Since the nation’s founding, progress in the Enlightenment sense has been key to the idea of America. A corollary belief has been an exceptional level of investment in creating a political, legal, and financial environment that encouraged scientific innovation. Jefferson’s patent statute, for example, gives particular latitude to inventors, as the founders (who were themselves remarkably keen on natural philosophy and numbered several world-class thinkers), sought to make the new nation a welcoming home for the brightest and most creative minds. That desideratum stumbled a bit in the first half of the nineteenth century, as southern members of Congress resisted an extensive role for the central government in financing “internal improvements” like canals and bridges; in one telling example, President Lincoln had to wait until secession to create a National Academy of Sciences, itself created partly to advise him on the most promising new armaments.

After the Civil War, public investment in science gradually intensified, as did the promise of scientific knowledge itself. A firm grounding in science, understood mainly in terms of physics, chemistry, and engineering, was thought to be a key feature of the cultivation of civic virtue, including a healthy Christian outlook. Darwinism was mostly influential as a justification for racial improvement (where “race” had a rather different denotation than it came to have in the early twentieth century, as Americanism itself was often thought to be a racial category). Some poorly defined notion of eugenics was famously embraced by just about everyone interested in social improvement, including of course major Progressive Era figures such as Teddy Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger.

The largely benign view of biology began to change after World War II. Eugenics, in particular, had begun to have a bad odor even before the war, but decisively after the revelations of the Nazi crimes. Then during the Cold War-era the stunning and rapid achievements of laboratory biology produced the bioethics movement, itself a measure of an incipient background concern about the direction of science and the power available to scientists. But this was largely an elite and gentile debate for about 40 years. As ideological lines hardened along the wedge of the 1990s culture wars, so the academic issues of bioethics emerged full-blown into the wider political arena.

The timing of Dolly, the first mammalian clone, in 1996 and the isolation of human embryonic stem cells in 1998 could not have been better—or, perhaps, worse—as these esoteric developments coincided with dismay at President Clinton’s dalliance with a White House intern. For social conservatives, the scandal crystallized larger concerns about the moral direction of American society. The new “liberal eugenics” of abortion, in vitro fertilization, and the increasing ease with which basic bioparts like bits of DNA could be manipulated meshed, for conservatives, with a narrative of a polity adrift from its moral moorings.

Still more intriguing, these worries cut across standard ideological lines. For reasons that focus more on social justice than human dignity, many progressives share cultural conservatives’ reservations about the implications of the powerful new biology. Yet in a century in which national power and prosperity will be determined partly by leadership in the life sciences, some reconciliation with the scientific prospects ahead will be required. That reconciliation will of necessity be a political process.

That political process can be undergirded by an alliance of bioprogessives on the left and the right. Their platform should be a shared commitment to the continued growth of knowledge as a basic humanistic value, the desire to use knowledge as a force for innovation, and an appreciation of innovation as a source of new wealth. Progressives have a unique opportunity to lead this process, but they need to be guided by a vision that integrates science as a cornerstone of human flourishing along with respect for the power of the science being unleashed.

Jonathan Moreno, Ph.D., is the Editor-In-Chief of Science Progress and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. This article was originally published in the Democracy Journal and is republished here at Science Progress.

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

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

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

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

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

Weathercasters as informal science educators

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

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

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

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

Meteorological myths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate change as a public health hazard

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor for Science Progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, you have to admire the “Rock Stars of Science” campaign—Rock S.O.S.; hat tip Mary Spiro—which launched with a four page portfolio in GQ magazine that paired up musicians with scientific “celebrities” (none of whom are household names) for a high-end photo shoot. The idea seems to be that having Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Harold Varmus, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, groove with Sheryl Crow will reflect some of the latter’s rays on the former. The campaign—which advocates for increased funding for biomedical research—is sponsored by Geoffrey Beene Gives Back, the philanthropic arm of the clothing design company. In case it isn’t obvious already, they know how to make anyone, even frumpy scientists, look good.

