found that the lost confidence is found not only among self-identified conservatives with less education, but among “high information” conservatives as well. This result undermines the notion that the more people know about science, the more they trust its conclusions. In fact, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown, people tend to select data that support their prior belief preferences. In his survey Gauchat found that more sophisticated conservatives appreciated the threats to their values posed by science (e.g., intensified government regulation) more than those who were less educated.

As Gauchat observes, if this trend persists the implications for science institutions could be dire. Both public funding of basic research and the use of evidence in policymaking are threatened by politicized science. Citing Chris Mooney‘s theory that the change in public attitudes began in the Reagan era and intensified under George W. Bush, Gauchat observes that until then most people identified science with the space race and moon landing, triumphs that gave science great cultural authority across the ideological spectrum. Indeed, as I’ve argued, historically American science policy has been closely aligned with the civic narrative of progress and the pushing back of frontiers: where Americans saw new worlds to conquer they’ve been enthusiastic about pioneering technologies: the telegraph, transcontinental railroad, telephone, vaccines, organ transplants, information technologies and spacecraft.

The obituary of the American frontier has been prematurely written before, starting at least with Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” of 1893. But with the close of the continent, the rise of China, and the uncertain future of space exploration it is hard to see where the next American frontier will lie. Well-intended but unsexy abstractions drawing on the “Sputnik” analogy, like energy independence, have not gotten modern Americans’ blood flowing.

And as science has become specialized it is harder to find an Edison or a Salk who inspires with a personal story. Post-Vietnam America allows for little heroic mythologizing, even of revered technology leaders like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

To make matters worse, in recent decades “experts” have come to be seen (and in fact often are) in charge of public policy. This is partly a result of the fact that modern society is so complicated and so dependent on science-based technologies that expertise is required to run them as never before. But conservatives who worry about threats to traditional values and encroaching government harbor doubts about the motivations and moral compass of scientists. Gauchat’s results square with those of the sociologist John Evans, who finds that it is not science in general or even the scientific method that is the ultimate object of mistrust, but rather scientists themselves.

The grounds for mistrust of science are found in the DNA of the Enlightenment itself. Francis Bacon is often credited as the first to articulate the modern idea of science, distinguishing between basic and applied research. In Bacon’s 17th century utopian tale The New Atlantis, the governors of Bensalem are scientists. But, as one of them explains to the shipwrecked visitors, not all of their knowledge is generally shared: “And this we do also: we have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not; and take all an oath of secrecy for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret; though some of those we do reveal sometime to the State, and some not.”

What is to be done? One answer is to change the conversation. The focus needs to be placed on what Bacon referred to as the fruits of science that can help achieve Enlightenment goals of human flourishing, the same goals that the American founders saw as keys to the prosperity of the new nation.

Another answer is to emphasize the activities of scientists that are publicly observable, concrete and transparent, activities that are often under the heading of engineering. This answer argues that, instead of looking to the space program as an analogy, we should focus on the modern version of the program itself. A manned Mars landing is controversial among many progressives and is far more difficult to achieve in every sense than many of us used to believe, but the implications of such a national commitment may redeem scientists themselves in all sorts of secondary ways.

As is well known, funding for NASA’s manned Mars mission has taken a hit in the 2012 budget. In truth, I have not been an advocate of a human mission. The risks to a human crew are (pun intended) astronomical and the benefits to scientific knowledge modest compared to a robotic mission. But there are some experiments that machines alone probably can’t do. And for a unified sense of national purpose, especially rescuing the public profile of scientists, there may be no other solution.

Of course, the financial obstacles are also extreme, especially in the current fiscal environment, when there are so many pressing human needs back on Earth. But for the future of America’s commitment to science, one that will eventually lift all boats, the manned Mars mission might appeal to another traditional American principle: pragmatism.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. This article is cross-posted in the Huffington Post.

National security organizations in the United States, including the armed services and the intelligence community, have developed a close relationship with the scientific establishment. The latest technology often fuels warfighting and counter-intelligence capacities, providing the tactical advantages thought necessary to maintain geopolitical dominance and national security. Neuroscience has emerged as a prominent focus within this milieu, annually receiving hundreds of millions of Department of Defense dollars. Its role in national security operations raises ethical issues that need to be addressed to ensure the pragmatic synthesis of ethical accountability and national security.

Introduction

During the past decade, the US national security establishment has come to see neuroscience as a promising and integral component of its 21st century needs. Much neuroscience is “dual use” research, asking questions and developing technologies that are of both military and civilian interest. Historically, dual use has often involved a trickle down of military technology into civilian hands. The Internet, for example, originated as a non-local, distributed means to secure military information. In the case of neuroscience, however, civilian research has outpaced that of the military. Both National Research Council (NRC) reports and Department of Defense (DoD) funding reveal ongoing national security interests in neuroscience and indicate that the military is quite eager to glean what it can from the emerging science [1],[2]. To pursue cognitive neuroscience research, the Pentagon’s science agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), received about US$240 million for the fiscal year of 2011, while the Army trails at US$55 million, the Navy at US$34 million, and the Air Force at US$24 million [3].

The military establishment’s interest in understanding, developing, and exploiting neuroscience generates a tension in its relationship with science: the goals of national security and the goals of science may conflict. The latter employs rigorous standards of validation in the expansion of knowledge, while the former depends on the most promising deployable solutions for the defense of the nation. As a result, the exciting potential of high-tech developments on the horizon may be overhyped, misunderstood, or worse: they could be deployed before sufficiently validated.

Current state-of-the-art neuroscience, including new forms of brain scanning, brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), and neuromodulation, is being tapped for warfighter enhancement, deception detection, and other cutting-edge military applications to serve national security interests.

Brain-computer interface

BCIs exemplify the dual use nature of neuroscience applications. BCIs convert neural activity into input for technological mechanisms, from communication devices to prosthetics. The military’s interests in BCIs are manifold, including treatment modalities, augmented systems for controlling vehicles, and assistance for detecting danger on the battlefield.

In the late 1990s, scientists demonstrated neurological control of the movement of a simple device in rats, and soon thereafter, of a robotic arm in monkeys [4]. More recently, a pilot study of BrainGate technology, an intracortical microelectrode array implanted in human subjects, confirmed 1,000 days of continuous, successful neurological control of a mouse cursor [5]. Non-invasive technologies for harnessing brain activity also show promise for human use. Progress has recently been reported on a “dry” EEG cap that does not require a gel to obtain sufficient data from the brain. The “brain cap” is reported to reconstruct movements of humans’ ankle, knee, and hip joints during treadmill walking in order to aid rehabilitation [6].

DARPA’s Augmented Cognition (AugCog) program sought to find ways to use neurological information gathered from warfighters to modify their equipment accordingly. For example, the “cognitive cockpit” concept involved recording a pilot’s brain activity to customize the cockpit to that individual’s needs in real time, from selecting the least burdened sensory organ for communicating information to prioritizing informational needs and eliminating distractions [7]. Although the Augmented Cognition moniker (and funding mechanism) seem to have been dropped, its spirit lives on in other DARPA projects. For example, the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System is developing portable binoculars that convert subconscious, neurological responses to danger into consciously available information [8]. Such a system could reduce the information-processing burden on warfighters, helping them to identify and respond to areas of interest in the visual field more quickly.

Via intracortical microstimulation (ICMS), a neurologically controlled prosthetic could send tactile information back to the brain in nearly real time, essentially creating a “brain-machine-brain interface” [9]. The technology underlying this concept is already evolving, and some researchers hope that optogenetics, which both enables “precise, millisecond control of specific neurons” and “eliminates most of the key problems with ICMS,” will ultimately supplant the ICMS for sensory feedback [9]. In addition to devising prosthetics that can supply sensory information to the brain, brain-machine-brain interfaces may directly modify neurological activity. Portable technologies like near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), for example, could detect deficiencies in a warfighter’s neurological processes and feed that information into a device utilizing in-helmet or in-vehicle transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to suppress or enhance individual brain functions [2].

Much of the technological evolution of warfare has introduced a distance between the parties involved. From the advent of firearms to airplanes, aerial bombs to remotely operated drones, the visceral reality of combat afforded by the physical proximity to one’s enemy has steadily eroded. In 2007, researchers taught a monkey to neurologically control a walking robot on the other side of the world by means of electrochemical measurements of motor cortical activity [9]. Considering this in light of the work on robotic tactile feedback, it is easy to imagine a new phase of warfare in which ground troops become obsolete.

Warfighter enhancement

The therapeutic paradigm of medical practice aims to heal and reduce suffering, to return the ill to a state of normal health. Yet, many interventions can be used by the healthy to enhance specific traits or capacities beyond the physiological or statistical norm [10]. For example, BCIs can operate prosthetics for therapeutic purposes, but they could also connect to orthotic exoskeletons that enhance strength and endurance. Similarly, therapeutic drugs like methylphenidate can help patients recover focus and attention, but they are also used, for example, by healthy college students looking to maximize academic performance [11]. Whether they do in fact improve performance is open to disagreement [11],[12]. Military pharmaceutical neuroenhancement came to the public’s attention in 2003 when “two American pilots accidentally killed four Canadian soldiers and injured eight others in Afghanistan” [13]. It turned out that the pilots had been taking Dexedrine, the amphetamine-based “go pills” often used to reduce the fatigue induced by long missions.

In 2008, a report for the US Army compared the effects of amphetamines with those of modafinil, a drug typically used and approved to treat narcolepsy, in combination with sleep-aiding drugs. Despite the controversy over “go pills”, the study found that for long-duration missions, both amphetamines and modafinil have statistically similar effects of reducing the cognitive decline associated with fatigue [14]. Other reports state that modafinil significantly outperforms methylphenidate for cognitive enhancement in healthy individuals, “especially on people undergoing sleep deprivation” [15]. Related research has investigated other ways to combat fatigue as well. Published in 2007, a DARPA-sponsored study showed that nasally administered orexin-A, a neuropeptide, restored the short-term memory of sleep-deprived monkeys [16].

In its 2009 report for the US Army, the NRC recommends that TMS should also be a part of further research on central nervous system fatigue [2]. Studies suggest that TMS can enhance a variety of neurological functions in healthy individuals, from mood and social cognition to working memory and learning [17]. Another noninvasive neuromodulation technology, transcranial pulsed ultrasound, was demonstrated to have a number of promising effects, from being “useful for sonoporation in gene therapy” to “promoting nerve regeneration” [18]. With the aid of both DARPA and US Army funding, researchers envision and work toward developing portable, in-helmet ultrasound transducers capable of stimulating neural circuits with a better precision and depth than TMS [19]. Direct current polarization, or transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), is another noninvasive, DARPA-supported technology for neuromodulation. “As might be expected, TDCS can enhance cognitive processes occurring in targeted brain areas” [20], including learning and memory [17].

While cognitive augmentation will enhance performance on some tasks, other situations call for the reduction of neurological capacity. For example, if a memory of a traumatic event could be dampened, one may be less likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result. In 2002, scientists produced preliminary evidence that propranolol, when administered shortly after a traumatic event, could mitigate the long-term potential for internal cues to invoke post-traumatic stress [21]. More recently, scientists demonstrated that propranolol can similarly reduce PTSD symptoms when administered “after retrieval of the memory of a past traumatic event”, not just immediately after the event itself [22].

Human enhancement may benefit individuals and society in myriad ways, but it also poses many risks. In the civilian world, if more and more people begin enhancing their minds and bodies, individuals may eventually feel subtly coerced into enhancing themselves in order to remain competitive in school or the workplace [10]. In the military context, the risk of coercion is much more pronounced [13]:

According to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, soldiers are required to accept medical interventions that make them fit for duty. Experimental treatments are a harder case, but the US government has shown a tendency to defer to commanders in a combat situation if they think some treatment is likely to do more harm than good, even if unproven.

If a warfighter is allowed no autonomous freedom to accept or decline an enhancement intervention, and the intervention in question is as invasive as remote brain control, then the ethical implications are immense. As Peter W. Singer has observed, “the Pentagon’s real-world record with things like the aboveground testing of atomic bombs, Agent Orange, and Gulf War syndrome certainly doesn’t inspire the greatest confidence among the first generation of soldiers involved [in human enhancement]” [23].

Neuroscientific deception, detection, and interrogation

National security agencies are also mining neuroscience for ways to advance interrogation methods and the detection of deception. The increasing sophistication of brain-reading neurotechnologies has led many to investigate their potential applications for lie detection. Deception has long been associated with empirically measurable correlates, arguably originating nearly a century ago with research into blood pressure [24]. Yet blood pressure, among other modern bases for polygraphy like heart and breathing rates, indicates the presence of a proxy for deception: stress. Although the polygraph performs better than chance, it does not reliably and accurately indicate the presence of deception, and it is susceptible to counter measures. Because of these problems with the polygraph, researchers are eagerly following up on preliminary successes in using new neurotechnological modalities for detecting deception.

“Brain fingerprinting” utilizes EEG to detect the P300 wave, an event-related potential (ERP) associated with the perception of a recognized, meaningful stimulus, and it is thought to hold potential for confirming the presence of “concealed information” [25]. The technology is marketed for a number of uses: “national security, medical diagnostics, advertising, insurance fraud and in the criminal justice system” [26]. Similarly, fMRI-based lie detection services are currently offered by several companies, including No Lie MRI [27] and Cephos [28]. DARPA funded the pioneering research that showed how deception involves a more complex array of neurological processes than truth-telling, and that fMRI arguably can detect the difference between the two [29]. No Lie MRI also has ties to national security: they market their services to the DoD, Department of Homeland Security, and the intelligence community, among other potential customers [30].

The Defense Intelligency Agency (DIA)-commissioned 2008 NRC report, Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies, in which one of the present authors (JDM) participated, reiterates the conclusion of a 2003 NRC report [31] that “traditional measures of deception detection technology have proven to be insufficiently accurate” [1]. While the NRC ultimately recommends pursuing “research on multimodal methodological approaches for detecting and measuring neurophysiological indicators of psychological states and intentions”, it cautions that like traditional polygraphy, neurological measurements do not directly reveal psychological states [1]. In fact, many scholars and scientists dispute the validity of brain scan-based lie detection [24],[32].

In addition to questions of scientific validity, these technologies raise legal and ethical issues. Legally required brain scans arguably violate “the guarantee against self-incrimination” because they differ from acceptable forms of bodily evidence, such as fingerprints or blood samples, in an important way: they are not simply physical, hard evidence, but evidence that is intimately linked to the defendant’s mind [32]. Under US law, brain-scanning technologies might also raise implications for the Fourth Amendment, calling into question whether they constitute an unreasonable search and seizure [33].

Another neuroscientific field stimulating national security interest pertains to the hormone oxytocin, which has been shown to augment the expression of various virtues, from “trust and trustworthiness” to “generosity and sacrifice” [34]. Without elaborating, the NRC’s 2008 report specifies oxytocin as a “neuropeptide of interest” [1]. If the interest in question relates to pharmacologically incapacitating the psychological defenses of interrogation suspects, this may conflict with the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). According to the CWC, a chemical that can cause “temporary incapacitation” is defined as a “toxic chemical” and is therefore banned from such use [35]. Beyond this ethical concern, oxytocin is far from being confirmed as a truth serum, and without further verification it should not be treated as such. The history of research on finding the ultimate truth serum is long and storied. Suffice it to say, “[T]he urban myth of the drugged detainee imparting pristine nuggets of intelligence is firmly rooted and hard to dispel” [36].

Recommendations

This paper has detailed the national security establishment’s interest in and ability to fund a panoply of diverse neuroscientific studies. It has also reviewed the ethical, legal, and social issues that emerge from this relationship. Yet, discussions in themselves will not ensure that the translation of basic science into deployed product will proceed ethically or contribute to the greater good. These considerations must be embedded and explored at various levels in society: upstream in the minds and goals of scientists, downstream in the creation of advisory bodies, and broadly in the public at large.

Although they may receive funding from national security agencies, neuroscientists may not consider how their work contributes to warfare. As we have seen, however, neuroscience does, and will continue to, play a role in military operations. This fact spawns a plenitude of ethical concerns, from which one may surmise that the sciences should divorce themselves from the military completely. However, the fact that the material explored in this paper is public information speaks to the possibility that a discussion about the role and limits of neuroscience in national security may be open and transparent. Bifurcating public science from national security may only drive the same research underground, undermining its current public accountability [13]. Thus, it would be impractical to try to circumvent the ethical problems simply by cutting ties between science and national defense.

Many would agree with George Mason University anthropologist Hugh Gusterson that “[m]ost rational human beings would believe that if we could have a world where nobody does military neuroscience, we’ll all be better off. But for some people in the Pentagon, it’s too delicious to ignore” [37]. In any case, as we have suggested, the dual use possibilities for neuroscience render such a world unlikely. Therefore, scientists themselves could become more aware of the dual use phenomenon, whether their work is specifically funded by national security bodies or not, in order to create a more self-conscious scientific enterprise. They could also involve themselves in constructing the parameters to guide and govern their relationships with national security agencies. Just as many nuclear scientists opposed the development of atomic weapons, contributing to the test-ban treaties of the 1960s and the drawdown of armed missiles in the 1980s [13], neuroscientists could consider and promulgate their perspectives on the military implications and ethical issues associated with their work.

This article was originally published in PloSBiology, and should be cited as “Tennison MN , Moreno JD (2012) Neuroscience, Ethics, and National Security: The State of the Art. PLoS Biol 10(3): e1001289. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001289″

Endnotes

1. Committee on Military and Intelligence Methodology for Emergent Neurophysiological and Cognitive/Neural Research in the Next Two Decades, National Research Council of the National Academies (2008) Emerging cognitive neuroscience and related technologies. Washington (D.C.): National Academies Press. 214 p.
2. Committee on Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications, National Research Council of the National Academies (2009) Opportunities in neuroscience for future army applications. Washington (D.C.): National Academies Press. 136 p.
3. Kosal M. E, Huang J. Y (2011) Security implications of cognitive neuroscience research: Results from an ethnographic survey of researchers. Brain Waves Module 3: Neuroscience, conflict and security. London: The Royal Society.
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5. Simeral J. D, Kim S. P, Black M. J, Donoghue J. P, Hochberg L. R (2011) Neural control of cursor trajectory and click by a human with tetraplegia 1000 days after implant of an intracortical microelectrode array. J Neural Eng 8: 1–24. Find this article online
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10. President’s Council on Bioethics (2003) Beyond therapy: biotechnology and the pursuit of happiness. New York: Regan Books. 328 p.
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13,.Moreno J. D (2006) Mind wars: brain research and national defense. New York/Washington (D.C.): Dana Press. 210 p.
14. Storm W. F (2008) A fatigue management system for sustained military operations. 104 p.
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16. Deadwyler S. A, Porrino L, Siegel J. M, Hampson R. E (2007) Systemic and nasal delivery of orexin-A (Hypocretin-1) reduces the effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance in nonhuman primates. J Neurosci 27(52): 14239–14247. Find this article online
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20. Ukueberuwa D, Wassermann E. M (2010) Direct current brain polarization: A simple, noninvasive technique for human neuromodulation. Neuromodulation 13(3): 168–173. Find this article online
21. Pitman R. K, Sanders K. M, Zusman R. M, Healy A. R, Cheema F, et al. (2002) Pilot study of secondary prevention of posttraumatic stress disorder with propranolol. Biol Psychiatry 51(2): 189–192. Find this article online
22. Brunet A, Orr S. P, Tremblay J, Robertson K, Nader K, et al. (2008) Effect of post-retrieval propranolol on psychophysiologic responding during subsequent script-driven traumatic imagery in post-traumatic stress disorder. J Psychiat Res 42(6): 503–506. Find this article online
23. Singer P. W (2009) Wired for war: The robotics revolution and conflict in the 21^st century. New York: Penguin Group. 512 p.
24. Greely H. T, Illes J (2007) Neuroscience-based lie detection: The urgent need for regulation. Am J Law Med 33: 377–431. Find this article online
25. Ganis G, Rosenfeld J. P (2011) Neural correlates of deception. In: Illes J, Sahakian B. J, editors. The Oxford handbook of neuroethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 101–117.
26. Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories (n.d.) Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories executive summary. Available: http://www.brainwavescience.com/ExecutiveSummary.php. Accessed 13 January 2012.
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29. Langleben D. D, Loughead J. W, Bilker W. B, Ruparel K, Childress A. R, et al. (2005) Telling truth from lie in individual subjects with fast event-related fMRI. Hum Brain Mapp 26: 262–272. Find this article online
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31. Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph, Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences and Committee on National Statistics, National Research Council of the National Academies (2003) The polygraph and lie detection. Washington (D.C.): National Academies Press. 416 p.
32. Farrell B (2010) Can’t get you out of my head: the human rights implications of using brain scans as criminal evidence. Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Rights Law 4(1): 89–95. Find this article online
33. Greely H. T (2006) The social effects of advances in neuroscience: legal problems, legal perspectives. In: Illes J, editor. Neuroethics: defining the issues in theory, practice, and policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 245–263.
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35.Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (1997) Chemical Weapons Convention, article II: definitions and criteria. Available: http://www.opcw.org/chemical-weapons-convention/articles/article-ii-definitions-and-criteria/. Accessed 7 August 2011.
36. Marks J. H (2007) Interrogational neuroimaging in counterterrorism: a no-brainer or a human rights hazard? Am J Law Med 33: 483–500. Find this article online
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 Science is giving us expectations
We want game-changin’ permutations
Science is giving us expectations
We want radical transformations
Good, good, good transformations …

You’re now in the frame of mind of many within the science policy community—the state of mind that sees the transformative potential of science and technology as having little or no downside.

Increasingly within our scientific institutions, mere incremental advance is no longer sufficient. Scientists are being asked to be more radical, more willing to take risks, and more disposed to push the frontiers of knowledge—to become, in a word, transformative.

The U.S. National Science Foundation, or NSF, is one of several agencies developing initiatives to promote so-called “transformative” research. For instance, in September 2007 NSF issued Important Notice No. 130, which announced a change to NSF’s Intellectual Merit review criterion effective January 5, 2008. Reviewers would now be asked, “To what extent does the proposed activity suggest and explore creative, original, or potentially transformative concepts?” (bold indicates addition of “potentially transformative” to the criterion).

This announcement followed the release of a document (often called “The Butterfly Report” from the image on its cover) in May 2007 that contained the following definition of the term:

Transformative research involves ideas, discoveries, or tools that radically change our understanding of an important existing scientific or engineering concept or educational practice or leads to the creation of a new paradigm or field of science, engineering, or education. Such research challenges current understanding or provides pathways to new frontiers.

Good, good, good transformations

This definition was not meant to define strict boundaries between “transformative research,” or TR, and all the rest.[i] In a January 4, 2007, talk, “Transformative Research: The Artistry and Alchemy of the 21st Century,” then-Director of NSF Ardent Bement, Jr. suggested it would often be easy to identify transformative research in hindsight, but that we would continue to discuss the meaning of the term “transformative”:

But we also can – and no doubt will – continue to quibble among ourselves about the meaning of “transformative research,” which as yet has no universally accepted definition. That is just as it should be. When concepts as complex as “transformative research” are still emerging, we need to practice a kind of “constructive ambiguity.” Doing so will give us the flexibility to incorporate new knowledge and fresh perspectives as they arise; in other words, leave room for discovery. In that way, we can make course corrections along the way, adapt to changing circumstances, and remain open to diverse suggestions about the issues.

In March 2012 the three of us led a two-day workshop at NSF Headquarters to once again raise the question of the meaning of “transformative research.” TR has come to encapsulate an increasingly central question across both U.S. and foreign science agencies: In a hypercompetitive global economy, with pressing challenges in many areas (energy, food, water, disease, etc.), how can we do a better job of picking research projects that are true game changers?

The workshop

Workshop participants included 25 career scientists, engineers, historians, philosophers, and science policy researchers. Former and current NSF officials also attended parts of the workshop. One of the first questions discussed was, “What is meant by the term?” Bement’s insight concerning the advantages of there being no universally accepted meaning only holds if NSF’s definition is not accepted as comprehensive. Accordingly, the workshop spent little time on establishing the “right” definition of the term. Instead, we focused on fleshing out alternative interpretations that would provide both NSF and NSF researchers with tools to harness the “constructive ambiguity” of TR and turn it to their advantage.

The workshop did, however, focus on whether transformative research truly existed except retrospectively. Is TR merely a useful moniker for Congress and the public to indicate extra effort, or is there a real phenomenon here that might be identified on the front end?

Another central concern was, “Why transform?” The argument in favor of TR is that it will help us deal with our many urgent problems, while assisting the U.S. economy in the global race for economic advantage. On the other hand, many people today are uncomfortable with change, feeling with some justification that the changes in economics and culture over the last 30 years have left them with the short end of the stick.

Central to all these discussions was the work of Thomas Kuhn. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argued that revolutions in science are spontaneous, radical breaks with the status quo that ultimately transform a field of study. But Kuhn assumed that most science consisted of incremental puzzle solving, which he called “normal” science. What happens if science is constantly revolutionary? Again, some suggested that transformative research was the result of incremental advances within the current structure of normal science. If so, then NSF’s emphasis on TR is redundant: Transformations naturally occur within scientific fields in the course of normal, or incremental, research.

NSF has committed to emphasizing the importance of funding basic research that contributes to societal benefits, such as quality of life, economic growth, and environmental health, through the Broader Impacts merit review criterion. Thus the workshop also asked, “What is the relationship between TR and broader impacts?” Peer review is arguably the proper tool to advance a policy of promoting transformative research, but participants also noted that review panels could present a significant barrier to funding transformative science.

If what NSF wants is to fund transformative research, then why use reviewers who are committed to the current state of the art to try to find it? Recalling some of the issues NSF has had with incorporating broader impacts considerations into its merit-review process, when it comes to reviewing potentially transformative research, it is natural to ask, “Who really counts as a peer?” Political considerations aside, given that so many of the world’s greatest scientific discoveries flew in the face of conventional wisdom, how can peer-review panelists tell when proposed research will be potentially transformative? Can we identify transformative characteristics up front? And if a researcher specifies that the proposed research might be transformative, can reviewers trust the label?

The conversations launched at the workshop are only beginning. A white paper is being authored now, and we have plans to create a volume of essays on the topic. This volume will not be targeted only at academic specialists, but also at a broader audience of those concerned with public funding of research. Overall, transformative research presents us all with another opportunity to make publically funded science more accountable.

J. Britt Holbrook is research assistant professor of philosophy and assistant director at the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity, or CSID, at the University of North Texas, or UNT. Robert Frodeman is professor of philosophy at UNT and director of CSID. Kelli Barr is a graduate student in the UNT department of philosophy and graduate research assistant at CSID.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support for this research provided by the NSF under grant No. 1129067, while emphasizing that any opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF or any of its employees.

Tina Swanson, in a NRDC Switchboard repost.

Imagine you’re sick and you go to the hospital seeking diagnosis and treatment from a doctor.  After taking your history, giving you a thorough examination and doing a huge number of expensive tests, your doctor determines that you are being sickened by pollution from an industrial complex, A**e Industries, located near to your home. But then, just as she is coming to tell you her results, your doctor is arrested, charged with attempting to report her diagnosis to you before she provides it, along with all her notes and test results, to A**e Industries.  A**e Industries also threatens to sue the hospital if they allow your doctor to reveal her results to you.  Sound outrageous or farfetched?  Then wait till you hear this…..

Earlier this year, lawyers representing the Mining Awareness Resource Group, which works on behalf of the mining industry, sent letters to a number of scientific journals, including Occupational and Environmental Medicine and The Annals of Occupational Hygiene, suggesting they “reconsider” publication of articles submitted by the National Cancer Institute or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health on the Diesel Exhaust in Miners Study in light of a court order issued by a U.S. federal district court.

This legal threat directed at peer-reviewed scientific journals, an unprecedented new low in the war on science, was just the most recent effort by the mining industry to derail and delay this $11.5 million publically-funded study of the relationship between exposure to high levels of diesel exhaust that occur in and around mines and lung cancer.  It began in mid-1990s, when the mining industry sued the Department of Health and Human Services, demanding industry representatives be included on scientific oversight committees for the study.

