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.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

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.