I am not nearly snooty enough to pooh-pooh this kind of initiative. Rather, I applaud it. For after all, I’ve long felt that when it comes to the cultural standing of science in America, our problem is a lot bigger than a poor educational system, bad test scores, or rampant scientific illiteracy. It is at least as troubling that very few Americans can name Fauci, Varmus, or Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute—and that very few American kids want to be them. A scientific research career, if you can get it, is a pretty good life—one could set one’s sights far, far lower. But it’s not clear that as a culture today, we recognize this.

Rock S.O.S./Geoffrey Beene Gives Back

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, Sheryl Crow, and Harold Varmus, M.D., President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

Other countries do: The crashing down of South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-Suk amid fraud allegations in 2006 was shocking precisely because Woo-Suk had become a nationally known figure, a celebrity, by virtue of his scientific success. The sense today that America may be “falling behind” in science isn’t just about the numbers of researchers we produce: It’s also based on the accurate recognition that in South Korea, or in China, there is a very different perception of science as central to the national future. It’s a perception we ourselves had 50 years ago, inspired in large part by those dreaded Sputnik bleeps. But times have changed, and it’s an open question as to whether we as a nation can ever go back there again—without, I hasten to add, abandoning any of the lessons learned since.

Initiatives like the Rock S.O.S. campaign, or the National Academy of Sciences’ Science & Entertainment Exchange, suggest that maybe we can. Finger to the wind prognostications aren’t worth much, but one gets the sense that with the Obama administration, the place of science in American culture may be changing—improving. Maybe we were at an artificial low under the Bush presidency.

Yet one also wonders whether the GQ spread does enough to combat prevailing stereotypes of scientists as nerdy, as weird and anti-social, or as mean and condescending religion bashers. Some of the researchers featured in GQ get beyond the geek, but mostly, the contrast between them and the rock stars is sharp and heightened.

It is particularly difficult to miss the fact that while the rock stars are far more diverse, the scientists are all older, white, and male. Yes, it catches your eye to see such scientists rocking out. But it would be even more bracing to see female and racially diverse young researchers—with tattoos! Believe me, they’re out there.

Nevertheless the Rock S.O.S. initiative makes several unforgettable points: Billions of dollars of scientific research can remain invisible without a good marketing campaign. And scientists, while undeniably respected, simply do not sit atop the totem pole of American culture—celebrities, musicians, and sports figures do.

Next stop for Geoffrey Beene: In the pages of Sports Illustrated, I want to see young, athletic scientists catching passes from Peyton and Eli Manning.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

QED: In only nine months Rick has had a tremendous impact on SP and throughout the organization. Considering his tough-minded reputation, Rick immediately took the public impression of Science Progress‘s serious intent to the next level. He has, as expected, written smart and insightful columns on topics like stem cell policy and biodiversity. Over the next few weeks our SP-based anthology, Science Next, will appear in bookstores. He has also had a less visible but equally important influence on the ongoing dialogue at CAP about science and public policy. From my point of view, Rick has lent his stature to the argument we have made when the very idea of Science Progress was germinating at CAP, that progressivism and science are deeply related and that that relationship will help to write the American future, as it has our past.

Rick now takes his leave for a position in the Obama administration, in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. There is simply no one in the country more qualified to convey the president’s science policy to the American people, nor to help the president craft policy in light of the best evidence. It is hard to lose a colleague who is so smart, so generous with his time and ideas, and so much fun. But we are all damn lucky that he’s going to work for us. Rick, as they used to say in the wires…

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Welcome to Science Next, a collection of some of the most exciting and far-reaching ideas about innovation for a new American century.

The writings in this volume emerged from a literary experiment that has been evolving during the past year on the virtual and paper pages of Science Progress (www.scienceprogress.org), which is a project of the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.–based policy-research institute. The mission of Science Progress is to provide an opportunity for scientists and non-scientists to share ideas about ways that scientific and technological innovation can contribute to human flourishing.

Given its genesis in a Washington think tank, the Science Progress conversation focused first on “inside the beltway” policymakers—a much-maligned but invaluable American species. Derided in the vernacular of Capitol Hill as “wonks,” these public servants and their minions are burdened with the enormous responsibility of translating the nation’s collective knowledge and wisdom into practical, political, and economic action.