Congress got into the act in 1999, demanding to “review and approve” study results prior to publication, an overreach that a federal judge rejected, instead allowing the industry and the Congressional committee a 90-day pre-publication review.  Legal and procedural skirmishes still continue over the committee’s and the mining industry’s demands for ever more documents.  For a more complete description of this disturbing story, see these articles here, here, here and here.

The diesel study, launched 20 years ago, builds on numerous other studies that have suggested a link between diesel exhaust (which contains sooty particulate matter as well as hundreds of toxic chemicals) and lung cancer, including research that led California to list diesel exhaust as a known carcinogen more than a decade ago and this one on railroad workers published in 2004.  The diesel study was also expected to provide valuable new information to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and arm of the World Health Organization, when it officially reassesses the science linking diesel exhaust to cancer this coming June.

According to Dr. Kyle Steenland, professor at Emory University’s School of Public Health, the Diesel Exhaust in Miners Study is a “state of the art evaluation of diesel” that should provide “very important … information about whether diesel is a lung carcinogen.”  Dr. Steenland expressed the frustration of many scientists and public health officials when he said “It’s high time that the public and the scientific community get to see the results of this study.”

Last month, when I began researching and writing this post, that was where this story of science interference and suppression ended.  But last Friday the good news came: results of the study had been published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.  The journal article and accompanying editorial are publically available online.  Bottom line: the Diesel Exhaust in Miners Study showed that regular exposure to high concentrations of diesel exhaust significantly increases the likelihood of dying of lung cancer, with cancer rates as much as three- to sevenfold higher for the most heavily exposed miners compared to miners exposed to lower levels.  My colleague, Diane Bailey, provides a more complete description of the study’s results in her latest blog.

This case of stalling and suppressing scientific results is not an isolated incident—books have been written about this kind of stuff and the news is full of similar stories.[1] But many of us think that it’s getting worse and that it represents a growing threat to our health, our democracy and our planet.

Last month, Dr. Nina Federoff, outgoing president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science expressed her profound concern that the anti-science movement was spreading and that we were “sliding back into a dark era.”  What makes the diesel study story such a compelling and illuminating example of the war on science isn’t just that the assailants are so clearly identified (the mining industry) and their objective is so cynical and self-serving (preventing disclosure of facts about the effects of working conditions on the health of their own employees).  It is that it has escalated the war on science from distortion and denial to the use of legal threats to prevent publication of peer reviewed scientific results (which, in this case, the industry almost certainly already knew) and manipulation of Congress to support this kind of interference.

Science, like a medical diagnosis, is the use of observation, measurement and experimentation to answer questions and establish objective facts.  By design and application, it is transparent, characterized by the free flow and exchange of ideas, information and, because we scientists can’t help ourselves, more questions.  Neither scientists nor doctors always agree with each other—but it is the open and creative yet informed discussion that makes science such a powerful tool for learning, problem-solving and progress.

So the next time you hear a story like this, evaluate the background, evidence and the players.  And then ask yourself whether it makes sense to attack science—the messenger and the message—rather than the problem that science seeks to understand.

Tina Swanson is Director of the Science Center at the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard and republished at Climate Progress.

[1] To cite just two recently published examples, read Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, or Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, by Shawn Lawrence Otto, for an excellent analysis and description of this problem.

Until Rush Limbaugh came out calling a female Georgetown law student a “slut” for demanding coverage of birth control under her self-financed academic health care plan, very few media outlets were covering her story. As a third-year law student and vice president of the Women’s Legal Alliance, Sandra Fluke was supposed to testify on the importance of contraception in front of the House of Representatives’ Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing last month, but was blocked from making an appearance because committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) said she was not “qualified.” Apparently, the all-male panel of religious leaders was considered more appropriate.

All too often, policy decisions concerning women are shaped without consulting those affected most, and advocates for women’s rights seem to only have a voice in the mainstream media when high-profile men bring their issues to light. According to a new survey conducted by the Association for Women in Science, or AWIS, problems that have traditionally been seen as “women’s issues,” such as work-life integration and family responsive policies in the workplace, are turning out to be issues that affect both men and women across the globe.[i]

The Association for Women in Science is taking advantage of the limelight of International Women’s Day in order to illuminate the challenges faced by men and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM fields. AWIS is releasing the results of its study at a convening of Global Experts on Work-Life Family issues in New York City, focusing on male and female researcher’s perceptions and sentiments about the STEM workforce.[ii] This survey is the first large-scale international snapshot of perceptions and attitudes on work-life satisfaction among women and men in the STEM workforce. Although we have known for decades the challenges women face in traditionally male-dominated work and educational environments such as STEM disciplines, the results of this study suggest work life integration difficulties may be contributing to the high rates of attrition for both male and female STEM workers, but for women most of all.

In rigorous, competition-driven work such as scientific research, where scientists are expected to publish papers, apply for and maintain grants with multiple research projects, manage postdocs and graduate students, teach undergraduate courses, and participate in their respective disciplinary societies, truly attaining “work-life balance” can be elusive. The model of workplace practices in STEM careers is based on the premise that researchers have a spouse at home to cook dinner and take care of the family, which is no longer realistic given that half the workforce in the United States is now comprised of women. As a result, male and female researchers are suffering.

The results of the Association of Women in Science’s survey indicate that lack of flexibility in the workplace, dissatisfaction with career development opportunities, and declining success rates for federal grants are driving both men and women to re-consider their STEM professions. “These findings confirm that work-life conflict is not gender-specific in the scientific community,” said Janet Bandows Koster, AWIS executive director and CEO. “The real issue is that the academic workplace is still modeled on an ideal that no longer exists nor compliments the realities of today’s global workforce.”

Despite their shared difficulties with men, women still bear the biggest burden in STEM fields. According to the survey, women were more likely than men to report that work-life integration difficulties have negatively impacted their careers and 40 percent have delayed childbearing so as not to conflict with their careers; while only 27 percent of men indicated the same situation. Because women have the additional biological burden of childbearing, as well as societal expectations that they take responsibility for family caregiving, female researcher’s ability to compete with their male counterparts is often hindered. To compound their barriers to success, women receive smaller salaries and lab spaces on average, scanter resources, and stunted advancement through the STEM career pipeline. While these are important issues to address, it is often difficult to bring attention to this issue as a policy priority because there are few men who will publicly recognize and speak out on the inherent inequities of the system.

But whether men or women, a diminishing STEM workforce is a challenge the United States must address in order to maintain global competitiveness in technology and innovation. Thus, it is time for men to speak out against the lack of family-responsive policies at institutions and the unreasonable expectations that academic researchers dedicate their entire lives to work. “If researchers who want a fulfilling home and work life are being driven out of the industry through archaic working practices, it’s time to address the system itself.  Let’s stop pointing the finger at women by putting a “baby” Band-Aid on the problem and solve the real issues,” said Bandows Koster.

Some federal agencies are taking the problem to heart, and launching efforts to raise awareness about the importance of work-life integration in the sciences and engineering. Two examples are the National Science Foundation’s Career-Life Balance Initiative and ADVANCE Program, which promote practices that would allow researchers more flexible work hours and provide interim grant support for individuals taking a leave of absence for caregiving. It also promotes a stop-the-tenure-clock option for childbearing, which would allow women to stay on track for tenure despite the unfortunate concurrence of early-career advancement and optimal fertility.

While these and other initiatives by institutions and the government to level the playing field for women researchers are paramount to the success of a movement toward a stronger and more gender-equal STEM workforce, it will take a much larger cultural shift in order for women to attain equal status and opportunities for advancement. Curbing the attrition of talented women from the academic pipeline cannot be achieved through advocacy, campaigning, or policymaking alone. It will require investment in institutional changes, such as those promoted by the NSF’s Career-Life balance initiative and ADVANCE Program, and the development of knowledge and skills to help people achieve greater work-life satisfaction.

Soon after Rush Limbaugh came out with his attacks on women seeking coverage for contraception, President Barack Obama called Sandra Fluke on the phone to offer his support. Today and in the future, let’s hope men take this as an example and stand together with women in ensuring our nation’s global competitiveness by keeping more women in STEM.

Alice B. Popejoy is the inaugural Phoebe S. Leboy Public Policy Fellow at the National Office for the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) in Washington, D.C. In addition to working for federal legislation that benefits the 7.4 million women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, Ms. Popejoy is involved in a host of other projects at AWIS, including the Advancing Ways of Awarding Recognition in Disciplinary Societies grant funded by the National Science Foundation. She writes and publishes the monthly advocacy and public policy newsletter, AWIS in Action! and is a regular contributor to science policy blogs as well as academic journals on the issue of under-recognition of women in scientific disciplinary societies. In the fall, Ms. Popejoy will begin a Ph.D. program in public health genetics at the University of Washington, Seattle.

References

[i] Survey results were collected in December 2011 and January 2012 with 4,225 scientists and authors responding. Of the respondents, 80 percent were married or partnered, 70 percent were male, 64 percent worked at a university and 83 percent worked 40 or more hours per week. Survey respondents were working scientists and researchers who publish academically across all disciplines. This AWIS project is underwritten with a grant from the Elsevier Foundation New Scholars Program. Elsevier assisted with the technical administration of the survey that has a margin of error of <1.3 percent at the 90 percent confidence level.

[ii] National Science Foundation data include six broad occupational groups in the STEM workforce: physical and life sciences, computer and mathematical sciences, social and related sciences, engineering, STEM managers, and STEM technicians (in addition to other workers considered a part of STEM in health and medical-related occupations, STEM pre-college teachers, and STEM postsecondary teachers).

This resistance stems in part from the definition of the sort of research NSF is supposed to fund—basic research. In 1945 Vannevar Bush, who was coming off a successful run as chairman of the Manhattan Project, spent his political capital arguing that the federal government ought to support basic research. Bush’s report, “Science – the Endless Frontier,” defined basic research as research done without regard for its practical consequences. The term was essentially a more practical way of saying pure science—a term that had been in circulation at least since the late 19th century. The point was to conduct research that was driven by the researcher’s own curiosity rather than by any sort of external need. This is why the term of art is often “blue skies” research, named after the question “Why is the sky blue?”[1]

This struggle between scientists looking to rebel against government efforts to restrict their freedom reminds us a little of the movie classic “Cool Hand Luke” in which prison warden Strother Martin engages in a running conflict with Paul Newman’s character, the inmate Luke. Luke has little interest in following prison rules, and Martin, in frustration, eventually lays down the law. Luke is told that he needs to “get his mind right” about how things are going to operate. Luke sees things differently.

Those of us who watch old movies will remember that Luke comes to a melancholy end. Of course, the relationship between Congress on the one hand and the NSF and individual scientists on the other is not the same as that of the warden and inmates. But one point does seem apt. Following a congressional mandate the updated merit review criteria issued by the National Science Board, or NSB, in December 2011 make it clear that the Broader Impacts criterion is not going away. Congress has, quite literally, laid down the law. Rather than continue to fight, the scientific and engineering community should look for ways to own the Broader Impacts criterion and make it work to their overall advantage.

The struggle to communicate how science benefits society

Since its implementation in 1997, NSF’s Broader Impacts criterion has often been viewed by scientists and engineers as an onerous burden. The view was that the real work of science was captured by outlining a project’s intellectual merit—that is, outlining its impact on science for an audience of other scientists. Many research project proposers and reviewers considered NSF’s requirement that scientists discuss the broader impacts of a project on society to be irrelevant.

Congress, however, viewed things differently. In fact, a requirement for NSF to attend to broader impacts was written into the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010. Moreover, in response to the repeated criticism that the Broader Impacts criterion was unclear, Congress provided a list of “national needs” that the criterion could be used to meet. Rather than going away, as some scientists had hoped it would, a new, more prescriptive Broader Impacts criterion emerged.

NSF then decided to reassess the entirety of its merit, or peer, review criteria. Proposed new criteria were released in June 2011, with a period for feedback.[2] NSB did receive some pushback—according to an entry on the Nature News Blog from December 13, 2011, the task force eventually settled on a “non-prescriptive, big-tent definition” of broader impacts:

Since 1997, the NSF has required all grant proposers to justify their requests not just on intellectual merit, but also on this notion of broader impacts. Yet researchers have found the requirements distressingly vague. Legislation passed by Congress in 2010 confirmed the importance of broader impacts, and also tried to be more specific, listing some of the activities that would count as having societal benefit. But when the task force’s May 2011 draft report dutifully repeated some of these examples, some critics worried that the NSF’s criteria would end up being too specific. [Task Force co-chair] Bruer’s team has since removed the list. “It raised problems about why some things were on the list and others not,” says Bruer.[3]

In NSB’s initial June 2011 revision, potential benefits to society appeared to have been limited to the list of national goals provided by Congress. But some feared that in taking away the vagueness of the “benefit to society” clause, the proposed criterion would limit the freedom of proposers and reviewers to suggest and judge novel and creative ideas not included on the list.[4] Although critics of the Broader Impacts criterion had consistently claimed that it was unclear or “distressingly vague,” NSB came to realize that a degree of vagueness is actually a good thing—it allows for maximum autonomy on the part of proposers and peer reviewers to provide their own answers to the demand for accountability.

A deeper emphasis on “broader impacts”

On January 9, 2012, NSB released its final report, “National Science Foundation’s Merit Review Criteria: Review and Revisions.” In the final revisions NSF’s Broader Impacts criterion does not merely survive—its status in the review process has grown. NSB’s revisions more explicitly integrate broader impacts with intellectual merit. They also require a separate broader impacts section in grant proposals and mandate a separate account and assessment of a project’s broader impacts in the grantee’s final report. In other words, the Broader Impacts criterion is approaching parity with the Intellectual Merit criterion.

Welcome to Broader Impacts 2.0, per the NSF:

Broader Impacts: The Broader Impacts criterion encompasses the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes.[5]

Note that not only is the new Broader Impacts criterion usefully vague, but it also explicitly requires that proposers (that is, not Congress) articulate a project’s potential benefits to society.[6]

The final revisions also ask proposers and reviewers to address the same set of questions for intellectual merit and broader impacts—in areas such as the soundness of the plan for the proposed activity, the qualifications of the proposer(s) to carry out the proposed activities, and the access to necessary resources. Indeed, even the question of the potential transformativity of the proposed activities now applies to both intellectual merit and broader impact.

NSB’s integration of intellectual merit and broader impact means seeing the connections between things formerly thought to be separable. NSB’s new criteria recognize that in the 21st century, our disciplinary peers are no longer our only audience. Moreover, science funding is increasingly tied to the notion that basic research is a driver of innovation, which in turn drives economic growth. This will require an adjustment in the way we think about broader impacts: Scientists and engineers will need to begin to see that even basic research must take place in the context of the needs of the users of that knowledge.

It is obviously too early to say whether scientists and engineers will actually make the adjustment. By removing the list of national needs in the June 2011 proposed revisions and enhancing the usefully vague “benefits to society” language of the final version of the Broader Impacts criterion, however, NSF is allowing members of the scientific and engineering community the freedom and creativity to give an account of their own broader impacts.

Whether scientists and engineers will embrace this freedom or continue to resist such calls for accountability remains to be seen. If we are to learn anything from the past, however, unless scientists get their minds right about broader impacts, Congress will be happy to step in to resolve this failure to communicate.

Robert Frodeman is professor of philosophy and director of the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity (CSID) at the University of North Texas. J. Britt Holbrook is research assistant professor of philosophy and assistant director at the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas. One of the central research projects at CSID is understanding the meaning of “broader impacts.”  The authors gratefully acknowledge the support for this research provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant No.0830387, while emphasizing that any opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF, or any of their employees.

In December 2011 the Center for Mississippi Health Policy released a report titled “What Do Mississippi Parents Think about Sex-Related Education in Public Schools?” I expected to see a strong reluctance to have comprehensive sex education in public schools. The common political ideology suggests that educating children about sex is a parent’s responsibility, not that of the government.

The related inclination is to think that demonstrating condom use will only teach students that having sex before marriage is acceptable. Such judgments ignore the facts. A 20-year study published in the January 2007 issue of Public Health Reports shows that premarital sex has been the norm since at least 1940. The study published in 2007 shows that of thousands of subjects surveyed, 95 percent of respondents between the ages of 15 and 44 had engaged in premarital sex. Plus, 75 percent of respondents had done so by the age of 20. These developments are not recent. The study showed in fact that “the number of Americans having premarital sex hasn’t changed much since the 1940s,” as Jennifer Warner put it for WebMD.

The 2011 Mississippi survey on sex education showed surprising results. Mississippi parents are overwhelmingly in favor of age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education. Marie Barnard, who is a parent of public school kids in Oxford, Mississippi and the assistant dean of applied sciences at the University of Mississippi, believes that “it is [clearly] a minority of parents” who oppose comprehensive sex education in the public schools, but “they are very passionate about their beliefs and are active in influencing their local school boards.” So it seems that despite the great popularity of comprehensive sex education, a vocal minority is in control.

Sex education is an important topic in Mississippi. We have some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy and poverty, aggravated by some of the lowest rates of educational attainment in the country. Each of these factors can spur the others. A young woman in a school with inadequate sex education is more likely to become pregnant than one with comprehensive sex education. If she becomes pregnant, she is much more likely not to complete school. Having a child, furthermore, will limit her ability to work full time, diminishing the already low income she will earn if she does not complete high school.

The common refrain we hear from politicians in Mississippi is that there is only one sure way not to become pregnant, which is to abstain from having sex. Beyond the fact that 75 percent of Americans have sex before the age of 20, the crucial fact is that scholars have offered conclusive evidence showing that comprehensive sex education is “the most effective approach to reducing STDs and pregnancy.” This statement was the conclusion of a 2010 Rutgers study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

At the same time it is worth noting that abstinence-only sex education is effective for some limited groups. According to a Rutgers news release about the 2010 study, an “abstinence-only program helped sixth and seventh graders delay high-risk sexual behaviors up to two years after the initial intervention.” But “nearly a quarter of these sixth and seventh graders had already had sex by the time they became a part of [the] study.” The study highlighted an underappreciated lesson: “Sex education is not about teaching one topic to one age group and that’s it. It has to start at the earliest ages, build upon and reinforce the previous knowledge and skills learned, and evolve as students get older and become more likely to start having sex.”

In Mississippi the state passed House Bill 999 in 2011, which requires that all schools in Mississippi adopt a sex education policy by the end of June 2012. Mississippi First, a nonpartisan nonprofit advocating for effective, data-driven policy in the state, strongly urges “comprehensive or ‘abstinence-plus’ education–because it works,” following the clearly established lessons learned in countless studies.

Unfortunately, the Mississippi law allows school districts to choose between abstinence-only and abstinence-plus sex education. So some school districts will choose a more comprehensive form of sex education from which objecting families could opt out of the lessons beyond abstinence for their children. But others will teach abstinence-only education, offering no options for those who want comprehensive programs. Even those abstinence-plus districts, however, “shall not include instruction and demonstrations on the application and use of condoms,” according to the law. Advocates for comprehensive sex education such as the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States argue that “there are many youth who still need to learn how to prevent errors in [condom] use.” Nevertheless, the Mississippi law against such instruction is clear.

Barnard heard a parent opposed to comprehensive sex education claim that “his disagreement with abstinence-plus was based on his religious beliefs.” She responded that “Our children deserve a comprehensive, factually accurate, nonjudgmental education that is not based on a few individuals’ personal religious beliefs, but on scientifically validated educational programs.” The comprehensive approach with an opt-out mechanism would respect both views, but some districts will not choose it.

One might expect Mississippians to be generally opposed to comprehensive sex education, given the legislation that passed, but Barnard is right. The December 2011 study from the Mississippi Health Policy Center undercuts the common misconception.

First, 92 percent of the 3,600 parents responding were in favor of some form of sex education, which refers either to abstinence-only or abstinence-plus education. Abstinence-only would exclude, among other things, education about the use of contraceptives. The surprising result of the study, however, was that 89.8 percent of survey respondents said that they either “strongly support” (78.4 percent) or “somewhat support” (11.4 percent) education about birth control methods. The total opposition to the teaching of birth control methods came from fewer than 8 percent of respondents.

Despite the overwhelming support for education about birth control, some Mississippi students will be stuck with their school district’s decision to teach abstinence-only sex education. This is a serious problem. The approach taken has been to deny some kids education, rather than to offer it with an opt-out policy approach.

Even the most controversial element of sex education in Mississippi, particularly the classroom demonstration of proper condom use, was in fact supported by a large majority of Mississippians. While 15.2 percent of respondents “strongly oppose” and 7.1 percent “somewhat oppose” classroom demonstrations of condom usage, 53.9 percent “strongly support” it and 17.2 percent “somewhat support” it. That means overall that 71.1 percent of respondents support in-class condom demonstrations, which the state’s sex education law wholly forbids for all schools.

The Center for Mississippi Health Policy’s December 2011 study shows that Mississippians are misunderstood and poorly represented. It is now up to school districts to choose the more effective approach to sex education—abstinence-plus forms instead of abstinence-only curricula. Perhaps in the next few years the legislature will have the courage to require that all schools provide comprehensive sex education—including condom use—while offering parents the choice to opt out of portions for their own children as they see fit.

Dr. Eric Thomas Weber is assistant professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi, freelance columnist for The Clarion Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, and author of three books, including the forthcoming Democracy and Leadership (2012). Visit his website at EricThomasWeber.org and follow him on twitter.com/EricTWeber.

A far too common error of commentary on Brave New World and its ilk is to receive them as “prophecy.” This error is even perpetuated by the writers themselves who like Huxley, live long enough to look back, as in his truly grim, and what is worse, far less lyrical 1958 essay, “Brave New World Revisited,” proving that the author is as liable to the sin of retrospection that tarnishes the original work as anyone else.

Not a prediction in the pre-scientific prophetic tradition, Brave New World is a kind of evidence-based thought experiment: considering where we are now, where might we go? Dystopically but realistically speaking, how bad might it get? As I argue in my new book, The Body Politic, this is a key question in America’s culture wars.

Nor is Brave New World a futurist fantasy like a few of those of H.G. Wells who, in his remarkably long and prolific career, produced dozens of works. Some of Wells’ novels relied on devices that systematically defied contemporary science, like anti-gravity devices, or even logical possibility, like time travel. By contrast, in Brave New World Huxley stuck close to what was then known about Mendelian genetics, and his eugenically modified humans owed much to the timely introduction of chemicals like alcohol during fetal development.

Writing 20 years before Watson and Crick decoded the human genome and 40 years before recombinant DNA technology, Huxley did not have at his disposal the far more specific modifications made feasible by modern genetics. The chemical industry was, after all, far better developed in 1932 than was genetics, and what was supposed to be hereditary alcoholism was then a rationale for policies that attempted to weed out the “lesser types “.

Again, unlike the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis or the “high fantasist” J.R.R. Tolkien, Huxley was not a mythologist or a romantic Medievalist who depreciated the Renaissance. For Huxley there was no turning back from the scientific revolution, in spite of the attendant risks of dehumanization, especially when combined with the characteristic malady of the 19th century nation-state: totalitarianism. Rather, his longing for solace amid modernity took the form of psychical research and experiments with mescaline and LSD, part of his quest for an expanded consciousness beyond both science and Western religion. In this part of his life, explored in The Doors of Perception, Huxley’s ripples reached far and wide, including inspiring a young Timothy Leary fresh from Mexico with a suitcase full of mushrooms.

Besides eugenics, the happiness drug “soma” is the other technology most identified with Brave New World. But on re-reading the novel one is struck that a far more accessible, low-tech preoccupation is key to the order and stability of the 26th century: sex. In the London of 2540 virtually everyone is expected, and indeed virtually required, to engage in Bonobo-like promiscuous coupling. (Perhaps certain modern politicians and celebrities are in an advanced state of evolution, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.)

“Freemartins” (a decidedly unromantic term normally applied to masculinized female cattle), are sterile women who are therefore especially available. Again, as a man of his time who was au fait with the available technology, and as the younger brother of eugenicist Julian, Huxley knew plenty about sterilization but did not anticipate The Pill. The central character of Brave New World, and the only one who rejected sex without love, is “John the Savage,” a state-of-nature creature who, having no place in either society or the wild, would have met the requirements of neither Hobbes nor Rousseau.

Brave New World remains a success not because of what it literally foretells. Indeed, as prediction the novel is a flop. Like virtually every other science fiction novel before the 1970s it totally missed the information revolution (though an argument might be made for H.G. Wells in The World Brain, 1938), and recent remarkable advances in neuroscience, for example, not to mention their combination in implantable brain chips (see my book Mind Wars for more on national security interest in neuroscience). It anticipated cloning for reproduction but not for therapy. An artificial placenta, the key to the “ectogenesis” performed in the Central London Hatchery, has proven surprisingly difficult to develop, even in an era of prenatal diagnosis, fetal surgery and intensive care nurseries, and incidentally would require grossly unethical experiments.

Rather, where Brave New World shines, and what makes it so fresh even beyond the biblical four-score-and-ten, is what it says about being human in any age: the longing for love and for a society that makes us feel truly human.

(I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague Mark Adams for deepening my appreciation of Brave New World.)

Jonathan Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a Senior Fellow at American Progress, and Editor-In-Chief of Science Progress. This article is reposted from the Huffington Post technology page.

That was 1999, and the book was a translation of a 1992 work by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, called Risk Society. One of Beck’s key premises is that the modern world is typified by the exportation of risk. His examples include the industrial disaster in Bhopal, India, in which thousands of people died from a gas leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant. Doing a little background work on Beck, I came to understand that his ideas were hugely influential in Europe, especially among advocates of the “precautionary principle” who would put the burden of proof on claims that no harm will be caused by an action or policy.

With some exceptions, the idea of managing risks proactively and proportionately, let alone embracing the precautionary principle, hasn’t caught on here as it has in Europe. In the U.S., technological risk management has been seen as too much government intrusion that threatens innovation. Instead, as Harvard’s Sheila Jasanoff has observed, the American approach has been to “normalize” new technologies like certain genetic manipulations as merely extensions of what already happens in nature.

But that approach can put a lot of weight on distinguishing between genuinely new wrinkles and what’s been done before, and it doesn’t help sort out high- and low-risk products. So for genuinely innovative technologies that cannot plausibly be lumped as minor variants of existing and proven technologies, there is little choice but to bear the brunt of the full force of the U.S. regulatory hammer. Instead of restraining government oversight, the result is often sweeping and unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles to innovation that aren’t well-matched to actual threats. The case I know best is that of human experiments, which are overseen by the same process, whether they are pen-and-pencil surveys or phase-one cancer trials.

Happily, albeit with little notice, the way the federal government regulates the risks of innovative science and technology is undergoing substantial change, one that started in the George W. Bush years and is gaining momentum under Barack Obama. The challenge is to reshape the regulatory philosophy of the 20th century to fit 21st-century research and development. Rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of the post-World-War-II era, government is trying to fit the oversight of emerging technologies — such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology and genetic engineering — to their risks.

What’s intriguing about this shift is that the idea of managing technological risk has not only been quietly embraced by both parties and across ideological lines, but it crosses over many and diverse scientific and technological fields. Last March the White House told federal agency heads that “regulation and oversight should avoid unjustifiably inhibiting innovation, stigmatizing new technologies, or creating trade barriers.” The statement by several presidential office heads emphasized principles like scientific integrity, public participation, benefits and costs of federal oversight, communication, flexibility, risk assessment, and risk management.

Take the case of nanotech. The last three presidential administrations have supported a National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) that has invested $14 billion in research since 2001 to speed the development of materials and devices with novel and valuable electronic, chemical, mechanical, and optical properties. At the same time, however — recognizing that public and business confidence in nano products could be threatened without good evidence of safety–the federal government, at the urging of the president’s science advisors, significantly increased research on the health and environmental implications of nanotechnology. The idea is to gain information while an industry is still young to avoid unnecessary, knee-jerk, and obstructive regulation later on. Along the same lines, in December the administration announced that it will develop a National Bioeconomy Blueprint, including “regulatory reforms that will reduce unnecessary burdens and impediments while protecting health and safety.” In another example, the human research oversight system is now being revised to concentrate oversight resources on the riskiest studies.

