The Christian Science Monitor called Ferris “the best popular science writer in the English language today,” and his new book is The Science of Liberty. In it, he tells the story of the intimate connections between the scientific advances that expanded the frontiers of human knowledge and the democratic experiments that expanded the frontiers of human liberty. He recently joined Science Progress editor-in-chief Jonathan Moreno for a podcast interview to discuss how science rescued generations of humanity from subsistence living and brought freedom to nations around the world.

In the opening pages, Ferris lays down his bold claim: “The democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution, and that science continues to empower democratic freedom today.” Dissatisfied with existing histories of the Enlightenment, he set out to ascertain more specifically what exactly was new about the period bookended by the English Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789. It wasn’t simply the embrace of reason, Ferris said, because after all, individuals can reason their way into all sorts of conclusions that don’t have anything to do with the nature of reality.

“Science was what was the new ingredient,” Ferris said, “And science isn’t just reason—it’s experimentation. The more I studied it, the more it seemed to me that this experimental approach is also the basis of liberal democracy.”

For this reason, Ferris likes to focus on a key event in the year preceding the 1688 installation of parliamentary rule in England. In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia, the foundational text for classical mechanics and the laws of motion familiar to high school physics students. From this difficult book describing universal gravitation, Ferris drew a vector to the nascent idea of liberal democracy. “That book really sealed the deal,” he said, as it established the “tremendous predictive power of science.”

“Here was this new way of studying nature that disproved ancient authorities. It didn’t matter how great the authorities were,” he explained, “Aristotle could have said it—but you could conduct experiments that showed that Aristotle was wrong. And from that, it’s not much of a leap to say that, well, other forms of authority may be illegitimate as well.” Authorities like kings, as Thomas Paine would later point out in the run up to the American Revolution. Citizens of nations around the world owe their freedom to these scientific ways of thinking, which helped erode the legitimacy of monarchies.

The way we live now is virtually indistinguishable from the way people lived prior to the scientific revolution—life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” as Moreno said, describing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s vision of the “state of nature” without government. He explained that people alive during the middle ages had no perception that living standards could get better, in part because there was no progress in technology. “People did not have the notion that there could be change and improvement,” Moreno said.

The difference between that world and our current one is immense, Ferris emphasized. Moreover, science has continued to accelerate improvements in standards of living.

“The United States, at the time of its founding, was what would be called a third world country today,” Ferris said. “When the United States first started being called an ‘affluent society’ in the 1950s, Americans had less than half the money that they have now.” In the larger scheme of human history, we’ve come a long way in a very short time.

But in spite of all the knowledge, wealth, and freedom that flows from science, critics remain.

“Dogma ruled the world before science came along and it is still the preference of the majority of people in almost every country, and certainly here in the United States,” said Ferris.

But democracy is not a dogma. It is a method. “It is the most successful method of governance ever hit upon by humans, just as science is the most effective method of learning that’s ever been found,” he said.

In their discussion, Moreno and Ferris also explored the postmodern intellectual movement of the 1980s and 90s, which engulfed humanities departments at many universities, but unfortunately misinterpreted science and the democratic systems it supported. At its root, postmodernism is a critique of capitalism and its related economic, political, and cultural systems.

Ferris traces this problem to the two World Wars and the Cold War that followed. The European thinkers emerging from that crucible, he argues, sometimes turned away from democracy and toward socialism and a skeptical view about the power of science.

“What it appears to have done to European intellectuals, by and large, is to have persuaded them that the scientific, democratic world that had seemed to being doing so well going into the 20^th century had been proved to be a failure and even a sham and led to this hideous violence,” he said. Ferris is quick to point out that this is not true: “Prior to the rise of liberal democracy, the average person was less safe at home in bed in his little village than was the average resident of Western Europe during World War II.”

Moreover, Ferris said, there is a common misperception embedded in many threads of academic education that totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were particularly good at science. “The widespread claim that socialist systems generally—and even their communist, fascist varieties—were more efficient than democracies is not true,” he emphasized—the evidence just doesn’t support the claim. A careful study of Italian train records, for instance, revealed that Mussolini did not, in fact, make them run on time.

Postmodern rhetoric can sound at times like the claims of the intelligent design movement, Moreno said, saying that each rejects scientific expertise.

“The anti-science movement in this country, which includes the religious right and the radical left and many other elements,” replied Ferris, “Its program is simply to seize on any weakness it can find in the interface between science and society.” The recent embrace of global warming skepticism by creationists fits this pattern, with its denial of “belief” in climate change.

But standing up for the simple facts of our own history as a great democratic experiment doesn’t require belief in anything, Ferris contends. “It just requires an acquaintance with the historical facts of how we got to where we are now.”