We at Science Progress have grown increasingly inspired, though, by the range of smart ideas outside those conventional circles and by the public hunger to become more a part of the process of bringing the art of science to good governance. With Science Next we take the conversation to a new level, and invite you to be part of it. After all, “wonk” spelled backwards is “know.” And it is knowledge—including public knowledge and understanding of science as an engine of progress—that will reveal solutions to today’s most pressing problems, including climate change, energy independence, and national security.

The phrase “science progress” is, arguably, a bit awkward. Some would say it is redundant; others, less sanguine about where science is going, might call it contentious. But we who have been cultivating the pages of Science Progress find the construction provocative in the best sense of the word. It reminds us that we are the inheritors of the Enlightenment’s confidence in the possibility of improving the human condition—a possibility predicated on values of individual freedom, social equality, and democratic solidarity, and one that values reason as superior to dogma or blindly “received wisdom.” From this standpoint, scientific inquiry is the paradigmatic exercise of Enlightenment values.

You got a problem with that? Well let’s go at it, because one of the things we love about science is that it is nothing if not argumentative. Both as a way of thinking and as a wellspring of novel ideas and products, science is a tumultuous truth-seeking process and even further, we contend, a revolutionary force for human liberation. This understanding of science as progressive does not deny that the power of science may be misused. Nor does it exclude the importance of other sources of inspiration or belittle the need for guidance and even regulation to ensure that the products of our progress are distributed fairly. But it does assert that the core values of science are democratic and antiauthoritarian. And it reflects a philosophical commitment to perpetual change and improvement over certainty and stasis.

The very words “science” and “progress” took on their modern meanings in the nineteenth century, and it should not be surprising that they came of age around the same time. It was an era in which microscopes and telescopes were drilling down and up into nature, while stethoscopes were revealing the body’s mysterious inner space. Systematic investigation involving the careful manipulation of isolated variables was beginning to prove itself superior to mere observation, speeding the shift from mere anecdote to real evidence. The possibilities that could emerge from human insight were beginning to seem endless.

Science as progressive, however, boasts philosophical and political skeins stretching much further back into the American historical experience. Francis Bacon’s utopian New Atlantis is often credited as being the first literary work to express the modern idea of progress in terms of advancing science and technology. It was a vision that was to have a profound effect on later seventeenth-century thinkers, including those who provided the intellectual justification for the American Revolution. For all the founders’ disagreements, they shared the conviction that the new nation’s promise was necessarily bound up with its innovative genius. Even those bitter rivals Jefferson and Hamilton were of one mind as they made their synergistic contributions to America’s identity as a nation dedicated to modernity: Jefferson through the patent statute and Hamilton by laying the foundations for history’s most successful capitalist economy, which together have so rewarded and nourished inventiveness.

It is no coincidence that so many of the concepts at the very heart of how America has come to understand itself—ideas such as the frontier and the West—demand an experimental attitude in grappling with novel challenges. The optimistic “can do” spirit; the approval of bigness, boldness, and adventure; the lure of “the road”—all are associated with this sensibility and are at the heart of our veneration of this country’s great inventors, people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, and Bill Gates. We hold these truths of perseverance and perspicacity to be, if not self-evident, at least within our grasp.

Even as America’s western frontier has vanished, the pioneer spirit and the virtues and values associated with it have maintained their powerful hold over the American psyche. Inspired by that vision, Americans have repeatedly heeded the call to cross new and ever more challenging frontiers—including those well beyond the comforts of our cozy planet. Indeed, few government initiatives have been so wildly successful in capturing the public imagination as the space program of the 1960s, which explicitly drew upon the American frontier spirit. “[W]e stand today on the edge of a New Frontier,” John F. Kennedy exhorted in 1960 as he clinched the Democratic nomination for president. “Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”

Generations of Americans have come to characterize the United States itself as an experiment, a romantic and visionary theme compatible in orientation with pragmatist philosophers and early progressives. In this view, the only sure path to social and scientific advancement is as an iterative process of hypothesis, systematic experimentation, and data-gathering, followed by reform in light of experience. That the human condition can and should be improved by any means necessary—whether through government or private enterprise or some combination of the two, but with government as the ultimate guarantor of the public interest—has come to be the essence of progressivism, ever grounding those alleged improvements in the best possible evidence.

