Political philosophy has a legitimate role in policy debates, but not in the underlying climate science. There are no Democratic or Republican carbon dioxide molecules; they are all invisible and they all trap heat.

On June 13 a larger group of Australian scientists one-upped that American letter by publishing their own open letter with even more uncharacteristically blunt statements of scientific fact. Besides direct calls for media accountability, the Australians are taking their letter one step further by following it up with a two-week series of statements titled “Clearing up the Climate Debate.” Each statement in the series explains a basic science concept that the media gets wrong again and again, such as: why we know the greenhouse effect is real, why we know humans are contributing to it, and the difference between peer review and rhetoric.

Below is the text of the initial letter (emphasis is ours). At the bottom you can find a list of all of the signatories and links to each of the daily statements. Now to be fair, not everyone on the list is a “climate scientist.” In July 2010 a group of 31,000 purported climate scientists was slammed for inflating its numbers with nonscientists in a similar short petition stating that there is “no convincing scientific evidence” for anthropogenic climate change.

But here’s the difference. That petition had only 39 actual climate scientists among its 31,000 signatories, and scarcely more than a quarter of the total had doctorates in any field at all. The signatories of the Australian letter by contrast at least seem to all hold professorships, and have published in the peer-reviewed literature. Some of them can even be found in the interactive climate science literature graphic we featured last week. And let’s also not forget that while a National Academies study found that 97 percent of climate experts agree that climate change is “very likely” caused by human activity, in the end science is–thankfully–not decided by majority vote.

Here’s the Australian letter from June 13:

The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes.

Climate change is real, we are causing it, and it is happening right now.

Like it or not, humanity is facing a problem that is unparalleled in its scale and complexity. The magnitude of the problem was given a chilling focus in the most recent report of the International Energy Agency, which their chief economist characterised as the “worst news on emissions.”

Limiting global warming to 2°C is now beginning to look like a nearly insurmountable challenge.

Like all great challenges, climate change has brought out the best and the worst in people.

A vast number of scientists, engineers, and visionary businessmen are boldly designing a future that is based on low-impact energy pathways and living within safe planetary boundaries; a future in which substantial health gains can be achieved by eliminating fossil-fuel pollution; and a future in which we strive to hand over a liveable planet to posterity.

At the other extreme, understandable economic insecurity and fear of radical change have been exploited by ideologues and vested interests to whip up ill-informed, populist rage, and climate scientists have become the punching bag of shock jocks and tabloid scribes.

Aided by a pervasive media culture that often considers peer-reviewed scientific evidence to be in need of “balance” by internet bloggers, this has enabled so-called “sceptics” to find a captive audience while largely escaping scrutiny.

Australians have been exposed to a phony public debate which is not remotely reflected in the scientific literature and community of experts.

Beginning today, The Conversation will bring much-needed and long-overdue accountability to the climate “sceptics.”

For the next two weeks, our series of daily analyses will show how they can side-step the scientific literature and how they subvert normal peer review. They invariably ignore clear refutations of their arguments and continue to promote demonstrably false critiques.

We will show that “sceptics” often show little regard for truth and the critical procedures of the ethical conduct of science on which real skepticism is based.

The individuals who deny the balance of scientific evidence on climate change will impose a heavy future burden on Australians if their unsupported opinions are given undue credence.

The signatories below jointly authored this article, and some may also contribute to the forthcoming series of analyses.

Signatories

Winthrop Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Australian Professorial Fellow, UWA

Dr. Matthew Hipsey, Research Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Environment, Centre of Excellence for Ecohydrology, UWA

Dr Julie Trotter, Research Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Environment, UWA Oceans Institute, UWA

Winthrop Professor Malcolm McCulloch, F.R.S., Premier’s Research Fellow, UWA Oceans Institute, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Professor Kevin Judd, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA

Dr Thomas Stemler, Assistant Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA

Dr. Karl-Heinz Wyrwoll, Senior Lecturer, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Dr. Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleoclimate scientist, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Research School of Earth Science, Planetary Science Institute, ANU

Prof Michael Ashley, School of Physics, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof David Karoly, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Prof John Abraham, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, University of St. Thomas

Prof Ian Enting, ARC Centre for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems, University of Melbourne

Prof John Wiseman, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne

Associate Professor Ben Newell, School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Matthew England, co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr Alex Sen Gupta Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof. Mike Archer AM, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Steven Sherwood, co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr. Katrin Meissner, ARC Future Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr Jason Evans, ARC Australian Research Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Global Change Institute, UQ

Dr Andy Hogg, Fellow, Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU

Prof John Quiggin, School of Economics, School of Political Science & Intnl Studies, UQ

Prof Chris Turney FRSA FGS FRGS, Climate Change Research Centre and School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW

Dr Gab Abramowitz, Lecturer, Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Andy Pitman, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, University of Adelaide

Prof Mike Sandiford, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Dr Michael Box, Associate Professor, School of Physics, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling, The Environment Institute, The University of Adelaide

Dr Paul Dargusch, School of Agriculture & Food Science, UQ

Prof Nigel Tapper, Professor Environmental Science, School of Geography and Environmental Science Monash University

Prof Jason Beringer, Associate Professor & Deputy Dean of Research, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

Prof Neville Nicholls, Professorial Fellow, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

Prof Dave Griggs, Director, Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University

Prof Peter Sly, Medicine Faculty, School of Paediatrics & Child Health, UQ

Dr Pauline Grierson, Senior Lecturer, School of Plant Biology, Ecosystems Research Group, Director of West Australian Biogeochemistry Centre, UWA

Prof Jurg Keller, IWA Fellow, Advanced Water Management Centre, UQ

Prof Amanda Lynch, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

A/Prof Steve Siems, School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University

Prof Justin Brookes, Director, Water Research Centre, The University of Adelaide

Prof Glenn Albrecht, Professor of Sustainability, Director: Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy (ISTP), Murdoch University

Winthrop Professor Steven Smith, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, UWA

Dr Kerrie Unsworth, School of Business, UWA

Dr Pieter Poot, Assistant Professor in Plant Conservation Biology, School of Plant Biology, UWA

Adam McHugh, Lecturer, School of Engineering and Energy, Murdoch University

Dr Louise Bruce, Research Associate, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Are you a scientist? Do you agree? If you’d like to add your name to the list, send an email to megan.clement@theconversation.edu.au

This is the first part of our series Clearing up the Climate Debate. To read the other instalments, follow the links below:

• Part Two: The greenhouse effect is real: here’s why.
• Part Three: Speaking science to climate policy.
• Part Four: Our effect on the earth is real: how we’re geo-engineering the planet
• Part Five: Who’s your expert? The difference between peer review and rhetoric
• Part Six: Climate change denial and the abuse of peer review
• Part Seven: When scientists take to the streets it’s time to listen up on climate change
• Part Eight: Australia’s contribution matters: why we can’t ignore our climate responsibilities

This article is adapted from a Climate Progress post by Joe Romm.

This coalition, promoting disinformation while claiming to be dedicated to science, is nothing new. In fact, today’s climate deniers are using the same playbook used by supporters of Ronald Reagan’s failed “Star Wars” program in the 1980s, and by the tobacco industry to avoid regulation of secondhand smoke in the 1990s. Indeed, science denial, free-market fundamentalists, and big industries have a long and sorry past together.

Let’s start with secondhand smoke. In the 1950s, scientific evidence demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the tars in tobacco smoke caused cancer. The tobacco industry responded by trying to get science on its side, pumping money into scientific and medical research that might show that tobacco was all right after all. It didn’t work. Despite decades of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the industry was losing the public relations battle, and, more important, customers. By the 1980s, smoking rates had decreased dramatically.

In the early 1990s, things got even worse for the industry, as science showed that secondhand smoke was deadly, too. Philip Morris executives decided then that science itself was their enemy. In 1993 they created an organization called The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, or TASSC, and a website, junkscience.com, which claimed that the science surrounding secondhand smoke was “junk.”

Soon, TASSC was making that claim about the science related to the ozone hole and global warming as well, and Philip Morris was recruiting third parties—mostly libertarian think tanks and antitax groups, such as the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, and National Empowerment Television, a conservative TV network—to join the effort.

It is perhaps not surprising that the tobacco industry found antigovernment groups willing to make common cause. But it is a bit more surprising that they found reputable scientists—indeed, some exceptionally distinguished ones—willing to help them. As we document in our new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming—the tobacco industry and libertarian think tanks knew that to make their claims seem credible, they would need scientists to make them.

In the 1950s, the Tobacco Industry had recruited C.C. Little, a prominent geneticist (and one-time eugenicist) to direct a “research program” to challenge the mainstream scientific position that tobacco was deadly.

In the 1970s, after Little retired, R.J. Reynolds created its own Biomedical Research Program, and recruited former National Academy of Science president Frederick Seitz. From 1979 to 1985, Seitz (by this time retired from the presidency of Rockefeller University) ran a research program for Reynolds that served to generate results and experts that could be deployed to defend smoking.

How did Seitz segue from defending tobacco to attacking these other lines of scientific inquiry? Well, in 1984, Seitz had joined forces with Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and William Nierenberg, retiring director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, to create the George C. Marshall Institute. The goal of the new organization was to defend President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (also known as “Star Wars”) from attack by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and in particular by the equally prominent physicists Hans Bethe, Richard Garwin, and astronomer Carl Sagan.

Between 1984 and 1989, the Marshall Institute focused on defeating communism by emphasizing the Soviet threat and the defensive possibilities of Star Wars. In hindsight it is clear that they greatly exaggerated both. One 1987 piece by Jastrow thundered that “America had five years left” before the Soviet Union became so superior it would achieve world domination without firing a shot. The collapse of the Eastern Block only two years later proved them wrong, yet the Marshall Institute didn’t go out of business for its inaccurate advocacy.

Instead, they found a new enemy to fight, an internal enemy they perceived as the next great threat to liberty—environmentalism and the science that supported it.

During the 1988 election, candidate George H. W. Bush had promised to address climate change—pledging to meet the “greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” But soon after Bush took office, Nierenberg presented a briefing to the White House staff that claimed global warming was caused by the sun, not greenhouse gases, and that as solar irradiance declined during the 1990s, the Earth would begin to cool.

Despite a complete lack of evidence that the sun actually had increased in brightness during the previous few decades, Nierenberg’s briefing was taken seriously. One White House staffer commented on the written report that accompanied it, “Everyone has read it.” And it strengthened a faction within the White House, led by Chief of Staff John Sununu, which opposed environmental regulation.

Alan Bromley, appointed a few months later as the president’s science advisor, realized how the White House staff had been misled. After some effort, he managed to restart discussion of the pros and cons of carbon taxes and cap and trade systems within the White House. In 1992 President Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change despite continued opposition inside his own administration. But the Framework Convention was only a promise of intent—it set no binding limits on greenhouse gases. That was supposed to be done later, in what became the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in the mid-1990s. By then, the Marshall Institute had forged links to the American Petroleum Institute and to Republican leaders who now controlled Congress.

Meanwhile, Seitz and Nierenberg had joined forces with another Cold War physicist, S. Fred Singer, one of the original rocket scientists of the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1990, Singer had established the “Science and Environmental Policy Project” in office space shared with the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, a think tank financed by the strongly anticommunist Unification Church. In editorials published by the Washington Times (owned by the Unification Church) and in many other venues, Singer now took on the issue of the ozone hole, insisting that the problem was being exaggerated, and that there was no scientific consensus on the issue, and it would be premature to regulate chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC’s.

Of course, in retrospect scientists from around the world decisively and conclusively determined CFC’s to be a major threat the ozone layer, which is the planet’s natural line of defense against cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. Thankfully, world leaders listened to the urgency of the actual science, and in 1987 signed the Montreal Protocol, which set a declining cap on ozone-depleting pollution. Kofi Annan hailed the treaty as “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date,” and thanks to swift political action, scientists believe the ozone layer will recover fully by 2050.

Undeterred by overwhelming scientific evidence, Singer also defended tobacco. In the mid 1990s, finding all avenues for legitimate scientific debate about the effects of second-hand smoke exhausted, he turned to   attacking the Environmental Protection Agency’s review process. His work was extensively cited in a handbook of antiscience circulated by the industry in 1993: Bad Science: A Resource Book. The two-hundred page collection of opinion pieces and quotations was designed to make mainstream science appear corrupt and unreliable. But legitimate scientific debate occurs in the pages of academic journals, not in op-eds or in industry-circulated handbooks.

Then, in 1996, Singer joined Seitz and Nierenberg in attacking a young scientist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Benjamin Santer, over his leadership of one chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment Report.  In the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, they attacked Santer, and claimed that he had altered the report to fit U.S. climate policy (as if there even was one!). The attack on Santer in op-eds and other non-science fora presaged last year’s assault on climate science, the theft of email from the University of East Anglia, and subsequent media feeding frenzy.

The attack also presaged Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe’s recent threat to indict climate scientists, and the witch-hunt by Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli focused on climate scientist Michael Mann, who had previously taught at the University of Virginia, and who has been exonerated by four separate panels. All these events are consistent with a longer history of attempts to undermine science and scientists to prevent government regulation of harmful industrial products and activities.

The New York Times recently declared the East Anglia affair a “manufactured controversy,” but this is just the most recent in a pattern of manufactured controversies spanning decades, a product of the ideology that George Soros has called “free market fundamentalism.” It is an ideology that rejects the idea that government regulation is ever appropriate.

Over the past half century, science has demonstrated that many industrial activities and consumer products are damaging to the natural environment and to human health: tobacco, DDT, acid rain, ozone depletion, and the burning of fossil fuels. These activities have unintended consequences that the marketplace did not anticipate, and did not succeed in preventing. Because these unintended consequences are “market failures,” it is reasonable to conclude that something needs to be done, something that creates a “price” for bad behavior that markets can recognize.

That something could be a carbon tax, or it could be a cap and trade system, or it could be some other form of regulation or prevention. Yet some people have continued to insist—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that all problems can and should be solved in the marketplace and no government action is needed. Because science suggests that government action is needed to protect the common good, free market fundamentalists have come to see science itself as their enemy.

The efforts of these free market ideologues to undermine legitimate scientific debate in the popular media helps to explain why, 18 years after President Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention, people are still confused about the science of climate change. It also helps explain why the federal government has taken no action to reduce emissions while nearly every other major economy puts together climate action plans. Meanwhile, the ice caps continue to melt, the permafrost thaws, and weather events become more extreme.

Ironically, worsening climate change and the increasing risk that we are approaching irreversible tipping points make it more likely that the heavy-handed government intervention that conservatives dread will actually be required. The longer we wait, the harder the problem of climate change will become to solve—and the more likely it is that climate change will become not just inconvenient, but very destructive, and perhaps catastrophic.

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of history of science and provost of Sixth College at UC San Diego. Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology, living in Pasadena, California.

However, the occasion provides an opportunity to reflect on many, many columns, and on several years of writing about American science as it intersects with our political world and our culture.

The topics I have covered here were diverse. After all, I wrote regularly about the science of hurricanes, about global warming, about the intersections between politics and science, and about science in the media, among many other topics. But the columns also shared many common themes. For I was exploring again and again, albeit in different ways, the problem of why science often just doesn’t get through to the people who need it most in other parts of our society—the politicians, say, or the journalists.

I am confident this emphasis was not wasted. The translation of science into other spheres is a critical problem today, not only because a new generation of science policy controversies will soon be coming down the pike, but also because we live in a time of media upheaval, when (as I have noted in many columns) science journalists are vanishing from the traditional press, and it’s not clear who is going to be there to take their place. It may well be that in the future, the translators of scientific knowledge will have to be the scientists themselves, if only because we may not be able to rely on the journalists any longer.

Looking back, I also see a clear progression to the many columns I wrote— one necessarily dictated by the much larger events that surrounded us all.

We went, during these years, from an administration that had stomped science into the ground, to an administration that consciously pledged to right that wrong. As this occurred, I inevitably focused less and less on anti-science abuses and wrongdoing by the outgoing Bushies, and more and more on the kinds of problems the Obama team couldn’t necessarily fix, despite their renewed emphasis on science. These were, largely, the problems of science in the culture, and in the society. They were the sort of problems that would remain with us long after the Bush administration departed from the White House and Washington.

It’s also notable that I wrote the column during a time of major anniversaries and occasions for reflection on where we now stand with respect to science in America. In October of 2007 came the 50-year anniversary of Sputnik. In July of 2009 came the 40-year anniversary of our landing on the moon. Also in 2009 came the 200-year anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 50-year anniversary of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture.

Such events provided repeated occasions in the column to ponder where we now find ourselves. Essentially, for 50 years in the United States—post Sputnik—magnificent scientific research has been performed. There have been incredible innovations we are all proud of: landing on the moon, decoding the genome, creating the Internet, and more. And we deserve that pride: We made a conscious decision, decades ago, to create a scientific establishment that would reward us in this way. It wasn’t done on the cheap; it wasn’t by accident. Rather, it was one of the soundest investments that our parents could possibly have made.

And yet it is apparent, looking back over those years, that there are also some things we are not so proud of. After all, much of the public didn’t come along on American science’s incredible odyssey of discovery. And our scientists didn’t learn nearly as much about reaching the public as they did about how to understand nature—and how to use such understanding to create technologies that benefit us.

If there has been a central theme to this column, it is that it is long past time for this imbalance—between research and outreach, between the creation of knowledge and its sharing—to finally be redressed.

Even without license to write regularly for the next year, I plan to keep thinking about how we can do that—and I want to thank all of you for following my work on this subject over the past two years.

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

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.

It’s the widespread sense in the scientific community that while research has, for the most part, proceeded apace over the last 40 years, the rest of America has not always followed along.

In my new book Unscientific America, along with co-author Sheril Kirshenbaum, I make the case that we really have lost something important since the days of the Space Race and, more specifically, since the post-Sputnik era, when many dramatic investments in American science and American science education were unleashed. However, it’s important to define precisely what that “something important” is, lest we wind up with just another dirge for a lost “golden age”—a feast of nostaglia rather than a contribution to understanding. So to that end, some considerations:

The American Public Doesn’t Hate Science. Many alarming polling results document  just how disconnected Americans are from the world of science and from the knowledge scientists produce. For instance, the new Pew/AAAS study found that far fewer Americans today than ten years ago consider scientific accomplishments to be among our country’s “most important achievements”: Just 27 percent nowadays, versus 47 percent in May of 1999. That’s a huge falling off. Similarly, fewer Americans today view the space program’s triumphs—epitomized by the moon landing—as our country’s top achievement.

This doesn’t, however, make Americans anti-science; rather, they have many positive feelings about the scientific community. Americans overwhelmingly think science has had a positive impact on society, and have a great deal of trust in the leaders of scientific institutions. In other words, it is possible for the public to be both disengaged from, and yet also positively inclined towards, the scientific world. Science may have been more on the public radar during the post-Sputnik era, but out of mind is not the same thing as out of regard.

We Don’t Want to Warp Back in Time To Before the Environmental and Consumer Awakening. Whatever it is that we may lament about what has happened to our society over the past half century with respect to science, we must not lament the set of very important realizations that helped knock science off of its post World War II pedestal. These include the recognition that science’s fruits can have unseen environmental costs, like the damage caused by the pesticide DDT, or the ozone-depleting effect of chlorofluorocarbons; that moneyed interests can corrupt research; that science is not really as objective as its practitioners sometime claim (thanks, Mr. Kuhn); and so on. Any case for why we need to make science more central to American life today certainly cannot be a case to reject these very important reasons for sometimes viewing science itself with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The 1950s and 1960s May Have Represented an “Artificial High” for Science in American Life. The post-Sputnik era was the height of the Cold War, and the Space Race was driven, in significant part, by what we might call nationalistic fervor. In other words, the 1950s were a unique, and not always entirely admirable, era—this was also the time of McCarthyism, let us not forget.

Moreover, if you look farther back in U.S. history, before World War II for example, you see a country whose scientific community lagged significantly behind the science establishment of Europe.  The post-Sputnik years, and the years of the Space Race, might be seen in this context as an anomaly, a peak with valleys on either side. Perhaps this is not what we can expect to be the norm in America.

These are all important considerations to weigh. Nevertheless, if there’s a bottom line that they do not change, it is simply this: Today as in the post-Sputnik era, our nation’s engagement with science is critical to its future. Science fuels the economy, and it also generates the controversies that will force us to make very hard decisions, both ethical and political, long after the stem cell or global warming debates have finally subsided.

And the more we wake up to this as a people, the better prepared we’ll be for what’s coming—rather than surprised or frightened by it. It’s that simple.

It is this central engagement with science and its place in the future that our society had at mid century—when our political leaders were investing heavily in science and science education, and when citizens absorbed intense media coverage of each new step of the Space Race. That’s the important difference between the way people approached science in the ’50s and early ’60s and they way we approach it now. You can’t seriously argue that today, we are similarly engaged as a people with science—just turn on your television.

