Archive for January, 2009
Multiple studies have advocated for improving and modernizing the U.S. rail network as a way to spur economic growth, rein in sprawl, and make a strong commitment to sustainability. One such report, focusing on Boston, found that quality regional transportation played a significant role in fueling life sciences research.
For decades, Japan and Europe have deployed [...]
Increased federal funding of basic research must be accompanied by thoroughgoing reform of the grant process to create a new generation of American researchers.
Members of Congress and others are calling for independent investigations into the federal oversight system for food production facilities in light of new revelations about chronic problems at the Peanut Corp. of America peanut-processing plant in Blakely, Georgia. Those calls are on target, and the matter deserves the attention of both the Justice Department and [...]
All the things I didn’t get to say to Stephen Colbert, and other thoughts on the comedics of science.
A flood of recent reports indicate that as a result of global warming, oceans levels are creeping upward far faster than originally predicted. Coastal residents around the world must adapt, and poor nations will need swift help.
Okay, so according to the Lyndsey Layton in today’s Washington Post, the FDA has issued clear information that major brands of jarred peanut butter on grocery shelves are not subject to the recall. But there are hundreds of products affected–so many that the FDA has set up a database to track them all. If you [...]
Stephen Colbert points to the helpful assistance that Bush administration policymakers provided to researchers while talking with Contributing Editor Chris Mooney last night:
Mooney points out that science and scientists make regular appearances on popular Comedy Central shows, and that’s a good thing.
Revisionist history is one of many threats to protecting human rights and punishing violators. To preserve interviews conducted with members of the International Criminal Tribunal, which recently convicted leaders responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide, computer researchers from the University of Washington devised a system that would secure the video files against possible tampering, NYT’s [...]
President Obama’s pledge that his administration will “restore science to its rightful place” is already echoing through several significant policies that undo years of Bush-era antiscientific partisanship. Last week, he lifted the “global gag rule“; today he will direct the EPA to grant California its long-delayed emissions waiver; later this week it’s expected that he [...]
Part of the problem behind the recent spread of
Salmonella-infected peanut paste products is a disastrously underfunded FDA.
Monday
Science Progress Contributing Editor Chris Mooney will be on the the Colbert Report.
ITIF: “Crafting an Effective Broadband Stimulus Package”
Russell Senate Building, Room 485, 12 noon
AMS: “Coming to Grips with Sustainable Practices: Where Do We Go from Here?”
Russell Senate Office Building, Room 253, 12 noon
Brookings: “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st [...]
As we wrote last week, the current stimulus legislation moving through the House can help boost the economy by providing funds that support scientific research.
In particular, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would allocate $2 billion for biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health. The NIH will determine how to distribute the funds based [...]
Andrew Pollack at The New York Times reports that biotech company Geron has won approval for its Phase I trial of a hESC-derived therapy, which will treat spinal cord injuries:
Geron’s trial will involve 8 to 10 people with severe spinal cord injuries. The cells will be injected into the spinal cord at the injury site [...]
Innovation to boost economic prosperity requires new ways to get more funding to our most talented young researchers.
The National Academies’ highest award, the Public Welfare Medal, will go this year to Neal Lane. The medal honors the “extraordinary use of science for public good.” Lane is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor and Senior Fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, and a member of the [...]
A recent report from the World Bank assessing the threat of sea level rise to poor nations ranked Vietnam as the most vulnerable country. One meter of sea level rise could potentially displace 8.6 million people [correction: this originally said 86 million, which was off by a factor of 10], about 10.8 percent of the [...]
Despite the inauguration of a new administration, conservatives have left a damaged scientific system and an archaic way of thinking about science policy. The outgoing policymakers cannot rewrite history for their own purposes.
The United States boasts a huge corps of public-servant scientists devoted to going where the evidence takes them and who, as of Wednesday, will for the first time in years be respected by the highest officials in the land for what they do.
The proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act recognizes that science, technology and innovation have long provided the foundation for America’s prosperity, and are crucial to boosting an economy in crisis.
The stories of research involving human embryonic stem cells and the policy governing that work are intertwined and stretch back into the mid-1970s. Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, discussions began about how to conduct ethical research on human fetal tissue. Since that time, scientists have made great strides—most notable the [...]
In his recent book,
Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell, Lombardo investigates the history behind the 1927 Supreme Court ruling that upheld a Virginia law allowing state-mandated sterilizations for citizens deemed “socially inferior.”
Are science and environmental advocates as happy with Obama’s OIRA choice as his other appointments?
We’re announcing this in conjunction with the American Meteorological Society:
For Immediate Release – January 14, 2009
Author Chris Mooney Honored by American Meteorological Society
Chris Mooney, author of Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming, has won the 2009 Louis J. Battan Author’s Award by the American Meteorological Society, the nation’s leading professional society [...]