All this is a good start toward replacing a one-size-fits-all regulatory philosophy with one that focuses on evidence-based risk. So far, though, an important potential problem has been underappreciated by planners as they’ve sought to predict on the basis of solid science the actual risk posed by various new technologies: the threat that emerging technologies like nano or synthetic biology could have illicit “dual use” by terrorist groups. A single documented biological attack using new technology could result in a huge blowback that would undermine investment and public trust for years, a consequence that the then-nascent field of gene therapy research suffered after the death of a clinical trial subject in 1999.

The dual use problem came up just a few weeks ago at the end of 2011, when bird flu experiments aimed at bolstering public health efforts raised concerns for the virus’ potential misuse by bioterrorists. Of course, not all risks can be anticipated, but we can surely learn from our mistakes. As the president’s bioethics commission concluded in its synthetic biology report in 2010, “risk assessment activities across the government need to be coordinated and field release permitted only after reasonable risk assessment.” Coordinated risk regulation in advance of product development would encourage America’s innovators to more aggressively explore low-risk/high-potential-value terrain while freeing up resources to move dual use oversight into the 21st century.

Jonathan Moreno is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and Editor-In-Chief of Science Progress. This article is reposted from the Huffington Post technology page.

One fact and one imperative appear to be on a collision course. Federal spending will decrease in the coming years, yet the  importance of boosting our nation’s science and economic competitiveness cannot be overstated. How do we reconcile the  two?

The traditional language used in such circumstances is to seek more bang for the buck. But even that’s not good enough  anymore. The federal budget has to deliver the “best” for the buck, meshing the most efficient use of taxpayer resources with the most effective structure. That is particularly true where the federal government works with businesses, workers,  communities, universities, and state and local governments to grow our economy. The historical evolution of federal functions and the jurisdictional scope of congressional committees no longer justify the current grab-bag organization of trade,  technology, economic growth, and workforce functions in our federal government.

Today, there are more than 3,000 federal assistance programs that provide grants, loans, credit enhancements, and financing and technical assistance to firms, educational institutions, nonprofits, and local governments to pursue job-creating activities related to science and economic competitiveness. These programs are currently administered separately by the Economic Development Administration, Employment and Training Administration, Small Business Administration, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Agriculture, and a swath of other federal agencies. Beyond assistance programs, other federal efforts that affect competitiveness—such as industry contracts, regulatory frameworks, and existing management structures—are equally fragmented.

That is why we propose reorganizing the functions of the Department of Commerce, moving significant portions of the current agency to other parts of the executive branch, and bringing in competitiveness-relevant functions from agencies outside the Department of Commerce. The purpose: to create a new, focused Department of Competitiveness that integrates federal policy around four interconnected areas of competitiveness:

• Trade
• Technology
• Economic growth
• Workforce development

Where federal efforts are focused on general-purpose outcomes, such as export promotion and infrastructure technologies, we suggest that they be placed within the new department to boost their effectiveness. Where federal efforts are specialized and mission-specific but share overlapping constituencies with the new department’s work, we propose the creation of a new “Common Application”—a single point of access to related federal programs—to ensure that programs also work smoothly across governmental agencies in a manner that is most convenient for their users, such as small businesses and universities.

It is a testament to American ingenuity and our talented people, within and outside government, that we get the outcomes that we do from the many disjointed existing efforts. Our science successes range from the sequencing of the human genome to social networking technologies, and our economic successes range from our nation’s leading edge biosciences industries to the job-creating power of new industries proliferating across the Internet. Yet the press of global competition requires that we do better—much better.

To its credit, the Obama administration, recognizing the disjointedness of these many different programs, has launched a series of initiatives to harness the best of these efforts into a new national innovation and competitiveness strategy for the 21st century. President Obama has also issued a presidential memorandum instructing agencies to assess possibilities for government reform for competiveness. And already likeminded federal agencies with missions and money that clearly overlap are teaming up to offer competitive grants to develop cutting-edge technologies and the workforce needed to commercialize them in energy efficiency, advanced nuclear technology, and solar-made fuels, just to name a few. These efforts have another common purpose—to tap the comparative advantages of key regional economies and scientific centers of learning so that federal efforts align with the unique competitive strengths of our nation—our bottom-up scientific development and economic engine.

These competitive-grant programs offer policymakers some clear lessons on how our federal government can play to the strengths of our scientists, our engineers, our entrepreneurs, our financiers, our experienced workforce, and our eager students at universities, community colleges, and high schools across the country.What’s missing is a federal government structure that also plays to these strengths, is institutionalized effectively, and delivers efficient and competitive federal funding to fuel the bottom-up economic capabilities of our economy.

Simply put, government structures from the 19th and 20th centuries no longer conform to the demands of the 21st. Budget exigencies and economic-growth objectives require that the economic-growth efforts of the federal government be reconstituted so that our nation:

• Makes the most efficient use of federal resources
• Aligns most effectively with the businesses that create business plans and the state and local governments that implement regional growth strategies
• Encourages bottom-up growth strategies attuned to the unique needs of the United States’ many regional economies

There has never been a U.S. cabinet-level agency like the one we propose. And there has never been a time when it is needed more than it is today. This new department would retain many of the existing functions of the Department of Commerce centered on economic growth and business formation, but would add to their critical mass while reducing redundancies across the federal government. Bringing together key competitiveness functions around trade, technology, training, and economic growth under one umbrella will elevate the effectiveness and the status of the newly created department within the government, and increase the influence of its secretary in the cabinet.

Today, national macroeconomic policies are managed by the White House, the Department of the Treasury, and the independent Federal Reserve Board. Mission-specific economic policies find their home in agencies that include the Departments of Education, Energy, Housing, Labor, and Defense, and the National Institutes of Health. But economic growth is not simply a matter of macroeconomic policy plus the sum total of mission-specific policies. The creation of businesses, the hiring and training of workers, and the growth of communities stem as well from opportunities fostered by governments seeking to boost economic growth in all sectors of the economy in all the different parts of our nation.

Crafting a new Department of Competitiveness would align federal programs more effectively and efficiently with the realities of our uniquely American competitive strengths. That process can start right now, before legislation is passed, with an executive order that, as explained below, improves the efficiency of current microeconomic policies. And that same goal would be the charge of the new Department of Competitiveness.

Any plan to revamp the Department of Commerce must ultimately find a home for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. A recommendation about the most appropriate location for NOAA is beyond the scope of this report. But regardless of its ultimate home within the bureaucratic landscape, NOAA must maintain its structural integrity and fiercely protect the preeminent role of science in management of our nation’s oceanic and atmospheric resources. Further, NOAA must ensure that its regulatory decisions remain free of undue pressure from external sources. As the conversation about government reorganization continues to evolve, the Center for American Progress’s environment and ocean policy teams will be developing specific recommendations about an appropriate structure for this agency.

Similarly, in addressing the issue of what to do with the federal government’s various economic statistics functions, we quickly found that the scope of the question outgrew the space in this paper. One approach, as CAP suggested in its “Focus on Competitiveness” paper, would be to bring the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis together as part of a consolidated economic statistics agency. We asked George Washington University research professor Andrew Reamer to write a separate paper for this series titled “Economic Intelligence.” He makes a number of practical, achievable recommendations to upgrade our national statistics efforts for the 21st century.

Uniting these four focus areas—trade, general-purpose technology, place-based economic growth, and workforce training—under one department would increase efficiency and enable the government to more effectively create and implement a truly comprehensive strategy to foster American innovation and economic competitiveness. The result would be more and better job creation and sustained economic growth.

We do not assert that the recommendations are unquestionably correct. In particular, we understand that questions of coordination can arise even if functions are managed within the same department; there is no single, perfect solution. But we hope that this paper begins a real dialogue about what it would take to design and implement a coherent national competitiveness strategy insulated from the quadrennial shifting of political fortunes.

In the main pages of this report, we detail our vision for this new Competitiveness Department, including an overview of its new functions and an explanation of which existing agencies, programs, offices, bureaus, and programs might be incorporated and why. We then examine how to better network and integrate other mission- specific innovation programs in the departments of Defense and Energy, and the National Institutes of Health, with the new work of the rewired Department of Competitiveness. First, though, here is our proposal in a nutshell.

Jonathan Sallet is a partner in the Washington D.C. office of O’Melveny & Myers LLP. Sean Pool is the assistant editor of Science Progress, the Center for American Progress’s online science and technology policy journal.

Download the full report (pdf)

Download the introduction and executive summary (pdf)

Read the report in your web browser (Scribd)

The bills

Politico’s overview is a good starting point for readers completely unfamiliar with the situation. The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, in the Senate and the PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA, in the House both aim to reduce piracy by cracking down on “rogue sites” that link to and profit from pirating copyrighted material. Opposition to the bill is largely based not on opposition to protecting copyrights, but due to concerns about the potential for abuse in the vagueness of the legislative language.

For instance, as written, SOPA would empower the attorney general to blacklist sites through Internet service providers, or ISPs, search engines, ad networks, and payment networks without a court hearing or trial and allow companies to sue service providers for unknowingly hosting copyrighted materials. This could leave room for collective reprisals against entire online networks such as Twitter or Tumblr for the copyright infringements of a single user, arguably resulting in the mass censorship of entire online communities. From an economic standpoint, it could also require ISPs to monitor and censor network use to ensure users are not infringing, placing heavier cost burdens on Internet startups that rely on user-generated content. Many Internet users and technology companies argue this would slow innovation in the increasingly interconnected and networked 21st century information economy.

Supporters of the legislation say the purported dangers of the legislation are overstated and that the legislation is aimed to take down only rogue sites with no legitimate business purpose. They even responded to earlier criticism in December with a manager’s amendment aimed at reducing the impact on domestic websites, although it appears that while the legislation may target foreign sites, the legal liability might very well apply to domestic sites and companies as well.

The debate has been escalating for months online and in Washington, where both bills started with wide bipartisan support. As online protest has grown, that picture has somewhat changed, with the Obama administration commenting on issue. The White House’s statement walked a fine line of moderation, saying the “important task of protecting intellectual property online must not threaten an open and innovative internet,” which has been interpreted as an anti-SOPA position, although by not referencing the specific pieces of legislation, the statement indicates the fight clearly isn’t over yet.

The blackout

At the forefront of the blackout was online encyclopedia Wikipedia, whose English homepage was replaced for 24 hours with a message stating SOPA and PIPA “could fatally damage the free and open Internet,” and offering more information and an opportunity for U.S. visitors to contact their congressional representation. Similarly, popular social link-sharing site Reddit.com went down for 12 hours and provided a technical run down of their opposition. Search giant Google obscured their logo with a black rectangle and featured a call to action on their homepage, leading the charge of numerous sites raising the online equivalent of protest flags.

Additionally, online freedom and privacy advocates including the Internet Society, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology have all provided supporting documentation outlining their objections to the legislation. A list of confirmed participants in the online blackout can be found here.

The backlash

The Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, a major backer of both pieces of legislation, called the black out, “an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information” and “an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.” PIPA author Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) had harsh words for the sites blacked out in protest yesterday, telling Politico:

“[M]uch of what has been claimed about the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act is flatly wrong and seems intended more to stoke fear and concern than to shed light or foster workable solutions. The PROTECT IP Act will not affect Wikipedia, will not affect Reddit, and will not affect any website that has any legitimate use. A foreign rogue website is clearly defined as one that has no real purpose other than infringement. Theft and fraud on this scale undermines consumer trust in online transactions.”

Despite Sen. Leahy’s comments, some original co-sponsors of both pieces of legislation have pulled support since the announcement of yesterday’s online protests and those still supporting the legislation are working to remove some of the most controversial provisions.

The future

So where will this legislation go? No one honestly seems to know. Despite early hopes that the bill would sail uncontested into the law books, the online backlash against SOPA and PIPA in coordination with hesitation from the Obama administration and some members of the Republican leadership appear to have slowed the charge. No one expects, or wants, the MPAA or Recording Industry Association of America to stop working to protect intellectual property rights, but the flood of co-sponsors abandoning ship due to activism and the associated increased media scrutiny may signal a change in how those advocates approach major Internet regulations in the future—or at least force them not to underestimate the power of online communities to make their side of the story known. But at least for now, the future of these bills, and the debate between online freedom and protecting intellectual property rights, are up in the air.

Andrea Peterson is Assistant Editor for Online Outreach and Analytics at American Progress.

This post was republished from Culture of Science.

“What have we learned from the research performed on the International Space Station?”

“Why don’t we hear about the ISS research and other space missions in the news?”

These are among the questions that I’m asked when I give talks around the country on the current status of space activities and how space development could more directly address the challenges we’re facing today. People want to know what we’re doing in space, and considering that we are in the midst of what has been called The Year of the Solar System – the period from October 2010 through August 2012 (that’s a Martian year, in case you are wondering) – when more missions will be launched or will reach their destinations than during any previous comparable period, the scarcity of news coverage is frustrating, especially for space enthusiasts.

Occasionally there are news items about SpaceX or Virgin Galactic or the final Space Shuttle mission or the discovery of possible Earth-like planets around other stars, but, in general, space activities receive little notice by the media, unless there is a failure, such as the recent launch of the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission. Part of the explanation is that there are other newsworthy events such as the recession, congressional deadlocks, and the Occupy movement. Another part of the explanation, particularly regarding ISS research, is that it is difficult to find current information on the results of the research being performed, which leaves the impression that not much scientific research is actually occurring on-board the ISS. This situation needs to change, and there is hope that it soon will.

I believe there are two primary, and related, reasons why ISS research hasn’t been clearly reported, and recognizing these factors can lead to improved reporting. Following completion of the Apollo, Skylab, and Spacelab missions, comprehensive mission reports were released [such as the Spacelab 3 Mission Science Review]. The limited durations of these missions provided clear end-points conducive to such reports. In comparison, the ISS mission and research is ongoing, with no clearly defined end-point for the mission. While allowing for more in-depth research, this is not conducive to comprehensive reports.

In addition to not having a clear end-point, the ongoing operation of the ISS also allows for long-term and more complex experiments, phased experiments, and the opportunity to make adjustments while performing an experiment, possibly extending its duration. This leads to experiments being completed at different times. So, experiments are typically reported on individually (or the results may not even be publicly available), but those reports just don’t have the weight of a comprehensive report and don’t receive as much attention. How can this situation be addressed so that the results of the ISS research are clearly reported and widely available?

The ISS has similarities with established research labs that previous space research missions did not have and, in 2005, the U.S. segment of the ISS was designated as a National Laboratory, similar to Argonne, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Livermore, Pacific Northwest, and all the others. These labs perform a variety of on-going research activities and most of them also publicize their research in a number of ways, including through journals, annual comprehensive reports, and conferences. The methods used by these labs could serve as models for reporting ISS research.

Research on-board the ISS has been managed by NASA as part of overall ISS management, but, in July 2011, a new non-profit organization, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), was awarded the responsibility of managing the ISS U.S National Laboratory. Since then, CASIS has set up a website and is co-sponsoring, with the American Astronautical Society, the 1^st Annual International Space Station Research and Development Conference, set for June 26-28, 2012 in Denver, CO. They are seeking presentations on topics related to science and technology activities (past, present, planned, and proposed) performed on the ISS.  Topics of interest include Biology and Biotechnology, Earth and Space Science, Educational Activities, Human Research, Physical Sciences, and Technology. (If you are interested in presenting, the deadline for abstracts is January 15, 2012. See http://astronautical.org/node/96.)

This conference will, hopefully, jump-start a more robust effort to disseminate the results of ISS research, including publishing the conference proceedings and initiating a periodical journal of the ISS research activities. The reports should include status updates of research in progress as well as the results of completed research experiments.

As CASIS takes on more of the responsibility from NASA of operating the ISS National Lab, I’m also hoping that CASIS will post on their website up-to-date information on research results and other activities being performed on-board the ISS. The public needs to know what is being done in order to make informed decisions and having one primary website with that information would help. Also, it would sure make it easier for me to answer those questions that I’m asked about the ISS. And maybe those questions wouldn’t even need to be asked, because the answers would already be in the news.

Paul O. Wieland is a professional engineer who worked for NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center for over 20 years, on programs including SpaceLab3, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Space Shuttle Challenger accident investigation, and, primarily, on developing the life support system for the International Space Station. He was also the fire protection engineer for several ISS payloads including the Materials Science Research Rack (MSRR-1).  He authored Designing For Human Presence in Space: An Introduction to Environmental Control and Life Support Systems, published in 1994 as NASA Reference Publication RP-1324. Since retiring from NASA in 2005 he wrote Crossing the Threshold: Advancing into Space to Benefit the Earth, which was awarded a gold medal in May 2011 by the Independent Publisher Book Awards. See www.threshold2020.com for more information and join the facebook page. This post was republished from  at Culture of Science.

Here are some examples of S&T budgeting that give a flavor of short-term ups and downs.

Increases over 2011 appropriations were claimed by the Department of Energy’s research wing ARPA-E, which receives $275 million, up from $180 million last year. Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy programs receive $1.8 billion, 1.6 percent above ’11. These are all far short of the president’s requests but still not horrible The DOE’s Office of Science gets a one percent increase at $4.9 billion, and Basic Energy Sciences within the office receives $1.7 billion, a small increase.

The National Institutes of Health budget will make some medical school deans breathe a modest sigh of relief. They received $30.7 billion in appropriations, $300 million or 1 percent above the amount in 2011, resulting in the same level of grants funded as last year. Included for NIH is $576 million specifically for the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), allowing NCATS to begin its work. Simultaneously, as proposed by NIH, the National Center for Research Resources is de-authorized and many of its programs moved to NCATS.

Important efforts to keep track of Mother Earth took a few hits. The Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey receives $1.07 billion, $14 million below the 2011 enacted level. The 40-year old remote land sensing project called Landsat is stuck in the mud, though, as the USGS didn’t receive the increase requested to begin the next phase, which would have provided images to advance research on agriculture, geology, forestry, regional planning, education, mapping, and global change. Along these lines, Science and Technology in the Environmental Protection Administration was funded at $795 million, $18 million below 2011. The cut came mostly from air and climate change research. And a renewal of an old provision requires the President to submit a report on all Federal climate change spending within 120 days. One may read here a worrisome attitude between the lines.

In keeping with skepticism about the Department of Education’s Race to the Top, that program is cut by more than 20 percent from $698 million in 2011 down to $550 million in 2013. Congress would not provide funding for the president’s ARPA-ED and 100,000 STEM teachers proposals.

Reflecting changing national security priorities and perhaps some continuing reservations about the organization of the Department of Homeland Security, the Science and Technology Directorate receives only $688 million, well below $828 million enacted in 2011 and a $1.2 billion 2012 Budget request. S&T fared better in the Defense Department, with $12.4 billion and so well above the 2012 Budget. But the Pentagon’s cutting edge science agency, DARPA, never a big-budget outfit, gets reduced by $160 million down to $2.8 billion, affecting portfolios across the board.

Though these are only some of the numbers, they give a sense of the continuing problem of public investment in long-term science and technology, at the same time that over two trillion dollars in venture capital is waiting in the wings. The defense authorization bill awaiting the president’s signature includes a smart and long overdue gesture toward leveraging small businesses that happen to have venture capital: National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs may give up to 25 percent of their SBIR funds to majority venture capital-owned businesses. Other federal agencies are authorized to award up to 15 percent. The willingness to allow a combine of venture capital with small business grants should help some companies over the “valley of death” that too often impedes a good idea from getting into the marketplace.

When money is tight more creativity is needed. As many have observed, and as the founders wished, immigration policies that encourage skilled and energetic young people to become Americans built the country. Today’s odious currents of xenophobia and nativism are nothing new to America, but neither is the determination to overcome them. Whether our generation rises to the challenge of putting this piece of a new American century into place is an open question.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. This article is cross-posted in Huffpo’s new science section.

In the late 18th century, Benjamin Franklin was something of an icon in Europe. The French hung portraits of Franklin on their walls much in the same way college students pay tribute to John Belushi or Jim Morrison in their dorms. Everywhere Franklin went, his feisty personality preceded him, and it was this reputation in Europe that played a key role in securing the foreign aid the revolutionaries needed to triumph over the British. Many consider the celebrated polymath to be the first “American” in numerous regards—in entrepreneurialism, in political discourse, and, of course, in partying. As it turns out, Franklin was also the first American environmentalist, and his inventions influenced the scientific community for decades.

Energy Efficiency

In the age of clean energy technologies racing to meet grid parity, we often forget that there was a push for cleaner energy in the time of the founders. Ben Franklin himself designed a four-sided street lamp to replace the commonly used globe lamps. A build-up of soot darkened the globe lamps, which required near-daily cleaning, and let off an excess of smoke. The Franklin lamp increased air circulation within the lamps, allowing for better fuel efficiency and less cleaning.

Similarly, Franklin sought to design a more fuel-efficient stove that consumed less wood and produced more heat. Incidentally, though Franklin managed to sell multiple sets, the stove did not work very well. It was later improved upon, however, and has come to be known as the “Franklin Stove.”

When Franklin was holed up in the suburbs of France due to a debilitating case of gout, his friends encouraged him to find ways to keep busy. And so, Franklin occupied himself in the only way he knew how: by devising ingenious and occasionally self-deprecating plots. In a 1784 letter to the Journal de Paris, Franklin parodied his penchant for sleeping late, observing, after a loud noise awoke him at dawn, “Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon… will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of [the sun] rising so early.”

As a more serious corollary, Franklin observed that, should he or any of his French compatriots rise with the sun, they would not have to burn candles for extra hours in the evening—a chore that Franklin, as a self-proclaimed cheapskate, found decidedly inefficient. It was from this observation and the desire to save a few bucks that Franklin outlined a rough idea for daylight saving time as a means for farmers to maximize production during light hours and cut down on fuel costs of illuminating the dark. The idea would not be adopted until after 1895, when George Vernon Hudson proposed the modern conception of daylight saving time.

It is no surprise that the first man to demonstrate that lightning was electrical would take a keen interest in electricity and energy. And take an interest, he did. Amid his busy schedule of promoting the American agenda, learning French in parlors, and drinking to excess, Franklin was the first to propose the theory of conservation of charge. Franklin also supported the controversial wave-theory of light. Among other contributions to physics, Franklin’s work with electricity precipitated his ascent to the first presidency of the American Philosophical Society, at the time a herald of scientific inquiry, which would later be headed by another famous scientist-statesman, Thomas Jefferson.

Environmentalism

Despite his humble birth, Ben Franklin rose to prominence via his publication of Poor Richard’s Almanack, a collection of aphorisms and amateur guide to meteorology. This interest in meteorology extended itself into other environmental realms, including those of forestry, oceanography, and clean air.

Franklin built his own paper mill in order to furnish himself with a cheaper, more efficient supply of newsprint that would save trees. In doing so, he undercut his competitors. In the 1740s, he encouraged his friends to do the same, and eventually found himself at the center of a wholesale paper mill industry that was also environmentally friendly.

It was in his study of postal routes that Franklin took an interest in oceans and currents. When sailors took Franklin’s advice on the Gulf Stream, they managed to cut their commute by two weeks. Franklin’s studies into oceans lent itself to a concern for clean water. In 1739, Franklin petitioned the Philadelphia government to prohibit local tanneries from dumping waste into the tributary of the Delaware River. Similarly, in the 1760s, Franklin led a commission to monitor water pollution and waste disposal in Pennsylvania. Franklin also urged people to decrease their chimney use so as not to pollute the air.

Public health

Franklin also concerned himself with promoting public health. His contemporaries assumed that wearing damp clothing caused the common cold; however, Franklin observed that sailors wore wet clothes frequently and remained healthy. Before germs were deemed the culprit of compromising the immune system, Franklin suggested that the common cold was transmitted from people living in close quarters—a trend that happened to coincide with winter.

In keeping with his commitment to public health, Franklin launched a campaign to open a public hospital. Franklin diverted funds to the nation’s first hospital, also known as the Pennsylvania Hospital, in order to care for the poor and the mentally ill—two demographics long marginalized by colonial society.

In his will, Ben Franklin stipulated the construction of a water pipeline to provide fresh, clean water to the city of Philadelphia. This construction led to the Philadelphia Water Commission, which institutionalized Franklin’s belief that the public right to health should supersede private interests.

Given his commitment to environmental issues and sustainable business practices, it may be prudent to say that Franklin would have opposed some of the House cuts that stand to strip the public of food safety and farming innovation grants. He certainly would have taken no pleasure in the “Drill, Baby, Drill” chants, and not just because he would have found them lacking in wit.

Today’s political discourse supposes that the Founding Fathers were suspicious of the popular majority and favored limited government. Yet while our nation’s founders may not have intended the government itself to be run by direct democracy, they certainly believed that government had an obligation to protect the welfare of all its citizens. For Ben Franklin, a truly self-made man, that welfare included clean air, clean water, and general hygiene and sanitation. In retrospect, Ben Franklin did a couple things right. Maybe we should follow his lead in the arena of civic duty to protect our earth and our health.

Lauren Simenauer is finishing her bachelor’s degrees in biology and psychology at the University of Virginia.

Narrative vs Evidence-Based Medicine—And, Not Or

The week before the US Preventative Services Task Force, or USPSTF, released its recommendations against routine prostate screening for healthy men, celebrity patients including Joe Torre and Rudy Giuliani had already lined up to challenge the population-based recommendations. To promote their position that screening for prostate-specific antigen is lifesaving,  these individuals relied on a powerful tool: their own personal narratives. However, the experts whose goal is to  disseminate and translate population-based evidence will, in the name of science, shun individual stories. This one-sided use of narrative has played out repeatedly, from the USPSTF recommendations on screening mammography to the US Food and Drug Administration labeling hearings on bevacizumab for advanced breast cancer. Each time, those who espouse only evidence—without narratives about real people—struggle to control the debate. Typically, they lose.

Patients and families have a right to tell their stories. But what about scientists? Facts and figures are essential, but insufficient, to translate the data and promote the acceptance of evidence-based practices and policies. Narratives— in the forms of storytelling, testimonials, and entertainment— have been shown to improve individual health behaviors in multiple settings. Moreover, evidence from social psychology research suggests that narratives, when compared with reporting statistical evidence alone, can have uniquely persuasive effects in overcoming preconceived beliefs and cognitive biases. Therefore, although narrative is often maligned as anecdote and thus scrubbed from the toolbox of guideline developers, epidemiologists, and regulatory scientists, these experts should consider narrative to develop and translate evidence-based policies. This is especially important because the federal government has made substantial investments to improve the dissemination and translation of evidence from comparative effectiveness research and patient-centered outcomes research.

Scientific reports are genuinely dispassionate, characterless, and ahistorical. But their translation and dissemination should not be. Stories are an essential part of how individuals understand and use evidence. A narrative—defined as a cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end—includes information about scene, characters, and conflict and raises questions and provides resolution. From this framework, stories that link individuals and their experiences to evidence are tools to translate (not drive) science without introducing anecdotal bias.

Scientists can use narrative in at least 2 ways. First is in the form of counternarratives, designed to neutralize stories that promote disproven theories. Take the largely negated theories of a causal link between childhood vaccines and autism. As recounted by Offit in his book on this topic, a celebrity actor claimed that she does not need real science to know that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine triggered her son’s autism: “[My son] is my science,” she stated on television to thunderous audience applause. Such narratives, challenging scientists who come to the table (or television studio) armed only with data, often succeed in the court of public opinion and weaken efforts to promote evidence-based health decisions.

When scientists encounter stories that promote unscientific approaches to health and health care, they should deploy an evidence-based counternarrative. The story of a mother in San Diego whose infant, too young for the MMR vaccine, became sick after exposure to an unvaccinated child with measles would add persuasive weight in a debate with the actor mentioned above. These counternarratives may also be useful when the evidence addresses individual risks as well as effectiveness. The FDA’s decision to remove breast cancer as an approved indication for bevacizumab was based not only on the absence of evidence to support its effectiveness in a general population but also on the relatively high risks of serious individual adverse effects, including death. In such cases, real and personal narratives can be told that embody, with characters and action, the evidence of a risky intervention. The public needs to hear the stories of patients, and their families, who encountered a drug that offered hope but was ultimately ineffective and even dangerous.