America’s emergence as a nation of perpetual progress is all the more impressive given that this historical theme is not an inherent element of Western culture. The Greeks tended to think of their own time either as inferior to the mythical Golden Age or as part of a cycle of advance and decline. Imperial Romans saw themselves as in stasis since the establishment of the empire. Medieval Roman Catholic thinkers largely gave up on worldly progress in favor of spiritual improvement while awaiting Armageddon.

And perhaps reflecting these cautious and frankly depressing roots, the conjunction of science and progress in the modern era has not always been welcomed as an unalloyed good. Just as the words’ modern meanings were coming into consciousness there were also the first signs of alarm, in a tradition that began famously with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and continues to exert a powerful hold on popular culture today. Taken to an extreme, this view holds that far from being a guarantor of progress (a promise that even progressives could not reasonably make), the potentially inhumane and even dehumanizing drift of science threatens the furtherance of progress itself.

One common criticism of progressive science policy is that it naively adopts an instrumental view of science without reflection on the goals of innovation. At Science Progress, we appreciate that progressives have too often appeared to worship at the altar of change, and we reject the notion that a philosophy of innovation must be dumb to moral values. As you will see, Science Next considers ends as well as means, moral values as well as instrumentalities, as it explores the places where new ways of thinking can inform good governance.

Similarly, at the risk of invoking a hackneyed reference to spirituality, we also believe that science occupies an exalted dimension, that the growth of reliable knowledge is in effect an expansion of consciousness. Science may not be the only path to a greater grasp of reality, but it makes a unique contribution to enhanced understanding of the cosmos and our place within it. To be sure, science is a social enterprise, conducted in the service of the metaorganism—We the People—that is funding the work, and it bears a profound responsibility to respect its roots. But to distort the process of inquiry through the imposition of political or religious filters amounts to a narrowing of vision, a corruption of imagination, and a threat to our freedom as beings endowed with intellect.

One need not hark back to Copernicus or Galileo to see how such distortions can affect the arc of progressive science. It seems to many Americans that in recent years the respect for evidence and the spirit of open inquiry has been undermined and even sabotaged for the sake of short-term political advantage. The complex machinations of the American electoral system have recently placed the United States under new management, and there is reason to hope that science may once again find a more respected place at the policymaking table. It should be obvious to all that it is in the nation’s long-term interest to have the best evidence available—evidence that in many cases only science can provide—to foster commercial innovation, economic growth, energy efficiency and environmental stewardship, educational advancement, military defense, and the best possible array of intelligence options.

In the twenty-first century, more than ever, it is no exaggeration to assert that only free and rigorous inquiry, and not authoritarian dicta, can provide the reliable information required for our physical survival. Open inquiry is also the best ticket to developing the tools that will allow us to fulfill our moral obligations to others in need, and to the planet itself. Perhaps most important, progress in science is essential for a continued sense of our national purpose as participants in a historic experiment in freedom and self-governance, as one people joined by a common future rather than a common past, a future we cherish not only for ourselves but for the sake of the generations of Americans to come.

Now we invite you to dip into Science Next, where our future may be written.

—Jonathan D. Moreno and Rick Weiss

But I’ll dive back in for Governor Bobby Jindal, the creationism-promoting conservative rising star who governs my home state of Louisiana. It’s now notorious that Jindal—who, in light of his post, ought to be extremely attuned to the importance of tracking natural disasters—decided to mock volcano preparedness funding in his rebuttal to President Obama’s speech before Congress last week. As Jindal put it, the recently passed stimulus bill contained “$140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.” Just substitute the word “hurricane” for “volcano” here, reread the statement, and be prepared to gasp at Jindal’s striking insensitivity. Indeed, he didn’t even get the facts right: the $140 million appropriation was for “U.S. Geological Survey facilities and equipment, including stream gages, seismic and volcano monitoring systems and national map activities”—and thus not entirely for volcano monitoring.