Interview by Jonathan Moreno; summary and production by Andrew Plemmons Pratt.

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Imagine that you are 13 years old and discover you are losing eyesight in the central portion of the visual field. There is hardly a part of the great adventure ahead, from learning to sports to dating, that is not changed forever by Stargardt’s Disease, an inherited disorder that resembles adult macular degeneration. A familiar trope of conservative critics of embryonic stem cell research was that regarding health problems as a crisis could provide ethical justification for just about anything. But how exactly is a young teenager’s degenerative eye disease not a crisis, not only for that child but for that family?

Medical intervention should not be the only response; parental support, counseling, classroom arrangements, and low vision devices are all important. Patients can and do live active and happy lives with a wide range of opportunities. There is no denying that we all live with disabilities or acquire them, nor that we cannot profit from life’s challenges.

And if regenerative medicine can offer a promising new therapy with reasonable risks to subjects, well, that’s not bad either. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration granted orphan drug status to cells derived from human embryonic stem cells by Advanced Cell Technology that will treat Stargardt’s. This bodes well for approval for a clinical trial.

This is not only an important step in normalizing the field as a regulated scientific activity. It also speaks to the sometimes-unpredictable ways that experimentation can address sources of human suffering. And it is a clear example of the way a smart regulatory system in a liberal democracy can respond to both a medical need and a market opportunity with no moral inconsistency.

Thus what is in some respects even more interesting than the fact that the company’s approach to a retinal disorder involves cells from embryos is that the FDA approval took place under the auspices of the Orphan Drug Act. The Act encourages innovative approaches to serious diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 Americans, conditions unlikely to attract private investment without additional incentives. The rare kind of macular degeneration that the therapy will attempt to alleviate afflicts mostly children. The idea—for which there is already support in laboratory and animal studies—is that embryonic stem cells can be pushed to become the retinal cells destroyed by Stargardt’s.

It was just early last year that biotech company Geron obtained permission from the FDA for the first embryonic stem cell trial. It will never be known how much of a chilling effect Bush administration policy had on the willingness of private companies to invest in the field, but conservatives and progressives alike understand that targeted, private-sector innovation is as critical for a healthy economy as it is for improving human life.

Someday therapeutic modifications in the gene that causes Stargardt’s Disease might be possible, but there might be too many harmful mutations to make direct gene therapy practical. That question, too, will surely be answered someday. Meanwhile, we may hope that the recent designation succeeds in moving the therapy forward and throws more light on this form of macular degeneration and on the lives of the kids who suffer from it.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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The ability to develop more complex artificial proteins is a reminder of the speed with which synthetic biology is developing. In “synbio,” biological parts like genes, proteins, and whole chromosomes are used to build new microscopic organisms that behave in certain ways, like producing specialized chemicals. Faster and cheaper DNA sequencing is a key technology that is making synbio practical for a range of purposes.

Previously scientists have been constrained in their experiments with proteins by the inability to introduce more than one modification at a time. The new technique developed at Cambridge enables significantly more flexibility by creating a parallel set of genetic information readable by specially modified ribosomes. Normally, ribosomes read messenger RNA in units of three nucleotides called codons, each of which corresponds to a specific amino acid. The altered ribosomes can also read “quadruplet codons” of four nucleotides and translate them into 256 protein building blocks.

Interestingly, the UK team tested their technique by culturing their new ribosomes with an antibiotic resistance gene with four codons. The designer ribosomes read the gene and produced the antibiotic resistance protein. Although the test selected surely seemed innocuous to the scientists, and is a standard way to assess such lab-designed alterations, one of the principle worries about synthetic biology is that novel biological weapons could be created by people with relatively modest lab skills who are malevolent or just careless. The biological parts or “biobricks” are in many cases available on the open market. Experts on biological weapons are concerned that antibiotic resistant organisms could be engineered either by nations or non-state actors.

Yet this research is crucial for a better understanding of cellular systems and for developing new and beneficial polymers. An encouraging example of openness and opportunity in the world of snybio was recently described in The New York Times Magazine, a 100-college competition called iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. As part of the contest, over 1,000 students learned how to use the tools of synthetic biology in order to make new products like more powerful pharmaceuticals, new fuel sources, nutrient-rich crops, or even biologically based computer monitors.

But what iGEM is mainly cultivating is the young engineering talent so badly needed at a time when people in their 20s are in danger of falling behind during a recessionary period. Research like that done at the Cambridge lab is the basic science needed for the iGEMers to do their applied work. The lesson here is that the lab doors need to be kept open.