Another role for scientific narrative is found within the process of evidence discovery and translation…

Visit The Journal of the American Medical Association to read the rest of this article for free.

What do George Washington and critics of fracking have in common?  More than you might think.

George Washington, commander of the Revolutionary Army and the first president of the United States, performed some early experiments in microbiology, when he and a team of collaborators, including Thomas Paine, paddled out into the Millstone River to set it aflame.

Washington had long admired Paine’s writing, and had selections of The American Crisis (best known for its opening line “These are the times that try men’s souls”) read aloud to his troops for inspiration during the war. In an effort to secure a pension from Congress for his service to the growing nation, Paine went to see General Washington at Rocky Hill, New Jersey in the fall of 1783. It was near the close of the Revolutionary War and the United States and Britain had recently signed the Treaty of Paris, but the British had not yet left New York and the Continental Congress was meeting in Princeton. They had heard that there was a river in the area that could be set on fire, and Washington, Paine would later write, “had a mind to try the experiment.”

General Benjamin Lincoln of Boston made preparations for a systematic study of the problem to take place on November 5, 1783, in a quiet section of the river. The experiment, as it was planned, would involve disturbing the river bottom and attempting to ignite whatever was released with a flame held just above the surface of the water.

There was a spirited debate (perhaps fueled by spirits) on the likely outcome of the experiment, with Colonels David Humphreys and David Cobb, both aides to General Washington, opining that bituminous matter —a viscous, oily residue of petroleum distillation—would float to the surface and ignite. Paine, on the other hand, believed strongly that stirring the mud would release a gas that would then rise to the surface and ignite. “Each party held to his opinion,” wrote Paine, but the experiment would show which hypothesis, if either, was correct.

The next night, Washington, Paine, Lincoln, Cobb, and several soldiers were ferried out to a scow stationed near the mill dam. Each member of the “research team” had a job to do. The soldiers stirred the river bottom with poles while Washington and Paine, positioned at opposite ends of the scow, held lighted parchments a few inches above the surface of the water to ignite whatever substance emerged from the mud.  The results, as described by Paine, were clear:

When the mud at the bottom was disturbed by the poles, the air bubbles rose fast, and I saw the fire take from General Washington’s light and descend from thence to the surface of the water, in a similar manner as when a lighted candle is held so as to touch the smoke of a candle just blown out, the smoke will take fire, and the fire will descend and light up the candle. This was demonstrative evidence that what was called setting the river on fire was setting on fire the inflammable air that arose out of the mud.

Incidentally, the “inflammable air” was most likely methane (also known as “swamp gas”), and it is produced in landfills, cow and termite guts, and the muddy bottoms of ponds and streams by a group of microorganisms that derive chemical energy from the conversion of organic matter into methane. By some estimates, upwards of a billion tons of methane are released into the atmosphere annually. A contributor to global warming, methane’s high heat capacity is comparable to carbon dioxide, a more abundant greenhouse gas. Methane is also the major component of natural gas, a substance of renewed interest in the energy debate.

Of course, Washington, Lincoln, Cobb, and Humphreys didn’t know any of this, but it’s interesting to note that nearly two centuries before the discovery of the double-helix, citizen-farmer-statesmen-scientists were studying the natural world to understand the how and why. Much is known about Washington and Paine, but less about the others.

Cobb, for example, went to Harvard College and was a physician before the revolution.  Benjamin Lincoln, who would become the first secretary of war, was raised on a farm and only later in life pursued science and literature, while Humphreys was a writer-poet-entrepreneur who imported Merino sheep from Spain for their prized wool. They may not have known about atoms, molecules, or the scientific method as practiced in the 21st century but, like any good scientists, they designed an experiment to test a hypothesis, they made observations, and analyzed their results. They may have disagreed about what could happen, but they used science as a tool to learn what did happen.

We could ask how Washington, Lincoln, Paine, Cobb, and Humphreys would respond to contemporary questions on the energy versus environment continuum. Here’s one: Is “fracking” safe? Fracking, the release of natural gas from shale deposits through the high-pressure injection of water, sand, and a mixture of sometimes unknown chemicals is a little like what the Washington-Paine experiment accomplished when they released methane from the river bed. Proponents of fracking maintain that it is safe and offers a cleaner-than-coal energy source from a vast domestic supply. Critics argue that it poses a significant environmental risk of contaminating our water supply, while doing little to accelerate the development of truly sustainable energy sources.

Washington, Paine, and their farming contemporaries would surely appreciate the critical importance of the domestic water supply to themselves, their livestock, and their livelihoods, and they would have had the wherewithal to devise and understand experiments that assess the risks of fracking. So do we. While science provides many tools for developing new drugs, quantifying with increasing accuracy the details of the natural world, and for designing and evaluating new technologies to secure our energy future, we don’t have to work in a lab to help solve the problems of our day.

Like Washington and Paine in their time, we have the capacity to understand and can contribute to the debates on energy, the environment, and the host of issues arising from advances in genomics–by asking questions. What is the nature of the chemicals used in fracking? Are they released to the environment during or after fracking?  Are they toxic? Are they present in our water supply? These are not complicated questions, and it’s a good bet that Washington, Paine, and their contemporaries would ask them too.

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The U.S. House of Representatives will vote this week on an appropriations package to fund several key parts of the government. Unfortunately, the appropriations committee that drafted the package left a few important parts out.

The Commerce/Justice/Science, or CSJ, and Transportation/Housing and Urban Development, or THUD, appropriations bills would keep the federal government running through December 16, 2011, but at the same time would kill or hamstring a number of small, humble, yet vital federal programs.

The bill as currently formed would have a negative impact first and foremost on jobs. It would also inhibit critical agricultural and industrial science research, food safety monitoring systems, science education, healthy food access in schools, violence prevention programs, drug trafficking enforcement, rural innovation and economic development, coastal development, and efficient, low-carbon urban transit systems.

While reducing the public deficit is no doubt an important priority in the long run, doing it through ill-conceived short-term cuts to low-cost, high-importance science programs would cause more harm than good, hampering economic growth, job creation, public safety, science education, technology innovation, and rural economic development. A quick look at what specifically the bill would cut is illustrative.

Cuts undermine public safety and crime-fighting

The house cuts would completely eliminate a key program, the Technology Innovation Program at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, or NIST, which drives innovation in public good technologies. The Technology Innovation Program funds scientific research and development to improve our ability to monitor the condition and integrity of civil infrastructure such as bridges, highways, dams, levees, and wastewater treatment systems.

The cuts would also help illicit drug traffickers by cutting funding to three key programs that help police departments across the country develop and use technology to take down increasingly sophisticated nationwide drug cartels. The bill would cut the COPS technology program, which provides grant funding for the development and utilization of new technologies to advance communications interoperability, information sharing, crime analysis, intelligence gathering, and crime prevention. Similarly, the $34 million in cuts to the Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center would hamper the ability of local law enforcement in different precincts to coordinate in taking down dangerous drug traffickers.

Cuts hamper food safety and take away healthy options

The proposed cuts would also do serious damage to the nation’s ability to respond to major food safety crises by completely eliminating the Microbiological Data Program. This small but vital $4.2 million program is charged with inspecting and analyzing produce like tomatoes, spinach, and peanuts for harmful bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella. On top of that, the House bill would cut virtually the entire budget for the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which helps fight food deserts—communities without access to healthy groceries—and the obesity epidemic by expanding the availability of nutritious foods in underserved communities.

Cuts slow rural innovation and entrepreneurship

The proposed cuts would hamstring innovation in agricultural communities. The New Era Rural Technology Program—which helps advance agriculture-related technology innovation and has already improved crop-storage efficiency in Oregon and trained students in Iowa in sustainable farming—would be cut entirely. The bill also cuts $38 million in funding and closes 12 federal agricultural research laboratories in 10 locations. These labs do for agricultural research, food safety, nutrition, and sustainable farming methods what the national labs do for atomic physics and energy technology. These cuts will have unforeseen consequences not only for the state of agricultural innovation but also the employment of the more than 2,000 highly skilled scientists employed by the Agricultural Research Service.

The bill also heralds cuts to programs that help smalltime entrepreneurs start new business in rural regions where the recession is hitting hardest. Cutting the $6 million Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program will make it harder for nonprofit and educational institutions in rural regions to provide small loans to get small technology-based entrepreneurs to get new businesses off the ground.

Cuts damage science and education, the engines of future innovation

And beyond agricultural research, the House cuts will also have deleterious effects on science and technology education and innovation across the board. Science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, education is what trains workers to compete for jobs in the increasingly knowledge-driven global economy. But  $36 million in cuts to the NSF Graduate STEM Fellowships in K-12 Education program wll deprive children around the country of the opportunity to get hands on learning from real experts in STEM fields. And  $10 million in proposed cuts to the NSF National STEM Education Distributed Learning program will diminish the changes of students born without privilege to find opportunities to pursue careers in science and engineering.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seem to agree that there is an urgency to attract more students to STEM jobs in order to improve our economic competitiveness. Casting aside these important initiatives  is bad for students, bad for science, bad of businesses who–despite the recession–still cannot fill STEM job openings, and bad for the economy.

Cuts make our communities and oceans less sustainable

Unsurprisingly, oceans and the environment will get the short end of the stick with the proposed funding cuts. Cutting funding for the TIGGER Grants will slow research into making transportation and infrastructure more efficient, functional, and environmentally friendly, and destroy the high-value research jobs that go with it. And forget sustainable energy for the poor—cuts to the EDA’s sustainable development programs will ensure communities in need are not equipped to cope with climate change.

Our coastlines will also have to do without, as cuts to the Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning program reduce the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ability to develop ways to protect coastal ocean resources in a way that harmonizes competing economic, environmental, security needs. If the goal of the GOP truly is to get government out of the way and allow businesses to rebuild the economy, cutting funding for coastal and marine spatial planning is completely counterintuitive. As a fundamental component of America’s National Ocean Policy, this program reduces permitting times for offshore industrial activities where appropriate by better coordinating and streamlining federal review of activities on our outer continental shelf, thereby using taxpayer dollars more efficiently. Cutting it would hamper not only efforts to protect the ocean but also the many industries—from fishing to offshore wind—that depend on it.

But there’s another option

Instead of cutting so many modest yet vital investments in our long-term economic wellbeing, the House Appropriations Committee might instead consider eliminating some longstanding corporate welfare programs that only help the richest 1 percent of Americans. As the figure shows, eliminating just one tax loophole that allows corporations to deduct the costs of their private jets for CEO travel on their tax returns would bring in about the same amount of deficit reduction as all of the science and public safety cuts combined. That’s right; under the House appropriations bill, American taxpayers will spend $4.6 billion over the next 10 years to subsidize corporate travel on private jets, while cutting the same amount in job-creating public safety, environmental, and agricultural technology innovation research programs.

Reducing the deficit is undoubtedly an important long-term priority. But so is continuing to make smart investments in science that help us develop and commercialize new technologies, maintain public safety, protect our environment, and create new business opportunities and new jobs. We cannot think of these programs as “spending.” Each one represents an investment with future returns. As the president said in his State of the Union address at the beginning of this year:

Gutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

We cannot, even in our haste to solve the debt crisis, resort to shortsighted solutions that compromise our position as a leader in innovation in the global economy. Even less advisable is acquiescing to pressures by compromising on our national health and safety.  There is a better way; it is attainable through thoughtful reflection and discourse. Lawmakers cannot be so cowardly as to take the easy way out at the expense of the 99 percent, while asking nothing of corporate jet owners.

Sean Pool is the Assistant Editor of Science Progress. Lauren Simenauer is an intern with Science Progress and a senior at the University of Virginia. Thanks to Matt Kasper, Patrick Garofalo, and Seth Hanlon for their input and ideas.

Many of our nation’s first political leaders were also leading scientists in their day, conducting research, founding academies of scientific learning, and inventing new methods and technologies, some of which are still in use today.

Each Monday for the next three weeks we’ll be looking at a different founding father and asking, what might he have to say about the big science questions in politics today? To get us started we ask “what would Thomas Jefferson do,” or WWTJD, about climate, vaccines, and evolution?

Next week, George Washington and natural gas fracking.

What Would TJ Do?

When it comes to political rhetoric, throwbacks to the founding fathers of our Republic reign supreme. On both sides of the aisle, it seems impossible to make a political argument not predicated upon what George Washington would have wanted. And it’s not just the founding fathers—a common trope on the conservative end of the spectrum is that “Ronald Reagan” serves as a sufficient counterpoint to any argument.

The rule of thumb seems to be: If you’ve got an old dead guy on your side, you’re golden. And lately, if you believe the media, it seems as though all the old dead guys have aligned politically with the right. This makes sense as a natural extension of the conservative ideology, which seeks to maintain tradition and stares longingly into the past with pangs of nostalgia. But perhaps it is time for the left to reclaim its stake in the political behemoths of the past—a past that is replete with progressive tradition, especially when it comes to the promotion of science. Indeed, among our founding fathers can be found astronomers, medical doctors, observational biologists, and inventors of many sorts.

The right wing has a tenuous relationship with Thomas Jefferson, for instance, when it comes to his attention to academia, which flies in the face of the anti-intellectualism movement. Through his entire life, Thomas Jefferson, like many of his contemporaries, was committed to the scientific method and progressive science policy.

To be fair, some allegations flung about in political rhetoric regarding the third president have credence. An ardent antifederalist, Thomas Jefferson believed that a centralized government would prove cataclysmic for the fledgling United States, and thought it best that America be divided into as minute of municipalities as possible, to be governed by the yeoman farmer ideal. Jefferson famously opposed the establishment of a centralized bank, bemoaning the state of credit in Europe. There are rational grounds from which to speculate Jefferson might have been sympathetic toward the Tea Party.

Yet most of what we know about Jefferson suggests he would oppose the right wing’s extremist, antiscience fringe. For instance, the Tea Party campaigned to require schools to show a movie, “A More Perfect Union,” distributed by a conservative group that describes the founding of America as a “divine miracle.” Having penned his own version of the Bible sans miracles, Jefferson probably would not have approved. After a series of correspondences with Dr. Benjamin Rush detailing his conception of deism, Jefferson rewrote the gospels, editing out most mentions of the supernatural. The Jefferson Bible reflected his ambition to represent the natural world as accurately as possible—a value that lent itself to a lifelong love affair with scientific inquiry.

In 1797, after having served on the board for some time, Thomas Jefferson was elected president of the American Philosophical Society, or APS. In the 18th century, “philosophical” took on several meanings that are now considered vestigial connotations of the word.

One of those meanings pertained to science; in fact, the APS was more analogous to science and research nonprofits back in the day. Jefferson commissioned the society, for instance, in the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In exchange for providing invaluable scientific resources to the explorers, the explorers deposited many of their journals and artifacts into the society’s archives. Jefferson also promoted the study of the Hessian fly, which was destroying crops in the region, and requested a whole skeleton of a woolly mammoth. Through his devotion to the APS, Jefferson demonstrated a decades-long commitment to the national pursuit of scientific advancement.

In light of the constant public deference to our nation’s founders, it is interesting to consider where Thomas Jefferson may have fallen on contemporary issues. Though it is somewhat arrogant to speak for the dead, especially in the cases of these monumental figures, with some historical context, we can make educated guesses as to what the great minds of the past would think of hot-button issues of today.

WWTJD on climate change?

Jefferson had a profound appreciation for the importance of the climate to economy. Ever the renaissance man, Jefferson was also an amateur meteorologist, rising every morning to record the temperature at Monticello. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote:

A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep.

No doubt Jefferson would have devoured material on theories that could account for this phenomenon.

An avid farmer, Jefferson redesigned the plow with his son-in-law to achieve greater planting efficiency. He manufactured his plow from iron, as opposed to his contemporaries’ wooden plows, and his was specially designed for hillside plowing. This innovation suggests Jefferson may have taken a keen interest in making industrial agriculture more sustainable. Creating jobs in agriculture would have been an added plus for the man who believed farmers to be the chief moral and political operators in society.

Finally, Jefferson demonstrated modern attitudes toward sustainable eating. In a letter to Dr. Vine Utley, he wrote that he ate temperately, and by many accounts he consumed a mostly vegetarian diet. Though no records show he conducted any systematic research on nutrition, TJ’s hunch that eating his vegetables would be beneficial served him to his old age of 83.

WWTJD on vaccines and medical research?

Thomas Jefferson was generally suspicious of the medical practices of his time. He held that folk medicine was grounded in erroneous theory rather than empirically derived facts, and opposed practices such as purging and bloodletting. Jefferson once lamented that the “state of medicine is worse than that of total ignorance.” Jefferson nonetheless treated his own myriad physical ailments, notably using quinine to alleviate severe migraines that plagued him his entire life.

The view that medicine was ineffective also did not preclude him from getting his family vaccinated from smallpox—a procedure that was not without considerable controversy at the time.

In fact, inoculation in the colonies sparked riots in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1768 Dr. Archibald Campbell and Dr. John Dalgleish brought the smallpox vaccine to Norfolk County, precipitating violent demonstrations that would culminate in the burning of Dr. Campbell’s house. Jefferson, still practicing law at the time, agreed to represent Dr. Campbell in a civil suit filed against the perpetrators. Though Jefferson resigned his practice before the resolution of the case, he would later advocate the repeal of anti-inoculation laws in the Virginia General Assembly.

Jefferson extended his support of vaccination beyond mere political advocacy. In 1801 Jefferson collaborated with Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse in experimenting with a less virulent cowpox vaccine. After that, he led a local campaign in Charlottesville to get his family, his slaves, and his neighbors vaccinated. Needless to say, Jefferson would have been quietly appalled by the recent uproar over vaccines that has recently dominated the presidential primary news cycle.

Although, on the whole, Jefferson favored a more limited government, he made exceptions when it came to the pursuit of knowledge—probably because he recognized the importance of advancing science and technology. In light of his vaccine activism, it may be safe to say that he would have condoned or even supported funding for the NIH. Jefferson demonstrated such support for medical research in 1793, when he laid the foundations for pharmacological innovation with his patent statute. True to his cautious nature, he tailored the act to protect inventors, while ensuring the system could not be abused so as to monopolize innovation.

WWTJD on teaching evolution in schools?

Even in the 18th and 19th centuries, Thomas Jefferson knew that the earth was more than 6,000 years old. In fact, Jefferson was an archaeologist himself, and he invented several techniques that are still in use today. Observing rituals at an Indian burial ground made an impression on Jefferson at age 8; as a young man, Jefferson returned to the site, just north of Charlottesville, for exploration. It was there that Jefferson revolutionized American archaeological technique by replacing top-down digging with careful removal of wedges with respect to their stratigraphy.

Due to his insistence that Meriwether Lewis take notes on the excavation of the Big Bone Lick in painstaking detail, naturalists concluded that the mastodon and the mammoth were, in fact, two distinct species. Jefferson was resistant, however, to the idea of extinction, which contradicted his worldview of the “completeness of nature,” an idea that the earth and the cosmos exist in a perfect continuity governed by natural law.

After examining the fossils of what he believed to be a massive lion (later determined to be a giant sloth and honored with his namesake—the Megalonyx jeffersonii), Jefferson demanded Lewis and Clark’s vigilance for a Megalonyx sighting, certain that the creature was extant. Confirmation would support his completeness-of-nature theory. While this might seem inconsistent with today’s scientific consensus on evolution, the fact that Jefferson requested evidence to support his theory suggests he was receptive to being disproved, and therefore dedicated to the scientific method. After all, it was Jefferson who said, “we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Given that he died five years before Darwin’s famous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, it is impossible to know whether Jefferson would have changed his mind, especially in light of the intellectual rigidity he acquired in old age. Nevertheless, Jefferson’s commitment to empiricism and penchant for fossil collecting may have made room for Darwin’s finches.

Jefferson once wrote that “democracy cannot long exist without enlightenment,” and “that talent and virtue, needed in a free society, should be educated regardless of wealth, birth or other accidental condition.” Coupled with the belief that an educated populace was imperative for universal suffrage, Jefferson would probably have supported the dissemination of this knowledge in public schools.

In 1778 Jefferson presented his “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” which would serve as the precursor to public education. As a cornerstone of this education, Jefferson supported the teaching of a variety of subjects, encouraging science especially at the university level. This led to the founding of the University of Virginia in 1819, in what Jefferson considered his crowning achievement in education advocacy. Today the University of Virginia has an impressive evolutionary biology department.

TJ’s science legacy

In recent weeks Jefferson has been credited with the ability to see into the future, the opposition of abortion, and to have been just kidding about the separation between church and state. Although he was certainly bound by the limitations of his time, Dumas Malone, a prominent Jefferson biographer, wrote that Jefferson “lamented that public affairs had taken him from the path of study and inquiry for which Nature really intended him.”

So perhaps in order to avoid that rumbling of the founding fathers turning in their graves (what—you thought that was an earthquake originating just miles east of Charlottesville?), we ought to leave Jefferson out of the political volleying over science and safely nestled in the annals of his favorite hobbies, which is where he wanted to be all along.

Lauren Simenauer is finishing her bachelor’s degrees in biology and psychology at the University of Virginia, the best university ever … founded by Thomas Jefferson.

Next week, we ask: What would George Washington do about natural gas fracking?

At noon today Science Progress Editor-In-Chief Jonathan Moreno will be talking to a packed audience at the Center for American Progress about his new book,

About This Event

We have entered what is called the “biological century,” and a new biopolitics has emerged to address the implications for America’s collective value system, our well-being, and, ultimately, our future.

Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Jonathan Moreno’s new book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, is the first book to recognize and assess this new force in our political landscape—one that fuels today’s culture wars and has motivated politicians of all stripes to re-examine their platforms. As Moreno explains the most contentious issues, he also offers an engaging history of the intersection between science and democracy in American life, a reasoned (and often surprising) analysis of how different political ideologies view scientific controversies, and a vision for how the new biopolitics can help shape the quality of our lives.

Copies of The Body Politic will be available for sale at the event, and Moreno will be available to sign books.

Introduction:

Neera Tanden, Chief Operating Officer, Center for American Progress

Distinguished Panelist:

Jonathan Moreno, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress; David and Lyn Silfen University Professor, University of Pennsylvania; and Author, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America

Moderator:

Andrew Light, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress; and Associate Director, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, George Mason University

In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama received applause when he spoke of restoring science to “its rightful place.” But October marks 31 Months since the Obama administration released a presidential memorandum about restoring scientific integrity to federal decision making, and still there is no government-wide policy. Nearly two and a half years later, just a handful of agencies have draft or final policies out for public review and/or comment.

For those expecting that this administration would be better for science than its predecessor, or better for government-employed scientists, the progress has been disappointing. Only now has there been notable agency activity on scientific integrity that the public can examine for itself.

While the Office of Science and Technology Policy recently noted that 19 departments and agencies have submitted draft or final policies on scientific integrity, very few are available to the public. You can review status reports, drafts, or final versions of policies from the following agencies:

• Environmental Protection Agency
• National Science Foundation
• Department of Commerce
• National Institute of Standards and Technology
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Department of the Interior

Some of the publicly available policies seek public comment. The deadlines for comments vary between agencies but are coming quickly.

These policies are not operating in a vacuum. The National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency are two agencies that already have developed policies related to conflicts of interest and other policies for conducting scientific research. The National Institutes of Health has an entire office on research integrity and is looking to update a key regulation on conducting research involving human subjects. But considering the government overall, the progress on developing, implementing, and executing policies on scientific integrity lacks cohesion, coherence, and support.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, has indicated it would develop a policy governing its own conduct but has been silent on any government-wide policies. Certainly each government agency has different needs, uses, and resources for scientific and technical information, complicating any all-inclusive framework. But an absence of an overarching policy—even to address whether or not agency decisions on scientific integrity issues could be appealed to OSTP—seems inconsistent with the broad focus of the presidential memorandum that started it all.

Looking at the few agency draft policies that are available, the focus appears mostly on ensuring the proper conduct of agency scientists. While taking a firm stand against scientific misconduct is welcome, ensuring scientific research is properly used in government decision making is the responsibility of nonscientists as well as scientists. The policies released to date do not provide much detail on how nonscience agencies are supposed to incorporate science into their decision making. Only the Department of Commerce memo is explicit about the ability of agency scientists to communicate their research to the public.

More direction and more communication from the Office of Science and Technology Policy would be welcome. Political interference with scientists (or at least the appearance of it) has not disappeared since the presidential memorandum was signed. In fact, federal agencies since then have had to fend off criticism after criticism for their scientific practices.

Take for example the high-profile and poorly-explained abandonment of ozone pollution rules EPA scientists said were necessary to human health; or the sloppy editing of an Interior Department report justifying the 6-month deepwater drilling moratorium following the 2010 BP oil leak, which gave the appearance of misrepresenting scientific advice in the executive summary of the document, even if the advice was better represented in the full document. Or take the story of Charles Monnett, the Interior Department scientist who either was or wasn’t being investigated over concerns about his research, depending on what press report you read. After suspending and reinstating him and continuing an ongoing investigation, the Interior Department is now responding to a complaint that their investigation has violated the Department’s scientific integrity policy

Many of these controversies were driven by appearances more than substance, but that is all the more reason for the Obama administration to push harder to implement a transparent and wide-reaching scientific integrity platform. Unfortunately, the lack of transparency over the development of agency scientific integrity policies has been as much of a problem as any weaknesses in the policies themselves we have seen so far. In the absence of specific scientific integrity guidelines to refer to, the administration has faced legal action (see the timeline below) and an added angle for congressional criticism that could have been mitigated or eliminated. Maybe this will change as more agencies release drafts and final policies for public view.

Of course, just because a scientific integrity policy exists, doesn’t necessarily mean the agency will uphold it. The first case under these policies—currently underway at the Interior Department—will determine if these policies are going to be more than words on paper. Done right, these efforts to establish fundamental scientific integrity reform in federal agencies could be great policy and good politics. But it seems continued attention and outside pressure will continue to be critical if we are to truly “restore science to its rightful place” in American politics.

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY TIMELINE

January 20, 2009 | President Obama says “we will restore science to its rightful place” in his inaugural address.

March 9, 2009 | President Obama issues a presidential memorandum on scientific integrity, “directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making” within 120 days.

May 9, 2009 | The Environmental Protection Agency releases an employee memo on scientific integrity, outlining the agency’s plans to comply with the presidential memorandum.

July 7, 2009 | 120 days have passed since the presidential memorandum, with no strategy apparent. As the delay lengthens, OSTP Director John Holdren notes the difficulty of preparing such recommendations and that the principles outlined in the March 2009 memo are in effect.

February 2010 | OSTP Director Holdren is asked about progress on the recommendations during a congressional hearing. The report on how to improve scientific integrity is eight months overdue.

August 2010 | Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, submits a Freedom of Information Act request to OSTP related to its development of the scientific integrity recommendations.

October 19, 2010 | PEER sues OSTP under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, to compel disclosure of records related to the scientific integrity memorandum. The lawsuit follows PEER’s August 2010 FOIA request. The next step in the case is a ruling on motions for summary judgment.

December 17, 2010 | OSTP releases its recommendations. Agencies are given 120 days to develop policies covering integrity of scientific processes, public communications of scientific research, scientists on federal advisory committees, and professional development of scientists and engineers.

February 2, 2011 | The Department of the Interior issues its Scientific Integrity Policy and appoints a scientific integrity officer.

April 16, 2011 | 120 days have passed since OSTP issued its recommendations.

April 21, 2011 | OSTP issues a scientific integrity update on its blog. It names the agencies that have submitted reports but provides none of these plans for public review.

May 5, 2011 | OSTP Director Holdren issues a new 90-day deadline for agencies to submit their draft scientific integrity policies.

May 26, 2011 | The National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, posts a summary report on its work toward compliance with scientific integrity guidelines.