Conservatives have been targeting the U.S. Geological Survey for a while—the Gingrich Revolutionaries even tried to do away with it entirely when they swept into Congress in the mid 1990s. This despite the agency’s obvious importance and effectiveness, which it has demonstrated in many instances, such as during the 2004 tsunami catastrophe. The attacks are themselves part of a broader tradition in American politics that is not itself partisan: The mockery of specific scientific appropriations, which are made to look silly even though, in most cases, it’s actually serious research geared toward a public purpose. Call it the “sex lives of marmots” line of argument, as a Washington science policy hand once memorably put it to me.

The greatest modern institutionalization of attacks on specific scientific appropriations came from the Wisconsin Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who initiated the “Golden Fleece Awards.” The idea was to ridicule government projects that wasted public monies, and often these were science-related projects. In the 1980s, the great Carl Sagan even had to go in and meet personally with Proxmire to get him to back off from attacks on NASA’s SETI program. Thankfully, Proxmire listened.

But if Proxmire touched off the Golden Fleece tradition, lately conservatives seem to have been spouting the corresponding rhetoric. We all remember how John McCain and Sarah Palin mocked important scientific research on grizzly bears and fruit flies during 2008 election. In each case—as with Jindal—experts patiently explained that this research serves a purpose and is eminently defensible, or even innovative. But it seems those who lampoon individual scientific research grants rarely bother to find out what they’re actually criticizing. It’s a point and blast—or point and laugh—technique that reeks of deep anti-intellectualism.

We should concede, however, that this impulse does at least have the glimmer of a serious argument behind it. We can’t fund all scientific research; we do have to make hard choices among competing priorities; and there should indeed be a strong relationship between the research we fund with public dollars and what we hope to get out of it.

The tricky thing about most basic research, though, is that you don’t always know what you’ll get out of it when you release the funds. Such research often opens up new and surprising avenues that themselves then spin off important innovative technologies that no one could have predicted. (In Jindal’s case, he wasn’t even attacking basic research, but rather, research of obvious disaster safety import. Not even my caveats can help him.)

In an ideal world, then, specific scientific appropriations would hardly be above criticism—but you would also have to make a cogent argument for why they’re not the best use of our investments. You wouldn’t just mock that which you don’t understand.

At the same time, though, it would also behoove scientists and their supporters to bear in mind that it really isn’t obvious to many people how basic research, applied research, and technology differ. Just consider the stem cell case: Advocates talked about the “search for cures” in a battle over funding for basic research. In California in 2004, “cures” mobilized many supporters of Prop 71, which provided billions of dollars in state funding.

So while the Jindals of the world are certainly debasing our discourse with wanton attacks on science, we also have some ‘splaining to do. Not because it will make conservatives cease the attacks, but because it will help others to tune them out.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Yet Obama’s use of a single word toward the end of his address was riveting. The word is “curiosity.” Obama had not used the word before in a major speech, yet here it was in his inaugural, teamed up with iconic words of Presidential inaugural addresses: “Our challenges may be new,” Obama said. “The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends—hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history” (emphasis added).

The word curiosity had been used only once before in a Presidential Inaugural Address—by William Henry Harrison in March 1841. Harrison referred to “the gratification of the curiosity of speculative statesmen,” what we would call today “idle curiosity.” The other values that Obama cites as “upon which our success depends” were used repeatedly by his predecessors: “hard work” or a variation (8 times), honesty (6 times), courage (10 times), “fair play” or a variation (4 times), tolerance (5 times), loyalty (4 times), and patriotism (21 times). These old and true values, President Obama said, are the quiet force of “progress,” a word used 33 times by presidents beginning with James Madison in his first inaugural address when he noted “the progress of manufacturers and useful arts” in the young republic.