The progressive response to synbio is more, not less, science. The more knowledge that is gained, the better prepared the scientific community is to establish a culture of responsibility, develop practical regulation, impose sanctions and, at the extremes, develop counter-measures for dual-use discoveries.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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Seizing on the moment for a light-hearted comment I said, “And perhaps we can get everyone here to come to America.”

Immediately the professor, sitting at the back of the room, raised his hand, smiled broadly and said, “But we’re going to bring them back!”

The point was not lost on anyone. That was 2005; even a few years before that his statement would not have been credible. I have been in China twice since then with the opportunity to see through a tiny window into the Chinese commitment to the life sciences. My impression is that their confidence has only increased.

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has provided an excellent brief comment on the growth of science in China, including a fascinating note about Mao’s skepticism concerning the scientific elite. Congress in the early nineteenth century was also skeptical about supporting gentlemen inventors out of the federal purse. The main sticking point was a constitutional debate about the authority granted the federal government to engage in “internal improvements.” A proposal for a national university to be located in Washington, though apparently a dream of George Washington, was caught in this debate. When scientific work presented specific and tangible advantages for their constituents, congressmen were supportive, but there were few such projects or opportunities in those days. One exception was the coastal survey, which aided in safe navigation and therefore commerce. Politicians were both willing and eager to support a project that brought concrete benefits to their own states. Similarly, a perceived need for nuclear weapons in the 20^th century moved China to develop a sophisticated physics infrastructure.

Both the quality as well as the quantity of Chinese science is rapidly improving. Their system enables focused investment and rapid adjustment to new opportunities. Although I have written that America’s cultural advantages should keep us in the lead for a long time to come by most metrics (publications, patents, etc.), we need to consider whether we are doing enough to leverage the strengths that China can bring for our own benefit. Mostly we think in competitive terms, about the quality of our science and engineering preparation. But we should also be thinking in ways that account for the cooperative nature of science. For example, is our immigration policy keyed to the best and the brightest in emerging science and technology? Is our visa system as flexible as it could be? What about language instruction and cultural exchange? Although the international language of science is English, there are good interpersonal reasons for at least some of our young scientists to have incentives to learn Chinese. What reforms need to be made in our intellectual property regime or regulatory systems to ensure maximum flexibility and enhance the investment climate while also providing adequate protections here and abroad? What sorts of transparency should we insist upon with our Chinese partners to keep the playing field level and humane, especially in sensitive areas like human research protection?

There is no reason for us to fear for our scientific advantage, but we should be resolute. One Chinese university official told me he is disturbed that so many of their medical students are still lost the United States for the long term. The tide is rising but the geology is still in our favor if we have vision and wit to build upon in a sustainable way.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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But sound science is driven by evidence rather than ideology; in that way it often surprises. A report from a French team effectively closes the circle on the skin-cells-to-stem-cells process by reporting that they have accomplished the reverse: mouse embryonic stem cells were used to generate a fully functional layer of skin. This work has tremendous implications for patients waiting for grafts from their own skin, as these people are vulnerable to life-threatening infections in the interim.

Just as this paper appeared The Lancet, the life sciences world was on edge, waiting to see if the regents of the University of Nebraska medical school would vote to turn back the clock, limiting Cornhusker scientists to the 21 embryonic stem cell lines approved by the Bush administration. The apparent sanctity of those cell lines is based on a morally arbitrary line in the calendar due to the scheduling of President Bush’s famous stem cell address to the nation.

There were so many things wrong with this idea it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately the motion failed on a tie vote of the university regents. However, the incident did show, once again, how morally vacuous posturing can overtake science policy. The fact is that no one knows where the science could lead. If the history of medicine is a guide, what is most likely is that there will be a menu of cell lines that will have come from different sources via a variety of processes, each with their advantages and disadvantages, risks and benefits. Reality has a way of trumping rhetoric.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the Silfen University Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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Of course we’ve heard this before, especially with reference to Japan. As I’ve traveled around the country this past week many conversations have touched on two topics: the recent change in government and the efforts by the new, more liberal administration to confront the corruption and waste that are contributing to Japan’s version of our economic crisis. Then there are references to the “lost decade” that still shadows the diminished Japanese giant. Far fewer companies are paying for those infamous thousand dollar lunches in the Ginza, let alone financing leisurely chats at the disappearing geishas. The purchase of Rockefeller Center that so shook Americans seems as remote as the Shogun.

To be sure, China is not Japan, but it’s easy to get caught up in the criteria of the moment. Next month I will be in Beijing for the third time in four years, where the air is indeed thick with excitement about the next Shanghai tower and robust economic growth. But atmospheric Beijing restaurants frequented by Western expats and visiting scholars are also full of talk about continuing unrest in rural areas, environmental catastrophe, the lack of a leadership succession, and the Communist party’s anxiety about any incident that could trigger another Cultural Revolution, which still cannot be discussed in public.