That’s what remains worrying, even after all the nuances have been dealt with.

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

On Fox News on Monday, Sean Hannity inaugurated a series looking at Obama’s policy “czars,” describing them as “a select group of unvetted, unconfirmed individuals who are now at the helm of a shadow government right here in the U.S.” His first example was Holdren—a very poor choice, as it happens, as Holdren was indeed confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.  “[Obama has] skirted the Senate confirmation process and has empowered individuals to see major offices now within the federal government, many of whom operate only under the supervision of the White House itself,” bleated Hannity. Who does his research?

Hannity then went on to describe Holdren as a “radical” and intone that he’s anti-American, wants to shut down our economy, and so on. But that’s really nothing compared to the other attacks that have surfaced online of late—and that have now made their way into the right wing Washington Times.

In 1977, more than thirty years ago, Holdren was the third author (with Paul and Anne Ehrlich) of a textbook entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment. It was a gigantic tome, fully 1,051 pages in length. In one vast 66 page chapter devoted to “Population Policies,” the authors surveyed a gamut of measures that had been undertaken or considered to control human population growth—including the most extreme. Those included coercive or “involuntary fertility control” measures, such as forced abortions and sterilizations.

However, to describe these measures is different from advocating them. And in fact, the Ehrlichs and Holdren concluded by arguing that noncoercive measures were what they suppported: “A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences”—such as birth control and access to abortions. In fairness, their text does read as dated today, ripe for quote mining. They were writing in very different times thirty years ago; but even if they were defending these positions then (and they weren’t), that hardly means that they do today.

But you may as well forget about context—historical or textual—when dealing with attack dogs. A website called Zombietime scanned passages of the textbook online, and intoned, “Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A ‘Planetary Regime’ with the power of life and death over American citizens. The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States?” The information zinged around, and eventually made its way to the Washington Times, which wrote of Ecoscience: “Several selections from the book have been highlighted at blogs critical of Mr. Holdren, particularly passages that appear to advocate sterilization, forced abortions and consideration of an ‘armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force’ for population enforcement capabilities.”

Only at the end of an article insinuating that these were Holdren’s positions did the Times actually quote the staff of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which then refuted all the claims.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich have also refuted the charges—they sent out an email observing that “We were not then, never have been, and are not now ‘advocates’ of the Draconian measures for population limitation described—but not recommended—in the book’s 60-plus small-type pages cataloging the full spectrum of population policies that, at the time, had either been tried in some country or analyzed by some commentator.” In his Senate confirmation hearing—yes, Fox, there was one—Holdren also rejected the idea that he supports government-mandated efforts at population control.

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

Holdren was just inducted as a foreign member of the British Royal Society—a huge honor. Oh, and he and other top Obama policymakers just released a critically important report on the impacts of climate change on the United States. Don’t expect Fox News segments on the importance of the latter.

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

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.”

Alec Ross, senior adviser on innovation to Secretary Clinton, explained the mobile-powered donation project in a conversation about New Media and public diplomacy at the Center for American Progress yesterday. Outreach efforts like these are “going to expand and enhance the way the U.S. government and its people can interact with a wider world,” Ross said.

Ross joined Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Faiz Shakir, research director for ThinkProgress.org, and CAP Senior Fellow Peter Swire to discuss Web 2.0 and the federal government.

Standard procedure for State Department initiatives now includes asking what New Media outreach can support the administration’s foreign policy work, Ross said. But he also explained this is new territory for a government that lost ground on innovation over the past eight years. “Innovation is in our DNA,” he said of the new administration.

O’Reilly applauded the creative use of technology in government outreach and went back to his earliest definitions of “Web 2.0″ to describe what he saw as crucial next steps. Pointing to the success of online communities like Craigslist.com, he said the key approaches are “harnessing collective intelligence” and “building systems that get better the more people use them.”

“How do we use technology to bring people together to do things we can’t do alone?” he asked.

Shakir described New Media as a tool for creating a “two-way conversation that government leads,” pointing to the Nowruz video President Obama recorded earlier this year as a public diplomacy effort to engage with the citizens of Iran.

Conversation also circled around the thorny issue of using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to offer direct communication between citizens and government officials. “If individuals in government can’t act as individuals, social media will never be effective in government,” said O’Reilly, “The authenticity of a conversation is central for social media.” To this, Swire repeated the cautionary warning from his papers on Web 2.0 policy: in the federal government, clearance is very important, as complex issues like foreign relations don’t always lend themselves to rapid-response blog posts or friend messages. On the campaign trail, a careless talking point gets lost in the news cycle and forgotten, he said; but in governing, a slip up, in the worst-case scenario, could send missiles flying from a temperamental dictatorship.

But in areas where it makes sense to collect and absorb public comments or input, the panel did point to policies that make it hard to harness citizen ideas and expertise. Ross described the lack of legal framework for implementing many Web 2.0 tools as part of government operations. There are “analog age laws that are attached to things we’re trying to do in the 21st century,” he said. “A lot of my friends in New Media spend more time talking to lawyers than they spend talking to geeks.” Hence the utility of Swire’s analysis.

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The X-Change Files, the program’s blog, launched today with a post from the Exchange’s director, Jennifer Ouellete. She addressed the value of a symbiotic relationship between scientists and Hollywood, writing that a scientist at the launch symposium “said it made him think about the implications of his own research in interesting new ways.” She went on: “Numerous writers were thrilled to discover the rich tapestry of scientific ideas available to them, and came away inspired about new creative projects.”

Through the Exchange, entertainment leaders have the privilege of learning about cutting-edge science they can use as fresh, realistic story plots, while scientists gain an outlet to engage new audiences in accurate science. The goal is not to turn movies and TV shows into a series of science lessons, Mooney pointed out. Rather, Ouelette writes, it will “offer a viable alternative” to troublesome stereotypes and misconceptions about scientific ideas. The Exchange broadens possibilities for science communication while helping to satisfy popular culture’s appetite for shows with science plots.

(HT: Framing Science)

Image: AP/Matt Sayles

“Everybody got mad at me, and they tried to fire me, but they couldn’t, cause I was on a fellowship,” remembers Paulson. But the longtime dean of science writers, David Perlman of the San Francisco Chronicle, loved it. “Never do PR,” he advised Paulson. “Always be a journalist.”

Seattle is fortunate that for 22 years, from 1987 to 2009, this irreverent troublemaker of a reporter went un-fired at the Post Intelligencer, where he covered health and science and was for many years responsible for putting out the paper’s weekly science page. During that time, Paulson took the lead on a number of important stories, including raising awareness about Seattle’s serious earthquake risk (now common knowledge, but barely recognized a few decades ago) and covering the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box E. coli outbreak, in which three children died in the Pacific Northwest and 450 were sickened. In the aftermath, Paulson tailed CDC investigators as they tried to figure out how the bad meat got into the system. “I traveled all around the country, went to meatpacking plants, got chased off by guys with guns,” he remembers. “It was sort of breaking-news detective science, and I was trying to explain to people how with a bug like this, we wouldn’t have known about it if not for a public surveillance system.” In the face of more recent food safety scares involving tomatoes and peanut products, as well as the current influenza outbreak, this sort of reporting is critical for protecting public safety and informing better health policies.

Over time, however, Paulson noticed a change at the Post Intelligencer. His editors, he says, grew less interested in stories that were “too complicated or in depth.” Paulson wanted to really dig into covering the Seattle-based Gates Foundation and its work on global health, but he was instead pushed into writing what he labels “entertainment science” stories. The science of chocolate. Back-in-time research. That kind of thing. “Everything was being driven by web hits,” Paulson observes. “And if they didn’t think a story was going to get a lot of web hits, they didn’t want me to write about it.” Seattle is a very important research hub, with scientists at the top of their fields in a number of areas, such as the study of the genome. The region is also, of course, a hub for numerous software, microchip, and biotech companies, as well the aerospace industry. Yet Paulson found it harder and harder to sneak real science into the paper.

Many of us know what happened next: In March of this year, Seattle went from a two paper to a one paper town as the Post Intelligencer put out its final print edition and went web-only. It is now the equivalent of a news aggregator site without much original journalism. Paulson lost his job, as did many other journalists. He is currently on a one-year severance as he casts about considering what to do next.

When I hung out with him recently for two days in Seattle—Paulson is head of the Northwest Science Writers’ Association, one of the most active such local groups in the country, which had had me out to speak—we drank “paradigm shift” martinis at the restaurant Andaluca and he explained to me his plan—or rather, his plans. He has some intriguing ideas, not least of which is a book proposal whose contents I won’t reveal. He has also thought about trying to start a U.S. “science media center,” parallel to those that exist in the UK and Australia, to help put non-specialist journalists in touch with scientific sources and stories. Meanwhile, he has of course snapped up a lot of freelance writing assignments.

But at the same time, Paulson is also going back to doing the kind of work he did long before he was a science writer or even a publicist: part time carpentry and building contracting. When I chased him down to chat for this column, he was out procuring materials for a job. Paulson doesn’t dislike the work—a visit to his home in Seattle, much of which he designed and built, shows that he’s a committed tinkerer. But still, there can be little doubt that something serious has been lost in Seattle with the decrease in its number of staff science journalists. In Paulson’s words:

I’d say the media in general here is more subject to spin. Fewer stories are being told through the mainstream media, and if you talk to the press officers at the institutions, they’re very frustrated with the fact that they will send out releases, and they’ll have something that’s a pretty big deal, and it won’t even show up in Seattle media. Because if the Seattle Times science reporter is already busy, it isn’t even going to get out there. So it sounds self-serving, but I think there’s less science news getting out now in Seattle.

Paulson emphasizes that what he has experienced isn’t unique—it’s “the same thing other people are going through too.” But that’s precisely the point. In a science-centered age, we’re becoming a society that lacks a professional and impartial means of informing its citizenry about science—and it’s happening one journalist at a time.

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 we shouldn’t, for that reason, sell Snow’s famous contribution short—even as it is now nearing its 50 year anniversary and prompting renewed chatter. Speaking as a scientifically trained novelist who had seen firsthand the disconnect between different intellectual groups, Snow unforgettably framed the issue that most centrally concerned him—the inadequate influence of science on policy and on society—as a matter of two cultures that couldn’t communicate. (See here for a fuller description of Snow’s argument and what drove him to make it.) It didn’t even matter, as Snow acknowledged from the outset, that there were probably more than just two cultures if you wanted to get technical about it. What counted was the message and, perhaps above all, its timing.

As Snow himself would later note, the “Two Cultures” lecture seemed to feed into a particular Zeigeist—perhaps not only because it captured a deep truth about weird and unnecessary breakdowns between otherwise very smart people, but also because of its articulation at a time when the Soviets had blasted into space with Sputnik I, and the United States set its sights on the moon. And so the “two cultures” concept hit world presses and began to generate such a voluminous international dialogue that even Snow couldn’t keep up with it all. One “contribution,” however, stands out, both because of its own fame and because of its demonstration of just how nasty and unproductive debates over science and culture can become—how dominated by navel-gazing and one-upmanship between people who ought to make common cause.

In 1962, the famous British literary critic and English educator F.R. Leavis decided to take a blast at Snow’s now three-year-old speech in another noted Cambridge peroration, the Richmond lecture. In the process, Leavis generated the mid-century equivalent of a spat between Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. The sheer brutality of Leavis’s assault got everybody talking: It spent far more time denigrating Snow personally than it did dismantling his argument. And ironically, it probably only increased Snow’s fame and notoriety, which by this time placed him among Britain’s and the world’s top tier of public intellectuals.

Insofar as Leavis had an argument, it was that Snow’s wasn’t really worth addressing at all, except in the sense that his puerile claims—and the great publicity they had received—represented a “portent” of society’s declining intellectual seriousness. Snow had described literary thinkers as “natural Luddies” at a time when what the world really needed was the spreading of scientific innovation to poorer countries; Leavis wholly rejected the characterization. He wasn’t anti-science, he said, but merely concerned with the true condition of human life amid industrialization, and how literature can instruct us as to that condition.

But most memorable were Leavis’s attacks. The man knew how to hurl an insult in a way we really don’t any more; even as you recoil at the incivility, you must admire the wordcraft. Snow, Leavis stated, “doesn’t know what he means, and doesn’t know he doesn’t know.” “The intellectual nullity,” he added, “is what constitutes any difficulty there may be in dealing with Snow’s panoptic pseudo-cogencies, his parade of a thesis: a mind to be argued with—that is not there; what we have is something other.” But what else to expect from a crappy writer like Snow? “As a novelist,” wrote Leavis, “he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is.” A few more scenes from the execution:

Snow’s argument proceeds with so extreme a naiveté of unconsciousness and irresponsibility that to call it a movement of thought is to flatter it.

Snow rides on an advancing swell of cliché: this exhilarating motion is what he takes for inspired and authoritative thought.

It is characteristic of Snow that ‘believe’ for him should be a very simple word.

And so on. As one ringside observer put it, Leavis “threw Sir Charles Snow over his shoulder several times and then jumped on him…the whole thing left one with a sense of comradely sympathy for Sir Charles, as it might be for a man who had been involved in a serious motor accident.” The eminent critic Lionel Trilling added that while he had problems with Snow’s argument, there could be “no two opinions” about Leavis’s breach of decorum: “It is a bad tone, an impermissible tone.”

In lashing out like this, Leavis merely reinforced the point at issue. To read Snow’s 1959 lecture and Leavis’s 1962 reply in succession is to witness precisely the “mutual incomprehension” that Snow had originally described between literary intellectuals and natural scientists—with the only difference being that where Snow sought to engage, Leavis reacted with the defensiveness of a caged animal, and thoroughly undermined any serious point he may have had to make. In a 1956 New Statesman article that preceded the “Two Cultures” speech, Snow had perfectly predicted this sort of response, describing the literary culture of his day as “behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining—standing on its precarious dignity, spending far too much energy on Alexandrian intricacies, occasionally letting fly in fits of aggressive pique quite beyond its means, too much on the defensive to show any generous imagination to the forces which must inevitably reshape it.”

For while Leavis may have possessed a sharper wit than Snow, and greater intellectual sophistication over all, he stood on the wrong side of history. Even as the Snow-Leavis battle sparked a renewed wave of chatter about the “two cultures,” trends in education clearly favored one combatant over the other.

In the postwar period, notes University of Virginia historian Guy Ortolano, British universities greatly expanded, and virtually all of that growth lay in the sciences, which began to receive copious government funding. It was a ratcheting up that Snow heavily supported: He had served as a scientific adviser to the influential 1946 Barlow Commission, which had called for precisely this course for British higher education, so as to create a much larger scientific workforce. By contrast, Leavis had devoutly hoped that Cambridge—his university and also Snow’s—would come to center on the English education program Leavis headed. Instead, the unhappy critic found himself fighting to prevent the ascension of a scientist to the position of Master of his Cambridge college (Downing) and lamented, “When I am retired, all that I have worked for at Cambridge peters out.” No wonder Snow epitomized everything Leavis despised.

And yet if we are to understand the plight of science today, especially in the United States, it helps to borrow a bit of Leavis’s animating philosophy and merge it with Snow’s. As Ortolano has put it, Leavis was centrally concerned with the “assault of mass civilization upon intellectual standards.” He bemoaned the growth of the mass media and the democratization and expansion of higher education, both of which (he felt) watered down excellence and weakened our ability to determine what really mattered, what to truly value. Leavis wished to defend the highest of high literature from these corroding, dumbing-down forces; but today, when we observe popular media culture, we can see that science, too, has not managed to compete. Not against mass coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death, or Britney Spears’ sad tribulations, or Paris Hilton’s arrest record.

In this sense, Snow and Leavis—both Cambridge men—might have been allies, if only they had known then what we know now. And if only they had been able to talk about it with civility.

We would be remiss, then, if we learned nothing more from the Snow-Leavis affair than that intellectuals sometimes behave badly. Stripped of all the nastiness, we can see in hindsight that both pugilists were saying something very important: Snow, that intellectual culture had grown fragmented and disconnected; Leavis, that mass media culture was squeezing out intellectual culture anyway. When you merge these two points together, you find, perhaps, a powerful articulation of the problem of the intellectual life in our times. Serious people, and serious arguments, are all too rarely taken seriously in the media (except, amazingly enough, on Comedy Central!) Meanwhile, continuing polarization, internecine battles, and ivory tower syndrome among intellectuals distract them from what ought to be their greatest concern—their tragic decline in influence.

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.”

As it happens, I stand in a rather interesting place to discuss this, having just moved my own co-authored science blog, “The Intersection,” to Discover Blogs on Monday, and for this reason finding myself hailed by Columbia Journalism Review as part of a trend of mainstream media outlets (the dreaded “MSM”) acquiring science-centered blogs and blog content.

A recent cover feature in the magazine Nature by writer Geoff Brumfiel stirred all this up. “Supplanting the old media?” it reads. “Science journalism is in decline; science blogging is growing fast. But can the one replace the other?” In reply, Curtis Brainard at Columbia Journalism Review’s “The Observatory” pointed out that Brumfiel and Nature might be constructing an artificial dichotomy. Brainard highlighted Discover’s burgeoning blog collection as an example of a marriage of old and new media in the science arena, and added: “next week the site will add another ‘top-ten’ blog from the Scienceblogs.com community.”

I don’t know about “top ten,” but that was us.

I feel very conflicted about all this. As both a science journalist and also a science blogger, I would be one messed up dude if I loathed either activity. Clearly there is no sharp dichotomy between blogging and journalism in the science field if the two merge in a person like myself, or in many others, like Carl Zimmer or Rebecca Skloot or Jennifer Ouellette.

Yet while I certainly enjoy blogging and feel it has many benefits—and we’re psyched to be at Discover—I actually side more with Nature and Brumfield than with Brainard in this dialogue. I don’t really see how blogging works as a substitute for traditional science journalism, and I question talk of “marriage” between the two when so many traditional science journalists are losing the jobs—and also, sad to say, when many science bloggers seem to have an adversarial stance toward their science journalist peers (and perhaps vice-versa).

So all the problems during this time of transition that Nature describes (and that many others have highlighted) resonate with me: Blogs have smaller, more specialized audiences. Most of the time, bloggers don’t have journalistic training and don’t “report.” And so on.

But there’s a deeper, and indeed, fundamental difference here that seems to me to have been elided, especially by Brainard. For the most part, blogging isn’t a career. As matters currently stand, most bloggers can’t expect to support a family, get health insurance, a retirement plan, etc, simply through blogging alone. At best they’re the equivalent of faculty adjuncts, never destined for the tenure track.

That’s why the science journalists who you find blogging tend to be freelance or unattached science journalists, and also book authors. We’re entrepreneurs and hacks of all trades; we do a whole bunch of different kinds of things; blogging is just one more to add on the pile. (And we’d be glad to take adjunct work too!)

In other words, our economic models are individualistic and entrepreneurial. One can scarcely doubt that there will always be people in the media willing—or crazy enough—to roll this way. We’re the types to to cry “Freedom!” at the top of our lungs while the media industry removes our entrails. But the question is, what happens to everybody else? The death of traditional science journalism is a death of pensions, healthcare, and childbearing leave. It is a harsh exposure of science journalism to the elements.

That’s why it was so beyond the pale to find a university faculty scientist and science blogger, University of Toronto biochemistry professor Larry Moran, commenting on my blog (quoted by Nature) that “Seriously, most of what passes for science journalism is so bad we will be better of without it…Science journalists have let us down. I say good riddance.” In other words, send them out into the cold.

The deepest problem here, in my mind, is moral: We lack the shared sense that people who cover science in the media—blogger, reporter, or otherwise—are part of the same team and need to be supported in bad times. We rarely take the time to look out for each other. We lack a sense of solidarity.

And now, many of our friends are going down alone.

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.”

On February 15, as he has done many times in the past, George Will of The Washington Post wrote a howler-filled column about global warming. The gist echoed a point Will has often made: Environmentalist doomsayers like to scare us, but they’re often flat wrong. To this end, the article contained a head-scratchingly long and pseudo-referenced paragraph, making the-oft refuted claim that during the 1970s, the scientific community was convinced that “global cooling” had arrived. In reality, while a few scientists were indeed worried about cooling at the time, and some journalists wrote alarmist stories about the subject, there was no consensus like there is today about human caused global warming.

How to make the case that we still need these hallowed gray newspapers to police our society and discourse?

Will’s column also took several other angular swipes at the mainstream scientific understanding of climate change’s human causation, without directly taking it on. In one case, it cited the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center to claim that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” In other words, we’re not really warming up—the ice is doing fine. (The Arctic Climate Research Center quickly repudiated Will’s assertion.) In closing, meanwhile, Will made this truly extraordinary claim: “According to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.” As the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization are central scientific authorities that have long supported the idea of human-caused global warming, this was a particular shocker.