So why did Obama include “curiosity” in his listing of “old-fashioned values” essential for progress? Did he plug it into the list because he understands the importance of scientific curiosity, of open inquiry into the how the natural world works? Much has been made of his intent, as he put it in his speech, to “restore science to its rightful place.” The word “science” appears in 15 inaugural addresses preceding Obama’s, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s second inaugural address. The last president to use the word was Richard Nixon who noted the nation’s “enormous strides in science and industry and agriculture” in 1969.

Clearly Obama understands that progress depends on ideas as well as virtues. Ideas are generated and translated into useful objects and processes through the process of innovation. To the extent innovation occurs, it is in part because curiosity is granted free rein. In his first weekly address as president, Obama called for tripling the number of science fellowships “to help spur the next generation of innovation.” Science, innovation, and curiosity are inextricably bound.

In a recent book entitled The Stem Cell Dilemma, my coauthor and I describe how Leonardo da Vinci, when a young man wandering among the Tuscan hills after a fierce storm, came upon the mouth of a dark cave. As he stood in front of it, he was seized by the question of what to do—to explore or to retreat. “I had been there for some time, when there suddenly arose in me two things, fear and desire—fear of that threatening dark cave; desire to see if there was some marvelous thing within.” As we wrote, in all of history up to that time “fear tended to overcome curiosity about what was inside the cave, what lay beyond the darkness” (emphasis added).

Da Vinci, the man who British art historian Sir Kenneth Clark called “the most relentlessly curious man in history,” entered the cave, symbolically making a clean break from the medieval order, “from a world influenced by things unseen to a world influenced by things seen and understood through careful observation.” Soon he would turn his attention to explorations of the human body, revealing through his anatomical drawings things revealed for the first time despite the social and religious taboos surrounding human dissection.

Ever since, scientific curiosity has been part and parcel of our understanding of progress, especially economic progress. And economic progress, with its corollary of a rising standard of living, has moral consequences, as Harvard political economist Benjamin M. Friedman argues in his book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. With economic growth comes “greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy.” With economic stagnation comes hardened attitudes toward openness and mobility, the desire to retreat into the past, and the search for scapegoats.

It is surely unfair to compare da Vinci with his polar opposite on the “curiosity” spectrum, former President George W. Bush. But if we are to understand why Obama’s interest in science, discovery, and innovation resonates with so many people, it is in part because he succeeds arguably the most incurious of all American presidents. At the very outset of Bush’s presidency in 2001, Princeton University political scientist Fred Greenstein observed: “As his lackluster academic record indicates, he lacks intellectual curiosity and is impatient with the play of ideas.”

By the end of his first term Bush was being dubbed “Incurious George,” single-handedly resurrecting the words “incurious” and “incuriosity” from the lexicographical grave and sending them to the top of an index that monitors words and phrases that appear in the news media. One wonders how Bush’s legacy might fare if he had been, say, even mildly curious about possible sectarian difficulties following the invasion of Iraq, the capability of the federal government to respond to a natural disaster of unexpected size, the strength of critical joints and ties propping up the nation’s financial infrastructure, or the possible consequences to innovation and global competitiveness of quarantining some fields of scientific endeavor. We will never know.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that Obama’s use of “tolerance and curiosity” is apt in the context of progress because these values are “notoriously associated with the adventurous, with those who seek out the new and the novel.” With his emphasis on progress, Obama clearly broke with the recent conservative past going back to Ronald Reagan, in Dionne’s view.

I don’t think of curiosity as an old-fashioned value but rather as a time-honored mental trait, a desire to know something more than what is readily apparent. In the realm of science and technology, the free play of curiosity may shed new light on something poorly understood with the possibility of changing things forever. That’s what happened to Isaac Newton as he was examining a glass prism in 1666: “Comparing the length of this coloured Spectrum with its breadth, I found it about five times greater; a disproportion so extravagant, that it excited me to a more then ordinary curiosity of examining, from whence it might proceed” (emphasis added).

I have no proof, but I wonder if Obama quite intentionally debuted “curiosity” in his list of old-fashioned values responsible for progress because we are going to need a lot more of it in the years to come to move beyond our economic and political impasses—as Newton might have put it, to see the light. Honesty, hard work, courage, fair play, tolerance, loyalty and patriotism—these old and true virtues will be necessary to do the heavy lifting, of course. But we have to be able to explore our own mental terrain and feel free to ask questions based on what we find.