Yet it is true that, for the moment at least, America’s self-confidence has been shaken. Worries that something is deeply wrong with the country were nearly universal in the late 1960s, and the 1930s, and so again in the early 2000s. Brooks is right that rekindling an innovation economy focused on regional clusters would go far to making Americans productive and optimistic again; that is exactly the cause we’ve championed at Science Progress. It’s also the orientation that can distinguish the American spirit from the Chinese system, which so far still lingers far behind as an innovation center.

One element of the American story that Brooks fails to mention that has been key to our success is immigration. Even the Japanese scientists I’ve spoken with agree that Chinese students are far more likely to spend virtually all their time at their work. A Japanese grad student told me that universities have had to remove makeshift beds from the labs so that Chinese students would stop sleeping there and stimulating rumors of sexual harassment. China has not shown that its system can unleash the combination of ambition and creativity that has long found such fertile soil in the United States—and in my view it never will. We should refocus our efforts on continuing to attract new waves of new Americans who can re-energize the American future and remind us why we came to America in the first place.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the Silfen University Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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That none of this is true seems almost beside the point. Americans are getting nervous and that is not good news for health care reform. Supporters of reform are now working overtime to reassure us that health care reform will not make us worse off, that it will instead improve the quality of the care we get, and that if we like what we have, we can keep it. Health care reform will not change, in any way that matters to us, the self-interested world we each inhabit.

At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, we want to try a different tack. Each of us should support health care reform because it is the right thing to do.

We should say at the outset that although we do ethics for a living, we are neither impartial nor indifferent to the needs of those we love. When someone in our families is ill, we do every thing in our power to get them every medical intervention whose benefits outweigh the harms. We desperately want them to have the best. And because we have excellent employer-sponsored insurance, and have the resources to pay for whatever out of pocket costs there might be, we usually succeed.

But we are always painfully aware that what we can do for our families, many other people cannot. And we are also aware that there is no morally defensible reason why we are in this position and they are not. Our system is just unfair.

Most of us who have insurance—whether through our employers or through Medicare—do so because the government pays a big chunk of the bill. Most of us who don’t have insurance don’t qualify for the tax breaks that go along with employer-sponsored health insurance and are just too young for Medicare.

Not that insurance insulates a family from the staggering financial burdens of a serious illness. If you are happy with your health insurance it may be because no one in your family has ever had advanced cancer, serious arthritis, a debilitating brain accident, or any number of illnesses or injuries where the cost of care can exceed by tens of thousands of dollars a year your insurance benefits. Putting aside the contentious issue of whether those wealthy enough to absorb such costs deserve to be that much better off, surely in a country as rich as ours no family should have to be in the awful position of being unable to secure critical medical care because they cannot afford it.

So what does this have to do with a personal moral responsibility to support health care reform? We each have a duty to take care of our loved ones and that extends, of course, to making sure that what is good and valuable about the health care they now have is preserved. But don’t be misled into thinking you are being asked to trade away your family’s interests. The next time you hear how health care reform is going to get between you and your doctor or deny you needed care, press for specifics. Despite the hype, the proposals currently being debated in Congress impose minimal or no burdens on most of us. Indeed, we will be more secure with health care reform than we are now. After all, while we may be healthy or have good insurance today, that may not be the case tomorrow.

But even if, in the near term, some of us may be slightly worse off than we are today, there is a line between appropriate self interest and simple selfishness. Opposing health care reform crosses that line.

This is a case where we can have our moral cake and eat it too. In supporting health care reform, we can be good citizens and morally responsible neighbors, and still do right by those we love. We want a country in which all families, not just ours, have affordable, high quality health care. Don’t you?

Ruth R. Faden is the Wagley Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Jonathan D. Moreno is the Silfen University Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

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Sam Brownback (R) wants to make sure that the United States government prevents the creation of human-animal monstrosities that could destroy humankind.

For years Sen. Brownback has been worried about mixing human and animal tissues for scientific purposes. In 2005 he introduced the Human-Animal Chimera Prohibition Act, which would have imposed civil and criminal penalties for making certain kinds of laboratory animals. The unintended consequences of this bill would have included severely hampering medical research on serious human diseases like Alzheimer’s that seem to have a genetic component.

Although barely noticed at the time, Brownback’s concerns got enough attention in the Bush White House to earn a reference in the 2006 state of the union address, in which the president called for banning human-animal hybrids. The remark excited little public comment, perhaps because it was so odd, and it certainly didn’t earn President Bush any more points with a scientific community that already held him in low esteem.