In essence, then, a number of Will’s claims—about “global cooling,” sea ice, and the WMO—were either flatly false or extraordinarily misleading, whether due to dishonesty, ignorance, or some combination of both. This wasn’t necessarily new for Will, any more than it is new for a number of other conservative columnists or pundits who write about global warming. But for some reason, the outrage this time built and fed upon itself. There’s no way to fully list all the things that have since been posted about the matter—the volume is far too great—but Joe Romm of Climate Progress seems to have kicked it off; Adam Siegel of EnergySmart has a very comprehensive overview; the folks at Media Matters and TalkingPointsMemo have driven the story; and Brad Johnson of the Wonk Room has not only written about the controversy in detail but gotten responses from the Post itself. In short, the paper takes the cowardly route and refuses to correct Will’s copious errors of fact, interpretation, and so forth. It equivocates. And it claims that Will’s column was fact-checked by multiple people “to the fullest extent possible.” (Ha.)

But enough blow-by-blow: What does it all mean?

Will is of course an eminence grise of Washington punditry, a regular on ABC’s This Week, and widely regarded as a distinguished conservative intellectual. He is also fatuously wrong about the science of global warming, and apparently impervious to and shielded from correction. Bloggers are now gleefully obliterating both him and the Washington Post, and they are substantively right in everything they’re saying-about climate science, about the stubborn inescapability of facts, and, indeed, about journalistic responsibility.

The Post thus takes a dramatic credibility hit here—and the bloggers a credibility gain—and given the current economic straits facing newspapers and the Post in particular, that’s something it can ill afford. We often hear that “technology” is what’s killing newspapers—innovations like Craig’s List have destroyed the in-print classified advertising market; people have stopped reading physical papers and turned to online headlines from news aggregators or blogs; and so on. But there are also matters of substance and standards, and if the Post editorial page can’t even print correct facts about global warming (or correct already printed errors), then how to make the case that we still need these hallowed gray newspapers to police our society and discourse?

In this sense, I view the George Will affair with sadness. Sure, I share in the temporary glee of the bloggers. But at the same time, I know there are many kinds of journalism, particularly about science, that bloggers will never replace. They’re extremely well-equipped to pounce and skewer a George Will column, but hardly well equipped to deliver an investigative or narrative feature story. We’re watching the media change before our eyes, the science media in particular—and no one can say, in light of episodes like the latest one involving George Will, that much of old media doesn’t in some sense “deserve” what’s happening to it now. Yet if our only sentiment is joy over the bloggers’ latest trophy, or outrage at the Post, we’re missing something deep indeed.

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.”

CJR’s Observatory recently rounded up two useful discussions on the fragmenting state of science reporting in the United States.

Curtis Brainard tuned into the “Future of Science and Environmental Journalism” panel at the Wilson Center here in DC that explored the business-minded cuts that have diminished or eliminated science reporting staffs at mainstream news outlets. Though some cuts seems stranger than others; he notes that Aviation Week & Space Technology closed its Cape Canaveral office in the last year (NASA’s budget in FY2008 was $12.2 billion).

Cristine Russell reported on the more dire-sounding “Science Journalism in Crisis?” event at the AAAS conference, but she and Brainard both mention the migration of science journalism from major U.S. newspapers to niche online outlets. At AAAS, this phenomenon was coupled with an influx of foreign reporters:

The number of science reporters and journalists-in-training from far-flung parts of the world—the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America, as well as Canada, the U.K., Germany, Sweden and other parts of Europe—has expanded at AAAS. At the same time, the presence of working American science reporters from major newspapers and magazines has declined over time, their ranks often replaced by a diverse group of freelancers and digital journalists who write, blog, and Twitter for a variety of startup and established news and information Web sites.

The Wilson Center event captured a slate of ideas for more citizen-centric science reporting that meets the local needs of individuals for environmental and technology news. Panelist Jan Scaffer, who directs the Knight Foundation-funded J-Lab at American University, is a champion of such “civic-media networks.” Inspired by her ideas, AU professor and science communication expert Matt Nisbet suggests in a recent column that the Obama administration should support collaborations between universities, museums, local media, and communities to produce and distribute science and environmental news.

The idea that nonprofit orgs may be the future of high-quality journalism in general is not new, but the suggestion that existing public media is a solid foundation on which to rebuild science journalism is worth considering, as any NOVA watcher or Science Friday listener can attest.

What do readers think the next iterations of effective science journalism will look like?

Image: flickr.com/mybloodyself

What was the view in your family about the Darwin legacy—were people living in its shadow? Did they make inside jokes about it?

I do think that some of the family lived in Darwin’s shadow. It’s hard not to, but it gets easier as time goes by. When I was young people did not make jokes in the way that I do. There were people, my mother included, who I think felt they had something to live up to, and, failing to do so, were made unhappy. Others I have met over the years—not my immediate family, I hasten to mention—seem to be rather excessively proud of it. I poke fun at the connection by saying that I’m the best argument creationists have because if you look at my family tree with Darwin at one end and me at the other this in itself disproves evolution. When I look at Prince Charles, he always seems rather rueful to me, as if he was saying to himself, “This is all very well, but it’s just an accident of birth.” He’s right about this, and it’s how I feel, except that in my case there are no perks.

What did you think every time you looked at the ten-pound note? Was that why you left England—you prefer your money with crazy pyramids on it?

The ten-pound note didn’t come into existence until after I left in 1982. Sometimes people ask me to sign their copy of Origin of Species, which I do, but with a little embarrassment. I will, however, for a fee of ten pounds, happily sign a ten-pound note.

When you appeared on Science Friday recently and discussed Darwin, the very first caller asked a question about atheism. Is this a regular response?

This is normal. Some callers hate him for his atheism, some adore him for it. I think it is an interesting fact that Darwin slowly came to the conclusion that God did not exist, but this is not his primary achievement. There are several dead philosophers and living commentators who do a far better job. The danger, I think, is that if atheists take possession of Darwin, the public will continue to be distracted from, or feel active antipathy toward, his scientific work and all its modern offshoots. As this is a vital part of modern science, anything that deters people from studying it and perhaps entering science seems to me a shame, and potentially disastrous to America.

Tell us what first sparked the idea of ScienceDebate2008. Do you think Darwin would have been proud?

Like most people, I knew that there were several environmental crises going on and that science was an integral part of their potential solutions. As I watched the first fifteen or so debates, I noticed there were no questions dealing with this, or very few. Similarly, none of the debate moderators were asking questions about the science behind health and medicine, both individual and global. Nor were there any serious questions about the relationship between education and science and science and technological development, nor any about scientific integrity in government.

To me, these were the key issues that would determine our future. That the politicians weren’t discussing them was understandable—that the debate moderators were letting them get away with it seemed really bad news for American voters. When I learned that half the growth in the American economy since the 1950s could be attributed to science, it seemed really, really odd that the debates did not include a segment devoted entirely to science and technology policy. I then thought that actually science was so important in so many ways that it actually deserved a stand-alone debate of its own. I still believe this. I think that Darwin would approve. He did have political causes (he was an abolitionist), and he would certainly be made sad by some of our attitudes to science, to science education, and by our self-inflicted environmental problems.

What do we need to restore science in our culture, so that someone like Darwin is respected as one of history’s greatest scientists, rather than reviled and dragged into the culture wars?

To some extent I’m sure this is an education question—and as such I’m not best equipped to answer it. However, it’s also a cultural question. Almost everyone has at one time or another taken a pill that saved their lives or reduced their physical or existential pain. This is just one example of one aspect of life that people are generally grateful to science for, and yet scientists are usually portrayed as wild-haired madmen. Why is this? There are fantastically interesting and charismatic scientists around, but somehow they don’t achieve popular fame. I’ve suggested elsewhere that scientists ought to dress better, earn more money, get more sex, misbehave, go to rehab at public expense, and generally reap the rewards of their great contributions to society. More seriously, I think that some of this anti-science and anti-scientist stuff must be toxic waste from the gigantic anti-evolution movement in America.

Any Hollywood projects in the works that involve science?

Yes, several, but I don’t want to get robbed!

So how are you celebrating February 12?

I’ll be having dinner with my wife and daughter. My daughter is the great-great-great granddaughter of Darwin. You have probably heard of “regressing toward the mean”—that’s me. My daughter shows signs of an upswing on the family tree.

“No!” she spat back as she turned away. A moment later I saw her nudge another artist and they fired a stereo look of contempt in my direction. I quickly moved several booths away, feeling the blush of my embarrassment, but without understanding it. Still, I was careful not to utter the same offense again as I went from stall to stall, studying the art displayed on that beautiful autumn day at the Bethesda Arts Festival.

Debra Aronson

Roses in Glass

Over the previous years I had taught myself how to use Adobe’s Photoshop software. First it was just to improve my amateur photographs, but over time I learned to see it as a tool to create original art from efforts that had missed the mark, and finally as a way to create work starting with a blank “canvas.” I had come to enjoy it so much that I fantasized about earning a living working with the right side of my brain. The artist within me pleaded for a release from my day job in the policy shop of a trade association. While my full-time position and family responsibilities left little time for artwork, I would sit down at my computer whenever I could and practice. Hours would race by. I forgot the rest of the world. My back ached. My bladder cried. In short, I was addicted.

Without time to meet other artists, I continued my craft in isolation. This, in part, explained my bewilderment at the disdain my question about the image provoked. The suggestion that a photographer might have improved an existing shot, or created something meaningful from nothing, was somehow a suggestion of inauthenticity. Thank goodness I had not joined a local photography club. I might have been tarred and feathered.

But how could I have been so naïve? —I, who spent my day job exploring popular antagonism to the application of technology to biology. Genetically modified plants and animals, organ transplantation, the use of drugs to improve mood or cognitive abilities— each of these meet fierce opposition from some groups. So much, in fact, that my organization was forced to use extensive security measures when we held our annual meetings. How could I have not seen a similarly strong reaction coming when I ventured beyond the “pure” bounds of classic photography?

I tried not to be so hard on myself. After all, biotechnology involves living things, including pieces of ourselves and even our whole bodies. Opposition to the technical manipulation of biological systems generally originates from arguments that man should avoid exercising powers that rightfully are the domain of God or nature. Such hubris invites the wrath of God and/or nature—as well as other unintended adverse consequences. Another deep-seated fear is that we may carelessly eradicate the very characteristics that make us human or that make life valuable. My job has been to encourage the public, along with policymakers, to reason beyond these instinctive reactions in evaluating the benefits and risks of a proposed biotechnology. At the same time, I work to help innovators grasp the negative public attitudes, and the impact of such attitudes, on the acceptance of their products. It has been challenging and fun. But really, what is objectionable about moving a few pixels around?

Hang on… I am transported back nearly 40 years to a concert in Forest Hills, New York. Bob Dylan takes the stage on his first tour using an electric guitar. The crowd’s reaction is negative, to say the least, and I join the growing chorus of boos. We stop only when he finally picks up his acoustic guitar.

Colorized movies caused similar outrage. Microwave ovens evoked disdain from “real chefs.” Both the end of vinyl records and the advent of mp3s caused apoplexy for audiophiles. Where does this reverence for what is familiar come from? The womb?

We love what we know—the cozy and comfortable. Yet we love to create and improve. Our love of invention is the very thing that distinguishes us from other animals, although we often have to work quite hard to overcome our aversion to change. This internal conflict assured plentiful work for generations of psychiatrists.

But then along came Prozac.

Debra Aronson is a health policy consultant and visual artist; she recently served as Director of Bioethics for the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Debra custom-designs creative pieces on commission. For more examples of her work and further information, Debra can be reached at dearonson [at] verizon.net.

It’s depressing to note that we’re still debating the issue at this level, yet such is the reality. Consider a recent column by Hoover Institution fellow and Scripps Howard contributor Deroy Murdock entitled “Even left is now laughing at global warming,” containing evidence like the following:

• Nearly four inches of snow blanketed the United Arab Emirates’ Jebel Jais region for just the second time in recorded history on Jan. 24. Citizens were speechless. The local dialect has no word for snowfall.

• Dutchmen on ice skates sped past windmills as canals in Holland froze in mid-January for the first time since 1997. Defense Minister Eimert van Middelkoop, who inhabits a renovated 17th Century windmill, stumbled on the ice and fractured his wrist.

• January saw northern Minnesota’s temperatures plunge to 38 below zero, forcing ski-resort closures. A Frazee, Minnesota dog-sled race was cancelled, due to excessive snow. Snow whitened Surf City, North Carolina’s beaches. Days ago, ice glazed Florida’s citrus groves.

Surely Deroy Murdock doesn’t think such anecdotes seriously refute the idea that there is a globally averaged warming trend—or does he?

I sometimes indulge the conspiracy theory that such drivel is intelligently designed to enrage and preoccupy those of us who honor the elementary distinction between climate and weather (the former being, of course, the statistical average over time of the latter). But then I consult the evidence about what people in this country think and know about climate change, and I realize that Deroy Murdock’s column probably speaks to many of us and even to many of our elites—people like CNN’s Lou Dobbs, for instance, who has also recently used the vicissitudes of winter weather to cast doubt on human caused climate change. (This is an example of why you need trained science journalists in the media.)

In fact, polling data suggests that Deroy Murdock’s column probably resonates with roughly half of the country—the conservative half. Whenever you break down acceptance of climate science along partisan lines, your quickly see that a vast political divide exists over the nature of reality itself. Last month, for instance, Rassmussen Reports released this finding (hat tip to Joe Romm): “Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democrats blame global warming on human activity, compared to 21% percent of Republicans. Two-thirds of GOP voters (67%) see long-term planetary trends as the cause versus 23% of Democrats.” The Pew organization has shed still more light on this huge partisan gap by including information about education levels in its surveys. The results are staggering: The higher a Republican’s level of education, the more likely he or she is to reject mainstream climate science.

My sense of how this alienation arises (and here I’m significantly influenced by people like Matthew Nisbet) goes something like this. The climate issue is already highly politicized, so people start out with partisan inclinations. Then, the more highly educated conservatives—people like Deroy Murdock—proceed in a typically “intellectual” fashion to find information about the climate issue that confirms what they already think. For this they go to partisan and like-minded sources, such as Fox News or any number of rightwing anti-science websites. One top stop is the high-traffic “Watts Up With That,” a climate skeptic outlet that was, very alarmingly, voted the “Best Science Blog” of 2008, and right at this very moment features several entries that stoke confusion about the distinction between climate and weather, such as “Mature Arctic Ivory Gull Seen in Massachusetts—first time in over a century.”

And so it is that each winter, we get another recycling of the idea that record low temperatures in individual locales somehow refute the idea that the globe is warming. Thus does an error of statistical reasoning become a political doctrine. And it is virtually futile to refute, because it’s highly likely you’ll be doing so for an audience that doesn’t need the lesson, and ignored or dismissed by the audience that does.

In this context, perhaps one has to look as high as President Barack Obama for salvation. Possibly, just possibly, the White House could launch a sustained public communication and education campaign on global warming, designed to shore up support for pending climate legislation, in such a way that it might actually make a difference. It would be especially helpful if we could get some prominent conservative thinkers to flip, join the show, and speak to the Deroy Murdocks of the world in a way that might inspire them to listen.

Even then, though, it’s best to wait until the ice thaws to start that campaign; as Shakespeare might have put it, “a skeptic’s tale’s best for winter.” After all, it took a record hot summer in 1988 for the climate issue to rise to serious public attention for the first time. Right now, the environmental community is heavily debating whether President Obama and the Democratic Congress will pass a climate bill in 2009 or 2010; perhaps they should really be debating which August.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has chosen December of this year to hold the summit designed to forge the successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The location? Copenhagen, Denmark.

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.”

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.”

Ethically Challenged
One Quarter of Stem Cell Lines Eligible for Federal Funding Fail Ethics Guidelines
By Rick Weiss
An expert panel at Stanford University determined in July that nearly one quarter of the colonies of human embryonic stem cells that the Bush administration had approved as ethically derived and eligible for study with federal funds did not meet Stanford’s ethics standards.

Enormously Pathetic Agency
The Evisceration of the EPA
By Chris Mooney
There was a near-complete breakdown at our central environmental regulatory agency under the Bush administration. And that was just what things looked like in April.

The Halfway House Between Science and Secrets
An Interview With Bruce Schneier on Science and Security
By Jonathan Pfeiffer
A National Research Council report recognized that the 9/11 attacks provoked counter-productive security measures that stifle access to fruitful scientific research. Security expert Bruce Schneier talked with Science Progress about the science that makes us smarter and the security that makes us safer.

Minding Mental Minefields
How to Stockpile the Neuropharmacological Arsenal
By Rick Weiss
Another report from the National Research Council argued that the military should harness the power of neuroscience research to amplify the cognitive prowess of U.S. military personnel and make foreign soldiers, um, less smarter.

Plight of the Postdoc
Is Modern American Science Strangling Its Young Talents In the Cradle?
By Sheril Kirshenbaum
Colleges and universities are graduating more science and engineering PhDs, but diminishing opportunities are derailing young scientists from future careers as scientific leaders.

Hearts and Minds
Expelled Suggests Defenders of Evolution are Losing Them
By Chris Mooney
The successful right-wing documentary demonstrated that science needs a loud, accessible, entertaining, mass media response to creationist nonsense.

The Staggering Cyclone Nargis Catastrophe
A Disastrous Convergence of Variables
By Chris Mooney
The alarming death tolls from the storm were a product of poverty, poor infrastructure, and a negligent government. Better forecasting for the North Indian region would be a start for protecting citizens from future cyclones. Democracy in Burma probably wouldn’t hurt, either.

Manufactroversy
The Art of Creating Controversy Where None Existed
By Leah Ceccarelli
Contemporary rhetorical tactics designed to confuse politicians and the public about scientific issues are as old as antiquity. The methods are just as disingenuous 2,500 years after their invention.

Contraception Is the New Abortion
The Latest Right Wing Trend? Attack Birth Control
By Jessica Arons
An HHS rule was just the most recent attempt in a longstanding campaign by social conservatives to turn discomfort with abortion into opposition to contraception.

Ubiquity Requires Redundancy
The Case for Federal Investment in Broadband
By Mark Lloyd
The attacks of 9/11 and body blow of Hurricane Katrina highlight for all but the most doctrinaire advocates of free markets that there is an exceedingly strong case for direct government investment in the deployment of advanced telecommunications services to build a safe, strong, and resilient America.

Science Under Obama
Next Administration Would Chart a Dramatic New Course
By Chris Mooney
The day after the historic election, Mooney wrote that there’s much for scientists to like about Barack Obama’s plans for science policy. But, Mooney asked, will the president-elect make it a priority, and what about the money?

Wikipedia and the New Curriculum
Digital Literacy Is Knowing How We Store What We Know
By David Parry
Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing. Encyclopedias are no longer static collections of facts and figures; they are living entities. Just check the entry on Global Warming. This article generated a spirited discussion on Science Progress and around the blogosphere.

Since then, the economic woes have continued, and so has the slaughter in the science journalism field. A few weeks back we learned that the Weather Channel, owned by NBC Universal, owned by General Electric, killed its “Forecast Earth” program, which focused on climate change and featured the respected on-air climatologist Heidi Cullen (it is unclear if she is leaving the network entirely). This occurred in the context of a 10 percent workforce cut—many experienced meteorologists were also let go.

And now we learn that CNN, owned by Time Warner, has let go of its entire science, technology, and environmental unit, including Miles O’Brien, respected producer Peter Dykstra, and numerous others. O’Brien, a veteran reporter, was known for being tough on science issues—including holding accountable Senator James Inhofe, the leading Republican global warming denier and a veritable misinformation machine. A CNN spokeswoman said the network wanted to “integrate environmental, science and technology reporting into the general editorial structure rather than have a stand alone unit,” and observed that Anderson Cooper 360 will continue to cover our “Planet in Peril.” But the fact is that with fewer science journalism experts on hand, we can only expect to see less science coverage over all from CNN, and worse coverage when we do get it.

Environment and energy issues appear (at least to me) to be growing in attention and interest, but covering them alone is no substitute for full-fledged science coverage.

Cable news was a tough place for science-related journalism even before the recession. In its 2008 “State of the News Media” survey, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in 2007, cable news outlets gave science and the environment drastically short shrift. If you were to watch five hours of cable news, the report noted, you could expect to see 1 minute of science and technology coverage and 1 minute and 25 seconds of environmental coverage—compared with 10 minutes of celebrity and entertainment content, 12 minutes of accidents and disasters, and “26 minutes or more” of crime.

But while cable news may carry less substantive science than some newspapers, let’s not forget that science coverage is struggling across the board. The pinnacle of newspaper science journalism is the hallowed Tuesday New York Times science section, but as Andrew Revkin of the Times notes at his blog DotEarth, “we (like everyone in print media) are doing ever more with less.”

