I attended last week’s Bromley Lecture (in honor of D. Allan Bromley, science adviser to President George H.W. Bush) by Dr. John Marburger, President George W. Bush’s science adviser and head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  As suggested by the abstract, the bulk of Marburger’s remarks focused on his call for a science of science policy and what that means.  Today I’ll post about what Dr. Marburger said, and tomorrow I’ll spend some time discussing what else is needed to fulfill the notion of science of science policy as envisioned by Dr. Marburger.

The summary that follows is based on my notes and recollections.  Any misrepresentations are mine and mine alone.  If you were there and think I mischaracterized something, please comment or contact me off-blog.

Dr. Marburger came to the job from a notable research and research administration career, having served as President of SUNY-Stonybrook as well as Director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.  He acknowledged that taking the job opened his eyes to science policy beyond his narrow slice of the pie (physics, mostly).  Moving quickly from his background to an overview of science and technology policy, he used a series of charts to note two points that often need repeating.  First, the pattern of public support ($) for science is typically reactive to random, outside events.  Second, there is no apparent systematic approach to support for science and technology funding.  The latest evidence of this was the addition of $6.5 billion to the NIH stimulus bill funding by one senator.  In other words, narrow advantage trumps objective planning. These repeating themes prompted Marburger to respond as a scientist and attempt to place some order on the chaos.

This combination of scientific method and political optimism fed into Marburger’s proposal for a science of science policy that started in 2006.  He is convinced that rational policies can be implemented in the areas of science and technology.  While that seems wildly optimistic on its face, forming policies that are designed to achieve specific outcomes (or at least outputs) is not crazy.  The true challenge is in getting those policies implemented.  More on how the science of science policy might work on implementation tomorrow.

Marburger spent the last portion of his remarks describing the need for tools to better measure and assess science and technology policy phenomena.  For instance, while he is sympathetic to the recommendations made in the many workforce reports during the middle of this decade, he didn’t care for the arguments because they lack a foundation in models or analysis.  Another challenge towards finding better tools is the absence of an embedded or established community around these issues.  Now there is certainly a collection of research communities connected to these issues.

But the critical problem (one Marburger could do a better job in articulating) is the absence of a developed community in this area that has the same kind of institutional resources in policy that you find in international relations, tax, education and other policy areas.  Unfortunately, I don’t see any kind of critical mass forming to address this concern.  I watched Michael Crow, President of Arizona State, make the same basic arguments at a conference in 2004 – asking why aren’t science and technology policy researchers or practitioners as effective in Washington as their counterparts in tax policy or foreign policy.  His remarks might as well have been met with crickets.

Dr. Marburger has developed one part of this challenge – the need for better (and better coordinated) understanding of the effect of policies on innovative phenomena (and vice versa).  There are other parts of this challenge, like building community infrastructure and knowledge transfer mechanisms, that need work.  As Dr. Marburger is back to being a professor, there is a need for others (and I mean more than one person) to help expand the project if science and technology policies are going to change from reactive to proactive.  Tomorrow I’ll expand on this and other challenges facing the science of science policy project, which at the moment is an NSF funding program, an interagency task force, and a lot of wishful thinking.