At the time I suggested that the White House speechwriters didn’t seem to know the difference between a hybrid and a chimera. All hybrids are chimeras because they involve mixtures from two sources, but hybrids are a special kind of chimera in which the genes themselves are mixed.  A familiar example of a hybrid is a mule, a sterile animal that is produced by mating a horse with a donkey.  Chimeras range from people with heart valves from pigs to people who resulted from fused embryos to once-pregnant women who carry some fetal cells with them the rest of their lives to the valuable lab animals I mentioned.

Apparently Senator Brownback has learned the difference between chimeras and hybrids. His new bill specifically “does not preclude the use of animals or humans in legitimate research or health care where genetic material is not passed on to future generations, such as the use of a porcine heart valve in a human patient or the use of a lab rat with human diseases to treat patients.” So the senator wants to ensure that the genetic makeup of human beings is not altered by some sort of animal combination, which would be “a violation of human dignity and a grave injustice.”

Conceding the dignity problem for the sake of argument, it’s hard to understand how a race of mermaids would be an injustice, certainly not to the mermaids themselves.

As a presidential primary candidate Sen. Brownback expressed his doubts about evolution. One wonders how he would square that position with his worry about the potential development of the human germline. Anxious about blurring species boundaries, the senator also likes to tout his background in agriculture that has given him expertise in genetic engineering of crops and livestock. It’s probably time for him to take a refresher course in animal husbandry, since speciation remains a poorly understood process. Genetics turns out to be only one component, and there are various ways to define a species.

Brownback has announced that he is leaving the senate to run for governor of Kansas. One might have expected that Kansas would, in a Brownback administration, be the first state to outlaw human-animal hybrids. But the (non-hybridized) Sunflower State is not the pioneer in preventing a pollution that could ultimately produce centaurs or the planet of the apes. Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal already signed a bill into law that would protect the Bayou State from such a fate, seemingly inspired by Sen. Brownback’s scary vision. Apparently bi-partisanship does not count as a suspect hybrid, since Democratic Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu has signed onto the Brownback bill.

Some years ago the French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the difference between modern and pre-modern states is that in the former sovereignty is claimed over life rather than death. Foucault would have delighted in this example of the exercise of sovereign authority over human bodies, and not just current ones, but those in the distant future as well. But do the conservative extremists who support this kind of nonsense appreciate that using state power to keep the human race pure serves the same eugenic purpose that they commonly attribute to the left?

The proposed protections are incomplete. They only cover human-animal monstrosities made within our borders. I propose the “Human-Animal Hybrid Immigration Prohibition Act of 2009.”

Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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In March, President Barack Obama issued an Executive Order that lifted restrictions limiting federal support to 21 Bush-approved lines of human embryonic stem cells, and that directed NIH to develop new guidelines. Since then, new requests for fund involving embryonic stem cell lines have been on “pause.” The path to today’s rules demonstrates respect for scientific integrity and democratic governance by providing for a full period of public comment, during which individuals and groups submitted some 49,000 comments on the draft policy, according to Acting NIH Director Dr. Raynard Kington during a conference call this afternoon. In contrast, President George W. Bush and his advisors developed their rules without such a process and without a formal policy mechanism like an Executive Order. Their approach consisted of a televised address and a “Fact Sheet” distributed to the media.

We’re pleased that the new guidelines are similar to those proposed in the Center for American Progress/Science Progress report, “A Life Sciences Crucible: Stem Cell Research and Innovation Done Responsibly and Ethically,” published in January. They include:

• Funding only for cell lines from excess embryos remaining after fertility procedures, including lines from other countries
• Full informed consent from the donors
• No financial inducements to donate
• A demonstrated understanding by the donors that the research will not confer benefits upon them personally
• A strict separation of the privately funded cell-derivation process from the publicly funded cell research
• A new working group composed of scientists and ethicists to review the donation process of cell lines derived prior to implementation of the new guidelines for their eligibility for federal funding
• A registry of cell lines that have been found eligible for federal funding.

It is important to note that these rules are in accordance with existing federal law, including the so-called Dickey-Wicker amendment, which prohibits federal funding of research that creates, harms, or destroys embryos. The rules likewise support the rapid advances in induced pluripotent cell research, which still relies on access to embryonic stem cells so that scientists can understand the hallmarks of pluripotency, the ability of stem cells to grow into any tissue in the body.