The Scientist this month features an excerpt from Nobelist and former National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus’s forthcoming book, The Art and Politics of Science. In it he describes some of the subtly to accounting for research money applied to the study of specific diseases:
The United States is one of only three industrialized nations that lack a national innovation policy. Most international competitors boast recently created or long-standing innovation agencies in addition to scientific research bodies. But not only is U.S. innovation policy disorganized, it is woefully underfunded. In 2006, the federal government spent a total of $2.7 billion, [...]
Inventions are being created at an ever-increasing pace and have grown increasingly complex, but the rules governing patents have not seen substantial change in decades. As a result, the system is bogged down, hampering investment and job creation. Here’s how to fix things.
Sometimes there is no substitute for just being there—being where exciting work is taking place, where high-content unstructured conversations take place, and where the unexpected may be explored and spark something new.
U.S. science and technology policymaking will be critical to carrying our deeply troubled economy back to the forefront of global innovation in the 21st century.
America’s use of the patent system has a special quality beyond rewarding the individual—as a way to construct the common good through socially shared innovation.
In the new print edition: Developing Regional Centers of Innovation, Tackling the Challenge of Patent Reform, and Government Contracting Run Amok.
A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel has deemed a drug from a genetically engineered animal to be safe and effective even though the agency has not yet decided what the rules for such approvals should be.
After a decade of overtly focusing on innovation economics, Britain appears to be moving ahead of the United States with regard to the innovation of innovation policy.
While many nations have taken the innovation challenge to heart and put in place a host of policies to spur innovation, the United States has done little, consequently falling behind in innovation policies and risking falling behind in innovation performance as well.
The new administration should create a National Innovation Foundation—a new, federally funded organization whose sole responsibility would be to promote innovation.
Regional centers such as Silicon Valley and Boston cultivate technology-based economic development through a dynamic mix of researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and infrastructure. Drawing lessons from their success can help revitalize the U.S. economy.
Scientific research and technological development have long been mainstays of American economic and military strength. Today more than ever, the global economic crisis and the prospect of a long and deep U.S. recession call for a reinvigoration of America’s scientific, engineering, and manufacturing enterprises.
By far, the most significant and destabilizing change in the patent environment since 2003 has been the dramatic increase in the growth, financing, and patent acquisitions of so called non-practicing entities, or “patent trolls.”
As the new Obama administration develops its innovation, economic development, and workforce policies, it should look to build and sustain regional and networked efforts, rather than only crafting broad national policies.
The Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse was formed in 2000 as a focused incubator to provide capital investments and customized company formation. A focused incubator provides deep knowledge of global industry trends, national networks, and corporate collaborations to identify investment opportunities.
Critical to the continued effectiveness of the U.S. patent and trademark system is a well-functioning U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, which is currently a bureau of the Department of Commerce. Alas, the office does not function well today.
The global patent backlog crisis cuts to the heart of the problem plaguing the roll out of timely and effective innovations to help the world cope with such immediate dangers as climate change and pandemic diseases.
Government contracting grew out of scientific inquiry in the interests of national security in the mid-20th-century and represents a government reform that yielded great successes but has since lost its moorings. It’s time to re-envision the role of private contractors in the public service.
Personalized genetic testing can tell us about our physical traits, but what can it tell us about psychology? In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Harvard professor Steven Pinker combines a narrative of personal genetic discovery with some insight into behavioral genetics.
As a participant in the Personal Genome Project, Pinker’s complete genome and medical history [...]
Some of the events next week in Washington, D.C. for the science and tech policy crowd.
Climate change will alter the Chesapeake Bay in ways that undermine important assumptions about resource management and restoration. Public agencies involved in bay protection do not need to wait for new authorities to address these issues.
Next week is bookended by science policy events at CAP: innovation and patent reform on Monday and stem cells on Friday, with the release of the new report: “A Life Sciences Crucible: Stem Cell Science and Innovation Done Responsibly and Ethically.”
Government Technology indicates that two major media outlets,
The New York Times and the BBC, are reporting that President-elect Obama will announce his pick for White House Chief Technology Officer this week. Among the speculative short listers is
Science Progress adviser Vint Cerf.
The new administration must provide proper patent incentives and thoughtful financial support for science and technology to germinate in communities around the country.
Get ready for regular discussions of science all year long—in the policy arena and the broader culture. But what are we hoping to gain from this effort, and how will we know if we learn anything at all?
A Turkish opposition leader has accused President Abdullah Gül of secret Armenian ancestry as the reason for his failure to reject a campaign to apologize for Turkey’s genocidal war against Armenians in the early 20th century. Republican People’s Party Deputy Canan Aritman demands that the president submit to a DNA test. But one would think that any Turkish political leader seeking to distance Turks from a holocaust would want to avoid racial biology as an explanation for anything.
We will release the Fall/Winter 2008-2009 print edition of Science Progress next Monday, January 12. This issue will feature entirely new content on regional centers of innovation, patent reform, and government contracting of scientific and technological work.
Here’s a look back at the most popular features we ran in the past year. Some of them dealt with major controversies over political interference with science at the Environmental Protection Agency, the teaching of creationism, and access to reproductive health services. Others tackled challenges of a networked world, or considered how policy can better harness the talents of a burgeoning scientific workforce.