June 2011 | The Department of Commerce issues a guidance memo on compliance with scientific integrity principles. It notes that Commerce agencies can develop their own policies (NOAA and NIST are Commerce agencies).

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, releases its draft scientific integrity policy for public comment.

August 2011 | 90 days have passed since the latest deadline was announced.

The National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency release draft scientific integrity policies for public comment.

The Department of the Interior opens its first investigation into a complaint under its Scientific Integrity Policy.

OSTP issues another update, again with no draft policies available for public review. No mention is made of the policies published in the Federal Register or otherwise released by agencies in the preceding few weeks.

September 2011 | The Office of the Inspector General of the Environmental Protection Agency issues a report indicating that the agency failed to follow proper procedure in the scientific assessments for its endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.

David Bruggeman is the Senior Public Policy Analyst for the Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, and blogs about science policy at Pasco Phronesis. The views here are his alone and do not represent the views of the ACM.

The controversy is budgetary: Webb’s estimated cost has risen from $1.6 billion, a decade ago, to $8.7 billion today. Of this $500 million is due to the addition of a five-year operating budget. But the rest is a huge cost overrun. The most recent estimate of $8.7 billion represents a $2.2 billion increase over the previous estimate by an independent panel last year.

Lawmakers are left to wonder: Will the spiraling costs ever end?

Given enough funding the Webb could launch in 2018. Scientists believe they have solved the complex instrument’s technical issues, so this is primarily a money issue.

Rising costs have put the Webb on the Congressional budget chopping block, and truth be told not all astronomers are particularly concerned. There’s a rift in the community, with some astronomers not associated with the Webb project concerned that the telescope is suffocating limited allocations for other projects.

Nevertheless, losing Webb at this point, with $3.5 billion invested so far, would be a huge loss. Canceling the project would lead to “a 20-year setback in astrophysics,” said astrophysicist Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Congress says NASA has to find the extra funds for Webb out of its own budget.

Late last month U.S. Rep Frank Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the House Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee that funds NASA, asked White House Office of Management Budget Director Jacob Lew in a letter to identify what part of NASA should be cut next year to cover Webb’s increased costs.

Unless his committee receives offsets in costs, Wolf said, he would move forward with the understanding that the Webb isn’t a priority for NASA. And therefore kill it.

So where to find $2.2 billion? Space News has a suggestion:

Canceling the project would be devastating. The money wasted and jobs lost can be quantified; the dulling of space technology’s cutting edge can be predicted. But the loss to science would be incalculable: Like Hubble — NASA’s most productive science platform ever — JWST has the potential to dramatically change astronomers’ understanding of the universe and its ongoing evolution. It is fair to say that if JWST is built and performs as advertised, it will document phenomena and objects never before seen, perhaps not yet even theorized.

Yet as painful as it is to even think about canceling JWST, this option must at least be considered given the unprecedented pressures on NASA’s budget. Even if lawmakers ultimately opt to stay the course — and they should — they have to understand the implications of that decision for NASA’s other activities.

In that regard, the Space Launch System, which per the House and Senate spending bills is slated to receive nearly $2 billion next year, is an appropriate bill payer for JWST. Given that NASA has no established exploration destination requiring the heavy-lift rocket on the schedule mandated by Congress, stretching out its development to help fund an observatory of undeniable scientific merit — its substantial problems notwithstanding — is a fair trade.

There are a couple of things to note here. First of all, this underlines the importance of identifying a mission for the rocket you’re building. A mission gives the rocket purpose. Without a mission or a hard timeline, what’s the harm in putting off the rocket for a year?

Secondly, if Space News is advocating putting development of the Space Launch System on hold for a year, how attractive is that $2.2 billion going to be to Congressional budget cutters with less of an affinity for human spaceflight?

Bottom line: This spaceflight program is dreadfully vulnerable.

Eric Berger is the Houston Chronicle’s space, weather and science reporter. He covers everything from nanometers to parsecs. You can follow him on twitter at @chronsciguy. This article is reposted with permission from Eric Berger’s blog at Chron.com.

We have entered what some call the “biological century” and a new biopolitics has emerged to address the implications for America’s collective value system, our well-being, and ultimately, our future. The Body Politic is the first book to recognize and assess this new force in our political landscape—one that fuels today’s culture wars and has motivated politicians of all stripes to reexamine their platforms.

As Moreno explains the most contentious issues, he also offers an engaging history of the intersection between science and democracy in American life, a reasoned (and often surprising) analysis of how different political ideologies view scientific controversies, and a vision for how the new biopolitics can help shape the quality of our lives.

Below we’ve reposted Friday’s interview in the Atlantic with Dr. Moreno. You can find out more about the Body Politic here.  

A former member of President Obama’s transition team; a professor of medical ethics and health policy, of history and sociology of science, and of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania; a national associate of the National Research Council; and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., Jonathan Moreno wears many hats. His most recent project, the new book The Body Politic, explores how bioethical issues — stem cells, genetics — have become a part of our political discourse.

Here, Moreno discusses how neuroscience and globalization are both affecting his chosen field; the problem with medical schools across the U.S. backing off on their commitment to bioethics; and why he’s trying to integrate bioethics with the history of ideas, technology, and public affairs.

What do you say when people ask you, “What do you do?”

My short answer is that I’m a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The longer and more descriptive answer is hard because, intellectually speaking, I’m a mutt. I’m trained as a philosopher but I live in academic departments of medical ethics and of history and sociology of science. Professionally, I’m mainly seen as a bioethicist but what I’ve been trying to do for years is integrate bioethics with the history of ideas, technology, and public affairs. So, when people ask me, I say that I teach, write, and do research at the intersection of bioethics and policy with a strong sense of the American cultural context.

What new idea or innovation is having the most significant impact on the bioethics world?

I’d suggest that there are two: globalization and neuroscience. The preoccupation with globalization has clearly affected my own work. In my new book, The Body Politic, I argue that the battle for control over the power of experimental biology is partly shaped by the fact that science is a globally networked enterprise of scientists and their sponsors. In the new paperback version of my 2006 book, Mind Wars, I’m reviewing the way that the global war on terrorism has influenced the growth of research on the brain. Right now, I’m a senior adviser to the president’s bioethics commission, which has been digging up the facts about the venereal disease experiments in Guatemala in the late 1940s. That commission report is being followed by an assessment of the international protections for human research subjects today. Globalization pushes us to think more about justice and fairness, which have been concerns more typical of non-U.S. bioethicists.

The other area that is having a big impact on bioethics is neuroscience, which has undergone remarkable growth by just about any measure over the last 15 years. One of the keys has been the advent of new imaging devices that make it possible to do experiments with healthy persons rather than during neurosurgery. Another is invasive implants that can alleviate distressing symptoms of brain disorders like Parkinson’s. “Neuroethicists” even have their own professional organization in which I am active. I’m especially interested in the national security implications of cognitive enhancements that might be developed, though I think we’re far from some of the science fiction scenarios about “super soldiers” and the like. I’m sure we’re in for some surprises along the way.

What’s something that most people just don’t understand about your area of expertise?

Bioethicists are caught in an interesting dilemma. Some doctors and medical scientists tend to see us as cops who just say no to important experiments. Others see us as co-opted by the medical and science establishment. I see the task for academic bioethicists as inherently a critical one, as in but not of the establishment. But we also have a responsibility to explain the rationale for a particular treatment or study when we think it’s justified, even if the explanation doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker. I don’t know that there’s any way to avoid this dilemma but as long as we have critics on both sides I’d say we’re doing our job.

What’s an emerging trend that you think will shake up the bioethics world?

That’s exactly the topic of The Body Politic: Bioethical issues that were the province of academic discourse since the 1970s are now permanently part of the political discourse, which I call the new biopolitics. The most obvious example is the way that the embryonic stem cell debate became an issue in three presidential campaigns. Already we’ve seen a little dustup among the Republican presidential candidates about science. These controversies are often related to but distinct from abortion politics because they involve sophisticated new ways of manipulating cells and genes, raising the question of how far experimental biology should go.

Most people in bioethics are academics. To see our issues caught up in the rough posturing of politics is disconcerting compared with the nuances that occupy us. Similarly, I’m sure economists cringe at loose talk about government debt and monetary policy, and many of them find it annoying to be pigeon-holed as on the left or the right. We’ll just have to get used to it, as other disciplines have, because bioethical issues are now so much a part of the public conversation.

What’s a bioethics trend that you wish would go away?

I have the sense that a few medical schools are backing off their commitment to bioethics. The field grew out of social reform movements in the late 1960s when patients started to appreciate the growing power of modern medicine and insisted that they wanted to be in charge of the goals of their care. That ’60s generation of leaders in reforming medical education is retiring. Of course, there are also serious funding problems in many universities, especially state institutions, and it only gets more expensive to educate doctors. And people in fields like bioethics don’t usually bring in big grants, so there are other reasons for funding cuts. On the other hand, there are lots of new medical schools opening up, all with students who will need to learn some bioethics. I’m hopeful they will establish high-quality programs.

What’s an idea you became fascinated with but that ended up taking you off track?

I can’t think of one recently. In the kind of work I do now I’m always looking for details that inform my understanding of the role of the history of the financial system to pop music. I can say that in the course of figuring out how to write my new book I spent a few months bouncing around between a memoir of my experience as an academic in the world of public policy and a more historical and philosophical treatise on modern progressivism. My editor helped me find my voice so I think the result is just about right.

Who are three people or organizations that you would put in a Hall of Fame for your field?

The two pioneering bioethics organizations were The Hastings Center, a free-standing think tank in New York that was founded in 1969, and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, which started in 1972. They deserve a great deal of credit for their vision. At the risk of sounding self-serving I’d add the University of Pennsylvania, which has tremendous strengths both specifically in bioethics and in complementary fields like the history and sociology of science, philosophy, neuroscience, and stem cell biology, as well as across the university. Penn’s president, Amy Gutmann, is a political philosopher who chairs President Obama’s bioethics commission; my new colleague Zeke Emanuel is a philosopher and physician who worked on health care reform in the White House; and my old friend Art Caplan is easily the most visible person in the field. There’s great excitement about bioethics at Penn.

What other field or occupation did you consider going into?

For a while in college I considered a career in public interest law, but as soon as I stepped in front of a class I knew I loved teaching. My romance with ideas began in high school, though I didn’t recognize that until I took my first philosophy course. And I love to write and felt at home in the academic environment, so my career choice was over-determined. I’ve always been fascinated by standup comedy. Perhaps I would have tried that if the opportunity presented itself when I was young. As a teacher I get some of the same satisfaction when I go for a laugh but my “performance” doesn’t depend on that reaction. If a joke doesn’t go over I just tell myself that I’m not there to entertain my students. But I can’t keep myself from trying.

What website or app most helps you do your job on a daily basis?

I’m an old-fashioned guy that reads the New York Times and the Washington Post every day. I travel a lot, work in several offices, and am writing something almost all the time, so cloud computing has greatly simplified my life. I also love the fact that I can go on the Web and nearly always find a video of some scholar whose work interests me.

What song’s been stuck in your head lately?

“Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” by U2. It reminds me that there’s nothing worse than cruelty and that, as frustrating as politics often is, it’s the only alternative to violence in resolving our differences.

Let’s look first at the ways in which science has shaped terrorism. Several of the September 11 attackers were students of applied sciences. The attacks’ mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a.k.a. “The Brain”, had an engineering degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and three of the four pilots had studied at the Hamburg University of Technology and Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Although engineers are overrepresented among Islamist terrorists, this is nothing new but goes back to the first modern terrorist group in the 19th century. For example the Russian Narodnaya volia,a 19th centruy Russian terrorist organization had several engineers, scientists and medical students among its members. This was followed in the 20th century by the likes of Dora Brilliant, George Habash, Leonid Krasin, Ted Kaczynski and Ramzi Yousef. The list can be made much longer.

“A great windfall for science is at hand, at least for some of us, because of the need for new research bent to the exigencies of new forms of warfare.“— John Marburger

The possibility of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs, after 9/11 deepened the relationship between science and terrorism. The 2001 anthrax attacks accentuated the fear of bioterrorism, but despite attempts to link the attacks to al-Qaeda it was soon apparent that they lacked connections to political terrorism. Nevertheless, bioterrorism came to have a real effect on the Global War on Terrorism, which we’ll abbreviate here as GWOT, in 2003 when Colin Powell used an alleged terrorist plot to manufacture the biotoxin ricin as justification for the invasion of Iraq. The British terrorists behind the alleged plot were said to have connections to an Iraqi terrorist network, until 2005 when, with the invasion accomplished, it was revealed that this evidence was flawed and that no ricin had been manufactured.

The overall track record of WMD terrorism is almost as minimal today as it was in the aftermath of  9/11. Except for several Iraqi bombings 2006-7 that rather unsuccessfully combined chlorine gas with conventional explosives, there have been no lethal terrorism attacks.Verified incidents primarily consist of speculative and aspirational plans and fantasies – often about using ricin for individual assassinations – rather than operational plans for mass-casualty attacks. There is furthermore no consensus among researchers whether any non state-supported organization would have both the motivations and capability to conduct such an attack. However small the risk, many governments have considered it too large to be ignored and according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation the US government by 2008 had invested more than $50 billion in defense research on WMD attack threats.

Science is not just seen as supplying critical knowledge and tools for terrorists but also for those protecting against it. In December 2001 the new Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger when speaking at the AAAS foresaw that “a great windfall for science is at hand, at least for some of us, because of the need for new research bent to the exigencies of new forms of warfare.” In no research area is this clearer than in research and development connected to bioterrorism.

The US government has, through its BioShield initiatives allocated more than $5 billion to life sciences research and development connected to bioterrorism. Just after 9/11 the social commentator Mike Davis warned that the earlier nuclear focused military-industrial complex had started to transform into a “Homeland Security-Industrial Complex.”

Although there does not exist any detailed investigation of the impact of the new focus on terrorism on science research trends, it is possible to show, however roughly and on an aggregated level, that such a ’9/11-effect’ does exists. This can be seen when looking at the growth of research and review articles published in science and technology research journals listed in the Web of Science database that includes terms related to terrorism. As shown in the graph there is a clear trend starting in 2001 of increased interest in terrorism within published research results in science and technology:

Articles with “terroris*” in title, abstract or keywords as indexed by Web of Science, Science Citation Index Expanded (article, review, letter) 1989-2010 (Alltogether 2.738 articles)

Besides bioterrorism, geography has been another field of science to be enlisted after 9/11 to aid in shaping US national security policy. Its sub-discipline Geographic Information Science, or GIScience is focused on research underlying geospatial information technologies, which have played an increasing role in U.S. military operations since the first Gulf War. The intermingling of government security agendas and science research priorities in the field is evident in the report “Priorities for GEOINT Research at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency” (2006). The report, which was prepared by leading GIScience scholars and echoes the priorities of leading US GIScience research organizations, defines the research agenda for National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a government intelligence agency with some 16,000 employees and a budget of at least $5 billion. Geographic sciences are also applied in a multitude of military systems, like the navigation systems and topographical models used by drones and other unmanned arial vehicles.

After 9/11 geographers tried to identify the location of bin Ladin’s caves using geomorphological data from video recordings and following his death in 2011 it was noted that UCLA geographers had used “island biogeography” models to prognosticate his location as a building with high walls in a populated area in Pakistan near Tora Bora. Furthermore NGA supplied data for the Abbottabad operation that ruled out tunneling as a viable approach.

These examples suggests the emergence of a new security-academic nexus where academic research not only benefits from directed government support but is also involved in framing specific government agendas. It is clear that the US military agenda has benefited from these efforts to direct science toward security goals. What is less clear is if this has also been of benefit to the US scientific agenda or if the pursuit of enhanced security has directed research away from other, more-deserving areas of scientific inquiry. Whether this is as good science policy as it is security policy is still in question.

Mats Fridlund and Gustaf Nelhans are researchers in security studies and theory of science at University of Copenhagen and University of Gothenburg. The article is abridged and translated from their contribution to the anthology September 11th: The State of the World Ten Years After (in Danish) to be published by Aarhus University Press on September 11, 2011.

The Obama administration’s efforts to protect scientific integrity moved forward recently with the submission of five finalized agency policies and 14 draft policies, but progress has been slow and haphazard. The administration recognizes that sound, uncensored science is critically important to protecting public health and the environment. The administration also understands that agencies should foster a culture of scientific integrity that includes effective policies and oversight to protect science from political manipulation and research misconduct. However, it has yet to undo the damage wrought by the previous administration.

Background

The Bush administration was widely criticized for abuses of scientific integrity, including political manipulation of scientific findings and suppression of the free flow of scientific information. These policies undermined the effectiveness of the public structures that protect our health, economy, and environment by delaying decision making and weakening public trust that government policies were based on the best available scientific and technical information.

As a candidate and in his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to restore scientific integrity. Shortly after taking office, he issued a memo on scientific integrity, which stated that “political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions.”

The memo directed the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, to develop guidelines to protect scientific integrity within 120 days. However, those guidelines were not released until December 2010, more than a year past the deadline. Despite the delay, OMB Watch, a non-profit focused on accountability and transparency in government,  praised the guidelines as a step forward and called for agencies to aggressively implement them.

In May, OSTP asked each agency to submit a draft scientific integrity policy within 90 days. In the interest of transparency and accountability, OMB Watch called for agencies to publish their proposed policies for public comment before finalizing them. However, OSTP did not formally instruct agencies to solicit public feedback.

Agency Policies

On August 11, OSTP posted information about the progress (or lack of progress) each agency had made in meeting the most recent deadline. Several agencies have adopted final scientific integrity policies, while others have released draft policies for public comment. Advocates have criticized both the content of some of the policies and the closed process that produced them.

Of the five agencies with final policies, only the Department of the Interior undertook visible public consultation. The Department of Commerce and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have published their final policies but do not appear to have solicited public comment at any point in the process. The Justice Department and the intelligence community do not appear to have publicly published their final policies nor solicited public comment on those policies.

Fourteen other agencies have submitted draft policies to OSTP, and several have published drafts for public comment, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Science Foundation. Of the remaining agencies, some are reportedly considering public consultation before finalizing their policies, while others do not plan to solicit public comment.

The Department of the Interior example demonstrates the value of consulting with the public before finalizing a scientific integrity policy. The department’s draft policy was criticized by OMB Watch and other groups for failing to address political interference with science and lacking protections for scientists who blow the whistle on misconduct. After receiving public comment, however, Interior made revisions, and the final policy was significantly improved.

What’s in the Policies?

The OSTP guidelines directed agency policies to address four areas: foundations of scientific integrity, including appropriate whistleblower protections; communications policies; federal advisory committees; and professional development of scientists, including opportunities to present research and serve in professional organizations.

While the available plans make some progress on those topics, the issue of scientists communicating with the media has been especially contentious. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) called EPA’s proposed policy “pathetically weak” for failing to ensure that public affairs staff don’t become gatekeepers restricting communication between scientists and the media.

The available policies are also thin on details of how political manipulation of science will be prevented. For instance, the Union of Concerned Scientists said NOAA’s policy “has raised the bar for scientific integrity policies,” but also said it was “critical for the agency to establish specific practices to protect the integrity of agency scientific findings to prevent manipulation.”

Next Steps

OSTP has not set a hard deadline for final policies, but the Aug. 11 blog post states that the office “will be working with [agencies] this fall as they finalize their policies.”

We at OMB Watch invite readers to submit their comments on the proposed plans to:

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (by Aug. 20);
• Environmental Protection Agency (by Sept. 6); and
• National Science Foundation (by Sept. 6).

Recommendations

OMB Watch continues to call for stronger commitments to public participation and more public accountability by all federal agencies. OSTP should direct agencies to publish draft policies for public comment at least one month before finalizing them and to finalize their policies before the end of the year.

Agencies should ensure their policies establish clear expectations that science will be free from political manipulation, with procedures to insulate science from inappropriate influence and to redress the problem if it does occur. The first component should be a policy that makes clear that non-science officials do not have the authority to alter findings or explanations without approval of the scientific personnel that produced the information. The second component should be a mechanism through which scientific and research personnel can submit concerns about possible political manipulation and receive an independent review. Complaints could be reviewed by an agency’s inspector general’s office or a scientific review board.

Agency policies should also protect the free flow of information, in particular safeguarding scientists’ freedom to communicate with the media without public affairs staff acting as censors or gatekeepers. While public affairs officials often coordinate and disseminate information to the media and the public, factual scientific findings should not proceed through the same message machine that oversees speeches and press releases. Otherwise, the risk is too great that a public affairs review will mutate into a political review and that findings will be delayed or changed to suit the goals of an administration.

Protecting scientific integrity also requires a culture change within federal agencies. To achieve this, leadership from the top of the agency; adequate training and communication of new policies and practices to personnel; and effective enforcement and oversight mechanisms, including appropriate involvement of agency inspectors general, will be crucial.

Finally, OSTP should take needed actions to regain its leadership position on scientific integrity, including communicating more openly with stakeholders and the public.

Gavin Baker is a federal information policy analyst at OMB Watch, and occasional Science Progress contributor writing on issues of scientific integrity and public accountability.

But the very fact that American scientists feel the need to aggressively advocate for science conceal a bitter irony that the Times article failed to note: We once had a group of brilliant, influential and politically engaged leaders who were fascinated by science, wanted the country to be the world leader in the pursuit of new knowledge about the natural world, and in some cases even made original contributions.

They were called the founding fathers.

Consider, for example, Benjamin Franklin, after whom one political action group, Ben Franklin’s list, is named. One can draw a line of descent from Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of his day, to Benjamin Franklin, the greatest scientist of his (and the founder of my university). The list goes on. Thomas Jefferson (founder of my previous employer, the University of Virginia), was famously preoccupied with both astronomy through Newton and political liberalism via John Locke. As a student at King’s College, now Columbia University, Alexander Hamilton was intent on a medical career and attended all the lectures on natural philosophy that he could.

John Adams, John Hancock and James Bowdoin founded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston. Jefferson and Hamilton, otherwise bitter rivals, made complementary contributions to the innovative foundations of the new country: Jefferson through the patent statute, Hamilton by laying the foundations for history’s most successful capitalist economy. By way of the wildly popular pamphlet Common Sense Thomas Paine was not only the most effective propagandist of the American Revolution, he also closely followed current scientific breakthroughs. In The Age of Reason he declaimed on the size of the earth, the nature of the planetary system, and the scale of the universe. Paine theorized that there must be millions of worlds like ours millions of miles apart.

President Lincoln chartered the National Academy of Sciences just as the modern meanings of the words “science” and “progress” were emerging. Especially in the industrial boom times after the Civil War, moral values were seen as a key consequence of scientific progress. Historian Charles Rosenberg has observed that “[t]he vast majority of nineteenth-century Americans never doubted that human beings had progressed and that this progress — inevitably — subsumed dimensions both moral and material. It was inconceivable to them that the steam engine and morality were not somehow interconnected.” Piety, productivity and, by the end of the nineteenth century, efficiency were all within the same universe of desirable values and consequences of science and progress.

Physics, engineering and chemistry were regnant, and biology was still largely observational rather than experimental, so the great debates about evolution and the origins of life were yet to come. Partly for this reason, conservative religious beliefs were quite compatible with a cohesive moral vision through the late 19th century. Ministers and naturalists could agree on their beliefs about nature. What has changed this American sensibility?

At the turn of the last century the atmosphere shifted due to misconceptions about Darwinism, debates about creationism and, in our time, the advent of experimental biology and modern genetics, which has stimulated political controversies like those over cloning and stem cells. Modern biology has become a cultural wedge. In popular culture, movies like Rise of the Planet the Apes continue a tradition of anxiety about the power of the life sciences that began with “Frankenstein,” with scientists the true villains who, in their fits of hubris, create innocent suffering and creatures who destroy themselves and their creators.

The United States is still by far the biggest producer of new knowledge, but China and other competitors are on the rise. In the 21st century leadership in science is not optional for a nation that proposes to remain a superpower. The new experimental biology will inevitably be part of that new foundation of power and prosperity, but the long-term investments involved require a deep and broad cultural commitment, the kind we’ve had since World War II and that fulfilled the founders’ vision. As I argue in my forthcoming book The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, we need to find ways to include the new biology as part of the American narrative of the 21st century.

Ben would have been the first to sign up for his list. Let’s add all our names to his.

Jonathan D. Moreno is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. This article was also published at the Huffington Post.

A few months back, those who care about accurate climate science and energy education in high school classes registered a minor victory. Under fire from outlets like The New York Times, the education publishing behemoth Scholastic (of Clifford the Big Red Dog and Harry Potter fame) pulled an energy curriculum sponsored by the American Coal Foundation, which gave a nice PR sheen to coal without bothering to cover, uh, the whole environmental angle. The curriculum had reportedly already been mailed to 66,000 classrooms by the time it got yanked.

When it comes to undermining accurate and responsible climate and energy education at the high school level, Scholastic may have been the most prominent transgressor. But precisely because it is a massive and respected educational publisher, and actually cares what The New York Times thinks, it was also the most moderate and easy to reason with.

Although it’s hard to find online now, I’ve reviewed the offending coal curriculum, entitled “The United States of Energy.” In my view, it didn’t even contain any obvious falsehoods—except for errors of omission. It was more a case of subtle greenwashing.

What’s currently seeping into classrooms across the country is far, far worse—more ideological, and more difficult to stop. We’re talking about outright climate denial being fed to students—and accurate climate science teaching being attacked by aggressive Tea Party-style ideologues.

Science magazine just released a report on the state of affairs out there in this place called America, and it’s ugly. From the piece:

How to fight this?

That’s very difficult because, as the Science piece notes, you can’t use the First Amendment. It only bans teaching religion in classrooms, and it is hard to claim that climate change denial—unlike evolution denial—is fundamentally religious in nature. I wouldn’t want to have to argue that case in court.

But while not religiously impelled in a traditional sense, the conservative activists who are attacking the teaching of climate science at the grassroots do fit a familiar profile. We’ve gotten to know them very well by now.

They are hierarchical in outlook, and tend to deny all manner of environmental risks. They often believe that climate science is part of a global conspiracy to impose a statist economy. And of course, they are often conservative white men like Jeffrey Barke, the Los Alamitos Unified School District board of education member who has placed this school at the center of attacks on accurate climate science teaching.

These people are nothing if not highly politicized and emotional. Here’s Barke in his own words:

What is the case for not letting people like Barke influence young students?

Simple: When a political fight erupts at a school over the teaching science, students are effectively being taught to tie science together with emotional, politicized reasoning processes–the way the adults who are interefering in the curriculum have already done in their own minds.

That’s precisely the opposite of what we want to be instilling in young brains. Students ought to be learning to think critically, to be dispassionate and apportion their beliefs to the evidence.

Attacks on climate science in schools aren’t just interferences with teaching, then. By supplying teenagers with politicized misinformation, you’re prepping them to have the kinds of emotionally driven argumentative responses that make our public discourse at the national level so fruitless.

You’re not just instilling denial. You’re creating the next generation of political dysfunction.

You’re not teaching kids to think, you’re teaching them to shout.

Chris is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine, senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and author of the bestselling book The Republican War on Science, dubbed “a landmark in contemporary political reporting” by Salon.com and a “well-researched, closely argued and amply referenced indictment of the right wing’s assault on science and scientists” by Scientific American.

No sane person is against protecting children from predators and clearly no one wants to appear to be against protecting children from Internet pornographers—imagine the campaign ads: “Rep. So-and-so voted against protecting children from Internet pornographers.” I am not making light of this issue: Sexual predators and pedophiles are a real threat to the safety of our youth and I fully support efforts to crack down on them. And we have the ability to find and prosecute them, as evidenced by the charges by the Department of Justice against 72 alleged members of an Internet child pornography ring last week. But this legislation feeds off of moral panic of this very real problem to go far beyond reasonable measures to solve it. If it were to become law, the bill would risk exposing millions of Americans to modern, technology-enhanced, McCarthy-style snooping, the results of which border on an Orwellian nightmare.