Moreover, don’t be fooled when a CNN, or some other outlet, points to its “green” coverage in order to underscore a continuing science journalism commitment. Environment and energy issues appear (at least to me) to be growing in attention and interest, but covering them alone is no substitute for full-fledged science coverage, any more than medical coverage or tech coverage are a substitute.

Science journalism should cover important developments in knowledge, where science is taking us, how science education and funding trends affect the competitiveness of the nation, science policy, and much else. Not only does science touch virtually every aspect of Americans’ lives—from health to economics to the Internet—but the federal government finances an enormous amount of research and development with taxpayer dollars. This year, that amount was more than $142 billion. Informed citizens deserve to understand more about what they’re getting from that investment. Medical, tech, and environmental coverage, though they may draw on science, rarely get into such areas.

Science journalism, at its best, should also be a vehicle for making ongoing advances in science relevant to non-scientist members of the public. Personalized medicine, designer babies, space militarization, geoengineering, brain-computer interfaces…how far away are such advances, and how will they affect people’s lives? Science journalism should put such questions on everyone’s radar, and then provide the best possible answers. It should help us forecast the future—and prepare us for it. Without such forward-looking journalism, we run a grave risk of not seeing what’s coming until it’s too late.

So what can we do? We have two options. We can continue to watch the economic contraction in the media business (witness the recent bankruptcy of newspaper giant Tribune Co.) destroy science coverage, and wring our hands whenever the latest dire news comes in. Or, we can take action to turn the tide.

For my part, I can say that the folks who created the ScienceDebate2008 organization are eyeing declining science coverage in the media and wondering how we might try to stick our thumbs in the dam. We’re convinced that disinterest from the press was one of the key reasons that we couldn’t get the candidates to commit to a live, televised science policy debate. Moreover, we know that while we’ve already lost a painful amount of science journalism, there is more yet that can be saved. However, it may require science defenders to actively raise money, whether by small donations over the Internet or bigger philanthropic ventures.

The CNN move last week did trigger considerable ire in the science blogosphere, so now may be the time to rally ourselves. My hope is to be able to write more, soon, about precisely how we can do so to greatest effect. In the meantime, I am very open to suggestions.

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.”

CNN, the Cable News Network, announced yesterday that it will cut its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, including Miles O’Brien, its chief technology and environment correspondent, as well as six executive producers.

The move seems strange and unfortunate given the ever-increasing role that scientific and technological issues play in shaping political and economic life in the United States.

Brainard rounds up a cohort of experts who are “dishearted” or “baffled” by the decision, particularly given CNN’s own admission that the move came not because the network fell on hard times. In fact, they’re doing just fine. He quotes CNN spokesperson Barbara Levin: “We want to integrate environmental, science and technology reporting into the general editorial structure rather than have a stand alone unit.”

Chris Mooney lamented the economic woes that are depleting the science staffs at newspapers throughout the United States and Canada in a recent column—and in particular the fact that in many instances, newspapers hear not a peep of complaint when they eliminate science coverage.

It should go without saying that science and technology are vital to the health, wealth, safety, and prosperity of everyone. If you think CNN should devote resources to covering those issues, here’s their feedback page.

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is author 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.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

Last week, along with fellow blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum, ScienceDebate2008 CEO and screenwriter Shawn Otto, and many other usual suspects from the Los Angeles science world, I attended the debut event for a very new sort of venture: The Science and Entertainment Exchange. Sponsored by the Washington, D.C.-based National Academy of Sciences, but with entertainment industry might behind it as well—most centrally Jerry and Janet Zucker, the director/producer couple who also backed Proposition 71, the successful California stem cell ballot initiative, in 2004—it was perhaps the most significant merger of minds from two utterly different spheres that I’ve ever witnessed.

It’s no secret that scientists have had their problems with Hollywood in the past. I’ve written here about the troublesome mad scientist trope that appears regularly on television and the screen; and blockbuster films are also constantly being blasted for containingbad physics, bad biology, bad epidemiology, and so on. Not to mention all the ridiculous technobabble that occurs in sci-fi and disaster flicks, which invariably feature a set-piece in which someone wearing a white coat (surprisingly often it is Jeff Goldblum) explains why all hell is about to break loose.

Much of this was deliciously spoofed in a hilarious short film by Zucker Productions that opened the Exchange event in Los Angeles—a parody of The Day the Earth Stood Still in which it is scientists, not aliens, who arrive in Hollywood in a flying saucer, and warn the entertainment community that they’re in big trouble if they don’t mend their ways. I devoutly hope someone puts this video up on YouTube; the million views it would likely draw would go farther than any single event to bring scientists and entertainers together, joined by belly laughs.

In reality, of course, the tone of the Science and Entertainment Exchange is not hectoring in nature, and scientists aren’t going to blast Hollywood types with lasers if they get the facts wrong. Quite the opposite. The point of the Exchange is to create more collaboration, rather than the standard wagon-circling or ritual denunciation. As recently hired Exchange director and science writer Jennifer Ouellete (author of The Physics of the Buffyverse) puts it:

Let’s face it: ragging on the depiction of science in film and TV is a time-honored tradition on the Interwebs. There’s an entire Website devoted to Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, and io9 just put up a poll asking readers to vote on which technical inaccuracies in science fiction annoy them the most….That said, I’m convinced that while the constant snark directed at science in movies and TV might be entertaining to those in the “geek clique,” it is not, in the long run, constructive, or conducive to fostering change in how science is portrayed in Hollywood. It’s easy to point fingers and toss off zingy crowd-pleasing one-liners; it’s a lot more difficult to actually offer well-considered workable alternatives in a format that is easily accessible to those in the entertainment industry.

National Academies president Ralph Cicerone echoed this point in Los Angeles. “We understand stories trump science in Hollywood,” he observed, and reassured the assembled audience—of what appeared to be over 300 people—that the goal of the Exchange was certainly not to turn every fiction film into a documentary. That would be, like, boring; the utter opposite of entertainment.

And just as scientists are trying to better understand the entertainment world, it’s not like everybody in the “industry” despises science. Far from it. Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy and emcee of the Los Angeles event, confessed himself a total geekophile: He said he’d seen Carl Sagan’s Cosmos “100 times” and added that he felt Scooby Doo is in many ways the best thing on TV, because it glorifies the use of reason and problem solving, rather than just letting the supernatural resolve any plot difficulties. Later on in the afternoon, I watched a full room of rapt writers and other industry creatives sit through a fascinating breakout session in which neuroscientists David Poeppel and Eric Haseltine explained “The Mysteries of the Brain and Mind,” where reality is definitely stranger than fiction—and the potential fodder for entertainment plots abounds.

So how well did the Exchange succeed in its debut, and what does the future hold? So far I’m hearing virtually unqualified applause—see for instance University of Southern California physicist Clifford Johnson’s take—and for scientists to pack a house in Hollywood is no small feat. Let me add to the accolades: This is a new departure for the scientific community, but precisely the sort of outreach measure that can help it better connect with our broader society. And as MacFarlane emphasized, these are two communities that need each other—the scientists can provide amazing (and also realistic) story ideas, and the entertainers can help spread the word about science to massive audiences through the medium of fictional film and television.

As this project moves forward, however, I’d like to end with a word of caution. For this kind of experiment to work, it is absolutely critical that the dialogue be fully two-directional. Scientists can’t just lecture, they also have to listen. They know the facts better than anyone, and no one disputes this. But they don’t necessarily understand how those facts can best fit into a story—something entertainers eminently excel at.

Attending an Exchange salon on “The Frontiers of Genomics” that featured J. Craig Venter, Lawrence Goldstein, and Gene E. Robinson, for instance, I heard a ton of science, but could only think of two movie plots. One would be a retread of 1997′s GATTACA—but Hollywood has already been there and done that. The other would be a story in which the synthetic bacteria that Venter hopes to create run rampant and threaten to destroy the world—in short, yet another retread of the Frankenstein myth. This is most emphatically not the kind of story that scientists want entertainers to tell. But the problem is, Venter didn’t give me (or the audience) anything better.

That’s a very minor criticism: The Exchange is just beginning, and I’m sure it’s already inspiring fruitful collaborations. And Jennifer Ouellette, who I know a little, is an ideal person to set up shop in Hollywood and start merging two very different worlds, something she has been doing anyway for some time. So suspend your disbelief, scientists—and I’ll see you at the movies.

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.”

NAS

Earlier this week at The Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum offered a look at a new program from the National Academies that will help television and movie makers who want better integrate scientific concepts into their work. The Science and Entertainment Exchange aims to bridge the gap between the research arena and the entertainment industry “and addresses the mutual need of the two communities by providing the credibility and the verisimilitude upon which quality entertainment depends – and which audiences have come to expect,” according to the program’s website.

New Scientist reports that veteran science writer and blogger Jennifer Ouellette will run the project.

Connecting producers, writers, and directors with science experts won’t just lead to more mind-bending episodes of CSI. The point is that the entertainment industry helps shape the way the American public thinks about issues like the purpose and goals of scientific research, bioethics, and the expansion and application of technology. And the people as comfortable behind a camera as they are behind a microscope are few.

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is author 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.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

There are probably as many ways of imputing meaning to Barack Obama’s presidential victory as there are pundits around to do so. But I’d like to start this column with an interpretation that isn’t exactly earth-shattering, and for that reason, probably true.

Obama’s election represented a mandate to cast aside an old way of doing politics, one that was divisive and superficial, and that throve on partisan attacks, culture warmongering, and the continual inability to find common ground. At a time of twin wars and economic calamity, Americans were sick of that breed of politics. They wanted change, of a sort that would usher in a new politics of unity, purpose, substance, and compromise. Or as President-elect Obama put it in his victory speech in Chicago:

Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers—in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people. Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.

Like so many people, I woke up the morning after the election with new inspiration and optimism, and my mind racing. I fired off a bunch of “let’s do this, let’s do that” emails. If they had any common theme, it was the drive to apply the mood of the moment to the stretch of politics and policy with which I’m most familiar: science.

We’ve been in a post-Sputnik mode of science politics since, well, Sputnik.

It’s an arena in which change, in the Obama sense of the term, has not exactly been a common occurrence. It’s a vast oversimplification, but in essence true: We’ve been in a post-Sputnik mode of science politics since, well, Sputnik. Scientists have most centrally been concerned with conducting research and securing funding (from the government or industry) to do so. The scientific community reaches out to politicians and the public, to be sure, but the goals of this outreach are not on par with the research imperative.

At the same time, divisiveness, and the lack of shared purpose, has been rampant in relation to science issues. There are two divides that chiefly concern me here, and they’re not unrelated. The first is the divide between the pointy-headed experts and everybody else, one where the experts want to lecture, and the citizens go “la la la” most of the time. The second is the divide between science and religion, where the atheists attack believers and claim science exposes a godless universe, and the creationists attack evolution and claim science is just thinly disguised atheism—and the middle gets polarized, or just drowned out completely.

Is it too much to hope that we in the science world, and we who care about it, might seize the momentum in the wake of Obama’s victory and try to heal these rifts? Is it even remotely possible that when Darwin Day rolls around on February 12, 2009—the 200-year anniversary of Darwin’s birth, which just happens to fall in the 150^th anniversary year of the publication of On the Origin of Species—we won’t use the occasion to fan the flames of another battle between the “new atheists” and the creationists? Rather, could we emphasize instead that science-religion conflicts are needlessly divisive and inflammatory and—as with culture war politics generally—not what most people really care about?

I’m hoping religious leaders and scientists will come together this February 12 with a strong statement to this effect. It is long past time that we heard from the vast middle on this issue.

Ask yourself this question: If Barack Obama was president of science, how would he govern? I think it’s obvious that he would emphasize common purpose, that he would seek to defuse tension, and that he would try to bring everyone along.

He would reach out to the entire public, and try to help it appreciate science—not through technical lecturing, but by emphasizing what science can do to improve our lives: create new energy innovations, new medical technologies, new jobs. And he would try to heal the divisive science-religion conflict, emphasizing how the two can and do coexist peacefully in so many minds, scientist’s and religious believer’s alike.

Of course, there is no president of science—it’s up to us to determine the ultimate direction of the nation’s scientific enterprise, and how that enterprise relates to the society in which it occurs. Gandhi said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” How’s that for a goal?

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.”

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is 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.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

Anyone who ever met the late Michael Crichton—who died of cancer in Los Angeles last week at the age of 66—was first stunned by his height. Crichton stood a staggering 6’9″, and yet by all accounts was a humble giant in person. Certainly that was my impression when the polymathic sci-fi thriller writer, film producer and director, screenwriter, computer programmer, and medical doctor went out of his way to introduce himself to me at a small 2007 scientific gathering at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Whether or not he knew how critically I had written about him, I can’t say.

While Crichton may have been humble in person, the bestselling author—over 150 million total books sold—knew how to court controversy in print. Crichton’s 1992 novel Rising Sun was criticized for its perceived anti-Japanese xenophobia, and 1994′s Disclosure for wrong-headedly turning the problem of sexual harassment upside down by making a woman the aggressor. But the biggest controversy came over 2004′s State of Fear, his anti-global warming polemic, which involves environmental activists who launch a nefarious plot to make us believe climate change is real. Within the confines of the novel, it isn’t—and so the eco-terrorists go about trying to cause unnatural disasters, like blowing a chunk off Antarctica or causing a tsunami (don’t ask).

With it so close to our memories, we should address this ultra-contrarian side of Crichton first—while acknowledging that his other works, and most of all Jurassic Park, surely had a more massive cultural (if not political) impact. State of Fear brought Crichton before the U.S. Senate to testify, and even gained him an audience with President Bush. Festooned with footnotes, as many of Crichton’s books were, and centered on an anti-global warming swashbuckler of a scientist who makes the enviros look dumb intellectually while simultaneously besting the bad guys in mortal combat, the book was a climate skeptic’s dream. Yet as I wrote in The Boston Globe, many scientists cited in Crichton’s footnotes didn’t agree with his use of their work. And as I argued elsewhere, while Crichton may be God of the universe in his novels and thus capable of dictating the laws of nature, in the real world it’s clearly warming due to human activities. Since the publication of State of Fear, the evidence of this has grown stronger still.

I still remember learning, from Crichton’s novel Sphere, about the staggering intelligence of the octopus, which I found fascinating at around age twelve.

Crichton’s motivations for lending such a club to climate skeptics may not have been purely political in nature. Obviously highly intelligent and fascinated with science, he seems to have had a conviction that with his own mind and scientific training—Harvard M.D., researcher at the Salk Institute, anthropology instructor at Cambridge—he could get to the bottom of any issue on his own. Alas, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and a brilliant mind can turn very eccentric. Take Crichton’s odd argument that we should hold climate science to the standards of medical research, which features double-blind placebo controlled trials. This would of course rule out the use of computerized climate simulations, which run various scenarios about the future that are built on a large number of assumptions—but how can we conduct double-blind trials on the climate when we have only one Earth?

Leaving aside State of Fear, in remembering Crichton’s other work we must first acknowledge, with a fair amount of awe, that he was a dramatic cultural force, and a chief definer of the image of science in our culture through the medium of Hollywood. As Steven Spielberg remarked in remembrance, “He was the greatest at blending science with theatrical concepts.”

Perhaps the most common medium through which people encounter science is through science fiction entertainment, and Crichton had a unique knack for wringing drama out of the technical. Hollywood abounds in crappy sci-fi and disaster narratives—think of Volcano, in which one sprouts out of the ground under Los Angeles, or The Core, in which scientists travel to the center of the earth using a material called “Unobtainium”—but Crichton’s stories were always smarter than that, more sophisticated, filled with painstaking details and ideas that sprang from the author’s research. I still remember learning, from Crichton’s novel Sphere, about the staggering intelligence of the octopus, which I found fascinating at around age twelve.

Nowhere did Crichton better demonstrate his powers than with Jurassic Park, which grossed nearly $1 billion at the worldwide box office (although NBC’s long-running medical drama E.R., which Crichton created, has also had a dramatic influence). I recently received this film through Netflix and re-watched it, and couldn’t help noting that all the heroes in the story are scientists, and there are wonderful brainy moments—an exposition of chaos theory, a long tutorial from a cartoonish strand of DNA on how dinosaur cloning works. It was a mega-blockbuster that simultaneously managed to be quite educational.

That’s not to say everything about Jurassic Park necessarily works to the benefit of science’s place in our culture. Numerous critics, and especially Reason magazine’s Ronald Bailey, have complained that Crichton’s plotlines depend heavily on various reiterations of the Frankenstein myth. Science—whether it’s nanotechnology in Prey, or mind-control technology in The Terminal Man, or biotech in Jurassic Park—always runs amok in some way, and pretty soon there’s a body count.

Crichton apparently dismissed such concerns (so Bailey reports), which I think is unjustified. This narrative of hubristic science turning inevitably to evil has become deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness, not necessarily in a healthy way, and Crichton was a significant contributor to that. Research on the negative stereotypes of scientists held by children, who rarely see scientists as role models, makes Hollywood’s influence hard to deny. One scientist, University of Texas-Dallas physicist Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, has even found that when kids encounter real life researchers who visit their classrooms, they think someone’s pulling their leg, because the scientists aren’t anything like the big screen version. As Leslie-Pelecky explained to the magazine Nature: “They might say the person was too ‘normal’ or too good looking to be a scientist. The most heart-breaking thing is when they say, ‘I didn’t think he was real because he seemed to care about us.’” To work to achieve more positive portrayals of science, the National Academies recently launched a project called the Science and Entertainment Exchange, and I’m sure the effect of scientist-stereotypes in entertainment will be one issue they’ll consider.

But let’s let Crichton have the last word here. He engaged with criticism from the scientific community over the influence of his films, and gave a lengthy speech before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, rebutting such charges, in 1999. Crichton argued that movies simply can’t capture the reality of the intellectual process of science, because it isn’t dramatic enough: “(i) Movie characters must be compelled to act. (ii) Movies need villains. (iii) Movie searches are dull. (iv) Movies must move.” And so did Crichton, pouring out novels and films, creating an ingenious corpus that, although controversial and much criticized, has influenced us immeasurably and commands respect.

Chris Mooney is the 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.”

The process itself is extremely complex and will happen very quickly. There will be about 800 people on the transition team, which will spend roughly $9 million. Given that this team will have about 11 weeks to form a new government as the country skids through an economic crisis, it will not be an easy job. The handover of power will involve an unprecedented amount of information and will require fast, effective communication. Briefing books, face-to-face meetings, and phone calls will be insufficient. The transition team must make the most of modern information and communications technology to shape, coordinate, and run the process of moving the next president into office. Here are some suggestions on how that can work.

Previous administrations—and ultimately the American people—have suffered from poor communication and coordination during transition periods.

One of the first priorities of the president-elect must be issues that could affect national security and other vital interests. Ordinarily, this information gets passed around in the form of briefing books and PowerPoint slides. But now, information and communications technology allows experts to conduct briefings remotely using videoteleconferencing, present information via secure webpages and internal wikis, and conduct real-time discussions and make document modifications using collaborative software and chat tools.

Previous administrations—and ultimately the American people—have suffered from poor communication and coordination during transition periods. For example, the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident occurred in Somalia at the time of the Bush 41-to-Clinton transition, and the “Bay of Pigs” occurred during the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition. Ultimately, these crises, and numerous others, boil down to lack of communication, coordination, and collaboration.

But the U.S. Intelligence Community has already cleared a lot of the technical hurdles in this area. Their recent advances with INTELINK and its cousin A-Space are essentially mashups of the functionality civilians are familiar with through Facebook, LinkedIn, GoogleDocs, and Google Reader—all rolled into an addictive work environment. These social networks allow status updates, subscriptions to real-time news feeds, activity streams, content management, a community tag cloud, drag and drop, discussion threads, a “scrapbook,” and widgets. This system is better than anything I know about in the private sector and the whole government should now make good use of it.

Using INTELINK to coordinate the intelligence and national security teams of the incoming administration is but one important example of how social networking software and Web 2.0 tools can facilitate the presidential transition, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What is the transition team?

Broadly defined, the presidential transition includes the entire campaign season, the election cycle, and a number of months after inauguration when the Senate confirms appointees and leaders are stepping into decision-making roles. The team that coordinates this process exists in two critical and intertwined worlds.

The first is in the Executive Office of the President, where transition staff are concerned about staffing the White House, vetting potential cabinet members, developing advisory councils, recruiting lower-level personnel, coordinating with the outgoing administration, communicating with key outside advisors and leaders in government and the private sector, and drafting an initial presidential agenda.

The second world is executive branch departments and agencies, where team members have three main responsibilities: analyzing the overall organization and function of parts of the executive branch, reassessing key senior personnel positions and responsibilities, and looking at pressing and long-term issues in subject-matter areas.

Department-specific teams are especially important during a change in which the incoming president is from a different political party from that of the outgoing administration. In the event that Sen. Barack Obama wins, those transition teams within departments and agencies are likely to be larger than what was normal in the past.

