Read the full press release from NAS here.

See highlights from Lane’s the keynote at the launch of our first print issue last June:

Read Lane and George Abbey’s recommendations for NASA policy priorities under the new administration: “How to Save the U.S. Space Program”

In a 97-page report released today, the NRC criticizes the current research plan on human health and environmental impacts of the National Nanotechnology Initiative–multiagency project to ramp up nanotech in the United states. From the National Academies press release:

The research plan, developed by the National Nanotechnology Initiative, does not provide a clear picture of the current understanding of these risks or where it should be in 10 years, says the new report. Nor does the NNI plan include research goals to help ensure that nanotechnologies are developed and used as safely as possible. And though the research needs listed in the plan are valuable, they are incomplete, in some cases missing elements crucial for progress in understanding nanomaterials’ health and safety impacts. A new national strategic plan is needed that goes beyond federal research to incorporate research from academia, industry, consumer and environmental groups, and other stakeholders, the committee concluded.

Of particular concern is how nanomaterials interact with the human body. As Rick Weiss reported earlier this year, the FDA knows that it needs to at least issue guidance on super-potent nanoscale drugs and other consumer products like cosmetics that contain nanoengineered particles, but has consistently failed to do so. There are at least 800 products on the market today containing nanomaterials. The new report chides the NNI plans for supporting drug R&D without sufficient complimentary research on risks.

In response to the report’s release, the House Science and Technology Committee issued a statement saying that Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) would reintroduce legislation that aimed to cover these environmental, health, and safety gaps. The bill passed the House last year but then stalled in the Senate.

Andrew Maynard, Chief Science Advisor at the Wilson Center Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, and who served on the NRC board that produced the report, framed the conclusions within a larger context on his blog, 2020 Science. He argues that without a national research strategy–and smart approaches to presenting the value of research to policymakers and the public–the investment in initiatives like the NNI won’t payoff. He writes:

And here’s the rub: if the new technology isn’t safe, isn’t perceived to be safe, or is plagued by uncertainty over how to use it safely, it will be stymied. And the economic and societal benefits will dwindle from a flood to a trickle.

He lays blame at the feet of the outgoing conservative administration the lack of an overarching innovation strategy and looks forward to new leadership under the president-elect.

UPDATE: The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies underscored the criticisms of the NRC report and reminds policymakers of their recommendations for improved funding mechanisms for the NNI that could the the research plan on track.

More on nanotech at Science Progress:

• Rick Weiss: Nanoparticles Get Nanoregulation
• Rick Weiss: Time to Sweat the Small Stuff
• W. Patrick McCray: It’s Just Like That, Except Different

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.”

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)

Every presidential election year going back to 2000—and before that, in 1992 as well—the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has released a report, addressed to the incoming administration, providing input on presidential appointments in the area of science and technology. In essence, these reports have underscored the indisputable importance of filling positions ranging from the White House science adviser to the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in a timely manner, and with the best possible candidates. And in some sense, each report reiterates several core points: The overarching need for an influential, cabinet-level science adviser (call the position the “First Scientist”) who is appointed just after the election, for instance; and the need for streamlining the appointments process and cutting down on red tape. In addition, the 2004 and 2008 reports both stress the importance of nonpartisan, expertise-based assessments of which scientists will serve on the federal government’s many science-related advisory committees.

Sadly, such repetition may stem in part from the fact that of late, these valuable reports have been more or less ignored. The Bush administration did not appoint an influential, cabinet-level science adviser, and certainly did not appoint its senior science adviser promptly. It was, in fact, the slowest administration ever to fill the top 500 positions in government, according to the Brookings Institution, and left many science-related agencies (such as the Food and Drug Administration) leaderless for significant periods of time. (Given recent concerns about foodborne illnesses and contaminants, let’s hope that wouldn’t fly this time around.) The Bush administration also became notorious for politicizing the membership of scientific advisory committees—presumably the reason the 2004 and 2008 NAS reports both take up this issue (which in 2000 wasn’t on the radar).

Marburger…will always be remembered as the science adviser who took Bush’s side when the nation’s scientists stood up and challenged the administration on the grounds of scientific integrity.

For indeed, while the core NAS recommendations haven’t changed much, it is indisputable that they read far differently now than they did eight years ago. Consider what has happened to the post of the presidential science adviser, arguably the most luminous gem in the science and technology appointments trove. Bush’s current adviser, physicist John Marburger, is the longest-lasting occupant of this role in American history, having served for a full two terms (although he was originally appointed very late in 2001). And yet at the same time, Marburger’s tenure probably represents the “nadir” for the position in terms of its influence, as University of California-Merced science historian Gregg Herken put it to me last year.

Marburger is, most emphatically, not what the NAS recommends; he lacks the title of “assistant to the president,” and thus does not serve in a cabinet-level role. And while it’s probably more important for a presidential science adviser to have a good relationship with the president than with the scientific community, it’s quite clear that Marburger’s position vis a vis the latter has been hopelessly undermined—he will always be remembered as the science adviser who took Bush’s side when the nation’s scientists stood up and challenged the administration on the grounds of scientific integrity. (There are good reasons to think that either Barack Obama or John McCain will restore prominence to the science adviser position.)

Over all, there is little to dispute about the body of the NAS recommendations; the problem here has always been political responsiveness to them on the part of the administration, rather than their substance. Still, there’s something new to the 2004 and especially the 2008 NAS reports that I think bears remarking upon.

In addition to demanding action from the president, both of the more recent reports also call upon the nation’s scientific community—and particularly its membership societies—to appoint its most promising young researchers to serve in government science and technology posts, and to create more fellowships, like the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences’ excellent program, to get younger scientists training in the workings government. In short, the idea is that while the president and his transition staff should grasp the importance of science and technology appointments, the science community, at the same time, must be ready to offer up its best and brightest.

Indeed, in the 2008 report one senses a stronger tone (stronger for the generally staid National Academies, anyway) about the need for scientists to embrace public service; as it concludes, researchers “have much to give back. Government service is an excellent means by which to repay that debt.” This is remarkable, because it’s fairly notorious that scientists have not always clamored to be involved in government. It takes away from their research work; it doesn’t necessarily lead to academic career advancement; it requires uprooting and can even pose political risks. Nevertheless, here is the NAS saying strongly that there must be much more of it. That’s critical, because to reconnect science and the political process, what we need to see most is bridge building from both sides.

And we need to see it urgently: The impending presidential transition is one in which the candidates cannot afford to dally on the issue of science appointments. Modern presidential transitions, each more complex than the last one, require an enormous amount of planning and effort, beginning even before the party’s nominating conventions. While the campaigns are certainly busy, they should heed the NAS advice and not loose a minute in restoring the integrity and prominence of federal scientific service.

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 anti-evolution, pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute issued this predictable reply, despite the book’s clear assertions and supporting evidence that “‘intelligent design’ creationism is not supported by scientific evidence” (p 40) and “attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist” (p 12).

Committee members who oversaw production of the book include Francisco J. Ayala, past president of the AAAS; Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History; and Science Progress advisory board member, former NAS president, and recently-named Editor of Science Bruce Alberts.