As the Internet has evolved to become one of the primary venues for self-expression, the place where individuals go to exercise their freedom of speech, technology has evolved with it to threaten that freedom. If the government has a carte blanche to dig through all records of speech, it is effectively stifled. Creating treasure troves of every citizen’s personal information and user activity and giving the government unfettered access to it, as mandated by this legislation, leaves Americans vulnerable to a wide variety of privacy invasions.

There is certainly a debate to be had about the role (and existence of) anonymity on the internet—Randi Zuckerberg, the soon-to-be-former marketing director for Facebook, recently suggested ending Internet anonymity as the only way to end cyberbullying. But there is a difference between an end to online anonymity in comment boards and on email for the purposes of personal accountability, and creating a database of all of your online activities, regardless of whether or not you are suspected of engaging in child Internet pornography. That’s right—this legislation, according to Conor Friedersdorf writing for The Atlantic:

… doesn’t require that someone be under investigation on child pornography charges in order for police to access their Internet history — being suspected of any crime is enough. (It may even be made available in civil matters like divorce trials or child custody battles.) Nor do police need probable cause to search this information.

The Big Brother comparisons may sound like an overreaction, and indeed, I am alarmed—but I am not alone: Friedersdorf suggests “The Encouragement of Blackmail by Law Enforcement Act” as an alternative name for the bill and legislators on both sides of the aisle have come out in vocal opposition to the bill. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) called the bill an “unprecedented power grab by the federal government – it goes way beyond fighting child pornography,” and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) noted the data retained “will be made available to law enforcement officers without a warrant or judicial oversight, and is a convenient way for law enforcement to get powers they couldn’t get in the Patriot Act.”

Consumer and privacy advocates have also mobilized in response: Electronic Privacy Information Center Director Marc Rotenberg testified against the legislation in committee, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation is running a letter-writing campaign urging members of Congress to stop the bill from going forward, as is Demand Progress, the advocacy organization founded by Aaron Swartz.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) was exactly right when he said, “The bill is mislabeled. This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.” Legislators have a responsibility to look past the title and assess the practical implications of legislation they support. In the case of the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, it is clear that those implications go well beyond the stated goal of protecting children; they threaten to undermine the fundamental civil liberties defining our society.

Andrea Peterson is the Assistant Editor for Online Outreach and Analytics at the Center for American Progress.

STEM jobs are disproportionately held by men at every level of educational attainment. Women only represent one-quarter of STEM jobs—the same level as 2000—though they make up approximately half of the workforce overall. Those women who do enter STEM careers, however, make on average 33 percent more than women in non-STEM jobs. The differential is just 25 percent for men.

The wage gap between women and men in STEM occupations is also smaller than in non-STEM fields. But despite that, women in STEM jobs still only make 86 cents to a man’s dollar, the report found. In non-STEM fields women make 79 cents to a man’s dollar.

Women tend to choose non-STEM majors in college and those that do choose STEM majors are entering non-STEM fields where the wage gap is higher, such as education and health care. Only 60,000 women with STEM degrees work in STEM jobs (26 percent), compared to about 2.7 million, or 40 percent, of men. In particular, women are much less likely to hold a degree in engineering; however, engineering, which is the most male-dominated STEM occupation with only one woman for every seven men, has the lowest wage gap (7 percent).

The report does not examine the causes of gender discrepancies in wages and occupations but it points to several factors that might lead to them, including career paths that “may be less accommodating to people cycling in and out of the workforce to raise a family,” lack of role models, and strong gender stereotypes.

These factors are consistent with the findings of a 2010 American Association of University Women report, “Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” that examined barriers limiting women’s participation in STEM fields. AAUW recommends several efforts to counter gender biases and stereotypes such as focusing on achievements, providing role models, and encouraging girls to take classes in STEM fields. In addition, policies to retain female students are necessary, including actively recruiting women, mentoring, and fostering work-life practices.

The Commerce report concludes there is “definitive evidence of a need to encourage and support women in STEM with a goal of gender parity” and that there is “a great opportunity for growth in STEM in support of American competitiveness, innovation, and jobs of the future.”

As CAP has pointed out, strengthening our STEM programs and workforce training is essential for maintaining and enhancing the innovation that drives our economic growth and competitiveness. With unemployment and a lingering recession, we need to address the societal and structural barriers that are preventing women from fully participating in the STEM fields of the present and future.

Rebecca Lefton is a Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress, working with the Energy Opportunity team.

Hollywood has done it again. The latest film about creepy scientists setting us on the path to the end of the world as we know and, more or less, love it will soon be in a movie theater near you—“Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” Since we’ve been warned for so long by filmmakers and novelists about the dangers of science run amok we really have no good excuse not to believe them. From “The Island of Dr. Moreau” to “Brave New World” to “Blade Runner,” “Gattaca,” “Splice,” and now the inevitable prequel to the iconic “The Planet of the Apes,” we learn anew why we should never tempt biologists with the latest science.

Don’t pass that apple, Eve, just transfect that genome.

Why are we so anxious about biology? Considering how sci-tech crazy the world is, including the convergence of physics, engineering, and genetics, basic biology would seem to be commonplace. That’s the question I pose in my forthcoming book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America (Bellevue Literary Press, 2011).

Through the 18th century, the Enlightenment philosophers largely set the tone of growing admiration among the educated classes for the importance of science for social improvement. By the early 19th century, the growth of knowledge itself provoked anxiety. Since its publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been a touchstone of popular resentment of overreaching science and scientists. Lately, it has functioned as a standard reference point for the critiques of an arrogant scientific community that messes around with stem cells and cloning.

Although the creature might be the central figure in our nightmares (my mother remembers walking home alone in terror after seeing the just-released 1931 Hollywood version), the center of the story is the scientist, Dr. Frankenstein. The creature is a physical horror but an innocent; the scientist, with his Promethean overreaching, is a moral monster. He and his ilk are the ones we have to fear. Shelley’s tale is nearly always taken out of her context.

Like the later genre called science fiction that she helped inspire, Frankenstein is a commentary more on the present than on the future. Shelley wrote in an atmosphere stirred by the British Romantic science movement of that period, the experimental analogue of the Romantic poets, who were excitedly investigating the properties of air, water, heat, and electricity. They hoped that greater knowledge of the physical world would lead to radical social improvements such as more effective medical treatments.

And they believed that knowledge grounded in demonstrative experiments would liberate the human mind. The idea that electricity could reanimate a dead or assembled body was only one element of Romantic science. It is unfortunate, then, that the most famous reflection on the Romantic scientists is a horror story. Not only did the Romantics anticipate some of the experimentation that flowered a century later with more powerful devices and more nuanced theory, they also stumbled upon at least one discovery that would prove to be enormously beneficial: nitrous oxide, the first truly effective pain reliever.

Thus, already in Frankenstein there is a template: abstract but dramatic anxiety about the direction of science that obscures its concrete achievements for improving human life. Even then scientists needed better public relations. Granted that the bomb made it hard for atomic physicists to improve their poll numbers (especially with all those giant ants roaming around New Mexico in Them!, released in 1954), today’s biologists face an even steeper uphill climb.

In fairness, the director of “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes” says that his movie is not an antiscience morality tale but rather “much more about mankind’s hubris.” That, of course, is precisely the point of morality tales. Human overreaching tends to have bad consequences. Just ask Oedipus.

The movie isn’t out until later this week.  But consider our recent experience with another planet dominated by allegedly higher primates. If the smart apes soon to rise in a theater near you can figure out how to straighten out Capitol Hill maybe we ought to give them a chance.

Jonathan D. Moreno teaches bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

This enthusiasm for science research was apparent at His Holiness’s July 9 talk for world peace on the West Lawn of the Capitol in Washington D.C. Referencing scientific studies about the effects of selfishness on heart disease, and of negative emotions on the immune system more broadly, the Dalai Lama used scientific evidence to support his artful advocacy for universal compassion and world peace.

Far from shunning science as a threat that disproves religious belief, the Dalai Lama has advocated for years that science and religion can be mutually enriching. Writing in 2003, the Dalai Lama said

“Though Tibetans have valuable knowledge about the internal world, we have been materially backward partly because of a lack of scientific knowledge. Buddhist teachings stress the importance of understanding reality. Therefore, we should pay attention to what modern scientists have actually found through experiment and through measurement the things they have proved to be reality.”

Departing from his usual spiritual writings, the Dalai Lama even published a book about science and spirituality in 2006. The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality discusses how science and religion can each promote the betterment of the other. On the one hand, since science can be used for either good or ill, it can benefit from religion’s ability help navigate the ethical space between. On the other, religion can avoid rigid fundamentalism by paying attention to advancing science. Together, he argues, they make a powerful combination that can help us better understand central questions of our humanity.

In the past, he’s used his spiritual authority to urge his followers to participate directly in scientific studies. Scientists had had little success studying the effects of meditation on the brain until the Dalai Lama dispatched monks experienced enough to meditate amidst the noise of an fMRI machine to participate in neuroscience studies abroad. The real-time images these studies provided have helped scientists better understand the actual ways that meditation influences brain activity. Another set of studies on the long-term effects of meditation has also showed a positive connection between the practice of meditation and brain tissue thickness.

In addition to using his spiritual authority to further science, the Dalai Lama has also exercised his political leadership to advocate for science education in society more broadly. He addressed the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting to champion a new cause: How moral leaders should work openly with scientists in order to keep up with the rapid progress of technical knowledge. As science speeds along gathering data behind common spiritually linked questions, the Dalai Lama asserts that religion should begin participating in the developing dialog.

“Today the question of science’s interface with wider humanity is no longer a matter of academic interest alone; this question must assume a sense of urgency for all those who are concerned about the fate of human existence. I feel, therefore, that a dialog between neuroscience and society could have profound benefits in that it may help deepen our basic understanding of what it means to be human.”

– Excerpt from article based on Society for Neuroscience talk.

The Dalai Lama’s enthusiastic embrace of interdisciplinary research has brought him in contact with tutors including quantum mechanics experts Carl von Weizsacker and David Bohm along with neuroscientists Robert Livingston and Francisco Varela. Imagine what benefits the United States would see in science policy if more of our political and religious leaders fostered such close educational mentorships with scientists.

Not only can meditation and spirituality aid our scientific understanding of human psychology, but science can augment the learning of the spiritual, according to the Dalai Lama. Since 2006 the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative has sent Tibetan monks to Emory University to take core science classes so that they can return to their monasteries in India and teach the basics to fellow monks and nuns. The partnership has also resulted in ongoing dialogue and collaboration between Tibetan monks and Emory science faculty, and has resulted in the translation of six science textbooks into Tibetan for the first time. Simple as it seems, the translation of science and mathematical teachings into Tibetan has brought down learning barriers between religion and science that have existed for centuries.

Images of a tranquil Buddha sitting placidly among nature couldn’t be more starkly juxtaposed with white lab coats practicing rigid sterile technique. But according to the Dalai Lama, these two fields—which evolved from, separate historical, intellectual and cultural roots—have grown to share basic philosophical methodologies. Both modern science and Buddhism share a deep suspicion of absolute notions and support ideas that organisms and the universe emerged as part of an evolutionary process.

Science continually renews itself by encouraging the questioning and correction of long-standing beliefs. Buddhism, he points out, does the same through a glorification of the investigation of reality that triumphs over even the most deeply venerated spiritual authority.

The Dalai Lama’s open-minded attitude toward science should serve as an example not just for other political leaders, but for people of faith everywhere. Religious studies are increasingly enriched by contemporary findings in science while technological progress continues to lead us toward unavoidable ethical questions. Science and religion therefore shouldn’t be seen as opposing forces, but rather the two-colored lenses of the 3-D glasses of reality. We need them both to see the full picture.

Elaine Sedenberg is a Science Policy Contract researcher at the Center for American Progress.

You can also read  this article at the Center for American Progress website.

John Schwartz at the New York Times summarized the case:

“A respected Harvard researcher who also is an Internet folk hero has been arrested in Boston on charges related to computer hacking, which are based on allegations that he downloaded articles that he was entitled to get free.”

While the details according to the indictment sound more dubious–Swartz allegedly covered his face with a bike helmet while breaking into a closet to connect to a hard access point to the MIT network–Schwartz certainly has the gist correct. Guests at MIT are granted access to the network’s JSTOR license so Swartz was using a legitimate pathway to access the information.

Though he is charged with violating the MIT and JSTOR Terms of Service Agreements by using a pseudonym, otherwise evading attempts to limit his access to the network, and using an automated script to download files en mass, he has since settled the matter with both wronged parties. Neither decided to press charges, and JSTOR even went as far as to issue a statement saying they have “no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.” But that didn’t stop the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts from bringing computer intrusion, fraud, and data theft charges hinging on the Terms of Service violations against Swartz on July 19.

This case raises some interesting questions about the nature of intellectual property in the digital world. While the United States Attorney’s Office accuses Swartz of “stealing,” there is no mention of copyright infringement in the indictments, and theft is a difficult term to define in a situation where the wronged parties in fact did not lose any property. JSTOR and MIT did not suddenly lose all those articles from their server when they were downloaded; all that occurred was the copying of information by an individual who had legitimate access to JSTOR’s hosted files.

This isn’t Swartz’s first run-in with the law; in 2009 he was investigated by the FBI for using an automated script to download public records from a library participating in a trial program allowing free access to the Pacer government court record search system. They claimed his automated downloads of 20 percent of the archive was the equivalent of stealing documents worth $1.5 million dollars, but the investigation was later closed without any charges. (Swartz obtained his FBI file from this period via a Freedom of Information Act request and has since posted it on his blog.)

The continued targeting of Swartz by law enforcement certainly serves to highlight the government’s increasingly dated response to the ongoing conflict between the commercialization of public information and the movement to use technology to democratize information access.

If his goal was to make a statement through civil disobedience, then it would seem that Swartz could have done a better job of being noticed. That he allegedly tried to cover up his information liberation campaign rather than doing it publicly and embracing the consequences weakens the credibility of his activism. But charging Swartz with criminal hacking for his conflict with MIT and JSTOR while far more nefarious cybercrimes are being perpetrated seems an odd choice of priorities, especially when his information liberation campaigns have focused primarily on academic or non-copyright protected public documents.

It is unclear if Swartz intended to release the JSTOR documents into the wild or use them for academic research, but it appears that at worst the end result may have been the distribution of the research he downloaded from JSTOR via peer-to-peer networking. Currently, scholarly research is trapped in an academic-commercial publishing complex run by for-profit publishers. Much of the research held there is supported by public funds, but in the academic publishing world neither the authors nor peer-reviewers are generally compensated, with the profits going to the commercial publishers or databases such as JSTOR who act as gate keepers to the wealth of public domain academic knowledge that many would argue should be available to all.

These circumstances have combined to cause hyperinflation of journal subscription costs, threatening institutional access to the resources the academic community has produced and amounting to an acknowledged academic publishing crisis. Many universities, including Harvard, have turned to open access policies that ensure authors and institutions have the ability to share their research freely in response. If Swartz’ goal were to “liberate” the research he downloaded from JSTOR by allowing its free circulation on the Internet, it is hard to argue the authors, the scientific process, and society as a whole would do anything but gain as the result.

The vast majority of responses from the science and technology community have been sympathetic to Swartz. At least one activist responded to the indictment with action: A man identifying himself as “Greg Maxwell” uploaded a 32 GB cache of 18,592 “stolen” articles to well-known file-sharing site, ThePirateBay.org, citing Swartz’ indictment as the direct reason. The articles were all in the public domain, but currently unavailable to the public except through JSTOR with per article prices ranging between $8 and $19.

Maxwell included a statement summing up his stance:

“The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works… [a]nd unlike ‘mere’ works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it.”

This is not an endorsement of Swartz’s alleged actions–he may well be convicted for his law breaking. But at the end of the day, we should take this as an opportunity to evaluate how a perhaps profoundly broken system limits scientific innovation and hinders the public’s access to research it often has already paid for.

Any judge evaluating this case would be well advised to look at last year’s high profile lawsuit against Google, in which the Internet titan was sued for making-public millions of pages of copyright-protected books without permission. But in that case no criminal charges were filed; the suit ended with a settlement in civil court. Let’s hope the judges hearing Swartz’s case take this as a precedent. If Swartz is punished for challenging a legal system in need of reform, and faces it with dignity as a good activist should, he will have given us an opportunity to reflect on what we need to do to bring 20th century intellectual property laws in line with the realities of 21st century information technology.

Andrea Peterson is the Assistant Editor for Online Outreach and Analytics at the Center for American Progress.

It’s incredibly easy to see Ann Clayborn as an extremist, someone with severe psychological problems (I’m always annoyed that Michel reveals that she was abused as a child, because it seems so incredibly simplistic and reductionist), someone who refuses to face reality. But I think Kim Stanley Robinson does something wise in ending Red Mars with the one person who can most genuinely mourn not just the people killed in Mars’ first war, but can grieve for Mars itself, for lost possibilities, for beauty that’s going to vanish. Terraforming is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have costs that are worth acknowledging.

The way Robinson makes this work is to show us that Ann knows who she is, what others think of her. “Some mistakes you can never make good,” Ann thinks after Coyote and Kasei save her little remaining band of the First Hundred after they become fugitivies. “Her mistake had been in coming to Mars in the first place, and then falling in love with it. Falling in love with a place everyone else wanted to destroy. Outside the rover, the planet was being changed forever.” But it’s not just that Ann knows that she’s alone, that she knows that in this specific situation, with her vision of her planet dying and her son potentially dead, she’s behaving like a zombie. It’s that Robinson puts her grief in context, especially when Frank dies, in part because Ann falls asleep at the wheel. Whereas Ann’s initially withdrawn, immobile, unable to speak, Maya is, typically, volcanic in her reaction to her lover’s death: “Sax went over and dug into the medicine chest, and walked over to her and crouched by her side. ‘Here, Maya, do you want a sedative?’ And she uncoiled and dashed the pills from his hand, ‘No!’ she screamed, ‘they’re my feelings, they’re my men, do you think I’m a coward, do you think I would want to be a zombie like you!’ She collapsed into helpless, involuntary, racking sobs.” Ann’s grieving for a whole planet, not a single person, but Robinson forces her to keep moving, to keep loving Mars: he won’t let her, or her perspective, succumb.

Interestingly, even as this installment of the novel finally gives us a first-person perspective on the debate between Ann and Sax, on the fundamental disagreement that will become an ancient divide and the cause of many heroic efforts to bridge it, it offers the hints of their essential similarity. Ann’s the one who understands that Sax would be shocked that she concealed scientific data from him in the interests of keeping Mars Red: “Concealing data—he was shocked, she could tell. He couldn’t imagine any reason good enough to conceal data. Perhaps this was the root of their inability to understand each other. Value systems based on entirely different assumptions. Completely different kinds of science.” But even as they disagree on ends and methods, Ann is the one who can see that Sax isn’t a pure scientist, who understands what Maya can’t see, that Sax isn’t anesthetized, he’s the opposite:

Sax she at least understood. He was trying to hide it from her, but it was clear he was excited by what was happening. That calm dead exterior had always masked a passionate nature, and she had always known it. Now he was high-colored as if he had a fever, and he never met her eye; he knew that she knew what he felt. She despised his shirking inability to confront her, even if it did arise from some kind of consideration for her. And the way he stayed always busy at his screen—he never actually looked out the low floor windows of the rover, to see the flood with his own eyes. The cameras have a better view, he would say mildly when Michel urged him to have a look.

The question is what’s more important: their temperaments, or their scientific methods? The seeds of their eventual reconciliation, of the reconciliation to a shared vision of a future for Mars are there in that rover, in their flight from the transnats, in Ann’s catastrophe and Sax’s triumph…

This is a cross post. To comment and join the conversation, please head to Alyssa’s blog at Think Progress.

Where does the public fit into the NSF mission? Besides being a beneficiary (directly or indirectly) of the output of NSF research dollars, what voice does the public have in determining what the NSF supports? What voice should it have?

It’s not clear that the NSF gave much consideration to these questions when soliciting input on revising the merit review criteria. The request for input referenced above was not posted in the Federal Register, where most proposed rules and regulations are posted for public comment, but just on the NSF website (and not in the News section). The description of the process in that request mentions reaching out to a wide variety of stakeholders inside and outside of NSF, but the public isn’t mentioned until the “about the NSF” paragraph near the end of the notice. An earlier notice requesting input was also not in the Federal Register and took the form of a “Dear Colleague” letter typically used for researchers in NSF-sponsored communities. Perhaps most critical, the Charge and Work Plan for the Merit Review Task Force doesn’t include contact with the public. Now, it is possible that there has been a lot of public input into this process that just isn’t publicized by NSF. But given the recent additional scrutiny of NSF research, it is hard to see what public input to NSF processes would not be publicized.

How might NSF solicit and use more public input in its mission to “maintain and strengthen the vitality of the U.S. science and engineering enterprise and to ensure that Americans benefit fully from the products of the science, engineering and education activities that NSF supports”? The YouCut program, where citizens were encouraged to review the NSF grants database for entries that seemed to be wasteful or frivolous, was problematic at best. People were asked to judge the merits of a grant based strictly on the abstract available online. Now, if the public has insight about fraudulent and wasteful research, it should certainly notify the NSF inspector general. But seeking general input from the public after grants are awarded seems best suited for crowd-sourced finger-pointing rather than assessing what areas of research the public thinks might best benefit them overall.

But that doesn’t mean the public cannot contribute to the discussion of what research should be funded moving forward. NSF merit review has two main criteria: the intellectual merit of a proposal (Is it a scientifically important, well-thought-out proposal?) and the broader impacts of the proposal (What effects could this research project have on other societal goals or societal goods?). It would be logistically difficult to have the public sit on review panels where intellectual merit is judged as most of the public would lack the background to judge the intellectual merit of scientific proposals.

The vast survey apparatus of NSF, however, could be used to gauge public opinion on what broader impacts should mean for scientific research. Such public outreach wouldn’t be the sole determinant—congressional input had a major influence this time around and will in the future—and it could serve other purposes besides defining “broader impacts.” A necessary companion to this survey work ought to be a broader communication of what NSF does and the broader outcomes (not just direct outputs) of the research it supports. NSF seems perfectly capable of explaining the value of research output, or the specific relevant problems that funded research seeks to address. That it does this usually after someone pokes fun at a research grant reflects a reactive rather than a proactive approach to the public. This is, unfortunately, consistent with the benign neglect of public input observed in the merit review revision process.

With the soon-to-close comment period, there is still an opportunity to encourage NSF to engage with the public in revising its merit review criteria. And while many would not consider NSF to be a mission agency, it still serves the public, and should engage that public more than it does.

David Bruggeman is the Policy Analyst for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and blogs about science policy at Pasco Phronesis. The views here are his alone and do not represent the views of the ACM.

Many websites, or ads placed on websites, quietly install cookies, beacons, and other tracking files on Internet users’ computers whenever they are accessed. Cookies generally perform harmless tasks like allowing websites to remember usernames and passwords for future logins. But some cookies can track the websites a user visits, while beacons, which consist of more complex software, can actually track what an Internet user is doing on a website—from the buttons they click to the words they type. Some tracking files may even locate and record sensitive information such as the incomes, locations, and medical conditions of Internet users.

In an examination of the top 50 most visited websites, The Wall Street Journal estimated in July 2010 that approximately two-thirds of tracking files from these sites were dispatched by tracking firms that compile Internet users’ personal information into consumer profiles. These profiles can then be sold to Internet companies to assist them in developing more personalized web services and advertisements.

A number of bills have recently been proposed in Congress to address the privacy concerns raised by the collection of this kind of information. In April 2011, Sens. John Kerry and John McCain put forth the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011, which would require Internet companies to increase the transparency of their privacy policies, acquire consent before acquiring sensitive information, and give users the option to opt out of being tracked.

In May, Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller introduced the Do Not Track Online Act of 2011, which would complement Kerry and McCain’s bill with a mandate for an across-the-board “do not track” option that would allow Internet users to prevent all websites from tracking them instead of having to opt out for each one. A similar bill specifically aimed at children, the Do Not Track Kids Act of 2011, was introduced to the House that same month. It calls for amending the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, or COPPA, to include teenagers, require online companies to obtain parental consent before acquiring personal information from minors, and an “eraser button” to allow users to eliminate personal information online, among other things.

On June 27, the Center for American Progress hosted a panel of leaders and experts in Internet privacy who discussed the problems of Internet tracking and the merits of proposals to fix them. A video of the event can be viewed here.

The keynote speaker at the event, Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill, said that the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is compiling a preliminary report on a new privacy framework proposal, which recommends that companies build privacy protections into new products and use more transparent policies that can be understood by consumers. The commission also supports the creation of a “do not track” mechanism. “Our proposal is a technology driven approach that will allow consumers to make persistent choices that will travel with them through cyberspace, communicating tracking preferences to every website they visit,” said Brill.

Ed Felton, the chief technology officer of the FTC, said that web browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox have already started developing antitracking features, like Tracking Protection Lists and Do Not Track Flags, both of which allow users to block websites from tracking them. “These technologies exist, they’re out there,” said Felton. “Three of the four major browsers now support them and we’re now seeing a dialogue about how to put the choices users are expressing into effect.”

All of the panelists emphasized a need to protect children online, especially Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the media lives of families and children. “Privacy is an incredibly important issue for kids and families,” he said.  “COPPA was written in 1998, which is like the stone ages. I believe there should be new legislation written.”

Although many people agree that kids need protection on the Internet, not everyone agrees on the components of the recent Do Not Track Kids Act. “Most people have applauded the motivation of this bill,” said Chris Wolf, a partner of Hogan Lovells LLC and co-director of the Future of Privacy Forum, who addressed a number of concerns that have been raised in response to the act. “The reactions have been mixed [so] it probably makes sense to carefully look at what this bill would accomplish.”

The act might require websites to verify the ages of Internet users, which seems contrary to the intentions of the bill because it would require the collection of even more personal data. It could also prevent underage Internet users from accessing lawful and benign content for personal or educational purposes. Additionally, the act would have to contend with industry’s First Amendment right to commercial free speech and the fact that the technology to erase personal information from all parts of the web has not been invented yet.

Peter Swire, a professor of law at Ohio State Law School and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, discussed the importance of finding the right balance between consumer choice and industry expense. “I have a slightly more optimistic view,” said Swire, who noted that other privacy issues have been successfully solved in the past through legislation like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA; the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act, or CAN-SPAM; and other initiatives. “We have found ways to manage them through technology, self regulation and legislation,” said Swire.

While the diverse perspectives in the privacy discourse have their merits, Swire urged participants to refocus the discussion on the future. “One of my questions for kids and privacy is, five years from now, what will be obvious that we should have done now and that we’ll all do then?”

Michelle Spektor is an intern with Science Progress, and a rising senior at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

Science Progressing: July 8

SCIENCE EDUCATION
A new model for science education
New research by Carl Wieman suggests that traditional lecture-style science courses are no longer an effective way to impart scientific knowledge to students. Unconventional teaching methods inspired by cognitive psychology that stimulate motivation and require students to “think like scientists” resulted in better attendance, more classroom engagement and higher test scores. According to the AAAS, Wieman’s teaching methods will better prepare future scientists for the challenges of the 21st century.

CELL PHONE SECURITY
News of the World closure after hacking scandal
A 168-year-old weekly publication based in England allegedly hacked into the cell phones of celebrities, soldiers, and an abducted girl. The owner of News of the World, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, announced that the paper will be shutting down this week and several of the publication’s journalists are expected to be arrested in the coming days. The incident overseas raises questions about whether the federal government is doing enough to secure cell phone and other personal data in this country.

CLIMATE DENIERS
Greenpeace report confirms climate denier scientist funded by ExxonMobil and others
Dr. Willie Soon, a scientist who attempts to disprove the findings of climate scientists through his own research, reportedly received much of his funding from big oil and big coal. According to Greenpeace, Soon received up to $1 million from companies in the oil and coal industries, including ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Southern Company, and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. There is currently speculation as to whether or not these companies worked together to fund Soon’s research in the interest of advancing their business agendas.