Biomedical researchers will now have the opportunity to expand their work at the cutting edge of the life sciences in a framework that respects the values of the American people.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

For more from Science Progress and the Center for American Progress on stem cells:

Report: A Life Sciences Crucible: Stem Cell Research and Innovation Done Responsibly and Ethically (CAP)

Timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research (SP)

Top Eight: Eight Reasons to Applaud Action on Stem Cells (CAP)

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The equivalence concept-that training should produce soldiers with similar skill sets-provides commanders with flexibility in replacing one soldier with another as casualties and other exigencies of combat require. It is embodied in the “uniform” assigned to each new recruit, and illustrated in such films as Band of Brothers, in which soldiers come and go as barely distinguishable names and faces. Of course, as soon as basic training is over, distinctions are drawn over such matters as special training, assignments and, eventually rank. But the essential idea that the basic warfighter should be functionally similar to another remains salient in military theory.

But with more attention to the empirical applications of modern neuroscience, we can better understand the connections between predictors of success and individual variability in training and learning. As a result, equivalence may not be the key to preparing the modern soldier.

Although commanders have always intuitively recognized individual differences (as in the case of President Abraham Lincoln, who sought a general who would execute his war strategy), the application of 20th century psychological concepts like IQ and personality types formalized the idea that uniqueness could be exploited as well as screened out. Work assignments and military career paths could be guided by valid distinctions in capacity and potential. In the selection of certain individuals for high risk/high gain tasks, as in the case of special operations personnel, it is surely desirable to have as much psychological data as possible.

Yet with data comes the potential for bias, and genetic discrimination is a concept familiar in the civilian world. While he was a U.S. Senator, President Obama co-sponsored a bill that prohibits discrimination based on the results of DNA tests. But the use of such testing for positive purposes like employment opportunities might not be considered discriminatory, and in any case national security needs could trump conditions thought to be unacceptable in the civilian world. Those who take up arms in defense of a nation, whether volunteers or conscripts, are commonly understood to have ceded their liberties, and implicitly accept risks that are not necessarily shouldered by other citizens.

In the real world these extraordinary burdens of duty are not usually resented. Soldiers tend to embrace virtually any arrangement that might make them more likely to be of help to their comrades in arms. Imagine for example that there was an advance in understanding of brain chemistry that helped predict susceptibility to post-traumatic stress. Combat soldiers might well welcome such a screen if it meant avoiding operational failures that could result in harm to others in their unit, even if their own career opportunities were impaired as a result.

Already there are biomarkers for the ability to manage stress and neurological measures of post-traumatic stress. Indeed, many in and out of the military have called on the services to mandate a pre-deployment mental screening in order to establish a baseline of brain functioning on which to measure future changes. This information could also help screen candidates for certain jobs and missions and be incorporated into debriefing and post-operations examinations. Neural indicators of different learning and decision making styles could help in designing training regimens and duty assignments. Growing understanding of the neural basis of performance under conditions like sleep and nutrition deprivation and stress could identify interventions to ameliorate performance degradation, like pharmaceuticals for cognitive enhancement and improved delivery of nutrients to the brain. The new report advises the Army to monitor nonmilitary research on neuroscience elsewhere in government as well as in academia and industry.

In 2008 there was a complementary report on the potential for neuroscience to make greater contributions-and create novel challenges-for national security. Entitled “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies,” the committee (of which I was a member) urged close collaboration between the scientific and intelligence communities to keep track of rapid advances in neuroscience and neurotechnology. Organizers asked the committee to assess the current state of work for trends worth trackeding, to assess the rate of innovation, and to pay special attention to selected countries. The committee’s key finding addressed the need for intelligence collection and analysis to emphasize science and technology, to obtain intelligence professionals with advanced scientific training, and to increase collaboration with the academic community. Its key recommendation was that the intelligence community use a more centralized indication and warning system concerning non-U.S. neuroscience potential. This new report broadens the conversation to include the uniformed military as well as the intelligence community.

Although the applications of neuroscience can easily be hyped, the implications are so great that we should expect the national security establishment to follow these developments with great interest in the years ahead.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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And I haven’t mentioned the amputation of her right arm at age 39 due to a sarcoma, or the fact that she taught herself to drive and sew with one arm, or that she re-read all of Proust in French two years ago, or that she is a world-famous psychotherapist who still works and still writes. The memoirs will be published next year. I challenge anyone reading this to find a tougher or more independent nonagenarian than my mother. My wife and daughter find her a formidable feminist act to follow.

My mother was luckier than the president’s grandmother. She did not have any other serious disease and recouped her strength following each of her hip surgeries. So when I read the president’s thoughtful remarks about the question of whether someone in his grandmother’s or my mother’s position should be able to elect hip replacement in their eighties, I thought it important to tell her story. As the president indicated, there are tough choices ahead. Perhaps not all expensive procedures can be justified for those near the end of life, but not everyone in their eighties is near the end. We don’t have enough data to justify the level of confidence that close cases require, which is why the president is right to support research that compares the effectiveness of medical treatments, and speeding the implementation of computerized information systems for better coordination of care. It’s not for government to decide life’s up at 80, but eighty-year-olds, like amputees who are decades younger, need evidence to make choices, with their doctors and their families.