Unlike his predecessor, Obama cannot be accused of lacking intellectual curiosity. And unless early signs are completely misleading, ideas will get greater play in this White House than at any time since the John F. Kennedy observed that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”

William Hoffman is founder of the Minnesota Biomedical & Bioscience Network (MBBNet.umn.edu) and coauthor of The Stem Cell Dilemma: Beacons of Hope or Harbingers of Doom? (Arcade Publishing, 2008).

Luckily for me, I didn’t.

Colbert’s segment was entitled “Obama’s New Science Policy.” For as he pointed out, our new president now acknowledges that science “exists.” Obama will restore science to its “rightful place,” Colbert observed—which, under Bush, had been solely for the purpose of outfitting Dick Cheney with new parts.

To get ready for this segment, I emailed friends and people I knew who had already been on the show, asking them what kinds of questions Colbert’s faux right-winger would be likely to ask the author of The Republican War on Science. Easily the most memorable response came from science journalist Eric Roston, who suggested: “Why do hurricanes hate America?”

So lest they go completely unused, here are a few of my painstakingly prepared replies to hypothetical questions, none of which he asked, none of which I answered:

Didn’t scientists start the “war” in the first place? Didn’t they commit acts of aggression?

Yes, if you mean by learning things.

Why should I care about science?

Because America is really good at it—much better than France.

Is there really a “war” on science? Where are the bodies?

Well, there haven’t been heads spitted on pikes—but there has been the equivalent of torture. Scientific studies have been confined in dark places for long periods of time. And they’ve been put on the rack and twisted until they can be made to say anything. (This last one I ripped off from Tom Toles.)

And so on. In retrospect, it’s probably good that I didn’t get to use my “wit” in this way. The whole point of “The Colbert Report” is that the host is funny, not you. If you’re trying to be funny, you’re very likely to be annoying, or worse.

So rather than eliciting any further groans, allow me to try something I’m somewhat more competent in than humor: Remarking upon Stephen Colbert’s role in the mass communication of science today. As Dan Vergano, USA Today‘s science correspondent, wrote recently on my blog:

A think piece is out there on how much science Colbert does (from Tiktaalik to astronomy.) He is the modern-day heir to Johnny Carson, who used to bring anthropologists and Paul Ehrlich onto his show.

Here it goes, Dan.

It’s absolutely true that as host of a show that regularly draws over a million viewers, Colbert features an astonishing amount of science content. Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson is a frequent guest, as is Columbia University string theorist Brian Greene. Other scientists who have appeared include Brown University’s Kenneth Miller, Oxford’s Richard Dawkins (making the non-scientific case for atheism), human genome project head Francis Collins, and numerous others.

And in addition to its many scientist guests, the show has also featured numerous science-related segments, such as “America’s Galaxy is Big” and several concerning the Pluto-demotion saga. In each case—always in the context of Colbert’s role-playing—the show conveys a large amount of scientific information, raises very important questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, and explores and its relationship to others areas like politics. And the viewers—or at least those viewers who get the jokes—come away with good reasons for trusting in science, rather than in “truthiness.”

In other words, you might say that George W. Bush’s anti-intellectual administration created a perfect opening for Stephen Colbert’s hugely popular caricature of anti-intellectualism; and this in turn transformed Colbert into possibly our most important defender and explainer of scientific knowledge. (Again, if you get the jokes.)

That might sound surprising at first, but as Dan Vergano noted above, television talk show hosts have often played an important role in bringing science to the public. Johnny Carson helped make a star of Carl Sagan. Recently David Letterman featured President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, in a kind of educational/public service segment about climate change.

Nowadays Colbert is doing as much mass science communication as anyone, but the question then becomes: How do you keep the joke going in the wake of Obama’s restoration of the so-called “reality-based community”? Our new president isn’t going to be nearly so easy to make fun of—not for trusting to his gut over his head, anyway. Ironically, the restoration of science in Washington might make the communication of science through comedy a more difficult endeavor. Reality is resurgent now, and truthiness is tumbling. This is the challenge of our times—for comedians, anyway.