SPACE PROGRAM
NASA’s last space shuttle blasts into history
An estimated 750,000 people jammed Cape Canaveral this morning to watch NASA’s final space shuttle launch. The shuttle is bringing a year’s worth of supplies to the International Space Station, marking the end of NASA’s participation in the space station program. After its 12-day mission the space shuttle will go on permanent display at the Kennedy Space Center. Private companies are expected to take over launching astronauts and supplies to the space station and, in keeping with the president’s priorities, NASA will focus its future efforts on Mars, earth observation, and asteroid research.

SPACE AND THE BUDGET
Congress proposes nixing flagship telescope
In addition to the impending retirement of the space shuttle, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, could be on the chopping block as well. The Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee is currently considering defunding the project in its fiscal year 2012 budget proposal for NASA and other agencies. If completed, the space telescope would enable astronomers to monitor the possibility of life on planets orbiting distant stars and observe the formation of galaxies in the earliest years of the universe. But behind schedule and over budget, the innovative new piece of equipment is a prime target for the Committee’s budget cuts.

CLIMATE SCIENCE AND SECURITY
UN Security Council to take up climate change
For the second time in four years, the U.N. Security Council will debate the issue of climate change. Unlike earlier attempts to put the issue on the agenda, several developing countries now support climate change discussions in light of global security and other concerns. Several small island governments have requested that the U.N. appoint a special adviser on climate change, and that the Security Council discuss climate change on a monthly basis. They hope such activities will increase the global sense of urgency on the issue.

MEDICAID AND HEALTHCARE
Study finds Medicaid increases use of health care, decreases financial strain, improves health
Researchers from Harvard, MIT, and the National Bureau of Economic Research have found that Medicaid coverage boosts low-income adults’ use of preventative care, lessens their financial stress, and improves their self-reported health. According to the study, Medicaid patients consume more health care across all categories except emergency services. Recipients of Medicaid benefits were also less likely to borrow money for health care or go into debt. Researchers also reported better health outcomes among patients after a year of coverage.  In a new report released today, CAP’s Scott Lilly explains how the Ryan budget plan for Medicaid would have extraordinary implications not only for poor individuals but for a very broad swath of middle-class families as well.

GREEN ENERGY
Global investments in green energy up nearly a third to $211 billion, but private RD&D declined
Last year, investors invested a record $211 billion in renewables, amounting to a 32 percent increase since the previous year, according to a new UNEP study. For the first time, developing countries spent more money on utility-scale renewables than developed countries. Small scale deployment of commercial renewable energy technologies showed big increases, though stock prices and corporate research, development, and deployment, or RD&D, saw overall decreases. These decreases reflected investor concerns about industry over-capacity, cutbacks in subsidy programs, and competition from cheap natural gas, according to the study. CAP’s recent report on low-carbon innovation looks more closely at some of these barriers and lays out a proposal for sustained growth in the clean energy sector.

FIRE AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Future fire–Still a wide open question
Australia’s national science agency, The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, suggests that human understanding of the relationship between fires and climate change will need to change, develop, and become more perfect as fires occur with increasing frequency. In particular, fires release aerosols and GHG into the atmosphere and influence the amount of carbon absorbed by organisms in the carbon cycle. There is some evidence that the frequency of fires has picked up in the Western United States.

CULTURE AND NEUROSCIENCE
Scientific evidence that pop culture matters
Think Progress’s culture blogger, Alyssa Rosenberg, has an interesting take on a recent study on how viewing positive and negative images of minority groups can affect a person’s adherence to stereotypes. The study found that students at a mostly white college, after viewing positive and negative images of minority groups, were more likely to stereotype those groups positively and negatively, respectively. Alyssa notes that “While it’s one thing to show people a lot of images as part of a study, pop culture’s probably the quickest way to flood the average American’s zone with any kind of images and to show folks images (positive or negative) of people who are different from them in a sustained way…. In any case, it’s nice to have scientific validation of the idea that pop culture can matter.”

JUST FOR FUN
Monumental discovery: Glow-in-the-dark mushrooms in Brazil
‘Shroom lovers out there no longer need a blacklight to see glowing fungi. A luminescent mushroom, actually first discovered in 1840 in the streets of Brazil by children, has been rediscovered and reclassified as Neonothopanus gardneri. It shines so brightly that one can use it to read a book in the dark. Scientists suggest that the luminescence may be due to a mix of a luciferin compound and a luciferase, an enzyme that helps the luciferin interact with water and oxygen to produce light. Some believe that the benefit of glowing is that this attracts insects to the mushrooms and spurs them to spread their spores.

This week’s news compiled and summarized by Science Progress interns Michelle Spektor and Gaurav Dhiman.

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I.

After the heavy science and economics of the previous sections, “Guns Under the Table” feels like a real diversion, though a long-awaited one. Finally, we get to see Frank Chalmers from inside his own head for the first time since he engineered the murder of his oldest friend, his oldest enemy, the late John Boone. To a certain extent, Frank’s the Raskolnikov of the First Hundred, a murderer motivated by his commitment to shaping an ideal society who is unable to execute his grand plans, though in Frank’s case, there are larger forces against him than his own weakness (though that’s not an immaterial factor). But Frank’s also uniquely a product of American politics, and “Guns Under the Table” is a striking portrait of the emptiness of the politician.

I love the description of how Frank spent John’s first night on Mars in part because it’s such a typical DC scene. John Grisham could have written it in The Street Lawyer, if not for the Mars thing:

Still, on that historic night he found himself in a foul mood. He went back to his apartment near Dupont Circle and then went out and lost his FBI tag and slipped into a dark bar and sat there watching the TV over the bartenders’ heads, drinking bourbon like his father, with Martian light pouring out of the TV and reddening the whole dark room. And as he got drunk and listened to John’s inane talk his mood got worse and worse. It was hard to focus on his plan. He drank hard. The bar was noisy, the crowd inattentive; not that the landing hadn’t been noticed, but here it was just another entertainment, on a par with the Bullets game that one bartender kept cutting to. Then blip, back to the scene on Chryse Planitia. The man next to him swore at the switch. “Basketball’s gonna be a hell of a game on Mars,” Frank said in the Florida accent he had long ago eradicated. “Have to move the hoop up, or they be breaking their heads.” “Sure, but think of the jumps. Twenty-foot dunks easy.” “Yeah even you white boys’ll jump high there, or so you say. But you better leave the basket alone, or you got the same trouble you got here.” Frank laughed. But outside it was hot, a muggy D.C. summer night, and he walked home in a plummeting foul mood, blacker and blacker with every step; and coming upon one of Dupont’s beggars, he pulled out a ten-dollar bill and threw it at the man, and as the bum reached for it Frank shoved him away shouting “Fuck you! Get a job!” But then people came up out of the Metro and he hurried off, shocked and furious. Beggars slumped in the doorways. There were people on Mars and there were beggars in the streets of the nation’s capital, and all the lawyers walked by them every day, their freedom-and-justice talk no more than a cover for their greed. “We’re gonna do it different on Mars,” Frank said viciously, and all of a sudden he wanted to be there immediately, no careful years of waiting, of campaigning — “Get a fucking job!” he shouted at another homeless man.

That paragraph tells you everything you need to know about Frank and his limitations: even before he gets to Mars, he’s a hollow man, the limited creation of a system where there are only a few overvalued prizes to win. And it’s worse after he kills John, after he gets what he thinks is the position he wants, that of the most politically powerful American on Mars. In fact, the murder makes it worse, because it makes Frank’s whole life, not just his political work, a performance: “The subject of the treaty began to come up, and so Frank said, ‘How I wish John were here now. We could use him.’ And then: ‘I miss him.’ This kind of thing would distract Maya instantly. She put her hand over his; Frank scarcely felt it. She was smiling, her arresting gaze full on him. Despite himself he had to look away.”

It’s impossible to put up that constant performance without getting a little paranoid, as it’s obvious Frank does, even with Maya, who he wanted so badly, who was part of the reason he was jealous of John: “And at night shower him with kisses, until it was impossible to imagine that she did not like him. Which was intolerable. That it should be so easy to deceive even the people who knew you best. . . that she should be so stupid.. . . It was shocking to realize these things more strongly than ever before.” In the previous section of the novel, the Sufis joke that Frank is John’s nafs, his evil spirit, and John responds that he thinks Frank’s nafs just gets kicked a lot, and so the evil part of Frank’s brain is perpetually irritated, on perpetual overdrive. This whole section strikes me as an argument for the accuracy of that observation, but it’s a structural observation as much as it is a personal one. One of the weirdest persistent fallacies of American politics is the idea that you can both do political work on a high level for a long time and be any sort of normal, connected person.

And the scale on which Frank is doing politics is unprecedented: he’s trying to negotiate for one planet’s future with another, something he’s doing under enormous pressure as Terra falls apart with the hope of Mars as an escape valve, something “the rich and poor nations of Earth were struggling over it as they were over everything else. The rich had the money but the poor had the people, and the weapons were pretty evenly distributed, especially the new viral vectors that could kill everyone on a continent.” And the influence of money in this international political game is at an unimaginable scale, too. Corporations, in this world, have mushroomed beyond anything we can imagine today: “Subarashii and Armscor and Shellalco were each bigger than all but the ten largest countries or commonwealths, and they really put out the funds. Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government. So that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were like the Lilliputians trying to tie down Gulliver.”

The role of the transnational corporations and their transformation into metanationals capable of handling the functions of entire nations and nation groups is one of the few things I wish we got more of in this book, and that I wish we were on Terra to see*. We never really understand the internal decision-making processes or cultures of these companies very well, and I sometimes think that showing readers some of that in a realistic way might make the arguments Robinson’s main characters make a bit stronger.

The thing that makes this section not just another run-of-the-mill complaint about the corrupting influence of power, and the falseness of politicians, and the impact of money in politics is that sense of scale. It’s not just that Frank’s going to run into the limitations of a deadlocked Senate: it’s that politics will end up being a flimsy little thing next to revolutionary efforts to start society over on Mars. Companies aren’t buying lawmakers in this story: they’re being brought in to manage entire nations. Frank’s not necessarily a fool, things are just too big for him to see more than part of the elephant. The question is whether other people actually see at a higher level enough that they’ll be able to succeed in building a new world where Frank’s efforts to negotiate one will inevitably fail:

“What do you want?” Frank said. “What do you imagine will happen if everyone here slips away into the highlands?” Arkady grinned. “Why then we will make a human life, Frank. We will work to support our needs, and do science, and perhaps terraform a bit more. We will sing and dance and walk around in the sun, and work like maniacs for food and curiosity.” “It’s impossible,” Frank exclaimed. “We’re part of the world, we can’t escape it.” “Can’t we? It’s only the blue evening star, the world you speak of. This red world is the only real one for us, now.”

…

To read the last section of this post and join the conversation, head over to Alyssa’s blog at Think Progress.

For all that I don’t particularly enjoy spending time in Michel’s and John’s heads, these are two sections of the book that I think do a lovely job of laying out the central debates of the novel: how much can we change Mars? How much can we change ourselves? And once we’ve established these capacities, or maybe even beforehand, how much should we alter the planet or ourselves and our societies? What’s valuable? What should we let go? And what sort of unintended consequences will result when we succeed at engineering one factor in a way that radically changes all of our calculations.

Not only does it pose these questions quite well, but in laying them out, upsets our understandings of who’s on what side, who is a radical, and who is a conservative. Is Ann a conservative because she’s the purest Red out there? Or is she a revolutionary for being willing to accommodate her whole life to the preservation of a harsh, originalist Mars? Is Hiroko a revolutionary for running off to create her own society? Or a conservative for essentially abandoning engagement with the wider Mars? Is Nadia the architect of a new society, or a homesick Siberian recreating the trees of her memories? Once the power to do actual alchemical work, or to radically reengineer human DNA becomes routine, is doing that work esoteric, and mysterious, and powerful? Or does radical change itself become routine? To deal with everything posed in these sections, I’m going to divide the discussion into three sections:

I.

One of the things I’ve always found compelling about the Mars trilogy is Kim Stanley Robinson’s argument that to a certain extent, all science is applied, that science untouched (if not tainted) by agenda and influence and the purity of desire, is something of a myth. John reflects on the peculiarities of desire as influence when he visits Ann and Simon and finds Ann tremendously bitter at her loss to the terraformers: “Would she want to find evidence of an oceanic past? It was a model that tended to lend moral support to the terraforming project, implying as it did that they were only restoring an earlier state of things. So probably she would not want to find any such evidence. Would that disinclination bias her work? Well, sure. If not consciously, then deeper. Consciousness was just a thin lithosphere over a big hot core.”

And Arkady is right, of course, that scientists who take corporate funding and convince themselves that the bill will never come due are also deluding themselves:

The people who pay for the scientist islands will eventually want a return on their investment. And now we are entering that time. A return is being demanded for our island. We were not doing pure research, you see, but applied research. And with the discovery of strategic metals the application has become clear. And so it all comes back, and we have a return of ownership, and prices, and wages. The whole profit system. The little scientific station is being turned into a mine, with the usual mining attitude toward the land over the treasure. And the scientists are being asked, What you do, how much is it worth?

And when a whole planet is your lab, it’s much harder to preserve the purity of your experimental conditions. As Ann tells John, “you and Arkady are the biggest advocates of some kind of new Martian society, you two plus Hiroko, maybe. But the way Russell and Frank and Phyllis are bringing up Terran capital, the whole thing’s going to be out of your hands. It’ll be business as usual, and all your ideas will disappear.” But even in some of its skepticism about the conditions in which science can be done, this section is tremendously optimistic about about what science can accomplish, both in the lab and as a model for process in politics. But there’s a real sense of limitation about the questions science can answer. It’s not just that politics has overwhelmed scientific imperatives, making it impossible for Ann to keep the landscape pristine until she can get the kind of certainty she want about Mars’ nature and history. It’s that the unintended consequences of science spool out far beyond their origins.

II.

Of course that biggest achievement, that biggest unintended consequence, is the longevity treatment. To my mind, it’s fairly odd that there’s absolutely no discussion about the wisdom either of going ahead and administering the longevity treatment, or of anybody’s taking it. Surely someone in the First Hundred has to think this is creepy, right? Given their other decisions, is it realistic that there would be consensus either on the bioethics of dramatically lengthening lifespan or on the politics of giving a small group of people the right to live for an almost infinite amount of time, giving them much more influence than others? Especially given how reluctant the treatment’s inventors are to let it loose on Earth, where it would inevitably be a disaster, the cause of class war and hemispheric conflict, and of course, where it would put much more pressure on Mars as a site of immigration. Obviously, the prospect of health, the sight of “the Acheron group, who, now that he looked at them, were wandering around their aerie working and eating and playing soccer and swimming and so on with little smiles of absorbed concentration, with a kind of humming,” is pretty appealing. But still! Big decisions made with very little discussion. It feels like a copout to have John be the person whose perspective we get this decision through, given how unthoughtful he can be about his own state of mind and motivations.

That said, it’s cool to see how the longevity treatment accelerates everything, from science: “Marina’s lab was getting ahead of the game. But so was everyone else. This seemed to be a result of the treatment, it made sense on the face of it. Longer experiments,” To political revolution and social engineering. As usual, it’s theorist Arkady who provides the definitive statement on how it’s all going to shake out:

If those aging treatments work, and we are living decades longer than previously, it will certainly cause a social revolution. Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work—no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the system they were old and dying, and for the next generation it was all there, massive and entrenched and having to be learned all over again. But look, if you learn it, and then stare at it for fifty more years, you will eventually be saying, Why not make this more rational? Why not make it closer to our heart’s desire?

And it’s the experience of going through the longevity cure, of subjecting himself to bioengineering, that gives John his central insight about how to create a genuinely new Martian political and cultural system: that it should be engineered out of a combination of existing traits. As he says in his literal speech on the mountaintop “it’s not like we have nothing and are being forced to conjure forms godlike out of the vacuum*—we have the genes you might say, the memes as Vlad says meaning our cultural genes, so that it’s in the nature of an act of genetic engineering what we do here, we have the DNA pieces of culture all made and broken and mixed by history, and we can choose and cut and clip together from what’s best in that gene pool.”

*I’d actually be really interested to hear what any economists, professional or armchair, have to say about the one idea conjured up out of the void that’s discussed here, Marina and Vlad’s proposal for an eco-economics. As one of those not-so-valuable artist types, the discussion made me nervous, but I feel a bit as if it’s over my head….

To read the last section of this post and join the conversation, head over to Alyssa’s blog at Think Progress.

Public science agencies worldwide find themselves pulled in two directions: Scientists require freedom to pursue research wherever it leads, while funders demand that research meets public needs.

Balancing the competing demands of autonomy and accountability is a constant challenge. Scientific curiosity that focuses too much on “blue skies” research risks losing the support of funders. But funding criteria that are too prescriptive can end up with bad science. Changing circumstances—scientific breakthroughs, success or failure in wars, budget surpluses or deficits, and cultural and political trends—mean that the relationship between science and society must regularly be renegotiated.

A brief history of NSF’s merit criteria

NSF is at the frontlines of these pressures. NSF is tasked with funding basic (i.e., nonmission) science. But Congress is interested in funding basic science for the practical results that accrue. Heir to the narrative outlined by Vannevar Bush in Science – the Endless Frontier (1945), NSF has been a model agency for strong autonomy advocates who argue that science progresses best via a paradox: Scientific research will be most societally relevant when scientists are left to pursue their own creative impulses with a minimum of outside direction.

This worked in the aftermath of World War II. But by the mid-1990s, political culture had begun to shift toward the pole of accountability. One sign of this was the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, or GPRA, an accountability initiative across the federal government led by Vice President Gore. A second sign was the refashioning of the peer review criteria for the review of grant proposals at NSF in 1997.

Previously, NSF’s “merit” criteria had focused mainly on the intrinsic scientific merit of the research. Beginning in 1997, however, NSF changed the review criteria to two: intellectual merit and broader impacts. The first criterion called for reviewing proposals by disciplinary definitions of excellence. But this was now counterpoised by a second criterion that made transdisciplinary demands upon scientists, asking them to align their research with societal needs.

These new criteria stirred controversy across the scientific community. Biologists knew how to judge the biological aspects of proposals, but what particular expertise do they have in judging broader impacts? Over the last decade, however, the “broader impacts” criterion has come to be integrated within the culture of science. With some grumbling, scientists have become more comfortable with thinking of their research in terms of having both scientific merit and societal impact.

Nevertheless, controversy remained about what properly counted as a broader impact, and about how one balanced the broader impacts with the intellectual merit of proposed research. And as scientists were adjusting to the broader impacts criterion, our national focus on accountability continued to grow. Growing distrust of government, the most serious economic crisis since the Depression, and the passage of time made it clear that a review of the merit review criteria was called for. And so in May 2010, the National Science Foundation announced a top-to-bottom review of both criteria.

Changes to the merit criteria

Last week NSB announced draft criteria for the review of proposals submitted to the Foundation. And there are significant changes to the two criteria. Addressing the broader impacts criterion now means showing “which national goal (or goals) is (or are) addressed in the proposal?” The complete list of goals is:

• Increased economic competitiveness of the United States
• Development of a globally competitive STEM workforce
• Increased participation of women, persons with disabilities, and underrepresented minorities in STEM
• Increased partnerships between academia and industry
• Improved pre-K-12 STEM education and teacher development
• Improved undergraduate STEM education
• Increased public scientific literacy and public engagement with science and technology
• Increased national security
• Enhanced infrastructure for research and education, including facilities, instrumentation, networks, and partnerships

Those familiar with the old version of the broader impacts criterion will see much holdover in the new. But the crucial differences can be summarized in terms of three points:

A focus on economics and national security

Four of the nine national goals are concerned with economics; a fifth with national security. (The remaining four focus on education and outreach.) The list of national goals does not include other values such as environmental sustainability or alleviation of social inequality (health issues, of course, are the province of the National Institutes of Health). Besides ignoring these other issues, there is also the danger that the focus on economics could become counterproductive, insofar as it discourages more idealistic students from entering science and engineering. There is evidence, for instance, that women and minorities especially are more attracted to science and engineering for meeting human needs rather than economic development.

Clarity at the expense of flexibility

The new broader impacts criterion shifts the judgment of what counts as a broader impact away from proposers and reviewers. Previously, the individual PI had flexibility to define broader impacts as he or she saw fit—as long as the proposer could answer the question:

What may be the benefits of the proposed activity to society?

Under the proposed new criteria, proposers and reviewers are limited to the list of national needs. Easier? Perhaps. But unless the list is made representative and nonexhaustive, proposers will be restricted to addressing only those national goals that have appeared on the list. This also restricts the list to current national needs, tying our hands to respond to new and future challenges.

Weighting the criteria

The new principles and criteria also contain an interesting ambiguity. NSF’s portfolio of funded projects is supposed to advance the nine national goals “collectively.” Whereas all proposals had to address broader impacts under the previous criteria, under the new principles and criteria, “Broader impacts may be achieved through the research itself, through activities that are directly related to specific research projects, or through activities that are supported by the project but ancillary to the research.” Does this mean that there is now no mandate that each individual proposal address broader impacts directly?

There are positive aspects to the new criteria. The idea of a set of principles is helpful. And there is a new emphasis on how the proposed broader impacts are to be achieved. Once one chooses the national goal advanced through the research, the new guidelines focus on questions of implementation, such as:

• Is there a well-reasoned plan for the proposed activities, including, if appropriate, department-level or institutional engagement?
• Are there adequate resources available to the PI or institution to carry out the proposed activities?

These sorts of procedural questions should help proposers and reviewers. They also strengthen the parallel between the two criteria. After asking about the role the proposed research will play in advancing knowledge, the new intellectual merit criterion also focuses on logistics:

• How well conceived and organized is the proposed activity?
• How well qualified is the individual or team to conduct the proposed research?
• Is there sufficient access to resources?

This parallelism is useful, for it helps dispel the illusion that “predicting” impacts is somehow more difficult than “predicting” intellectual success. Reviewers who reflect on their judgments regarding intellectual merit will recognize that they do not set themselves the task of predicting the future, but rather focus on whether the proposer has thought through their proposed research. Reviewers ask questions—is it feasible, is it an important topic, and so forth—about the planning and thought that have gone into the proposal, about whether the research has a chance to succeed. No reviewer is a fortune teller. The same is the case for judging broader impacts. The point is not to predict the future but to ensure the proposer has thought through what the broader impacts might be, who might benefit, and how to encourage that to happen.

As suggested above, we believe the proposed changes in the review criteria are too narrow and too restrictive. But we also know this is an ongoing process that will continue to be renegotiated as cultural attitudes shift.

Doubtless the proposed criteria and principles will be revised. NSF solicits comments until July 14, and the announcement notes that “It is expected that NSF will develop specific guidance for PIs, reviewers, and NSF staff on the use of these criteria after the drafts are finalized.” There is thus still time for the scientific community, and the science policy community, to weigh in.

In closing, it is worth noting that students of science policy have seen this movie before. Over the last 15 years, the European Commission has struggled with integrating societal impacts into the peer review process. Across Framework Programmes 5, 6, and 7 (running from 1998 to 2013), the EC has swung back and forth in terms of how to interpret broader impacts, and to what degree individual PIs should be given discretion in fulfilling the mandate. The EC is currently designing Framework Programme 8 and is again thinking through the tension between autonomy and accountability. It is a perennial question that each generation will struggle to strike the right balance on.

Robert Frodeman is professor of philosophy and director of the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas. J. Britt Holbrook is research assistant professor of philosophy and assistant director at the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support for this research provided by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant No.0830387, while emphasizing that any opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF, or any of its employees.

Watch “huge science geek” Miss USA 2011 Alyssa Campanella’s response, courtesy of Think Progress:

Meanwhile, the answers provided by the rest of the candidates clearly illustrate many of the confusions and misconceptions that surround evolution. Several seemed to have a poor understanding of exactly what evolution is, while others suggested that schools adopt policies that the Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional for decades.

While the opinions of Miss USA contestants will have little impact on what kids learn in school, the statements made by these representatives of America’s future might mean that we haven’t been doing too well in educating our youth in science. Evolution is included in the National Research Council’s national science standards, as well as most state science standards, which means that most of the Miss USA contestants should have learned about it in high school, if not college.  Why, then, did most of these talented young women seem to be so uninformed?

A study of 926 public high school biology teachers found that only 28 percent of them adhere to National Research Council standards in the development of their curriculums. Up to 13 percent teach creation and/or intelligent design, while an additional 5 percent do not explicitly teach these concepts but endorse it in passing or in response to students’ questions. Meanwhile the majority of teachers, who the study authors refer to as the “Cautious 60 Percent” either teach only select evolutionary concepts, teach evolution and creation/intelligent design together, or teach neither. Some teachers in the Cautious 60 Percent choose these strategies in order to avoid controversy, while, more surprisingly, others choose them because they were never formally educated in evolution and do not feel comfortable teaching it.

As easy as it is to ridicule the answers given by the Miss USA contestants, it is important to remember that their responses are, more than anything else, a reflection of their teachers, their schools, and science education in the United States. Recently, Dr. Steve Rissing, a professor of evolution, ecology and organismal Biology at Ohio State University (the alma mater of Miss Ohio, Ashley Nicole Caldwell) told The Lantern, “There’s a growing gap between what [students] are getting in high school and what we expect them to have when they come into college. A great disservice is being done.”

Asking Miss USA contestants to opine on evolution and airing their responses on national television certainly adds pizzazz to the public discourse on evolution, but it should really serve to remind us that public misconceptions of evolution are much more prevalent than they should be. Perhaps the Miss USA interviews serve as a call for us to address some of the common public misconceptions about evolution and the educational problems they create.

Miss-conception #1: Schools and communities can prohibit the teaching of evolution

The government advised us on this issue over 40 years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968) that an Arkansas statute that prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools was unconstitutional. What’s more, in 1994 the Ninth Circuit  Court of Appeals held that requiring science teachers to teach evolution is completely permissible. So the law is pretty clear: it is illegal for states to prohibit the teaching of evolution in their public schools, though they are allowed to require it. Madeline Mitchell (Miss Alabama) and Kia Ben-et Hampton (Miss Kentucky), both of whom stated that evolution should definitely not be taught in schools, should take heed.

Miss-conception #2: Evolution and creation deserve “equal time”

Seven contestants suggested that evolution and creation should both be taught in public schools. The answer given by one of these contestants, Haley Jo Herold (Miss Nebraska), is eerily reminiscent of mid-20th century creationist “equal time” rhetoric that was used in attempt to rebrand creationism as a type of “science” and insert it into science curriculums alongside evolution: “In public schools you have to give all credited theories equal amount of time, so I think both evolution and creation should be taught.”

“Equal time” legislation has been prohibited since the 1980s on the basis that teaching creationism in schools violates the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution. In Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s “Creationism Act,” which forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools unless creationism was taught along with it, was deemed unconstitutional.  A few years earlier, an Arkansas District Court ruled in Mclean v. Arkansas (1982) that Act 590, a state law that required balanced treatment of evolution and so-called “creation-science,” was unconstitutional, and that the biblical origins and nonempirical nature of the “creation-science” it advocated makes it religion, not science.

Miss-conception #3: It is only fair if all sides are taught

Most candidates suggested that evolution should be taught in schools along with the “other side,” “all perspectives,” or “every theory” on the basis that students’ education would be optimized if they learn about all ideas in order to make an informed decision. Although the principle behind this opinion is well-intentioned, teaching “all perspectives” in a science class would actually do students a huge disservice when the other perspectives are unscientific.

Most would (hopefully) be hard-pressed to find a biology teacher who would teach Lamarckism, a disproven idea that organisms evolve by passing on acquired, rather than genetic, traits to their offspring. It would be similarly absurd to learn the views of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which hold that everything was created by a spaghetti-and-meatballs deity, in a science class.

Although creationism and intelligent design have a more significant following than these two perspectives, their religious and nonscientific bases render them just as improper for a science curriculum. As is the case with creationism, including intelligent design in science curricula, or even providing materials that cover the topic, was deemed unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court Judge in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005). Given its religious underpinnings, the court considered it to be a version of creationism and determined that it was not science.

