The New York Times has occasionally come under some criticism here at Prometheus. But in an editorial Tuesday on the politicization of science, the Time gets it just about right when it observes:

“The Bush administration has from time to time found it convenient to distort science to serve political ends. The result is a purposeful confusion of scientific protocols in which “sound science” becomes whatever the administration says it is. In the short run, this is a tactic to override basic environmental protections in favor of industry. In the long run, it undermines the authority of science itself.”

Of course the same might be said of Bill Clinton, Bush Sr., Ronald Reagan, etc. There are of course those who enjoy debating who is a “worse” offender in distorting science – Here is my 2 cents on that topic from an article in the 17 Sept 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Scientists are thinking too narrowly if they view presidential politics as the forum for resolving the debate, says Roger A. Pielke Jr., director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “It’s very plausible to me that the Bush administration is the most egregious offender in misusing science, or the most skilled, depending on your perspective,” he says. However, that “doesn’t mean that under a Kerry administration, everything would be just fine,” he adds. Scientists will still need to work to counter interest groups that spin research results to support their views.”

And while the New York Times doesn’t tell us what is meant by “the authority of science itself,” they certainly don’t imply that science necessarily implies that one political perspective should always win out over another. And this nuance is just about right.

The Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University has unveiled a new WWW site with new content and organization. For those of you interested in science and technology policy it is a site you’ll want to bookmark.

Here are a few links:

How science makes environmental controversies worse: A new paper in Environmental Science & Policy by Daniel Sarewitz. (This is a paper in the special issue of ESP that I co-guest edited.)

Details on a panel discussion organized by CSPO at ASU 13 October 2004 titled, “Science Defiled – Or Politics as Usual? An Interactive Panel Discussion in conjunction with the Third Presidential Debate”.

A new Perspective by Daniel Sarewitz titled “Fundamentals and Fundamentalists”. Here is an excerpt:

“For it seems that science policy discourse is remarkably, and maddeningly, bound by a set of definitions and debates that have been more or less in rigor mortis for the past fifty years for all the wonderful insights generated by focusing a variety of social science lenses on the processes of knowledge creation and innovation, in the real world it was, and continues to be, the physical and life sciences who are fighting cold wars, revitalizing industries, bringing home the bacon, remaking society. They have all of the power and influence because they produce, and this power and influence confers upon them the right to be unreflective about why and how they do what they do.

Yet this license to cluelessness may be approaching its expiration date-not because the ideas emerging from science policy scholarship are gaining traction, but because the tensions built into the current system are becoming unavoidable, and the standard response-that all problems can be resolved with more funding, more velocity, more information, more stuff-begins to strain credulity.”

Read the whole thing here.

The September 2004 edition of Ogmius, the newsletter of the CIRES Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, is now available online.
This edition of Ogmius features an article entitled “Addressing the Under-representation of Women in the Sciences” by CU professor Patricia Rankin, a research highlight analyzing the distinction between regulatory science and academic science, the Center’s fall noontime seminar series schedule, recent Center publications, and other news of interest to the science and technology policy community.

Click here to subscribe to Ogmius.

Since I’ve been asked a few times I thought that it might be worth posting an analysis of hurricanes and climate change from work I’ve been involved in. Below is an extended excerpt from a 1999 paper I collaborated on, looking at trends in hurricane incidence and their policy relevance. Even though the paper was published more than five years ago, I think that the analysis remains sound.

Landsea, C. L., R. A. Pielke, Jr., A. Mestas-Nuñez, and J. Knaff, 1999: Atlantic Basin Hurricanes: Indicies of Climate Changes. Climate Change, 42, 89-129.

Here is a link to the paper in PDF.

The paper can also be found here in HTML.

Begin extended except …

(more…)

The September/October 2004 issue of Foreign Policy is a special issue focused on “The World’s most Dangerous Ideas”. Foreign Policy describes this issue as follows:

“Ideas matter, and sometimes they can be dangerous.

With this simple conviction, FOREIGN POLICY asked eight leading thinkers to issue an early warning on the ideas that will be most destructive in the coming years. A few of these ideas have long and sometimes bloody pedigrees. Others are embryonic, nourished by breakthroughs in science and technology. Several are policy ideas whose reverberations are already felt; others are more abstract, but just as pernicious. Yet, as the essays make clear, these dangerous ideas share a vulnerability to insightful critique and open debate.”

Two of the eight articles, by Robert Wright and Fareed Zakaria, are available without a subscription.

A question follows from Foreign Policy’s exercise: How does the knowledge represented in the “dangerous ideas” compare to how we organize ourselves to produce and deal with knowledge? One answer to this question is that there is a considerable mismatch between how we organize the knowledge enterprise and how we organize ourselves to deal with the consequences of knowledge.

Aspects of this problem are discussed by Lightman et al. in their volume “Living with the Genie: Essays on Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery” published by Island Press.

Yesterday the National Academies of Sciences issued a report that recommended, “Current policies that allow scientists and the public unrestricted access to genome data on microbial pathogens should not be changed … [and] concludes that security against bioterrorism is better served by policies that facilitate, not limit, the free flow of this information.”

