Science matters. It’s hard to make good decisions in today’s world that aren’t somehow informed by sound science — especially if you’re the head of state of a country like the USA.
This means that it’s important to know where the people lined up to get the job of President of the United States stand on science. Those of us deciding how to vote could use this information, and even you folks who are subject to US foreign policy have a significant interest in knowing what you’ll be in for.
There ought to be a presidential debate focused on science and technology before the 2008 election. It’s not just the bloggers who think so, either. A bunch of serious scientists support the idea, too.
Here are some big things I want to know about where presidential candidates stand on science — the kinds of questions a science and technology debate might put on the table:
Category Archives: Doing science for the government
Does valuable information want to be free?
The November 5, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an editorial by Rudy M. Baum [UPDATE: notbehind a paywall; apparently all the editorials are freely accessible online] looking at the “Google model” for disseminating information.
Baum writes:
Fifty years after Sputnik.
Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, Earth’s first artificial satellite. I don’t remember it (because I wouldn’t be born for another decade), but the “BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP” heard ’round the world left indelible traces on the fabric of life for my parents’ generation, my generation, and for the subsequent generations, too.
Reacting to PRISM and publishers’ concerns about ‘scientific integrity’ (the short version).
Even though I’ve been frightfully busy this week, I’ve been following the news about the launch of PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine). I first saw it discussed in this post by Peter Suber, after which numerous ScienceBloggers piled on. If you have some time (and a cup of coffee), read Bora’s comprehensive run-down of the blogosphere’s reaction.
If you’re in a hurry, here are three reasons I think PRISM’s plans to “save” scientists and the public from Open Access are a bad idea.
Some light reading on animal research regulations.
As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about the suit filed against UCSF, I thought I’d point out some resources relevant to the federal regulations (in the U.S.) governing the use of animals in scientific research.
These are the regulations currently in place — whether you think they do too little to protect the welfare of animals or too much to restrict scientific research, they’re the rules of the game. If the feds are not satisfied that they are being met, the feds are within their rights to withdraw federal funding from the institution that is out of compliance.
UCSF sued by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine over treatment of lab animals.
Today a number of doctors affiliated with the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) filed suit against the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) alleging that state funds are paying for research that violates the Animal Welfare Act. Among the big concerns raised in the suit:
- Experiments that were “duplicative” — i.e., whose outcomes were essentially known before the experiment from experiments already conducted.
- Experiments where there was no documentation that the researchers had considered alternative that would minimize the animals’ distress.
- Experiments where the justification given for the animal distress (gaining insight into how to alleviate Alzheimer’s disease) is problematic, because the neural system under study in the animals is not involved in Alzheimer’s disease.
You can read the AP’s story here and the PCRM press release about the lawsuit here.
Opening lines of communication between universities and the FBI.
In the July 16 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (secure behind a paywall), the article “FBI Reaches Out to Campuses” [1] caught my attention. The gist of it is that academic scientists are increasingly the targets of foreign espionage, where the stakes have less to do with national security than potentially huge economic losses. The FBI would like to help academic scientists avoid being dupes and giving scientists in other countries an unfair advantage.
Book review: Storm World.
When I was growing up in New Jersey, hurricanes were “on the radar” for us, one of many possible (if infrequent) weather patterns during summer and fall. Later, in my first semester of college in Massachusetts, the morning of my first broadcast on the college radio station was made memorable by the landfall of Hurricane Gloria; I remember the name of the storm because I closed my show by playing the U2 song “Gloria” before signing off the air at 7 am. (The governor of the Massachusetts had just declared a state of emergency, although it wasn’t until some 30 minutes later that the trustees of the college decided it might be a good idea to cancel classes.) The Atlantic coast, and the inland area not too far from it, was a site of weather events that commanded your attention.
For nearly two decades now, I’ve lived in California, in an area described as having climate, not weather. When I started reading Chris Mooney’s new book Storm World, a part of me wondered whether the fact that hurricanes are no longer a part of my day to day life would make it harder for me to get into this book about the scientific efforts to understand and forecast hurricanes, and the political struggles around the science.
My worry was misplaced.
Is it arrogant to want to use our scientific knowledge?
Perhaps you heard Steve Inskeep’s interview with NASA administrator Michael Griffin on Morning Edition this morning. Perhaps you also are trying to tease out the logical consequences of this statement he made about climate change:
I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change. First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.
Independent confirmation and open inquiry (investigation? examination?): Purdue University and the Rusi Taleyarkhan case.
My recent post on the feasibility (or not) of professionalizing peer review, and of trying to make replication of new results part of the process, prompted quite a discussion in the comments. Lots of people noted that replication is hard (and indeed, this is something I’ve noted before), and few were convinced that full-time reviewers would have the expertise or the objectivity to do a better job at reviewing scientific manuscripts than the reviewers working under the existing system.
To the extent that building a body of reliable scientific knowledge matters, though, we have to take a hard look at the existing system and ask whether it’s doing the job. Do the institutional structures in which scientific work is conducted encourage a reasonable level of skepticism and objectivity? Is reproducibility as important in practice as it is in the scientist’s imagination of the endeavor? And is this a milieu where scientists hold each other accountable for honesty, or where the assumption is that everyone lies?
The allegations around nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan — and Purdue University’s responses to these allegations — provide vivid illustrations of the sorts of problems a good system should minimize. The larger question is whether they are problems that are minimized by the current institutional structures.