Now you might suppose that my mother would join the chorus of critics of the administration’s efforts to secure adequate health care for all Americans, fearful that someone like her might someday be denied one hip surgery, let alone three. But if you spoke with her you would find that, like most Americans, she believes that a decent society should provide care as a moral imperative, and that markets alone are not well-suited to address the vulnerabilities that can come with illness, especially for those without family and resources. She would tell you that Medicare isn’t perfect, but at least the government doesn’t spend up to a third of her premium on advertising. How much better would it be if our health care system demanded a high quality of care rather than just paying for more procedures?

So she will not be cowed by the cries of “rationing” we will surely hear in the next few weeks from certain self-interested parties, anymore than losing her arm or her hip intimidated her. Smart government can and must deliver a reasoned, evidence-based health plan for all. Compassion demands it. Is that so much to ask for Mother’s Day?

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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QED: In only nine months Rick has had a tremendous impact on SP and throughout the organization. Considering his tough-minded reputation, Rick immediately took the public impression of Science Progress’s serious intent to the next level. He has, as expected, written smart and insightful columns on topics like stem cell policy and biodiversity. Over the next few weeks our SP-based anthology, Science Next, will appear in bookstores. He has also had a less visible but equally important influence on the ongoing dialogue at CAP about science and public policy. From my point of view, Rick has lent his stature to the argument we have made when the very idea of Science Progress was germinating at CAP, that progressivism and science are deeply related and that that relationship will help to write the American future, as it has our past.

Rick now takes his leave for a position in the Obama administration, in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. There is simply no one in the country more qualified to convey the president’s science policy to the American people, nor to help the president craft policy in light of the best evidence. It is hard to lose a colleague who is so smart, so generous with his time and ideas, and so much fun. But we are all damn lucky that he’s going to work for us. Rick, as they used to say in the wires…

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In this environment the “socialization” of the scientist becomes ever more challenging and important. As the National Academies notes in the newly published third edition of its celebrated brief text, On Being A Scientist, society must trust in the competence and judgment of the scientist (and colleagues must trust each other), in order for the enterprise to flourish. As the philosopher of science Peter Caws has long observed, science generates fiduciary knowledge. Those of us not steeped in a field must have confidence in expertise.  Without professional ethics the house of science is a deck of cards.

The appearance of the third edition is timely for another reason. President Obama has made clear his refreshing view that good policy must be guided by the best possible evidence. The onus is now on the scientific community to rise to the challenge, now more than ever.

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Predictably, Obama has run into some political pushback. The complaints have arisen primarily over two issues, neither of which is substantial and both of which deserve to be countered.

For one, some opponents of the research have inferred that because the president himself did not announce in his executive order any preordained limits on the research field, there is no aspect of human embryonic stem cell research that he is not willing to endorse. But anyone who paid attention to Obama’s words during the signing ceremony last Monday would know better than that. He spoke repeatedly about the need for such research to be “legal”—a clear reference to the Dickey-Wicker amendment that Congress has renewed annually for 13 years running, which precludes the use of federal funds for any work that could cause harm to a human embryo—and “responsible,” an even more demanding level of ethical care than that of mere legality. Obama also spoke forcefully against the prospect of human cloning in words that could leave no question in any listener’s mind that the president is not going to let this field of science run amok.

Second, some research opponents are upset that the president turned to the National Institutes of Health to create guidelines that will set limits on embryonic stem cell research. In their eyes, these critics saw that approach as one that puts scientists unilaterally in charge of overseeing science—arguably no better than putting theologians in charge.

But that view ignores the expertise within the NIH in areas such as research ethics, biomedical distributive justice, and other fields of social science that focus on the fair integration of pluralistic American values with the intellectual and humanistic imperative to explore science and reduce suffering. The executive order also charges the NIH with reviewing “existing NIH guidance and other widely recognized guidelines.” This refers to the guidelines put out by organizations such as the National Academies and the International Society for Stem Cell Research, which both include ethical safeguards that ensure responsible conduct of embryonic stem cell research. As the president noted, the point is not to assume that science and ethics are opposed, but to view ethics as inherent in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Finally, Obama observed that the stem cell policy issue is only one example of the need for policymakers to have access to the best evidence, an important realization after the last eight years. Reasonable people may disagree, but reason cannot flourish without the facts.