Technology in the transition

During the Clinton-Bush transition to the 43^rd presidency, the United States was just past the Y2K confusion and at the peak of the dot-com bubble; Time-Warner purchased AOL; Microsoft released Windows 2000 and was in the middle of an antitrust case; Netscape launched its open-source Navigator 6.0 browser; Wikipedia did not yet exist; and the first short film to be widely distributed on the Internet, “405: The Movie,” had just appeared.

But now the presidential campaigns are longer, more expensive, and more stressful, and the government is larger. Since that last transition, there is a new department in the executive branch for Homeland Security, as well as significant new coordinating offices like that of the Director of National Intelligence. As such, transition organization will be more difficult than ever.

In this process, personal connections are imperative, and new social software lends itself to precisely these situations. A new administration in transition, just off a grueling campaign, cannot reasonably be expected to comb through mountains of data which are not necessarily well-organized, in agreement, or even fully available due to classification issues. Social technologies, inherently designed to bring people and ideas together, can improve the transition process.

The transparent transition

Eight years after the last hand over of the presidency, collaboration tools have emerged and evolved, and the complexity of projects like managing an 800-person government transition, organizing what might be the largest White House ever, and analyzing a myriad of government agencies, employees, contractors, and policies, could be easier and more effective by drawing some lessons from Wikipedia and even the familiar Facebook.

Immediately post-election but pre-transition, there is a huge need to understand the institutional memory of the White House and of the cabinet agencies. Eight years ago, briefing books—big thick binders of information— were still in vogue. But now, social tools like websites, wikis, and collaborative software can help by making information more widely available, searchable, and discoverable, and it can also promote and aid discussions between relevant transition personnel with areas of overlap.

The White House must also coordinate a recruitment effort to seek out individuals with required expertise to staff the incoming administration. This involves not only the creation of a website for this purpose, but management of the resume information—which they can expect will be about 40,000 applications in the first few weeks and eventually total 70,000 interested persons, according to an article written by Clay Johnson III, the current deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and previously the executive director of the Bush 43 transition team. Social software will also facilitate the associated research for vetting job candidates. Information management tools, collaborative software, advanced Internet search algorithms, and knowledge of online social networks would greatly facilitate a good deal of this important task. In addition, current career government employees could staff some of these thousands of open positions. The transition team is in a unique position to reach out to and recruit those people—even if just temporarily—using social tools. This approach would leverage existing bureaucratic knowledge without risking administrative gaps in the critical first months of the presidency.

Next, the incoming administration will be immediately and constantly overwhelmed with “advice” (some wanted, some unwanted) from think tanks, previous administrations, “experts,” interest groups, lobbyists, governors, legislators, and donors. And this information will come from a variety of sources using diverse media—print, email, video, and audio. Points of contact for these people and groups need to be organized and coordinated; information must be organized and shared; and staffers must meet and sometimes partner with groups, all in the effort to craft the short and long-term agenda of the critical first 100 days (and beyond) of the new administration. New social websites and software allow coordination of formal debates so as to allow actionable conclusions from what might at first seem like the chaos of many opinions. And the new administration might consider using social networks to reach out to stakeholders as well.

Within departments, small teams from the incoming administration will be interacting with existing personnel in order to prepare for the cabinet and sub-cabinet heads, tee up important upcoming issues, and reorganize resources and personnel. Social tools would enable teams interacting with different departments to share information and advice while they perhaps struggle to obtain information or solve problems. Social software can also help coordinate informal social networks and organize advisory groups of outside-subject-matter experts to advise the transition team members, keep track of discussions, and include people who cannot attend in person.

Risks during the transition

Once the president takes office, there is a very real chance of a crisis that will test the new administration. Both World Trade Center incidents occurred in the first year of a new presidency. If this happened in 2009, would formal and informal networks and communication be in place? Social media can reduce these risks by getting the right information to the right people before they need it. Prior to September 11, 2001, groups within the intelligence-gathering community did not share information. Tools like INTELINK, discussed above, have solved many of those information-sharing problems in principle, but the transition team must plug the right people into the system right away—and they have to use it.

Within the Executive Office of the President, every administration’s staff is organized differently according to the president’s desires. But this organization has consequences for communication and effectiveness. For example, staff with insufficient titles cannot go to certain parts of the White House, including the Mess. Where else might important, informal, evolving staff interactions (say, between speechwriters and policy advisors) come from? Social media can help create more of these interactions. One potentially useful idea from corporate America is that every morning each person must enter one sentence into a collaborative system, answering the question, “What are you working on?” These data—available to anyone on the system—are simple, searchable, discoverable, and archivable.

In addition, now in office, the president must focus not only on the voters he needed to get elected, but on the public sentiment of the entire nation. Governing is very different from campaigning. Social software can help with this too. Websites like Twitter offer real-time information on public discussions people are having on the Internet. Quantifying public sentiment using these and other tools, both open and proprietary, will be very important for reaching out, listening, and engaging the citizens post-election, and henceforth for influencing new policies and programs.

Last but certainly not least, the people of America should be engaged in knowing about what is happening during the presidential transition process, and what increased risks (if any) there are during that period. Historical incidents, like the World Trade Center bombings, tell us that there are increased risks. In an increasingly fragmented media and information society, that level of engagement requires more than a press release on the White House website and stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post. It means full multimedia engagement in a myriad of locations and times using a blizzard of tools including blogging, speeches, informal gatherings, mobile technologies, podcasts, online video, and widgets. In addition, the outreach should use social tools that allow not just message “push” but rather bidirectional conversation—increasing citizen participation and interest in government.

Dr. Mark Drapeau (mark.d.drapeau@ugov.gov) is an Associate Research Fellow directing the Social Software for Security (S3) project at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government.

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is author of two previous books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs at The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum. (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

Peter Calamai describes himself—and only half jokingly—as a “grizzled veteran” of the newspaper industry. Over the course of his forty-year career, he has covered a wide range of subjects, but for the past decade Calamai served as the dedicated science reporter for Canada’s most widely read newspaper, the Toronto Star. That’s until June of this year, anyway, when along with one tenth of the paper’s staff, he took a buyout—an all too common occurrence these days, as newspapers cut back on resources in the face of declining subscriptions and ad revenue thanks to competition from the Internet. Today the Star retains medical and environmental reporters, who of necessity do science-related writing in the course of their work, but has not hired another science-centered journalist since Calamai’s departure.

Indeed, the treatment of science at the Star was shrinking long before 2008. As Calamai explained to me recently in Montreal—where we were both participating in a panel discussion about science and the media at McGill University—up until a few years ago the paper ran pages labeled “Science” in its Saturday and Sunday editions. But when those fell by the wayside, the rest of the paper didn’t make up for it; Calamai could still file science feature stories, but the total column space for science coverage declined noticeably.

In a time of media industry upheaval, Calamai’s story sounds achingly familiar. Indeed, the only recent study that I know of on the subject, undertaken by longtime science reporter Cristine Russell on behalf of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, showed that large numbers of newspapers are making cuts similar to those made by the Star. Russell found that between 1989 and 2005, the number of U.S. newspapers featuring a weekly science section declined precipitously, from 95 to 34.

I fully believe there’s a professional (and perhaps even moral) duty, on the part of the media, to cover science and cover it well.

It may be understandable that newspapers are cutting back on total coverage in light of the economic challenges they face; it may even be understandable that they see science as one obvious area where they can save dollars and space. But still, one behind-the-scenes detail that Calamai related in Montreal just blew my mind. When the Star got rid of its formal science section, he remembered, almost no one called in to complain. Sure, there were a handful of protests—Calamai estimates about 12 at most—but certainly nothing like the kind of volume that might prompt the paper’s management to reconsider its decision.

It’s a fact which puts a troubling gloss on the not-unfamiliar narrative of declining science content in the media. That it’s happening isn’t in doubt; neither is the cause (economics). But the question of whether there will be anything resembling a concerted response to the phenomenon from the people who most notice and lament it remains very much up in the air.

My sense is that many scientists and science aficionados are very unhappy with the terrible shake their subject often gets in the press. Certainly I’ve certainly heard scientists complain about media coverage countless times. But if science’s dedicated coterie of followers aren’t willing to pick up the phone and raise hell when Canada’s biggest newspaper cuts back science coverage, is it any surprise that many media outlets fail to give science its due?

Don’t get me wrong: I fully believe there’s a professional (and perhaps even moral) duty, on the part of the media, to cover science and cover it well. And here I’m talking about the mass media; not just the science magazines, not just the newspapers. I also believe there are more than enough people in the U.S.—and in the world—who care about such coverage to make it economically viable (if done engagingly and entertainingly enough). Yet if these two realms, the media and science, are so disconnected that the latter won’t make a ruckus about bad moves by the former, then it’s hard to see how sciencecould ever compete with sports, or even the horoscope, for newspaper space. Rather, we should fully expect that newspapers, facing hard times, will keep making decisions much like the one the Star made.

So perhaps we should acknowledge the fact that pointing fingers at the press, and taking principled stands about its obligation to elevate national discourse, serve democracy, and so on, represents a type of idealism that we can no longer afford. These media companies are moneymaking businesses, and struggling ones at that. So of course they can’t always stick to the loftiest goals, even though many folks within the news business themselves regularly bemoan the way things are headed.

Isn’t it time, then, that those of us who care about science, and who think it belongs in the media, start doing something about it? Because while the Toronto Star no longer has a science section, and neither do many other papers, others still remain.

One suggestion is to be preemptive: If your paper still carries a regular science section, write the editors and tell them that it’s important to you as a reader, and that you value the content. It’s particularly critical that lay readers outside of the formal scientific community make this clear, thereby underscoring that it’s not just a small scientific elite that appreciates such coverage. And don’t think for a second that just because your paper carries a fair amount science, it has proven impervious to the market forces affecting the industry as a whole. The science journalists who remain at newspapers are facing the pressure too: I’ve heard from several that they’ve increasingly been transformed into part-time bloggers, compelled to post constant story updates to the paper’s website. Inevitably, such new duties leave these journalists with far less time to dig in for in-depth stories of the sort that really inform, educate, and can have large policy repercussions.

Editors should also recognize what my colleagues at the ScienceDebate2008 coalition have impressed upon the presidential campaigns: that the health, wealth, and safety of the nation depend upon science and technology, and consequently the American people deserve to know about it. So not only should media outlets cover science, but they should cover its intersection with these other spheres, which should, in turn, help broaden the subject’s appeal.

And finally, let’s just admit it: If the longstanding for-profit economic model of journalism cannot survive in this day of free content on the Web, then perhaps some major news organizations need to become nonprofit 501(c)3 organizations, committed to serving as neutral, educational, public service institutions essential to the maintenance of democracy. This trend, too, has already begun—witness the launch of Pro Publica, a nonprofit investigative journalism outfit—and over time, perhaps it will change the media landscape considerably. But in the meantime, if we care about science journalism, the bottom line is clear—we have to fight for it.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is author of two previous books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs at The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum. (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

When I started writing for Science Progress a year ago, I wasn’t sure what kind of publication would materialize. True, I had some idea of the kinds of arguments I myself would contribute—being known, among other matters, for discussing political interference with science and the problem of science communication—but it wasn’t clear where the broader experiment would go.

At its one year anniversary, however, I can honestly say that in my opinion, this site—regularly featuring the work of Rick Weiss, Jonathan Moreno, and numerous other insightful contributors—ranks among the very best sources of timely, rigorous, and intellectually serious science policy thinking on the web.

To see that, let’s peruse some of the important threads that have been pursued here over the last year, to give a sense both of the extensive scope and of the quality of analysis. I want to talk about five themes in particular that have recurred at Science Progress: how to restore science advice to the next president and next administration, including revitalizing the role of science in the federal government; the parallel importance of science in Congress; the challenges facing young scientists in America today, especially in the context of concerns about preserving our scientific competitiveness; the knotty but crucial problem of science communication; and the future of the life sciences.

In the wake of an administration that failed to make science a priority, Science Progress writers have worked to outline a better, healthier course for next president to take. Ranging from my own parsing of the National Academies’ advice for the next administration—most notably, that it must quickly appoint a presidential science adviser who can restore the prominence of this role—to bioethicist Art Caplan’s attempt to put six pressing science policy concerns on the administration’s radar (hint: we have to do far more than simply resolve the stem cell issue), you might say Science Progress has provided a cheat sheet concerning what to do, and what to pay attention to, should you happen to be running a government that actually wants to heed the “reality-based community.” Of foremost importance to that government will be having scientists on hand and allowing them easy access to the president and other top policymakers, not only to advise on the issues of the moment but also to provide foresight—so that the issues of the future, like synthetic biology or geoengineering, won’t take anyone by surprise.

And as with the administration, so with Congress—the House and Senate haven’t exactly been science-friendly places of late, but that can and must change. First, there’s the needed but long-delayed solution of bringing back the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, discussed in this column by Darlene Cavalier. But there’s also the imperative to get more science-friendly members of Congress elected to begin with, so as to improve the scientific literacy of the body from within. We must pursue multiple strategies simultaneously to increase the resonance of science for the average legislator, so that he or she can see that science underlies many or even most important issues handled in Congress and, indeed, directly affects voters back home.

The advancement of scientific research isn’t the same as progress in scientific outreach and communication, and the science community has traditionally privileged the former and given short shrift to the latter.

Science Progress has also been an important outlet for analysis on what is arguably the most visible issue in science policy today: How to ensure ongoing U.S. competitiveness in the face of challenges from emerging science superpowers like India and China. But while authors writing here certainly wouldn’t argue that such competitiveness concerns should be ignored, they have brought out an important sub-theme that has all too frequently been neglected: Namely, that if we want to compete in the broadest sense of the term, simply producing more scientists isn’t enough. For after all, note Science Progress contributors Sheril Kirshenbaum and Beryl Lieff Benderly, we already have staggering numbers of talented young postdocs stuck in holding patterns, without nearly enough academic jobs awaiting them. There is a constriction of opportunity for the youngest scientists in America, and if we want to remain competitive, that’s just as serious an issue as the total number of scientists and engineers we’re producing.

Another important, related wrinkle has been the argument that international scientific competitiveness, alone, may not be enough. For while the United States must continue to excel in research (and let us not forget that our nation still leads the world in science), it’s entirely possible for laboratory science to thrive even as the influence and relevance of science, in policy and to the average citizen, decline. In other words, the advancement of scientific research isn’t the same as progress in scientific outreach and communication, and the science community has traditionally privileged the former and given short shrift to the latter. And so a recurring theme here has been that scientists must study the modern media, and engage in outreach to other important sectors of society. Moreover, such outreach must go beyond simply lecturing about the facts, and come to include broad public engagement on equal footing with non-scientists—as Rick Borchelt and Kathy Hudson argue—which is the only way to break down the walls between the experts and everybody else, rather than reinforcing them.

Such rapprochement will be particularly critical going forward as we watch science generate a deeper and deeper understanding of ourselves. Today genetic research is bringing us ever closer to a world in which being able to sample each individual’s DNA will trigger personalized medical solutions tailored to a given arrangement of base-pairs; even as burgeoning neuroscience work is explaining more and more about how we actually come to be the creatures we are, from the brain up. Ongoing, rapid progress in such fields will raise a host of new ethical concerns and has great potential to alarm the public by calling into question traditional concepts of identity, free will, morality, and obligations between generations. Once again, Science Progress has become a leader in analyzing the bioethical challenges implicit in these unstoppable new discoveries.

We live in a paradoxical time. One the one hand, it’s one in which science is changing our world more than ever before, and matters to policy and individual lives more than ever. Yet at the same time, it has become increasingly difficult to get science on the radar of politicians, the media, and the public, and to make it resonate. In this context, Science Progress plays a unique role as a connector between scientific research and the policy and public process—a task that’s now more vital than ever, and that will only grow more so in 2008 and beyond.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

There is no American progress without science progress.

We entered the scene against a backdrop of deep concern. Was our government truly committed to policymaking based on the best available evidence? Did elected officials appreciate that not a sector of a modern society can be sustained without constant efforts to innovate, that the very future of the country hangs in the balance? Is there freedom of speech for those appointed to protect the public from disease and improve their prospects of a society that promotes human flourishing?

Now, to top it all off, the current financial crisis is not reassuring about the future of funding for research and development, either by government or the private sector.

It will be years before we know whether we have turned the corner on these worries. Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that a serious conversation has begun. The ScienceDebate 2008 movement did not result in a presidential debate on science policy, but it did stimulate renewed interest in the importance of getting these issues on the radar at the highest levels of our leadership. Several major organizations have published analyses and recommendations for enhancing the role of White House science advice, and there is buzz about reviving some version of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The organized scientific community is making a greater effort to communicate with the public, including an increasing number of public events.

It seems to us that the movement to put the direction of American science back on the map is quickening and, through our contributors and readers, Science Progress has become part of that movement. We are pleased that traffic to our site has steadily increased over the year, as have subscribers to our weekly email. But the most important measures of our success are the dynamism and intelligence of our articles and blog posts and the feedback we receive from readers around the country. Besides several highly visible panels at the Center for American Progress and the National Press Club, we have helped sponsor such events as the World Stem Cell Summit. Several weeks ago Science Progress columnist Chris Mooney and I participated in a science policy panel at Ole Miss, as part of the run up to the first presidential debate. And of course the first hard copy of Science Progress was widely distributed to science policy experts in Washington, and we have organized a group of experts on financing science and technology to advance our understanding of the elements needed to promote regional centers of innovation.

We are excited about the new opportunities to make our case that will come with a new administration and a new congress. And next year Bellevue Literary Press will provide us with another way to reach the public with the first book to emerge from Science Progress. You can expect to hear more about this project, entitled Science Next, in 2009.

I’m very grateful to the people who do the heavy lifting, especially assistant editor Andrew Pratt and editorial director Ed Paisley. Kit Batten and Mike Rugnetta are two CAP staffers who guide and write for us, and we scored a real coup in recruiting the wise and experienced science reporter for The Washington Post, Rick Weiss, as a regular columnist along with Chris Mooney.

Ultimately, it was the leadership of the Center for American Progress, especially CAP’s president John Podesta, who took what we think was a winning gamble on this endeavor. Like our contributors and readers, they know that there is no American progress without science progress.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is author of two previous books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs at The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum. (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

The good news is that September 10 has passed and the Earth is still here. But of course, it may only be because of a mechanical glitch.

In case you haven’t already heard, I’m referring to widespread concerns that the recently completed Large Hadron Collider or LHC—the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, built by Europe’s CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research)—will in some way destroy the world. The alleged means by which it might do so are numerous: Some worry the machine’s high speed proton collisions could create tiny black holes that grow to engulf us all; others that it might generate “strangelet” particles that change everything into their particular form of nastiness; and so on.

Scientists have repeatedly dismissed such concerns—cosmic ray collisions with the Earth’s atmosphere, they point out, are happening all the time and are much akin to what the LHC will produce, and we’re still here—but they’re up against something not entirely rational in nature. In a sense, people just can’t help it: They’ve been trained, most centrally by Hollywood, to think of big strange science projects as having an inherent tendency to go badly awry. And there is no bigger science project in the world than the multibillion-dollar LHC.

Sure enough, there’s currently a film going forward, based on Dan Brown’s book Angels & Demons, the plot of which turns on villains trying to use antimatter taken from CERN to destroy the Vatican. CERN has set the record straight, but the likelihood that its webpage will equal the Ron Howard/Tom Hanks film in viewership is about the same as the probability of the LHC sucking us all into a vacuum.

It ought to be possible for scientists to be more anticipatory of public reactions, to predict them, to monitor sentiments and misinformation that’s circulating and seek to engage long before things reach the boiling point.

Meanwhile, several lawsuits have been filed trying to stop the LHC from beginning its dastardly proton smashing. Where scientists merely want to achieve a deeper understanding of the nature of matter and the universe—and perhaps discover the mysterious Higgs boson, and thereby determine whether particle physics’ “standard model” is correct—public reaction has been so extreme that it has prompted death threats directed towards CERN researchers.

In any event, the apocalypse is currently on hold: In early runs the LHC blew a gasket and now won’t be operational until 2009, when the first particle-colliding experiments can begin.

The delay gives us ample time to reflect on this whole saga—which serves as a particularly noteworthy example of what is today almost a general principle regarding major scientific events that draw mass attention. Members of the public, having scarcely followed the underlying research, and nourishing very different initial assumptions, rarely see such developments in the way that scientists do. In some cases, they may strongly recoil on grounds that to scientists might seem simply irrational.

Take, for instance, the 2006 vote by the International Astronomical Union to demote Pluto from planetary status. The decision of a relatively small group of scientists, made on the strict basis of technical considerations, prompted a global backlash that is still ongoing. In such cases, the public, which hasn’t been monitoring developments in science, is suddenly shocked to hear what is going on; and the scientists, who haven’t been monitoring the public, are just as surprised at the backlash.