Still, I would never underestimate Stephen Colbert’s ability to find humor in any situation. Who else would say, in a discussion of the difference between basic research and technology, “Are you telling me there are stem cells in my iPhone?”

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Mooney points out that science and scientists make regular appearances on popular Comedy Central shows, and that’s a good thing.

You’re going to be hearing a lot about these milestones over the next twelve months, as the science community gears up for an annum of anniversaries that will—hopefully—help engage our broader culture in the scientific process. Or at least, that’s the stated goal of the COPUS network—it stands for “Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science”—which has organized the “Year of Science 2009” initiative to connect science-related events across the country and raise awareness about the nature of science and its importance to policy and our future.

And it’s not just big anniversaries: We can expect science-related issues to come up repeatedly in Washington and in the media as the new administration starts governing. How will president-elect Obama resolve the stem cell and climate issues—solely through administrative and executive action, or by championing new legislation? Expect an answer this year. Meanwhile, the administration has a science budget to propose in short order, and will be investing heavily in clean energy to fire the economy and create jobs. Such initiatives start this month with the push towards an economic stimulus bill.

When you combine a new science-friendly administration in Washington with all these historic milestones, there’s no doubt it adds up to a unique opportunity to get the broader American public better connected with the world of science that lies right under their noses, but which many citizens seldom perceive. Still, it’s worth asking a few questions about what we hope to achieve by capitalizing on these convergences.

Take, for example, the string of anniversaries: All celebrate momentous scientific achievements, but each also has, as a subtext, conflicts between science and religion. Galileo, we all know, was persecuted by the church; and Darwin’s theory is the reason Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins, the world’s leading anti-religionist, claims he can now be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Does science or the American public benefit if these anniversaries become a new cause for debating the alleged rift between faith and reason—or are we just inviting another round of culture war skirmishes?

While there are reasons to fear an uptick in divisiveness this year—as some of the science world’s more confrontational types try to use the Darwin anniversaries as a reason to assault the public’s religiosity—there’s zero chance the administration itself will get involved in such politically futile and damaging advocacy. Obama’s science team isn’t a bunch of culture warriors; they’re deadly serious about tackling what is arguably the biggest issue we face, our intertwined climate and energy problem. And you don’t waste time needling people of faith if you want to solve such an intricate and massive challenge. In fact, over the past two decades, faith communities have joined the green movement in force, working to protect the environment and avert the worst threats of climate change. This is a new opportunity for those groups to collaborate with other freshly energized efforts.

Still, we’re left with a potentially large gap between the role of science in policy and politics this year, and the level on which the coming science anniversaries could be discussed. One dialogue moves us forward toward solutions; the other holds us back. It’s totally Bush era to argue endlessly over how science clashes with religion; and it’s absolutely critical to use science to get us out of the energy and climate mess we’re in.

There’s no avoiding the fact that as we discuss the great achievements of Darwin and Galileo—and how far we have and haven’t come since their times—we’ll awaken some dragons that still slumber among us. I would hardly propose toning down our science celebrations for this reason, but I would suggest adding to them, leavening them by adding a new dimension.

You see, there’s another science anniversary coming this year that I believe deserves considerably more recognition. On May 7, 1959, a British scientist and novelist named C.P. Snow delivered a now-famous lecture entitled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Snow wasn’t nearly as important a researcher as Darwin or Galileo—in fact, his early scientific career involved a publishing-related scandal that may have helped push him on to literature—but his delineation of the broad disconnect between the scientific and humanistic ways of thinking has resonated powerfully across the last half century, and describes a problem that’s very much still with us.

The COPUS “Year of Science” advocates want to communicate about science—they want to bring science to the rest of America, seizing upon this year’s auspicious timing to do it. It’s a noble goal, but Darwin and Galileo alone don’t necessarily get you there. You need a lot of Obama—and more than a little bit of Snow—as well.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified Galileo as the original inventor of the telescope.