Some additional scrutiny is called for when the NAS recommends a single a policy recommendation that happens to be focused on satisfying the interests of those making the recommendation. Specifically, the committee making the recommendation is comprised primarily of life scientists who benefit from and are committed to open access to scientific information. As Stanley Falkow, chair of the committee that wrote the report, and professor of microbiology and immunology, Stanford University, stated in the NAS press release, “The current vitality of the life sciences depends on a free flow of data and ideas …”. Thus, there is a built-in bias among the committee to recommend that data be kept open and available. The committee based its recommendation (what it calls “the best policy choice” on p. on criteria that it determined were best for advancing science.

We should be uncomfortable when NRC committees take on an advocacy position related to science. Specifically, the NAS should not be in the business of pushing for a single policy option, particularly one that best serves the needs of its own community. Instead the NRC should carefully evaluate the pluses and minuses of a range of plausible policy alternatives, and then allow government officials to decide which course of action is in the public’s interest. NRC Committees should allow for sufficient disciplinary and other diversity to allow for such policy evaluations. The NRC has access to expertise on every area of science. But it also has access to those with expertise in policy evaluation, this report (and many others) showed no evidence that they consulted or otherwise incorporated such expertise.

As an example of the general problem consider this quote from Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a bioweapons expert at the State University of New York’s Purchase College, in this week’s Science “This is the right decision, from the standpoints of both public health and security.” First, the NAS should not be in the business of making policy decisions and, second, it is not at all clear that the NAS committee developed or applied criteria of public health or security in performing its policy evaluation.

In a letter in last week’s Science John T. Durkin provides a Stalwart’s defense to a Dealer’s argument made by Michael S. Gazzaniga in an earlier letter to Science.

This exchange shows that this debate cannot be settled on scientific grounds and why the issue of stem cells is both highly political and closely related to the abortion debate.

Durkin: “The scientist who destroys an embryo to harvest stem cells commits a wrong, for the scientist has denied that embryo the opportunity to grow into an adult. My moral objections to human embryonic stem cell research are not assuaged by severing its connection to reproductive cloning. In my judgment, the developmental events leading from fertilized ovum, to blastula, to embryo, to fetus, to fully formed adult constitute a continuum. It is artificial, and even self-serving, to declare the embryo “not yet human” before some point, and to declare that we may do with that embryo as we will.”

Gazzaninga: “Looking at a miniscule ball of cells in a petri dish, so small that it could rest on the head of a pin, one may be hard pressed to think of it as a human being. After all, it has no brain or capacity to think and feel. Merely possessing the genetic material for a future human being does not make a ball of cells a human being. The developing embryo that becomes a fetus that becomes a baby is the product of a dynamic interaction with its in vivo environment, its postnatal experiences, and a host of other factors. A pure genetic description of the human species does not describe a human being.”

I discuss these sorts of debates which may be related to science but cannot be addressed by science in this paper:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. 2004. Abortion, Tornadoes and Forests: Thinking about Science, Politics and Policy, Chapter 9, pp. 143-52 in J. Bowersox and K. Arabas (eds.) Forest Futures: Science, Policy and Politics for the Next Century (Rowman and Littlefield).

A pre-publication version here and the published version will be online soon.

The University of Washington has a new initiative in science policy called the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy. FOSEP is focused on fostering “discussion about the role of science in our society” and building “a network of individuals interested in science ethics and policy in the Seattle area.” FOSEP is a graduate student-created and run effort.

Their next public forum is on stem cells and takes place on October 18, 2004.

The giant Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral took serious damage over the weekend from Hurricane Frances. The New York Times and Space.com reported the hanger sustained damage to its walls and roof, raising the possibility of costly repairs and a delay to return to flight for the shuttle. 52,000 square feet of exterior tiles were blown off the walls of the hanger, while an inspection team is still determining the extent of damage to the roof. The hanger houses the orbiter, tank, and boosters for much of the pre-flight preparation. Damage also occured to the Cape Canaveral manufacturing facility for thermal tiles, though NASA officials suggest a seperate plant in California could produce the critical tiles. Meanwhile, the hurricane season continues with Hurricane Ivan.

Alvin Weinberg published a paper in 1971 with this title in which he discussed the value structure of the scientific enterprise. Weinberg’s value structure, which I think survives largely intact today, helps to explain why certain areas and types of science are perceived within the community to have a higher standing than other areas.

I was reminded of Weinberg’s axiology when reading a news article in Science a few weeks ago that included this comment:

“A Slovenian economist has been tapped to be Europe’s next commissioner for science and research. Janez Potocnik, lead negotiator for Slovenia’s entry into the European Union, is slated to take the reins of E.U. science policy, including the 5-year, $22 billion Framework 6 program that funds trans-European research. The appointment surprised many E.U. watchers, because the 46-year-old Potocnik has no background in the natural sciences. (Outgoing commissioner Philippe Busquin studied physics before entering Belgian politics.)”

Now I don’t know either person, but it would seem to me than training in economics — a discipline focused on the allocation of finite resources — might provide a very useful background to someone heading a large multi-disciplinary funding agency. Of course, appointing a non-natural scientist challenges the articles of faith that comprise Weiberg’s axiology, hence the “surprise.”