And yet these are critical moments for the world’s scientific community, centrally because it’s so hard to get science on the public radar to begin with. When it finally does occur, you don’t want it to be over something petty, like the Pluto issue, or something silly, like fears that the Large Hadron Collider will make us all cease to exist. The good news is that such developments spark dramatic levels of interest in science; but the bad news is that they’re highly negative encounters with the scientific community, rather than positive ones.

So how should we deal with such situations? Well, it’s difficult: You can’t easily stamp out misinformation, and in the case of particle accelerators, apocalyptic concerns greatly predate the LHC. However, for precisely this reason, it ought to be possible for scientists to be more anticipatory of public reactions, to predict them, to monitor sentiments and misinformation that’s circulating and seek to engage long before things reach the boiling point.

In fact, that’s precisely what’s happening with nanotechnology: There’s a lurking worry, having been fanned Michael Crichton’s novel Prey and other chatter, that this form of research, too, could unleash some sort of apocalypse. But the National Nanotechnology Initiative has engaged scholars to study and anticipate such concerns, in the context of more broadly examining public participation in nanotechnology. In short, the fear of backlash, based on misunderstanding, is being addressed through attempts to reach out to stakeholders and inform them about what nanotechnology can and can’t do.

There’s outreach from CERN, too—the hilarious Large Hadron Rap has been seen by millions of people on YouTube, and several safety studies have been undertaken to respond to public fears. Still, the official responses appear to have been more reactive than proactive; and the black hole and strangelet fears have long since reverberated around the globe.

So as we wait for the particles to finally collide, let’s not forget to study collisions between scientists and the public as well: There are strong forces here, too, that are poorly understood.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is author of two previous books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs at The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum. (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

Tomorrow, along with Science Progress editor Jonathan Moreno, I’ll be at the University of Mississippi—the site of the first of three official presidential debates—for an event that may be as close as we come, geographically and perhaps substantively as well, to achieving the explicit goal of the ScienceDebate2008 initiative. Ole Miss has planned a variety of events in the run up to the big show on September 26, and thanks to the initiative of philosophy professor Neil Manson, one of them will focus on science policy and the election—our panel.

I was invited down to Mississippi because of my role in originally helping to impel the ScienceDebate2008 push—I was one of six founders and currently serve on the steering committee, although in this column I speak only for myself—and for my many commentaries on the relationship between politics and science over the past several years. And coming from this background, let me say that at Ole Miss I plan on taking the opportunity to state some strong opinions. Although I suppose this could still change, I’m not happy with the minimal role that science has played in this election. I find it a revealing comment on the media and the political process today.

These responses, though I’m very glad to have them, do not substitute for a science and technology policy debate.

In fairness, we who have worked on ScienceDebate2008 are pleased and heartened that in the past few weeks, Barack Obama and now John McCain have both answered the fourteen written science policy questions that we put to their campaigns, questions winnowed down from an original field of some 3,400 submitted by our supporters. The replies have gotten considerable blogospheric pickup, and make for some interesting reading, especially if you’re inclined to do a compare and contrast (which is not the purpose of this column). It is not unprecedented to find presidential candidates answering science policy questions in writing—George W. Bush and John Kerry both did so for Science magazine in 2004, for instance—but we’re glad that it has happened in this election just as it did in the last one, and that the responses are quite meaty and substantive.

Still, I’m not completely satisfied. Although I’m sure the candidates agree with and approved them, let’s remember that these responses are coming from the campaigns, not the candidates directly. Their mass media pickup, as opposed to their online pickup, has thus far been relatively small—nothing remotely comparable to the mass attention paid to Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy, for instance. And they do not show us the candidates intellectually engaging with science policy or with each other in a dialogic way, so that we can determine how they think and how much they really know.

In short, these responses, though I’m very glad to have them, do not substitute for a science and technology policy debate, and neither do they achieve the central goal of ScienceDebate2008—namely, to dramatically elevate the prominence of science policy in this historic election, and to do so in a nonpartisan way.

Why didn’t we get more? Well, one central factor is the role of the mass media—and especially the television news media—in all of this. I’m fairly confident in saying that if the year had been 1958, not 2008, and the nation’s scientific brain trust had called upon its presidential candidates to discuss science policy just one year after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the politicians would not have turned down the opportunity. That’s because science was far more prominent in American life those days, and the call for a debate would have garnered much more concerted attention in a much less fragmented, frantic, and entertainment- and spectacle-driven media environment.

By contrast, today the story with ScienceDebate2008 and the media has been the same from the start: Specialized science-oriented media outlets and blogs are very interested in the initiative, but mass TV news media outlets—the CNNs, the NBCs, and so on—don’t seem to think it’s news that the American scientific community has organized like never before to call for a presidential science policy debate. They’re wrong, but nevertheless, they’ve made their call, and they play a very large role in setting the agenda.

And what of the candidates and campaigns? First, they respond heavily to the agenda setting power of the mass media, so it’s a no-brainer in this respect that they would not participate in ScienceDebate2008. Furthermore, I suspect their political advisers aren’t very keen on the idea, perhaps seeing plenty of risks in the prospect of such a debate and relatively few rewards. So especially if the media isn’t blaring away about it, why take a chance?

We achieved a lot with ScienceDebate2008, especially when it came to mobilizing the science community; perhaps it’s over-optimistic to think we could have accomplished everything we originally sought. But I think we have to keep pushing. The goal here, as I see it, is nothing less than to restore the prominence of science in American public life—and we’re still a long way from achieving it.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Hurricanes are incredibly dramatic—we’re talking about storms capable of swelling to the size of Texas and churning out as much power as the entire world’s electricity generating capacity.

After all, for those advocates and bloggers who desperately want to draw attention to climate change, storms pose an often irresistible opportunity. And who can blame them: Global warming is a subject that the media has a great deal of trouble handling, because it is a slow-moving, uncertain, long-range threat that always has to compete with sudden, urgent problems and scandals for attention. Accordingly, there are many grounds upon which to slam press coverage of climate change (see a full discussion here and here by Columbia Journalism Review‘s Curtis Brainard). Personally, I think one statistic says it all: According to a study by Yale University’s Anthony Leiserowitz, the fantastical 2004 global warming disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow, garnered ten times as much media attention as the 2001 release of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report, the definitive scientific study of climate change and its impacts. In short, in the total media arena, a climate change blockbuster with little connection to reality made a vastly bigger splash than the release of the single most important scientific study.

Hurricanes, however, command intense and sustained media attention whenever they threaten. And no wonder: In many ways, they’re much more like a movie than a new scientific paper. Hurricanes are incredibly dramatic—we’re talking about storms capable of swelling to the size of Texas and churning out as much power as the entire world’s electricity generating capacity—and provide plenty of visuals, ranging from sublime satellite images of hurricane eyes to on-the-ground footage of wind-whipped reporters occasionally dodging palm tree fronds and flying billboards. No wonder advocates ranging from Al Gore to, most recently, the National Wildlife Federation have sought to emphasize the hurricane-climate connection.

The science, though, is tricky. There’s a general scientific expectation that the average storm ought to be able to achieve a greater intensity due to climate change’s heating of the oceans—but it’s also quite possible that total storm numbers may decrease, and that different parts of the world will be affected differently. Moreover, regardless of theoretical expectations, there’s an open debate over the extent to which global warming can explain recent, high levels of hurricane activity, of the sort that we’ve seen in the Atlantic region since 1995.

My own view is that while hurricanes can and even should be used to discuss global warming, it must be done with rigorous fidelity to the current state of scientific understanding—something that’s hardly easy to achieve when scientific understanding on this topic is a moving target. Nevertheless, using a language that emphasizes risk rather than certainty—and, of course, avoiding the causal attribution of any individual storm to climate change—generally insulates against criticism. For instance, regarding an eerie, record-breaking storm like 2007′s Category 5 Cyclone Gonu, I might say something like this: “Scientists predict that hurricanes should worsen due to global warming…and when you see a seemingly unprecedented storm like Gonu, doesn’t it at least make you worry that they’re right?”

Gonu occurred in the Arabian Sea, but we can translate a similar argument easily for the Atlantic region. For instance, one might observe that: “Since 2003 in the Atlantic, there have been no less than eight Category 5 hurricanes—an unprecedented number. Even though scientists continue to debate the issue, doesn’t that make you wonder whether global warming could be at work here?”

For Gulf Coasters, meanwhile, there’s an approach that may resonate even more, and that suffers from less scientific uncertainty. One of the most scientifically airtight aspects of climate change is sea level rise, as higher temperatures cause the thermal expansion of seawater and melt land-based ice, which flows into the world’s oceans. This effect is, essentially, built into the definition of global warming, which means we can basically promise, for any coastal area, that seas are already rising and will continue to do so for decades or even centuries to come. As this occurs, any future land-falling hurricane will drive its wall of water substantially further inland than before. Ergo, the hurricane risk increases because of global warming—it’s that simple.

And there’s something else that Floridians, recently drenched by Tropical Storm Fay, might duly note: Global warming also, by definition, increases the intensity of precipitation in storms, because air holds more water vapor at higher temperatures. This is nothing more than basic physics, but its implications are profound. Hurricanes are, in essence, a triple threat—they can hurt you through wind, through their storm surges, and through their sustained downpours. And the downpours, on average, ought to be worse as a result of climate change. Once again, that’s hard to dispute.

However, here’s something that, as a global warming advocate, you really can’t do: Make an opportunistic leap from these arguments about hurricanes to a very different atmospheric phenomenon: tornadoes. As I reported in New Scientist last month, the science in this area is just too new, and too uncertain, to let us predict whether tornadoes ought to become more numerous or worse due to climate change. Indeed, scientists are just beginning to study the effect that climate change may have on the severe thunderstorms that spawn these tiny, short lived, but very intense whirlwinds—but the second order change to tornadoes themselves is far too uncertain to characterize at this time, and impossible to include in climate models due to problems of scale. Making a strong link between recent intense tornadic activity and climate change thus represents true opportunism and ought to be avoided—at least until more studies come in on this very novel and little-researched topic.

In the end, given the uncertainty and the careful language that advocates must use to discuss hurricane threats in the context of climate change, one could argue that better messaging strategies are called for. When presidential candidates, politicians, and the Center for American Progress itself talk about “Green Jobs,” after all, they’re basically talking about climate change, but in an economic context where the science isn’t really subject to dispute, because it isn’t part of the message at all. When storms threaten, we may want to talk about them—but most of the time, for most audiences, messages that involve positive and hopeful economics, rather than uncertain and contested science, are probably the way to go.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Effect Measure goes where few other dare and questions the validity of the Ivins fiasco, not once but twice this week. The evidence is the same as what the mainstream media presents, but the authors arrive at a different conclusion from the FBI’s.

Joe Romm, writing at Science Blog’s Next Generation of Energy Ideas blog, explains that if we don’t stem the flood of carbon pouring out of coal-fired power plants, nothing else we do to stop climate change will matter.

Mira Kolodkin at SEA’s blog covers the FDA’s inability to adequately follow up on illegal uses of drugs and comments on the GAO’s suggestion of a tracking system to help the FDA respond to complaints of violations more efficiently.

Brandon Keim at Wired touches on the bioethical implications of cloning Booger and comments on misconceptions about personhood. He explains that Booger, like people, was more than his genes.

SOURCE: Walker & Company

We are living in the carbon age.

Former Time magazine-reporter-turned-environmental-policy-analyst Eric Roston will make his Colbert Report debut tonight talking about his new book, The Carbon Age.

Science Progress featured an interview with Roston earlier this month that ranged across the various scientific fields connected by the carbon atom. He explained why he wanted to write the book like this:

The book is also an attempt to say, “Alright look, lets just take a breather here for a second. Lets peel back some of these categories, look at something very fundamental, and see if we can’t come up with a way to rethink the way we think about the world.” If you retreat to carbon, which is the central structural element of all life and civilization, and you build up from the central element of our civilization, then you understand how energy and climate and personal health and industrial materials are all far more interrelated and interconnected than we give them credit for.

Roston isn’t the only science expert to sit down with Stephen Colbert in recent months. Physicist and author Brian Greene talked about the World Science Festival back in May. Contributing Editor Chris Mooney pointed out that talking science in such a hip setting is just what the Ph.D. ordered: “We can’t simply assume that traditional science journalists will carry the message of science to the whole population. Rather, we need almost the reverse process—for science to bring its message to the entirety of the media.”

So tune in to Comedy Central at 11:30 p.m. EST tonight and learn how carbon organizes your life.

Update: Watch Eric talk about how “carbon is not the enemy”:

SOURCE: Flickr/Andrew Huff

Embryonic stem cell research, strong scientific input on global warming policy, and more federal funding for scientific research: these are all things the American public wants.

Recent polling shows that 80 percent of survey respondents think the federal government should fund scientific research, “even if it brings no immediate benefits.” According to Ruy Teixeria at the Center for American Progress, opinion polls also indicate that while President Bush thinks embryonic stem cell research is morally unacceptable, fewer and fewer Americans agree with him each year. In 2002, a Gallup poll revealed that 54 percent of Americans found embryonic stem cell research morally acceptable. In 2007, 64 percent were on board. That number is even higher when framed in the context of specific diseases embryonic stem cell research could help cure. Yet federal funding policies continue to limit stem cell research in this country.

The disparities between current federal funding and the amount of funding Americans think should go towards scientific research might be narrowed if we just listened to our scientists. The polls show that the American public want scientists to have more of a say in policy when it comes to issues like global warming, stem cell research, and genetically modified food. Scientists, survey takers feel, are more informed and more impartial decisionmakers than business leaders, religious leaders, or politicians. In fact, Teixeria found that Americans express a higher level of confidence in the leadership of the scientific community than they do in any other institution besides the military. You can read the full report on “What the Public Really Wants on Science” on the CAP website.

In the aftermath, however, I’m highly enthusiastic. I sense a strong hunger among young scientists (and especially graduate students and postdocs, who stare down a highly uncertain job market) for better training in dealing with the media—not to mention in learning how to explain and share their research with friends, family, and other people very close to them.

Plus, it turns out that creating productive collisions between scientific content and media formats can be a heck of a lot of fun–particularly when we got to talking about sheep (but more on that later).

Scientists have long held to a kind of classroom-oriented, one-way model for the dissemination of their knowledge—e.g., they know the science, they tell it, the public understands it and accepts it.

Working with Nisbet, we started off the boot camp on a fairly scholarly footing—assigning the students a list of readings about science, media, and the public from top journals like Public Understanding of Science and Science Communication. Interestingly, these were not the sort of readings that the students (ranging from undergraduates to postdocs; we also had several participants who worked at Caltech) seemed to have encountered before.

This set the stage for a morning session in which Nisbet outlined the progress made in the fields of communication and science studies over several decades as scholars have parsed how scientists interact with different segments of the public and seek to communicate. A core issue: Scientists have long held to a kind of classroom-oriented, one-way model for the dissemination of their knowledge—e.g., they know the science, they tell it, the public understands it and accepts it. And everybody’s happy. Except, that’s not what really happens out in the world.

In contrast, evidence from the latest installment of the National Science Foundation’s Science and Engineering Indicators report—whose seventh chapter traditionally focuses on public attitudes and understanding of science—suggests that while Americans share a broad respect for science, they don’t unquestioningly accept what it tells them, especially if they perceive a conflict between that information and personal values or experiences. This Nisbet illustrated, in part, with some revealing polling data culled from the NSF report: Only 42 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals”; but 74 percent agreed after the following wording change: “according to the theory of evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” In short, people know very well what the science says—but they also reserve the right to reject it.

A similar point came across when we surveyed one of the classic studies concerning how different publics interact with and apprehend scientific information. British science studies scholar Brian Wynne has written extensively on the experience of Cumbrian sheep farmers who, in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, found government scientists suddenly ordering them to stop moving and selling their sheep due to radioactive fallout risk. The sheep farmers rely, for their livelihood, upon raising lambs high in the British Lake District’s famous uplands—think landscapes out of a William Wordsworth poem—and here came the experts telling them they had to put their business on hold to wait for sheep and soil radiation levels to go down.

At first, the farmers took the scientists’ advice and waited. But the government experts’ confident predictions that contamination levels would quickly clear up proved incorrect, and the ban on the sheep trade was extended indefinitely—threatening farmers with ruin. Meanwhile, the scientists began to set up experiments on the sheep, but ignored the farmers’ specialized knowledge of how they behave; consequently, the experiments failed. (Here, feel free to imagine startled and upset sheep jumping all over nerdy researchers.) It didn’t help matters that a nearby nuclear reactor was known to have undergone a previous accident and caused radiation contamination in the area—and there were longstanding suspicions in the community that this had been covered up.

We need a “paradigm sheep” in how scientists think about interacting with the public.

In short, the sheep farmers became increasingly distrustful of the arrogant assertions of government scientists who didn’t seem to credit their own sophisticated understanding of all things sheep-related. And they had every right to be. The scientists weren’t communicating or even taking their audience seriously, and so kept making fairly bone-headed mistakes. Hence the joke that came up later with the Caltech students, over beer and dinner: We need a “paradigm sheep” in how scientists think about interacting with the public.

The afternoon at Caltech was my turn: I had to lead a more hands-on media training for scientists who might someday find themselves being interviewed for print or radio or even sitting in front of the camera. So I started out by showing students examples of scientists involved in mass communication that I’d referenced in previous Science Progress columns—Brian Greene on The Colbert Report, several scientists appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America. I then moved on to lists of do’s and don’t for dealing with the media—do challenge journalists’ angles and incorrect reports; don’t tell them things you wouldn’t want to see appear on the front page of The New York Times.

The final segment then focused on teaching the scientists how to draw up and deliver a “message.” One commonly suggested approach is to outline a triangle-shaped diagram with your simple message written in the middle, three supporting points at each point of the triangle, and along each side, three talking points (expressed in “sound bites”) that support those points. I made the scientists break into teams, come up with messages, and appoint one of their number to appear on “The Mooney Report”—a mock interview program for a general audience—in which I sought to knock them off message.

The scientists did a great job, in general, but there were certainly moments when it wasn’t hard to drag them away from talking about what they wanted to talk about. At one point a scientist seeking to explain advances in cell reprogramming referred to research using “mouse models.” I asked her if they were attractive. When another scientist tried to explain how ice discovered on Mars can tell us about past climates on the planet, I asked about Martian canals and then we spent much of the time discussing extraterrestrial life (off message!). And then came the scientist designated to explain nanotechnology—I asked him “How small is small?”, and pretended to be obsessed with nanotech’s fashion implications. Not at all what he was expecting.

From all of this, I learned that I’m a bit of a smart aleck. But I’m confident the students learned something much more important: The language and approach they use to talk with their peers just can’t dominate their approach to communicating with everyone else, least of all the media. That’s a message that seems to strike home these days among many, many young scientists—but the question remains, will broader scientific institutions embrace it as well?

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Like a growing number of others, I can no longer pretend that this doesn’t matter.

The orderly and unbiased testing of reality to see how things actually work—the art and science of science—has ever been the engine of better health, higher productivity and greater economic power, not to mention enhanced entertainment and leisure-time options. So it is something of a wonder that so many today eschew it, and so openly.

But while incurious leaders and an undereducated public surely account for much of this disconnect, scientists and the marketers of science deserve blame too, having done so much to lose the public’s trust.

Unkeepable promises, exaggerated claims, financial conflicts of interest. It all starts to sound like the worst of politics and business. So why believe scientists when they tell you that the Earth is going to cook, or that vaccines don’t cause autism, or that life has been living for 4 billion years?

This is an excellent time for a Renaissance of reason. For one thing, the world is not waiting for us to put our lab coats back on. And while there is nothing that says the United States really has to be No. 1 in science, being on top is good for the competitive juices and can, if nothing else, bolster the gross national product. But more fundamental is the simple fact that facts work best. They are the raw materials on which ingenuity and innovation work their alchemy.

It’s not just the facts, Ma’am, of course. “Facts do not speak for themselves,” Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “they are read in the light of theory.” And not just scientific theory, as Gould probably meant, but political theory too. So yes, when it comes to crafting policies, power and politics will have their say.

But first there has got to be an honest call for facts. And some assurance that the facts that do come in—the ones showing that new drug to be a winner, for example—are not just the ones that were left standing after the evidence for nasty side effects was buried.

The United States has lost a good deal of credibility in recent years, and has even been ridiculed, because of its careless blending of faith and fact. Faith, for example, that government and taxes are bad and that markets will bring us what we need, even as evidence has repeatedly shown that without blue-skies, taxpayer-funded basic research there would be no Internet, no biotechnology, no DNA databases to convict the criminal or exonerate the bystander—not to mention no science for science’s sake, the nonprofitable but hugely enriching enterprise of finding out what the heck we are and where we came from.

We Americans have been ridiculed, but we can fight cat calls with fact calls. My goal is to have history look back at the post-Bush era as the time when evidence was reintegrated into the business of government decision making.