Miss-conception #4: Evolution is just a theory

The general perceptions of theories and facts are quite different than the way these terms are utilized in the sciences. Some contestants, like Keeley Patterson (Miss Mississippi), suggested that evolution “should be taught as what it is: theory, not fact.”

Evolution is actually both a theory, which the National Science Foundation defines as a well-supported explanation of an aspect of nature, and a fact, which it defines as an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed. The tenets of evolutionary theory—descent with modification, common ancestry, natural selection, and genetic drift—have been observed, proven, and widely accepted by the scientific community. Lauren Carter (Miss Vermont) astutely pointed out that “evolution exists,” and cited a real life example of it: the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

The truth

Some of the contestants suggested that schools have an obligation to teach students the truth. But what does this really mean? What is true for one person is not necessarily true for another, and truth varies across disciplines, cultures, and even languages.

While there is much concern over whether or not students learn the “truth” of the origin of species in science class, the energy would be better spent on promoting the real obligation schools have to their students: providing the highest standard of education. In terms of science education, this means that science teachers must provide their students with the best and most up-to-date scientific knowledge without conflating science with other disciplines. Evolution is top-of-the line, real science, and is crucial to our understanding of every area of the life sciences, from microbiology to ecology to medicine to bio-energy. It’s about time for all science teachers to fulfill their responsibility and teach evolution the way it should be taught.

Miss USA contestant Brittany Toll (of New Mexico) got it right: “Evolution is based off of science and I think science is a huge thing we need to continue to enrich our schools with.”

Watch all of the Miss USA contestants’ responses here:

Michelle Spektor is a Science Progress intern at the Center for American Progress and is an undergraduate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

What do you think? Comment on this article and join the conversation at facebook.com/scienceprogress or by tweeting at us @scienceprogress.

The first two sections of Red Mars have to do a lot of heavy lifting and they feel like it—not only are they outlining a lot of very complex political and scientific arguments, but you’ve got to look at them through Maya’s eyes, which is not always a pleasant or sympathetic place to sit. So in a sense, “The Crucible” is a relief as we shift from Maya to Nadia, probably my favorite character in the books, and from the craft of leadership to the tangibility of engineering and architecture. And in shifting from the world of ideas to the world of things, we actually get a much more powerful emotional sense of what’s at stake as the First Hundred try to decide whether they will begin aggressive efforts to change the Martian atmosphere and climate.

One of the things this section does beautifully is juxtapose the mechanical and the whimsical—it makes Nadia’s jazz habit a perfect metaphor for her experiences. It’s there from the moment Nadia starts unpacking the town that is hers to reassemble: “The tractor itself was a real pig, with 600 horsepower, a wide wheelbase, and wheels big as tracks…They took off and rolled slowly toward the trailer park—and there she was, Nadezhda Cherneshevsky, driving a Mercedes-Benz across Mars! She followed Samantha to the sorting lot, feeling like a queen.” Those moments when Kim Stanley Robinson contrasts her tool kit to King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, or when Nadia explain to Arkady that being on Mars is like Louis Armstrong finding his way to the Hot Five, are just so wonderful in a writerly sense—Nadia’s constantly improvising, and she can do it because of her solid technical background.

Music isn’t the only reference to the past that Nadia finds as she builds her town. It’s there in the architecture:

She recalled vaulted ruins she had seen years ago on Crete, at a site called Aptera: underground Roman cisterns, barrel-vaulted and made of brick, buried in a hillside. They had been almost the same size as these chambers. Their exact purpose was unknown—storage for olive oil, some said, though it would have been an awful lot of oil. Those vaults were intact two thousand years after their construction, and in earthquake country. As Nadia put her boots back on she grinned to think of it. Two thousand years from now, their descendants might walk into this chamber, no doubt a museum by then, if it still existed—the first human dwelling built on Mars! And she had done it. Suddenly she felt the eyes of that future on her, and shivered. They were like Cro-Magnons in a cave, living a life that was certain to be pored over by the archaeologists of subsequent generations; people like her who would wonder, and wonder, and never quite understand.

And even in the water: her colleagues build a Greek temple out of blocks of ice after they finally discover water that’s accessible on the surface of Mars.

But one of the most interesting things about this section of the novel is the extent to which Nadia, who relies so heavily on reference points and grace notes from her past as a source of joy, makes the leap into something new. It’s a move she’s able to make only one Ann gets her out of Underhill, and when Ann shows her something she can’t touch in a situation where she’s not building anything:

Stars were popping out everywhere, and the maroon sky shifted to a vivid dark violet, an electric color that was picked up by the dune crests, so that it seemed crescents of liquid twilight lay across the black plain. Suddenly Nadia felt a breeze swirl through her nervous system, running up her spine and out into her skin; her cheeks tingled, and she could feel her spinal cord thrum. Beauty could make you shiver! It was a shock to feel such a physical response to beauty, a thrill like some kind of sex. And this beauty was so strange, so alien. Nadia had never seen it properly before, or never really felt it, she realized that now; she had been enjoying her life as if it were a Siberia made right, so that really she had been living in a huge analogy, understanding everything in terms of her past. But now she stood under a tall violet sky on the surface of a petrified black ocean, all new, all strange; it was absolutely impossible to compare it to anything she had seen before; and all of a sudden the past sheered away in her head and she turned in circles like a little girl trying to make herself dizzy, without a thought in her head.

When she comes back to Underhill, Nadia sees her own work differently, at least temporarily: “It had the disordered, functional, ugly look of Chelyabinsk-65 or any of the rest of the other Stalinist heavy-industry cities in the Urals, or the oil camps of Yakut.” She’s not the only one who’s living in contradictions. This would have been a really easy section of the novel for Robinson to just have left as a statement of support to the Red position, especially given the subterfuge the Greens, or at least some of them, commit to jumpstart terraforming in the windmill expedition….

To read the rest of this post and join the conversation, head over to Alyssa’s blog at Think Progress.

We have become accustomed to this state of perpetual flux, of this open-endedness in the application and proliferation of new digital technologies. Yet underneath this flux and unpredictability lies a shared certainty: The cost of digital electronics, and the technologies built with them, will dramatically plummet as their power and performance continues to rise exponentially.

This conviction about the future of digital electronics—silicon microchips—is widely known as “Moore’s Law,” named after Gordon Moore (a chemist and co-founder of both Fairchild Semiconductor and the Intel Corporation) for his explication of this developmental dynamic in silicon microchips in 1964.

Equal parts economic and technical, this developmental dynamic has been maintained for a half century by the semiconductor industry, through the efforts of thousands of researchers and the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars. Maintaining Moore’s Law has required a coordinated push in a single, common direction: shrinking the size of the basic building blocks of microchips—tiny switches known as planar transistors—and, to use Moore’s term, cramming more and more of them into the same area of a silicon chip. To semiconductor initiates, this common direction is known as CMOS scaling (CMOS is an acronym for the variety of microchip that rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s). In fact, since the 1990s the semiconductor industry along with its specialty manufacturing tool and materials partners have collaborated on the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, a careful timeline of the problems that must be solved to maintain the traditional pace of change in silicon microchips.

The metronomic pace of CMOS scaling, largely taken for granted outside of certain technical communities, underlies our expectation of continual surprise in the digital world, from the continued proliferation of ever-more-powerful microchips. Our conviction in the reliability of Moore’s Law profoundly shapes the expectations and decisions of both producers and consumers of electronics-reliant goods and services. From military weapons systems to consumer electronics, product planning is grounded in Moore’s Law. As individual consumers, our purchasing decisions share this grounding: Who has not waited a year to buy a gadget, with the expectation that next year’s gadget version 2.0 will deliver much more bang for the buck?

But what we’ve taken for granted for decades may soon change. On Wednesday, May 4, some of the leading technologists at the Intel Corporation held a press conference to disclose details about their new silicon manufacturing technology. While there was much of interest in the Intel disclosures about the future of silicon microchips and the competitive landscape of the global semiconductor industry, perhaps the most important implication of the presentation has received little comment: We have already entered into an age of uncertainty about Moore’s Law itself. This conclusion is somewhat ironic, since Intel announced that it had succeeded in developing a new innovation that will extend Moore’s Law for at least another six years.

What did Intel disclose last month? In essence, Intel announced that it had abandoned the planar transistor, and, therefore, traditional CMOS scaling. As Mark Bohr, one of Intel’s most senior technologists put it in the press conference Q&A, “We can say goodbye to planar transistors.”

For the remarkable run of CMOS scaling over the past four decades, a defining feature of planar transistors was that they were flat; hence, their name. As planar transistors were shrunk so that a billion of them could be crammed into a single microchip, one problem became more and more pronounced. They became harder to turn off, a very bad thing for a switch. Solutions to this problem entailed a growing difficulty of their own: The improved transistors were power hungry, anathema to applications like smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

To continue shrinking transistors in order to maintain the pace of performance and cost improvement for microchips, and to untangle itself from this power dilemma, Intel announced a new manufacturing technology that it will begin to use for all of its products next year. In this technology, Intel will replace planar transistors with “Tri-Gate” transistors. These new transistors are no longer flat, but rather take the form of a minute rail or “fin.” Indeed, the more generic term of this new form of transistor, used by other semiconductor firms, is “finFET.” One of the principle virtues of these new non-flat or “3-D transistors” is that they are easy to turn off, and thus combine great switching speed with very low power consumption.

At left is a traditional 32-nanometer 2-D transistor, while at right is the newer, smaller, 22-nanometer 3-D transistor.

Intel is making the jump to its Tri-Gate transistors several years ahead of its semiconductor industry rivals, and sees them as providing a basis for its subsequent generation of manufacturing technology in the next six years. This new path to maintaining Moore’s Law, as the Intel researchers noted, builds on previous deviations in the last five years or more from traditional materials and structures for CMOS scaling. As Bill Holt, the Intel VP for technology development put it, “Simple CMOS scaling…ended a while ago.” In the midst of their press conference, the Intel team presented a quote about the move to 3-D transistors from none other than Gordon Moore himself: “For years we have seen limits to how small transistors can get. This change in the basic structure is a truly revolutionary approach, and one that should allow Moore’s Law, and the historic pace of innovation to continue.”

While Intel’s jump to the world beyond traditional CMOS provides a view into the immediate future of the world’s largest chipmaker, a considerable haze of uncertainty now surrounds what its rivals will do in the near term, and what the whole industry will do after six short years. For the immanent “22 nanometer” or “22 nm” technology for which Intel will use 3-D transistors—and which Intel claims will have the capability of cramming as many as 6 million such transistors into the area occupied by a standard printed period—many of its major competitors will maintain the planar transistor, and pursue an alternate approach to the power problem known as “silicon on insulator.” At the upcoming “14 nm” technology some three years down the line, the semiconductor industry could bifurcate, with larger firms abandoning planar for 3-D transistors—moving beyond CMOS—while smaller firms pursue the “silicon on insulator” technology.

This handy (and not-at-all corny) video Intel put together illustrates the difference between 2-D and 3-D transistor technology:

Looking out further toward 2016, at the “10 nm” technology for which development is already underway, the haze thickens. The optical technology used to form today’s microchips becomes increasingly improbable at that level of the nanoscale, and the top contenders to replace it are already late in their development to keep pace with Moore’s Law. Looking out less than a decade from now to the “7 nm” technology that is planned to follow 10 nm, the inherent atomic nature of matter looms as an issue for fabricating uniform devices. The diameter of a silicon atom is 0.2 nm.

As the semiconductor industry drives deeper into the nanoscale, it appears that we are returning to an age of technological uncertainty not dissimilar from the one from which silicon microchips first emerged. <pullquote>Such a return to a period in which the future of electronics was highly uncertain, and developments were far more unpredictable, could be both highly disruptive and incredibly exciting. <pullquote>

Disruption could occur in many forms. Patterns of technological change may become less uniform, with the magnitude of changes and their timescale disaggregating across different technologies. The management and funding of research and innovation may have to undergo considerable revision to adapt to uncertainty. On the one hand this means technological and economic planning may become significantly more difficult. On the other, creative and unexpected new directions in research might abound.

For most of the past 40 years, industry has conducted and financed the bulk of the R&D for CMOS scaling. In an age of increased technological uncertainty, government support of high-risk research may return to prominence. Indeed, direct military funding of R&D and activist, price-insensitive military demand were essential to the initial development of the microchip in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this era, government research spending on microelectronics was significant, risk-tolerant, and open-ended, supporting a broad array of speculative approaches. It is interesting to note that the semiconductor community looks to DARPA-funded research at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1990s as the origin of the 3-D transistor approach.

One conclusion to be drawn from Intel’s recent announcement is that while the immediate future of Moore’s Law appears clear, the longer term developmental path for electronics is now as, or more, uncertain than it has been for a half century. Previous news of the death of Moore’s Law has turned out to be exaggerated. The rather incredible extensibility of silicon technology and the creative potentials of the semiconductor community have repeatedly surmounted previous purported barriers. Surely silicon technology and microchips will continue to surprise even the most knowledgeable observers in the years ahead.

Nevertheless, with Intel’s leap to the world beyond traditional CMOS scaling and the planar transistor we appear to be quickly approaching a regime of increased technological uncertainty. Perhaps this is a return to a more typical state of affairs from a temporary excursion into unprecedented continuous and predictable change. “Doubt is not an agreeable condition,” Voltaire once quipped, “but certainty is an absurd one.”

David C. Brock is an historian of technology and the co-author of Makers of the Microchip (MIT Press, 2010). Brock is a Senior Research Fellow with the Center for Contemporary History and Policy at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and is also affiliated with the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Please Welcome Alyssa Rosenberg, Think Progress’s new culture blogger. Over the next couple weeks Alyssa will be doing an online book club on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. Since we thought it an apt book, we decided we’d post a bit of her write up each week here at Science Progress, and you can follow the discussion in the comments section over at Think Progress. Enjoy.

Kim Stanley Robinson has to do an incredible a amount of heavy lifting in the first two sections of Red Mars: introduce a huge cast of characters and the loves and animosities that will bind and divide them for decades, provide background context on the rationale and support for the settlement, and lay out a number of very complex political debates. Fortunately, he has two central metaphors that wrap up all of those problems: escape velocity and terraforming.

On a technical level, achieving escape velocity and starting their trip to Mars is the easiest part of the mission. As a metaphor, it raises a larger, perhaps unanswerable, question. As Robinson puts it “What kind of Dv would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.” Whether or not to terraform — to deliberately alter Mars’ atmosphere in order to make the air breathable and soil arable — is a more immediately relevant question, and one that the characters will battle over fiercely, even as they start experimenting with things like architecture and their approach to work assignments.

One of the things I like about this book is that things don’t align easily. We meet Frank Chalmers at a moment of high cynicism, angry over the implication that the colonization of Mars was a purifying experience. “The truth was the trip to Mars had been the functional equivalent of a long train ride,” he reflects. “Not only had they not become fundamentally different beings, they had actually become more like themselves than ever, stripped of habits until they were left with nothing but the naked raw materials of their selves.” But even though Frank’s suspicious of the idea that coming to Mars had an alchemical effect on the First Hundred and those who followed, he’s motivated by the desire to have control over the planet’s future, and the transformations that will follow. He’s simultaneously someone who appreciates the linguistic possibilities of Arabic for Mars — “Arabic had a larger vocabulary for this landscape: akaba for the steep final slopes around volcanoes, badia for the great world dunes, nefuds for deep sand, seyl for the billion-year-old dry riverbeds…People were saying they might as well switch over to Arabic and have done with it.” — while also manipulating a Muslim man into murdering John for him and stoking anti-Muslim sentiment to make the coverup more plausible.

Arkady, by contrast, is an idealist pain in the ass. It’s not that he’s wrong to insist that the colonists will have the power to make decisions independent of earth once they get to Mars, or that social experimentation is a good idea. It’s just that the ways in which he goes about proposing revolution is maximally disruptive, meant to make his fellow colonists uncomfortable. Until, of course, the moment when he turns to hugely traditional means to calm them during a moment of crisis….

To read the rest of this post and join the conversation, head over to Alyssa’s blog at Think Progress.

The report undercuts its own conclusions again and again, demanding more accountability while cutting support for accountants, asking that scientists propose experiments that are more difficult to justify while demanding they fill out more paperwork, and calling for higher-quality research while interfering in the review process for political reasons. Before cutting a federal agency’s budget, we should understand the agency’s mission, operations, and outcomes. Sen. Coburn’s report makes it clear that despite his protestations, he has little idea how science works, how the NSF supports science, or how scientific knowledge strengthens America.

The report’s central claim that the NSF failed to recover $1.7 billion in unspent grant funds is patently incorrect and is based on a simple misunderstanding of federal statutes, according to NSF officials. In fact, the $1.7 billion figure represents the pot of money obligated for multiyear grants, and the figure drops as research teams draw down their accounts over the course of their projects. “It’s being used for exactly the purpose for which it was intended,” explained an NSF budget official to ScienceInsider.

Beyond the blatant misreading of federal statutes, “Under the Microscope” drives home two main points: First, the NSF is poorly administered; second, the activities that it funds are silly. Coburn has a clear vision for the NSF: It is an agency that should solely fund “transformational research.” Quoting from “Under the Microscope,” which quotes from an NSF memo, transformative research is research that promises extraordinary outcomes, such as:

Revolutionizing entire disciplines; creating entirely new fields; or disrupting accepted theories and perspectives –in other words, those endeavors which have the potential to change the way we address challenges in science, engineering, and innovation.  Supporting more transformative research is of critical importance in the fast paced, science and technology-intensive world of the 21^st century.

The problem is that “transformative research” can only be identified in retrospect. We often don’t know where the next breakthrough will come from, or which scientific theories will prove critical in the long run. The closest we can come to supporting transformative research is looking for what Thomas Kuhn called potentially “paradigm-shifting science.” In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn noted that scientists work within paradigms—broad sets of ideas, concepts, and theories that define what a valid scientific question is and how it can be answered. As scientists fill out various parts of a paradigm, they accumulate inconsistencies, observations that don’t fit their paradigm. Mostly, these inconsistencies are ignored, but at some point they reach a critical mass and a bright mind develops a new theory, which incorporates the inconsistencies.

For example, an Aristotelian astronomer saw his job as observing the stars and accurately describing their motion through epicycles, minor patterns of rotation. As centuries of observation accumulated, the initially elegant and logical geocentric model of the universe required too many arbitrary epicycles to make it work. Copernicus realized that the Earth travels around the sun, Galileo popularized it, and Newton proved it with his theory of gravity, resulting in a paradigm shift in astronomy that led to calculus, modern mechanics, and a host of other scientific discoveries.

Unfortunately for Sen. Coburn’s recommendations, paradigm-shifting science cannot be produced on demand. Until the point at which the new paradigm is confirmed, its theories often sound like sheer madness: matter as both a particle and a wave, invisible organisms causing plagues, mankind descended from apes, the continents moving, the Earth orbiting the sun; at one point all of these accepted scientific truths were the most insane heresies. People were—and in some cases still are—burnt at the stake for proselyting these ideas. Furthermore, new paradigms are often strictly less useful for solving practical problems. For about a century after Copernicus, until the mathematics of elliptical orbits were worked out, the geocentric model of the universe was far better at predicting where stars would be in the night sky.

Trying to get a committee composed of top experts in their field to go against their paradigms and fund “transformative research” is psychologically impractical. Yet the NSF can’t go around handing out money to every crank and charlatan who promises to revolutionize science. Peer review committees serve as gatekeepers, evaluating proposals on the strength of the proposed plan of research, the expertise of the investigators, and likelihood of achieving its aims. Generally, the more ambitious and transformative a scientific theory is, the less likely it is to pan out. The compromise institutional science has made between working on hard problems in the accepted paradigm and creating new paradigms is giving researchers enough time, money, and intellectual freedom to discover something really novel.

Sen. Coburn’s solution to a lack of “transformative research” is more oversight. He complains that nearly 50 percent of NSF grant progress and final reports are turned in late, and 10 percent are never turned in at all, but doesn’t discuss how scientific publications already serve to mark progress. Scientists work to advance the sum total of human knowledge—and their own careers, by publishing articles in scientific journals, not filling out reports that will never see the light of day. Rather than further burdening researchers with government red tape, the NSF should be better equipped to keep abreast of the latest discoveries in the literature.

Of course, all this close oversight of the NSF, according to Sen. Coburn’s staff, is to be done on a smaller budget, since the agency spends too much on office space and airfare. It’s unclear how NSF employees are supposed to conduct site visits without plane tickets; perhaps they can use some of that CIA research on clairvoyance and telepathy.

Likewise, the inspector general’s office is criticized for spending too much of its time investigating porn viewing among senior management as opposed to actual fraud. Of course, the fact that NSF employees view porn during working hours is worthy of three pages in the report. As a very angry Steve Silberman says in his take on Sen. Coburn’s report, “They’re [scientists are] making fools of American taxpayers while indulging their liberal — indeed, sinful — excesses.” Sin and excess is a big theme of the report, including tales of porn surfing at work and lurid photos of Jell-O wrestling at the NSF-funded McMurdo Antarctic Station (what happens in Antarctica stays in Antarctica). The excess goes so far as to include an evening of pizza and bowling for undergraduates at an NSF-funded summer research internship. Responsible use of taxpayer funds is important, but let’s keep a sense of perspective here. McMurdo is an isolated research station; you can’t just go out on the town, and some kind of recreation is necessary to keep the crews’ morale up. We might also want to begin asking hard questions about the softball leagues and ice cream socials afforded to congressional interns.

Somehow, I find it hard to work up much outrage about fraud in the NSF, given that Minerals Management Service employees were caught up in a massive sex/drugs/corruption scandal with oil company representatives, or that 25-year-old stoners defrauded the Department of Defense on a $300 million arms contract, or that contractors in Afghanistan funneled military money to the Taliban, or pretty much everything connected with the Great Recession of 2008.

But “They’re more corrupt than me” is no defense, and scientists should hold themselves to a higher standard than arms dealers, oil prospectors, and bankers. While Sen. Coburn’s report makes a case for better accounting standards to ensure grant monies are spent, it also relies heavily on the work of the NSF’s own internal inspector general for its examples of fraud, and in several cases, the employees in question were fired for their transgression. It appears that the NSF is already capable of detecting and dealing with corruption, and that extra investigators might be more efficiently used in other areas of government.

But corruption and government oversight is not my forte. Let’s return to the science policy side of the report. Sen. Coburn’s “staff spent several years reviewing hundreds of NSF research awards” and picked the 50 or so of the least transformative, most ridiculous ones to share with the public. Thirty-six of these grants are in the social sciences, five are in education/public outreach, five are in biology, and one is in mechanical engineering. These numbers are in no way representative of what the NSF does, as science policy expert Dan Sarewitz[1] put it in his response, “The entire social and behavior science budget at NSF ($252 million) amounts to all of 3.6% of the total NSF budget, 0.3% of the civilian R&D budget, and 0.006% of the federal budget. Attacking social science is good conservative politics, but it has nothing to do with serious budget policy.” The NSF approves tens of thousands of proposals each year, and rejects countless more.

Why does this report overwhelmingly focus on such a small section of the NSF, to the exclusion of 96.4 percent of its activity? If I were to hazard a guess, the reason why social science projects predominate is not that the GOP dislikes the social sciences more than climate science or evolutionary biology, as Steve Silberman argues, but that it is very hard for congressional staffers to evaluate the worth of proposals like “Nodulin Intrinsic Proteins at the Plant-microbe Symbiotic Interface: Multifunctional Roles in Metabolite and Water Transport in Nitrogen Fixation and Stress Responses,” or “The ISM of Luminous Infrared Galaxies: Tracing Gas Properties, Dynamics and Starburst/AGN Activity,” to pick two grants at random from this week’s approvals. As the selection of projects in this report demonstrates, scientific peer review is done by experts because lay people can’t tell the difference between good and bad science just by examining grant proposals.

The social science work that the NSF does is far from frivolous. One study that Sen. Coburn calls out is one that examines the reasons why Turkish women wear veils. According to the study, rather than submission to Islamic law, many middle-class Turks wear the veil as an act of “fashion rebellion” against an authoritarian secular regime. Given current volatility in the Middle East, and Turkey’s traditional role as bridge between East and West, it seems useful to gain information about how radicalized 50 percent of the Turkish population is.

Studies on video games and virtual worlds are a particular bugbear of Sen. Coburn; however, video games are now a major entertainment industry on par with television and movies, with more than $10 billion in sales. Internet fundraising and activism has the potential to be a transformative force in politics, both at home and abroad. Children are effectively growing up in virtual worlds, and if Google is truly making us stupid, or if rumors spread through Twitter can bring down dictatorships, then it is important for us to understand these phenomena.

Another science policy issue that the report touches on is duplication, or the notion that NSF-funded activities are being done elsewhere. According to the report, research that might cure disease should be done in the NIH, while energy research is the sole province of the DOE, and training for scientists should be moved into the Department of Education. This attitude, however, is far too reductionist. Science cannot simply be divided into categories of basic and applied, or NSF and agency-mission based. Research into solid-state physics can probe both the fundamental properties of matter and improve the efficiency of solar panels. Studies on cell division might lead to a cure for cancer but will certainly advance biological knowledge as well.

“Science: The Endless Frontier,” the NSF’s informal constitution, makes explicit that the justification for basic research as conducted by the NSF is that it will eventually improve the security, prosperity, and health of the United States and its citizens. NSF proposals are ranked both on their intellectual merit and their broader social impacts. Recommending that the NSF no longer fund research on issues like health, energy, and jobs would separate the scientific community from problems of public concern, and likely lead to more of what Sen. Coburn derides as “silly science.”

Duplication of effort is an inherent problem for distributed organizations like the NSF. Scientists, working independently, tend to find the same problems interesting. Similarly, the need to continually present results and “publish or perish” leads to some amount of obvious and trivial science. But duplication of effort is strength rather than a weakness. Diverse approaches increase the chance that a solution to a given scientific question will be found. Rather than big pork-barrel research centers, the NSF funds scientists working in every state, creating a flexible and adaptive community of scientists.

At the cutting edge of science, there is no clear divide between research and education. Scientists learn by doing; the core of graduate training is planning, conducting, and writing up your own original research. The NSF’s education and outreach efforts are targeted not toward the general public but those students with exceptional potential who may go on to become award-winning scientists. For students, there is no substitute for imparting the excitement and importance of science like directly interacting with leading scientists, a mission better fitting the NSF than the Department of Education.

Of course, the decentralized style of the NSF is not the only way for the government to fund science. One proposed solution toward reducing duplication is a stronger development of a national innovation system, which would support all aspects of science and technology, from primary education to product development, and parcel scientists out based on identified national needs. A more centralized, activist role for the federal government in science, however, is an uncharacteristic policy for a small government conservative like Sen. Coburn to advocate.

Sen. Coburn wants a leaner NSF that is better at advancing American interests. This is an admirable goal for anybody who believes we need to innovate to maintain future economic competitiveness, military dominance, and even ecological survival, but the report is crippled by internal contradictions and blatant misrepresentations. As he calls for eliminating the NSF’s education and outreach efforts, Sen. Coburn wants a strong scientific enterprise without paying for the necessary human capital. Similarly, he approves of the role science plays in protecting us from natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes, while ignoring the many disasters—like  financial collapses, wars and conflicts, and anthropogenic climate change—whose human origins,might benefit from scientific investigation. Eliminating the Social, Behavioral, and Economics Directorate, as Sen. Coburn recommends, would dramatically reduce research into the human dimensions of scientific and technological issues.

The place of science in Sen. Coburn’s world is not that of an active participant that helps businessmen, politicians, and activists solve problems, but a miraculous force that constantly transforms society out of its existing problems. Science may appear smooth and monolithic from a distance, but at its bottom-most level, it is a very human endeavor, run by ordinary people who make mistakes, who have bad ideas, and who prefer working on their experiments to dealing with red tape. More than malfeasance in the NSF, or a failure to fund the right kind of science, this report reveals that Sen. Coburn believes he can score points with voters and the conservative punditocracy by attacking a pillar of American scientific excellence on any grounds he can gin up.

Science policy and government oversight deserve better.

Michael Burnam-Fink is a PhD student with the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University.