The full press release:

For Immediate Release
June 9, 2008

Contact
John Neurohr, 202.481.8182
jneurohr@americanprogress.org

RELEASE: Rick Weiss Joins CAP as a Senior Fellow

Washington, D.C. – The Center for American Progress announced today that Rick Weiss, veteran Washington Post science reporter, has joined the Center as a Senior Fellow. Weiss will be initiating and contributing to a number of projects at the Center, and will be a regular contributor to Science Progress, the Center’s science magazine.

“My overarching goal is the reintroduction of evidence into the policy-making process,” Weiss said. “When it comes to designing political solutions to the energy and food crises, environmental health and other pressing problems, we are bound to fail if ideology continues to trump scientific reality.”

During his 15 years at The Post Weiss covered a wide range of topics relating to science, medicine, health and public policy, with a major focus on the ethical, legal, social, political and economic implications of research advances. He was the newspaper’s lead analyst on such hot-button issues as cloning and stem cells, agricultural biotechnology, and nanotechnology and led coverage of the civil liberties and consumer protection issues raised by the genomics revolution and personalized DNA testing.

“We could not be happier to welcome Rick Weiss as a Senior Fellow here at the Center for American Progress,” said President and CEO John Podesta. “Rick’s insight, expertise and understanding of the science community will be an incredible asset for all of us. We all look forward to working side by side with Rick on issues that, as of late, have not garnered the attention they deserve.”

Weiss contributed a chapter to “Wrestling with Behavioral Genetics – Science, Ethics and Public Conversation” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and is the recipient of many awards, including the National Association of Science Writers’ Science and Society Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science Journalism Award, and the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting.

For this achievement alone, Greene and his wife, former ABC producer and festival co-founder Tracy Day, truly deserve to be called the “first couple of New York science,” a phrase generated by New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye and one that I hope will stick. I’ve been scanning the web, and it has been hard to find anything but rave reviews for what Greene and Day created in New York—tales of fascinating, sold out panels simply abound.

But let’s be clear about the true nature of this success, which I think depends at least as much on the the types of media coverage that the World Science Festival garnered as it does on how many people actually attended. The attention to the festival clearly went well beyond traditional science media, which for the most part have a fairly limited reach. Not only did the World Science Festival get incredible billing on Comedy Central; we found an outlet like ABC’s Good Morning America covering the event twice, and even declaring science sexy, and geek chic.

Once you create intersections like these, you invite broader types of media attention, which is precisely what science needs right now.

The apparent trick here was to make sure that the World Science Festival’s content brought science into intersection with many other walks of life—and so Greene, Day, and Board Member Alan Alda closed out the NASDAQ (economics), got Michael Bloomberg to give the opening address (politics), and populated panels with people like The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman (entertainment). Once you create intersections like these, you invite broader types of media attention, which is precisely what science needs right now.

That’s especially the case at a time when traditional forms of science coverage appear in decline. In early 2008, a Pew analysis found that on average, if you watch five hours of cable news, you can expect to see just one minute devoted to coverage of science and technology. Meanwhile, from 1989 to 2005, the number of U.S. newspapers featuring weekly science sections shrank by nearly two thirds—from 95 to 34.

In this context we can’t simply assume that traditional science journalists will carry the message of science to the whole population. Rather, we need almost the reverse process—for science to bring its message to the entirety of the media.

In that endeavor, the World Science Festival represented a huge start. But we still have a long way to go, as was apparent once you actually watched how the Festival wound up being covered on Comedy Central and ABC. Sure, a lot of science came across through these mass media venues (albeit in very short snippets). But at the same time, the shows still kinda treated the scientists they were covering as if they were Martians or something.

You can see it in Greene’s appearance on the Colbert Report. It’s an unqualified triumph just to get on the show in the first place, but notice the tone differential between guest and host. Greene wants to talk about how cool science is—”Science is the act of inspiration. Science is the greatest of adventure stories”—but Colbert counters—humorously, of course, but it hit close to home—that most people see scientists as individuals who consider themselves superior and look down on everybody else. (“Of course we’re intimidated by science, because science holds itself above everybody else—above God, evidently. You guys have been kicking ass since the Enlightenment.”)

Something similar came across on ABC. Again, it was good, positive coverage, but Good Morning America couldn’t help describing the World Science Festival’s goals thusly: “Organizers hope to shift science from the chalk-dusted fringes into America’s cultural center.” If science today is starting out from the chalk-dusted fringes, it’s inarguable that it has a long way to go.

Nevertheless, at least for a few days, the World Science Festival managed to integrate science rather fully into the life of an extraordinarily busy city, and rescue it from the standard estrangement from the rest of our culture and our media. Any way you look at it, that’s a staggering accomplishment.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

The sad news of Senator Kennedy’s brain cancer has made the general question of balancing politicians’ privacy and the public’s right relevant again, especially in a presidential election cycle. In 1992 Sen. Paul Tsongas, locked in a primary battle with Bill Clinton, claimed he had been cured of lymphoma, but he died a day before the end of what would have been his first term, had he accomplished his White House bid. Since then medicine’s ability to diagnose and prognosticate has only grown, but in general effective interventions lag behind.

Presidents and candidates for the office do release the results of their physical exams, but this is voluntary. The press and the public have no way of knowing what information is withheld, nor exactly when it is released. For example, some cancer patients may get checked for suspicious cells every three months, but politicians may not release medical records, and even if they do, they might hand them over to the press just months before election day.

Also challenging is the question of whether the explosion of new drugs now marketed for conditions like insomnia and erectile dysfunction should be part of a presidential medical report. I have often wondered how many highly stressed candidates used Ambien or some related sleep medication, which would likely disable them for that now-legendary “3 a.m. phone call.” Or, to stay awake on 4 hours of sleep amid half a dozen stump speeches, how many use Provigil? If Bob Dole had been elected, would we have been told that he used Viagra? Would we have needed to know?

The answer to the “need to know” question for many of these new drugs is obscure because we don’t know much about the long-term effects of their use. Not only is the system for our follow-up data poor (though perhaps improving with the FDA’s new “Sentinel” program), never before in human history have so many people been on so many drugs for so long. There is virtually no understanding about how these medications might affect an individual’s mood or judgment, especially over the long term.

The question will only become more pressing as genetic knowledge information explodes. The issue is not confined to risks for maladies like cancer, stroke, or heart disease. When more is known about what genes increase the risk of depression, for example, will that screening be reported? George Stephanopoulos revealed that he used an anti-depressant while working in the White House as the Communications Director for President Clinton. There has been much speculation about the effect of steroids on President Kennedy’s mood (though it was probably positive). It is not difficult to imagine that a future president would be prescribed a mood-lightener. What would this mean for his or her conduct in office?

Many will conclude that the imponderables implied by more medical information are so overwhelming that we should not even raise these questions, and that the practice of releasing presidential health records should remain voluntary and unregulated. But when there is one serious incident that could have been anticipated by the medicine of the day, whenever that day arrives, that judgment may change.

Debating the science, David Michaels points out in his new book, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, is a lot easier for these companies than debating policy. He traces the same “tricks of the trade” that industry-funded scientists used to delay action to curb the health risks posed by tobacco, asbestos, beryllium, dangerous pharmaceuticals, diacetyl (which causes “popcorn lung”), and man-made climate change. Scientists, policymakers, journalists, and citizens deserve independent science that protects public health, says Michaels, an epidemiologist and the director of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy at the George Washington School of Public Health. This interview transcript has been edited.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt, Science Progress: When did you know that you needed to write this book, and why?

David Michaels: During the Clinton administration, I served as assistant secretary of energy for Environment, Safety, and Health. I was responsible for the health of workers, the communities, and the environment around the nation’s nuclear weapons factories, some of the most polluted and dangerous places in the United States. One of the hazards I had to address was beryllium, an extremely toxic lightweight metal that’s used in the manufacture of our nuclear weapons. We had workers who were getting chronic beryllium disease, which a terrible, often deadly disease, after extremely low exposures. We had an accountant who got sick after working for a very brief time in a building in which beryllium had been used several years earlier.

In the Clinton administration, under the leadership of then-Secretary of Energy, now-New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, we issued a beryllium protection rule that’s ten times stronger than the one that’s used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for private sector workers. As we were developing this rule, the beryllium industry submitted studies that I saw as attempts to obscure the issue. Instead of acknowledging that the old standard wasn’t adequately protective, they focused on what we didn’t know. They clearly wanted to delay our more protective regulation. Of course, we didn’t let their reports stop us and we issued a strong regulation.

But I continued to be interested in beryllium after leaving the Clinton administration. So if there was an “ah ha” moment, it was probably when, searching through the tobacco archives—millions of pages of previously-secret documents put up on the web as a result of the tobacco lawsuits—I discovered that the same scientists who had manufactured uncertainly for the beryllium industry were doing the same thing for the cigarette manufactures.

SP: That’s one of the key themes that you write about, the “manufacture of uncertainty.” Can you talk a little bit about the different kinds of methods that industries use to create this uncertainty where it did not exist before?

Michaels: In the book I call them “tricks of the trade,” which are tricks one can do as a scientist if you know how to do them. These are tricks that turn positive studies into negative ones or take one positive study and do a literature review which buries the positive study in what is essentially a whole mass of garbage so it looks like there is nothing there.

Comedian Lily Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” I see these same techniques and these same approaches across the scientific literature, and not just in terms of chemical hazards. They’re used by the deniers of global warming, the people who are essentially fueled by the big oil and coal companies trying to say that humans aren’t causing global warming. After finding the initial information, I dove into the literature, court records, and dockets where corporations and trades associations file comments with agencies, and I found the same names, the same tactics—the same alchemy in campaigns run by all these different industries.

I found some very powerful smoking guns: the sales pitches made by these product defense firms. They boasted about how they were able to delay regulation, what they were able to do, how they needed to change scientific studies around.

I found one for example around freon, which we know causes a hole in the ozone layer. The Hill & Knowlton company was saying, “We were able to essentially delay regulation for a couple of years when we were working for DuPont on this.” So what I’ve done is put all these smoking guns up on our website, which is www.defendingscience.org so anyone can download them and read exactly how these people work.

SP: How can scientists, policy makers, and journalists learn to spot these tricks?

Michaels: It’s very tough, and you have to be somewhat of an expert in the field. I see things in epidemiology immediately, but I have more trouble with the toxicology. Given that it’s difficult to do, and a layperson can’t just pick it up, it’s very important, first of all, that scientists who are in the field who see these problems write letters about them and put critiques up on the web. But I think the other thing that is more fundamental is to have a screen around conflict of interest.

We know the basic problem is that scientists who are paid to find a certain result will find that result. That’s certainly what we see in these studies over and over again: that scientists who work for these companies that actually manufacture uncertainty never find a result the sponsor doesn’t want.

So one thing that we should be demanding on the part of our scientific journals, and on the part of the regulatory agencies, is to ask, “Who paid for this study, and under what contract were these studies done?” If they were done with a secret contract, as is often the case, or a contract that says the sponsor has the right to see the results before they’re published. Those studies should immediately be in question and they should be looked at much more carefully.

SP: And there is research on this “funding effect” demonstrating a link between who’s paying for the research and the results of it, correct?

Michaels: That’s true, and we see that across the board. We saw it in tobacco; we see it all over the pharmaceutical literature; most recently in bisphenol A, a plastic chemical that’s used in baby bottles. There are well over a hundred studies that have been done—there’s a small handful paid for by the producers, the chemical companies making bisphenol A—all those studies show no effect. But 90 percent of the studies done by scientists independent of these corporations find an effect. It’s very powerful. We know that to really trust a study, it should be done independently.

SP: You write about how the sustained assault on scientific integrity under the Bush administration has actually demoralized a whole lot of scientists who are working for the federal government. Shortly after your book came out, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a survey saying that about 60 percent of the respondents of scientists at the EPA had personally experienced political interference with their work in the past five years. What is the toll of this interference and of this manufacturing of uncertainty on scientists, and how can we make sure that the government has good researchers in the future?

Michaels: It is a significant problem. As you said, the morale of government scientists has plummeted. Out best scientists chose to work in government because they see—or at least they saw—public service as a higher calling. They want to help in the nation’s efforts to improve human health, to protect the environment. Now many of them feel they can no longer make a contribution to the public good in their current job and they’re getting out or they’re just fading away; they’ve become marginalized. We have to reverse this trend by making public service an appealing career choice again.

I think we have to do this on two levels. The first and somewhat more obvious one is to set up structures and policies to ensure that government scientists will be respected and listened to—that they can publish their studies; that they can meet with other scientists; that they can get training that they need to keep up. We need of course the best scientists in the country. When one of our regulatory agencies has to go nose-to-nose with a multi-billion dollar chemical or pharmaceutical company, they need to have the best scientists; they can’t have scientists who can no longer go to scientific meetings to keep up with their field. So we have to make the job of scientists one that good scientists want to go into.

But on a more fundamental level, we have to change the national view of government work. Idealistic young scientists should feel the call to public service. In the past, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy called young professionals and activists to serve their country. Our next president needs to make public service a desirable career goal—not just Americorps or the Peace Corps, but signing up with the EPA or the Justice Department with the understanding that people will work there for multiple years. We should see this as an important part of any homeland security program, because it is our future and our children’s future.

SP: How can people who are working scientific fields, or are writing about them, or who are dealing with policy present these ideas without getting into the complexities of the science or of the regulatory policy, which can confuse people?

Michaels: It’s very tough. But one thing that I’ve seen people start to do is come together as scientists to look at the scientific literature—to step back to a minute and say, “Here is a chemical that is in our environment; we’re very interested in this; there are studies being produced by government scientists, by university scientists, by corporate scientists.” There is a group of us in any university town—let’s come together and look at the literature almost as a journal club. Let’s get together and see what we think of the interpretations done by these different groups of scientists and start writing ourselves: put up a blog post and weigh into the discussion. Scientists can do that with a lot of credibility and they bring a lot of expertise because there are so many toxic chemicals out there, and producers of these chemicals can hire scientists to create fictions about whether or not they’re dangerous or safe. But there are independent scientists who don’t take those issues on because they’re often not funded to do so. Just as volunteers, I think that’s something we could do—little chemical investigation groups.

SP: Let me ask another question about one of the “tricks of the trade” you point out that seems pervasive, which is reanalysis of existing data in order to come to different conclusions from those at which a particular study might have arrived. Part of the problem here has to do with access to raw data from scientific studies, and the FDA is one particular agency that does generally have access to raw data from studies when they’re making decisions about pharmaceuticals. Can you talk about why access to raw data is so important in combating these nefarious reanalyses?

Michaels: It’s a fascinating issue. There’s an unequal playing field. There was a law passed by Congress in the late 1990s called the Shelby Amendment that gives public access to any study done by the government or paid for by the government and done by, say, university scientists. What has happened over and over again is corporations have gotten this raw data and paid mercenary scientists to reanalyze the data and to essentially make positive results go away. If you have raw data, you can do that.

Now the FDA also understands that the interpretations done by scientists paid by drug companies can’t absolutely be trusted; they want to do the analyses themselves. So the FDA says, “Give us the raw data when you’re looking at a drug’s efficacy or safety, and we’ll analyze it ourselves.” But for other agencies—the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or parts of the EPA, for example—companies submit studies and the agencies have to rely on those interpretations done by, essentially, the corporate scientists. Those corporate scientists, or mercenary scientists in some cases, have access to the raw data for the work paid for by the universities and by the government. So you have this unequal playing field where the raw data of some studies are available, yet important studies that are produced by corporations can’t be reanalyzed.

Given that you have this unequal playing field, we think everyone’s data should be made available in a way that any researcher should be able to look at those data, but under certain conditions. They have to be able to say not that, “We’re going to go fishing and figure out how we can manipulate these studies to make a positive result disappear,” but rather, “We’re going to set our hypotheses out in advance; we’re going to say this is how it will work—in consultation with the people who wrote the studies.” And then everybody can essentially play equally in the same field.

SP: Well let me ask another question about federal rules that have an impact on this playing field. You devote an entire chapter of your book to what you call “the most important Supreme court case that you’ve never heard of,” Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, which gives trial judges the responsibility to determine the quality of scientific testimony from expert witnesses. Could you explain why this is a problem when we’re talking about public health?

Michaels: It’s an interesting problem because the Supreme court ruled in 1994 that judges must decide that the expert testimony to be given in court cases is “relevant and reliable.” Now most judges have no scientific training and they’re very much influenced by the attorneys—in many cases the corporate attorneys—who weigh in saying, “Don’t believe this study. This is junk science. Don’t let it in.” And so in some cases what judges are doing is saying, “Well this evidence doesn’t look like it makes any sense to me. I’m not going to let it in.”

That ends the court case, and the people who are suing a manufacturer of a dangerous product or a polluter essentially lose their case at that point. Litigation and court cases are a very important part of our public health protection system, especially now in the Bush years when the regulatory agencies have been handcuffed. There are numerous examples I talk about in the book of hazards that are under control only because we have lawsuits because the regulatory agencies really aren’t doing much. So you have this system now where the judges, in many cases very sympathetic to corporations, are using Daubert decisions as an opportunity to stop evidence from getting to juries so they can decide whether or not an injury is caused by a toxic substance.

Now in some cases, they’re very well meaning. But I think that it would be much more reasonable to let a jury decide whether or not there is evidence that some toxic exposure caused an illness. The judges don’t have a particular expertise in this and it’s too easy for them to throw evidence out. So I write about that quite a bit. It’s not a very well-know decision, but it’s a very important one. And I think it does have a big impact on public health.

SP: What do policy makers, journalists, or other readers most need to understand about the way that industry may manufacture uncertainty in dealing with science and public health?

Michaels: Well I think they have to see that this strategy—which tobacco came up with and is now so widely used—we have to expect it. Whenever independent scientists create some new information that shows a link between a toxic chemical, or something else, and human health or the environment, you expect to see the immediate response saying, “We’ve looked at this carefully; it’s not there; more research is needed.” You’ll hear the call for “sound science,” when in fact I think they’re looking for something that “sounds like science” but isn’t. I think what has to be done is that the public, the press, legislators, should demand independent evaluations of studies. You can’t trust interpretations or studies done by sponsors who have an interest in the outcome, and that’s the bottom line.

For Levin and Gerson, though, dismissing concerns about a conservative “war on science” just serves as a springboard for another offensive.

A new wave of conservative science punditry—epitomized by an essay by Yuval Levin in The New Atlantis entitled “Science and the Left,” which was itself recently publicized by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in an oped in the Washington Post—demonstrably lacks such candor. Setting out to debunk the idea that there really is a “war on science” coming from the right, these writers don’t bother engaging on the facts of the case at all. They don’t attempt to show that, say, conservative anti-evolutionists are right, or that conservative global warming deniers know what they’re talking about. Instead, Levin and Gerson ignore, trivialize, and even mock the very serious argument that scientific information has been systematically mistreated under this administration and by the American political right. Here’s Gerson: “There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a ‘war on science.’” As for Levin: “Beneath these grave accusations, it turns out, are some remarkably flimsy grievances, most of which seem to amount to political disputes about policy questions in which science plays a role.”

And that’s it for these authors—rather than taking apart the “war on science” argument, they simply assert with a wave of the hand that we’re all confused, that the facts of science aren’t under attack from the right, it’s just that disagreements have occurred over ethics and policies. But of course, that’s hokum. As the author of the original book making this argument—The Republican War on Science—I took pains to show that in each of my case studies, the scientific information itself was under attack. And as for the literally hundreds of scientists employed by this government who have now been shown, in successive surveys conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, to have experienced political interference in their work? Once again, these scientists trade in facts, analysis, and expertise. They know the elementary science-policy distinction as well as everyone; as government researchers they live and breathe it. They’re still outraged.

For Levin and Gerson, though, dismissing concerns about a conservative “war on science” just serves as a springboard for another offensive—trying to show that the political left’s loving embrace of science might well lead it off a cliff. Levin rightly observes that there’s something in the spirit of modern liberalism that grows out of the scientific revolution of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, which unleashed a profound distrust of hoary old authorities and empty traditions (especially religious ones). Levin even admits: “The left is therefore generally justified in thinking of itself as the party of science.” (Why, thank you.) But that’s just a set-up: Levin’s lengthy essay (parroted by Gerson) proceeds to argue that the liberal embrace of science engenders two key conflicts—one, with its support of environmental values, and second, with its support for equality. Science, according to Levin, can undermine both.

But the arguments adduced to show this hardly withstand scrutiny. True, in the European green movement we do see a rift between science and a value system rooted in the desire to preserve the authenticity of “nature”—hence the sabotaging of biotech crop fields. But this case notwithstanding, there are many more ways in which science bolsters the environmental cause—most obviously, by allowing for the serious and detailed analysis of environmental impacts and problems. Environmental scientists, based at universities across the country, hardly see any conflict between the two chief words that describe their professions. What does irk them, however, is to conduct a painstaking study of an environmental problem, only to find some industry-funded scientist with the gall to assert that their facts are wrong—and then to further watch that industry-funded scientist get pulled before Congress by conservatives to testify, or get used by the Bush Office of Management and Budget to torpedo a proposed environmental regulation.

Score one for science, and one for equality at the same time.

But then Levin strays still farther, arguing that some fundamental conflict exists between the liberal embrace of science on the one hand, and the liberal concern for preserving equality on the other. You’ll only follow Levin down this road if you share a key assumption—that abortion, in vitro fertilization, and genetic pre-screening constitute a “new eugenics,” which I certainly do not. Science Progress’s Jonathan Moreno has already taken apart Gerson’s (er, Levin’s) clumsy attempt to draw an analogy between old eugenics and “new,” but let me just explode one of Levin’s additional assertions. “Science, simply put,” he writes, “cannot account for human equality, and does not offer reasons to believe we are all equal. Science measures our material and animal qualities, and it finds them to be patently unequal.” Oh, really? What more equalizing force could there be than a book like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which shows that racialist theories cannot explain how it is that Europeans managed to take over virtually the entire Earth—rather, distinct environmental and technological advantages made all the difference. Score one for science, and one for equality at the same time.

In the end, Levin and Gerson (who just does the Cliff Notes version) fundamentally ignore the assault upon scientific conclusions and expertise that now exists, and that emanates largely, in this country, from the political right. Instead, they seek to turn the tables and depict science as a kind of Kryptonite for the political left, because it undermines some of our core ideals. But that’s just wrong—science helps advance and strengthen those ideals. Finally, then, Levin and Gerson don’t just conveniently ignore the core of the “war on science” argument; they also creatively redefine liberal ideals and values so as to create greater tensions between them than actually exist. Fundamentally, they’re ignoring the truth about what progressives think and argue—and thus, unfortunately, engaging in still more conservative obscurantism.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Dr. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, said he told his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.”

…

[He] dismisses the argument that it is only fair to teach both sides of the evolution/creationism controversy. “We don’t teach alchemy along with chemistry,” he said. “We don’t teach witchcraft along with medicine. We don’t teach astrology with astronomy.”

He said he was saddened when he saw the embrace of evolution identified with, as he put it, “explicit atheism,” as in the books of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins or other writers on science and faith.

Neither the existence nor nonexistence of God is susceptible to scientific proof, Dr. Ayala said, and equating science with the abandonment of religion “fits the prejudices” of advocates of intelligent design and other creationist ideas.

Sound bites proclaiming the opposition of science and religion tend to drown out more moderate voices calling attention to the compatibility of belief in evolution with belief in God. However, many religious institutions, including the Catholic Church, already support or explicitly endorse the latter view. With the brouhaha over recent creationist movie Expelled, and ongoing disputes about teaching “intelligent design” in the classroom, scientists and religious believers alike have a strong interest in making sure that voices like Dr. Ayala’s come through loud and clear. Failing to do so does a disservice to science and religion alike.

Sirine Shebaya, Ph.D. is a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

The definition of what science is and what should be taught as science in a world in which Asia and Europe are itching to clean our economic clocks by seeing us throw away our considerable lead in synthetic biology, genomics, agriculture and the biomedical, oceanographic, geological and energy sciences escapes Stein and his producers. This despite the fact they have ample time to regale us with all the documentary stylings involving old movies, public health messages and TV film clips that Michael Moore has already made stale. The failure to say what science is constitutes a huge failing in this cinematic cant.

Among the many problems with promoting anti-scientific sentiment is that it impairs the country’s ability to develop scientific solutions to real-world problems. Without the fruits of scientific research, citizens would be less healthy, less safe, and the economy would be far less dynamic.

Clearly, something needs to change in the science-public landscape.

Lately, all manner of ways to “involve” the public in science policy and practice have cropped up, mostly around oversight of emerging technologies like synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and human genetics. Scientific associations are developing centers devoted to public engagement in science, funding agencies have created sweeping mandates for collecting public input on research, and research-performing institutions are hosting community meetings and science cafes about their work. But one might wonder—are these new organizations going to truly “engage” the public?

In a nutshell, an erosion of public trust that began as a trickle of doubt about radiation safety and pesticides has grown to program-threatening uprisings against emerging new technologies, from genetically altered “Frankenfoods” to concern over “grey goo” in nanotechnology.

Initially, the “deficit” in question was framed as an “information deficit”—if only lay people knew what scientists did, goes this line of thought, they too would support the agendas of the scientific establishment. Since World War II, the science community has been operating under this information-deficit model, built on one-way flow of information from the expert to the public with very little information flowing back the other way. This model drove communication of science and technology for the last half of the 20^th century, despite its very obvious shortcoming: Neither public support for research nor scientific literacy increased significantly in all that time.

More recently, however, the information deficit model increasingly has been reframed as an “attitudinal deficit”—to know us is to love us, runs the mantra of this public-understanding school of science-society interaction. Having realized the practical futility—if not the ethical challenge—of making every lay person a lay scientist, the public-understanding model contents itself with pursuing public appreciation, emphasizing the benefits of science to society without worrying unduly about how much science the public actually understands. The end goal hasn’t changed—increased public support of S&T—even if the methods used to get there and the metrics used to define success are different. The direction of information flow remains the same as well: top-down from the scientist or engineer to the public.

The asymmetric communications practices embodied by both the scientific literacy and public understanding movements cultivate scientists who resist ceding any level of control of the science policy agenda to non-scientists, a view neatly encapsulated by a quote from a series of scientist interviews we conducted at GPPC a few years ago: “I don’t think that the general uninformed public should have a say, because I think there’s a danger. There tends to be a huge amount of information you need in order to understand. It sounds really paternalistic, but I think this process should not be influenced too much by just the plain general uninformed public.”

This wariness is reciprocal in the 21^st century, as UK-based communications researcher Martin Bauer and his colleagues noted in the journal Public Understanding of Science last year: “Mistrust on the part of scientific actors is returned in kind by the public.” Negative public attitudes, they say, as revealed in large-scale surveys, are viewed by scientists as proof that “a deficient public is not to be trusted” to provide uncritical support for the scientific enterprise.

Clearly, something needs to change in the science-public landscape. Writing in Science in 2003, AAAS Chief Executive Officer Alan Leshner summarized the problem eloquently: “Simply trying to educate the public about specific science-based issues is not working…We need to move beyond what too often has been seen as a paternalistic stance. We need to engage the public in a more open and honest bidirectional dialogue about science and technology.”

Indeed, research-performing institutions increasingly say they have traded in their old, top-down models of science literacy and public understanding for the new buzzwords of “public consultation” and “public engagement.” But the philosophy behind consultation and engagement seems, on closer inspection, not to have changed much at all. Many scientists expect consultation and engagement to cultivate a public more supportive of science as planned by, performed by, and promoted by scientists—despite the fact that neither consultation nor engagement have been rigorously evaluated to see if these goals are reasonable or even possible. And even if they turn out to be measurably effective in meeting some articulated goal, are they affordable enough to deploy? Neither consultation nor engagement can be done on the cheap.

The end game of public engagement should be empowerment.

What, then, can consultation or engagement do for us? This “participatory turn” in science-society relations, as Harvard scholar Sheila Jasanoff terms it, ostensibly focuses on regular dialogue (two-way, symmetrical communication), transparency of the decision- and policy-making process, and meaningful incorporation of public input into that process. On paper, the goal of these two-way, participatory models is mutual satisfaction of both parties, the research enterprise and its publics, with the relationships that exist between them. Key dimensions of this dialogue are negotiation, compromise, and mutual accommodation. It places a premium on long-term relationship building with all of the strategic publics: research participants, certainly, but also media, regulators, community leaders, policymakers, and others. These emerging models offer promise for scientists and the public to engage each other more fully and productively—although the promise is as yet only tantalizing, and not yet tempered by much scrutiny from social science research.

The dearth of evaluative research on engagement stems partly from the fact that very little is being done. In practice, much communication currently passed off as public consultation and engagement is still one-way, expert-to-layperson information delivery, albeit in different settings like cafes scientifique, public meetings, and town halls. Research organizations have been quite adept at putting together well-rehearsed, tightly scripted opportunities for “public input”—but with no institutionalized mechanisms for reflecting the public’s input in deliberation or policy construction. In fact, one gets the not-so-subtle impression that these engagement events are being held with the hope of staving off public dissatisfaction, or providing just enough semblance of listening to public concerns that the natives don’t get so restless they revolt.

In our view, the end game of public engagement should be empowerment: creating a real and meaningful mechanism for public input to be heard far enough upstream in science and technology policy making and program development to influence decisions. It is not about making a decision among a scientific elite, and then staging public events to move the public toward agreeing with that desired outcome. It is about empowering lay citizens to learn all they want about pending program or policy issues (not what scientists believe they need to know to weigh in), and then giving them access to deliberative processes where that knowledge can be questioned, applied, and incorporated with knowledge or questions gleaned from outside the scientific process.

And it is about agreeing up front to accommodate public input politically, not just to listen and nod politely. Unlike the unidirectional and hierarchal communication that characterizes scientific literacy and public understanding models of science-society relations, public engagement practiced as iterative dialogue does result in demonstrable shifts in knowledge and attitudes among participants. At GPPC, we have documented and measured these shifts during town hall and online deliberations. But the shift is not always in the direction scientists might expect or prefer. Public engagement is not about getting the policy you want; it’s about getting the public input you need to craft sustainable policy that enjoys public confidence.

Public engagement is also about agreeing up front to accommodate public input personally. Public engagement changes people. The public gains knowledge, shares expertise, and reflects on how much risk society is willing to accept to realize the promise of emerging technologies. Less appreciated, but perhaps even more significant, is the expectation that scientists who enter into public engagement should see their knowledge and attitudes change, too. This is the real mark of successful public engagement: Rather than insisting upon the public’s deeper appreciation and understanding of science, its primary goal is scientists’ deeper understanding of the publics’ preferences and values.

Rick Borchelt is director of communications and Kathy Hudson is director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University, which is supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts with research funding from the National Human Genome Research Institute.

We see this as strong evidence that the U.S. science community has been yearning for a stronger voice during an administration that has been repeatedly criticized by scientists (5).

Scientists themselves recognize that their work has been misrepresented, misinterpreted, or ignored for ideological purposes, but the writers also point out that the effort to elevate the connection between scientific and technological research and nearly every major national policy concern was an interdisciplinary effort:

Among the motivations we have heard for taking up this cause are the following: continuing inaccurate media coverage, poor science education, widespread public science illiteracy (6), flat funding and/or cutbacks to research funding and consequent contraction of opportunity, lack of credible public policy response to climate change and other environmental issues, and governmental suppression of science information. In a climate of declining support for science, the United States risks losing its competitive advantage to emerging science superpowers. Although science and engineering have been responsible for half of U.S. economic growth over the past half-century (3), by 2010, according to some estimates, 90% of all scientists and engineers will live in Asia (7).

A science and technology debate seems unlikely at this juncture, but one positive message from this initiative is that science is not an island apart from policymaking. Rather, smart policy depends on sound scientific advice in order to make people healthier, safer, and more prosperous—and if that’s the focus of the conversations going forward, then the organizers can count it as a success.

SEED’s Science and Society blog has posted video of its Science and Society Series with Drew Endy and Annie-Marie Mazaa of the Committee on Science, Technology and Law at the National Academies. The two discuss synthetic biology: the technology behind it, the current state of research, and the legal and regulatory dilemmas it faces.

Expect only one minute of science and environment coverage in five hours of cable news programming, writes Matthew Nisbet at Framing Science. Taking a hard look at the recently released Pew “State of the Media” report, he explores the lack of science coverage on cable news networks.

How to combat the rise of drug-resistant antibiotics? In the wake of a new study indicating that U.S. citizens often fail to complete prescribed courses of antibiotics or use them to treat the wrong kind of infection, 60 Second Science suggests “education, education, education.”

Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline critiques a proposal from MIT professors Stan Finkelstein and Peter Temin for rethinking the drug development process. In their new book, “Resonable Rx: Solving the Drug Price Crisis,” they suggest breaking up the pharmaceutical business into drug discovery firms and drug marketing firms.

From: Science Progress Advisory Board and Editors

The undersigned members of the Science Progress advisory board and editorial staff express their support for the Science Debate 2008 initiative and encourage the presidential candidates of both major political parties to devote one nationally televised debate specifically to issues related to science, technology, and innovation.

The next president must be able to make clear and effective decisions about science and technology policy, and must be able to synthesize advice from advisers who can make recommendations without fear of political interference. Policy decisions on the issues of greatest concern to voters–national security, the economy, health care, and energy and the environment–should rest upon a foundation of sound scientific advice. Candidates must be able to clearly articulate how they will harness that counsel to lead the United States toward a clean energy transformation, care for the health of the country’s citizens, and cultivate a diverse and dynamic low-carbon economy that capitalizes on American creativity and entrepreneurship.

The objective of Science Progress is to improve the understanding of science among policymakers in order to develop exciting, progressive ideas about innovation in science and technology for the United States in the 21st century. We believe that the Science Debate 2008 initiative shares the same ethos that is behind our mission statement:

Science Progress proceeds from the propositions that scientific inquiry is among the finest expressions of human excellence, that it is a crucial source of human flourishing, a critical engine of economic growth, and must be dedicated to the common good. Scientific inquiry entails global responsibilities. It should lead to a more equitable, safer, and healthier future for all of humankind.

Current Advisory Board Signatories

Martha Farah, PhD, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences; Director, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania
Steve Fetter, PhD, Dean, School of Public Policy University of Maryland – College Park
John Gearhart, PhD, Professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Physiology, Comparative Medicine, and Population Dynamics; Director of Stem Cell Biology, McKusic-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
John H. Gibbons, PhD Science Advisor to President Clinton; President, Resource Strategies
Barry Glassner, PhD, Executive Vice Provost, University of Southern California
Kathryn Hinsch, Founding Director and Board President, Women’s Bioethics Project
Neal Lane, PhD Malcolm Gillis University Professor; Senior Fellow, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Rice University
Zack Lynch, MA, Executive Director, Neurotechnology Industry Organization
Tara O’Toole, MD, MPH, Chief Executive Officer and Director, Center for Biosecurity, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Scott Page, PhD, External Faculty, Santa Fe Institute; Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics University of Michigan
Jonathan Tucker, PhD, Senior Fellow, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies
Paul R. Wolpe, PhD, Senior Fellow, Center for Bioethics; Professor, Departments of Psychiatry, Medical Ethics, and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
Laurie Zoloth, PhD, Director, Bioethics, Center for Genetic Medicine Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities Professor of Religion, Northwestern University
Richard O. Lempert, JD, PhD, Eric Stein Distinguished University Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Michigan Law School, NSF, AAAS, NRC
Dawn Bonnell, PhD, Trustee Professor of Material Sciences; Director, Nano/Bio Interface Center University of Pennsylvania
John S. Irons, PhD, Research and Policy Director, Economic Policy Institute
Susan Solomon, JD, CEO, New York Stem Cell Foundation

Editorial Staff

Jonathan Moreno, Editor-In-Chief
Kit Batten, PhD, Editorial Advisor
Ed Paisley, Editorial Director
Andrew Plemmons Pratt, Assistant Editor

Scientists and literary intellectuals stood separated by a “gulf of mutual incomprehension.”

In short, I argued that Dickens and Eliot were proposing a kind of “scientific method” for avoiding self delusion, in life and especially in love. Darwin, meanwhile, had a similar approach to the naturalists who had come before him and had tried desperately to fit species into Linnean categories that just didn’t work any more—in the process disregarding the full range of evidence from nature, which showed insensible gradations between variations and species that, in turn, suggested common ancestry rather than immutability.

On some level, then, the scientist and the novelists were engaged in closely related endeavors.

Coming from this background, of course I found myself intrigued by Jonah Lehrer’s clever little book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, recently released by Houghton Mifflin. Some have argued that Lehrer overstates the case in claiming that a number of 19^th and 20^th century artists and writers anticipated the discoveries of modern neuroscience. But one can also read the book more modestly, as a catalogue of overlaps and resonances between thinkers working in vastly different arenas (or so we thought). Whatever else he achieves, Lehrer clearly demonstrates that scientific and artistic processes have more in common than you think. And he succeeds by having the courage to explore an intellectual space that’s too often neglected—the little visited hinterland between the humanities and the sciences.

Reading Lehrer, it’s hard not to be reminded of the British novelist-scientist C.P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture and essay, entitled “The Two Cultures.” For Snow, scientists and literary intellectuals stood separated by a “gulf of mutual incomprehension.” Snow lamented academic over-specialization and the educational system that had created it; and called for an end to fruitless polarization between two different kinds of very smart people.

If science today isn’t learning much from the humanities, neither is it learning enough from those with expertise in politics or in communication.

Despite Snow, however—and despite the work of a few innovators like Lehrer—I would argue that the “two cultures,” today, remain just about as divorced as ever. After all, remember the Sokal Hoax of the 1990s—and the resultant battle between science and the humanities that came to be known as the “Science Wars”? Have we really come very far from Snow’s time?

In fact, if anything I would say it’s even worse than Snow thought. Not only does modern American science remain largely alienated from the humanities—it is essentially divorced from the rest of our society as a whole. How else to account for the continual frustration of scientists with the media, with the political system, and with the public?

If science today isn’t learning much from the humanities, neither is it learning enough from those with expertise in politics or in communication. And it shows. Consider the experience of American science in the 2000s. Despite producing more Ph.D.s than ever—with 29,854 in 2006 representing an all-time high according to the National Science Foundation—science found itself continually outraged by inaccurate media coverage of science; poor science education and widespread public science illiteracy; a resurgence of anti-evolutionism; and the Bush administration’s assault on scientific expertise on issues like climate change.

Science today doesn’t have any problem producing; but it has a huge problem connecting.

Alas, while some in science are beginning to recognize this problem, for others it still remains off the radar. Part of the problem may be that science convinced itself, not so long ago, that it had actually vanquished the problem highlighted by Snow. In particular, about a decade or more ago came claims (originating with literary agent John Brockman) that a so-called “third culture” had come to the rescue and bridged the gap. “Third culture” scientists were typically thought of as including people like E.O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Pinker, and especially Richard Dawkins. During the 1990s and beyond, these scientists sold lots of popular books—and that, of course, represented a core element of their success.

But that didn’t mean they had addressed the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” described by Snow between science and the humanities. First of all, the audience of popular science book readers still represents a very narrow slice of America as a whole. Moreover, many of the messages that came from the “third culture” hardly seemed to have outreach at their core. E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience, for instance, could be described as an attempt to usurp the place of the humanities, rather than to build a bridge between them and the sciences. Its tone depicted science as somehow superior; and that wasn’t the only way in which some of the “third culture” science popularizers failed to help reconnect science to other disciplines or to the rest of America. Many elements of the “third culture” also engaged in considerable sneering at the ignorance or religion of the rest of America—an attitude that, again, only set science off from everyone else.

Here, of course, Richard Dawkins—most recently, the author of The God Delusion—is probably the greatest culprit.

Appropriately enough, Jonah Lehrer ends his book Proust Was a Neuroscientist by slamming the “third culture” movement. Many of its luminaries, he writes, are “extremely antagonistic toward everything that isn’t scientific.” And so Lehrer calls for a “fourth culture”: “Much closer to Snow’s original definition, [it] will ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blur the lines that separate. It will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and will focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience.”

I’m all for it—and clearly, by this standard Lehrer would count as a “fourth culture” intellectual. But alas, the problem is bigger than he thinks. It’s not just that we need people transplanting knowledge between science and humanities—it’s that we need people who can transplant between science, the humanities, politics, communication, law, business—and everything else. All other walks of life, types of talent, kinds of expertise…the more science draws upon these and the more these intersect with science, the closer science will move back into relationship with the society that fosters it. We need more people engaged in intersectional endeavors like Randy Olson, the scientist-filmmaker whose Flock of Dodos poignantly captures why we keep having to re-fight the evolution wars, or like Matthew Chapman and Shawn Lawrence Otto, two Hollywood screenwriters with a deep love of science who, in turn, have been central to the push for a presidential science debate in 2008.

But that, in turn, would require broad changes to education, and considerable reforms to the way in which science trains its students and awards its graduates. It would take a massive, creaking, groaning alteration of current scientific culture—a reinvestment of resources to train the kinds of ambassadors who can blend scientific knowledge with some other type of understanding and thereby help it to resonate beyond the rarefied world of science itself.

In short, it’s close to asking the impossible. But then, every time a book like Proust Was a Neuroscientist appears and enjoys a success, perhaps the range of the impossible shrinks—ever so slightly.

Chris Mooney is the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.