Earlier this year, Science Progress and the Center for American Progress released a report, “A Life Sciences Crucible: Stem Cell Research and Innovation Done Responsibly and Ethically,” in which Michael Rugnetta of CAP and Michael Peroski spell out a basic formula that would lead to a new openness in this research field without overstepping ethical lines. We review some of the key recommendations below in the hope that it will help the NIH and assorted experts find a path to bringing this important field to maturity while addressing the concerns of those who have good questions with this new and promising frontier.

Key recommendations from the report

Currently, federal funding is only available for research on the 21 lines of embryonic stem cells that were derived before August 9, 2001. Once this arbitrary limit is lifted, the National Institutes of Health will be able to issue grants to scientists who wish to research embryonic stem cells in accordance with guidelines for ethically derived cells.

CAP believes that the quickest and best way to open up the stem cell field is to focus first on those areas where there is common ground among a wide array of Americans, by allowing funding for research in which:

• The stem cells come from embryos that were originally created at in vitro fertilization clinics for the purpose of fertility treatment and are now stored at these IVF clinics because more were created than required to fulfill the patient’s clinical need.
• Proper written informed consent is obtained from the donors.
• As part of the informed consent process, the embryo donors determine along with the physician that the embryos will never be implanted in a womb and would otherwise be destroyed.
• There are no financial inducements and the donors understand the purpose of the research is not to eventually confer therapeutic benefits upon the donors.

CAP also recommends that embryonic stem cell research requirements along these lines be codified in legislation by the 111th Congress and become law so that future presidents can not obstruct this research.

Over a period of time the NIH must also address the more contentious issue of deploying federal funds for research on stem cells that have been derived with private funds from embryos created for research.

To enforce ethical guidelines and to ensure that all stem cell research (embryonic or otherwise) is conducted cautiously and responsibly so as not to threaten the safety or autonomy of research subjects or the donors of research materials, the following administrative oversight requirements should be included either in the NIH guidelines that respond to the president’s executive order or in legislation that should be passed in the first session of the 111th Congress:

• The National Institutes of Health should require that all research be conducted under the review of a stem cell research oversight committee that adheres to the standards put forth in the regulations issued by the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services as informed by the National Academies or the International Society for Stem Cell Research guidelines. Any embryonic stem cells that are not in compliance with these rules, or are derived from embryos that are not in compliance with these rules, will not be eligible for federal funding.
• The one caveat to this requirement is that the 21 cell lines that were approved by the Bush administration should be grandfathered into the new policy because federal funding has already been provided for research that is now well underway.

These policy guidelines will ensure that human embryonic stem cell research is carried out with the highest ethical standards. It will also ensure that U.S. public and private biomedical research laboratories live up to the highest scientific standards.

Jonathan Moreno is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Michael Rugnetta is a Research Assistant with the Progressive Bioethics Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

See also:

• Report: A Life Sciences Crucible: Stem Cell Research and Innovation Done Responsibly and Ethically
• Column: Eight Reasons to Applaud Action on Stem Cells
• News: Stem Cell Science Takes an Ambitious Step Forward
• Timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research

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Welcome to Science Next, a collection of some of the most exciting and far-reaching ideas about innovation for a new American century.

The writings in this volume emerged from a literary experiment that has been evolving during the past year on the virtual and paper pages of Science Progress (www.scienceprogress.org), which is a project of the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.–based policy-research institute. The mission of Science Progress is to provide an opportunity for scientists and non-scientists to share ideas about ways that scientific and technological innovation can contribute to human flourishing.

Given its genesis in a Washington think tank, the Science Progress conversation focused first on “inside the beltway” policymakers—a much-maligned but invaluable American species. Derided in the vernacular of Capitol Hill as “wonks,” these public servants and their minions are burdened with the enormous responsibility of translating the nation’s collective knowledge and wisdom into practical, political, and economic action.

We at Science Progress have grown increasingly inspired, though, by the range of smart ideas outside those conventional circles and by the public hunger to become more a part of the process of bringing the art of science to good governance. With Science Next we take the conversation to a new level, and invite you to be part of it. After all, “wonk” spelled backwards is “know.” And it is knowledge—including public knowledge and understanding of science as an engine of progress—that will reveal solutions to today’s most pressing problems, including climate change, energy independence, and national security.

The phrase “science progress” is, arguably, a bit awkward. Some would say it is redundant; others, less sanguine about where science is going, might call it contentious. But we who have been cultivating the pages of Science Progress find the construction provocative in the best sense of the word. It reminds us that we are the inheritors of the Enlightenment’s confidence in the possibility of improving the human condition—a possibility predicated on values of individual freedom, social equality, and democratic solidarity, and one that values reason as superior to dogma or blindly “received wisdom.” From this standpoint, scientific inquiry is the paradigmatic exercise of Enlightenment values.

You got a problem with that? Well let’s go at it, because one of the things we love about science is that it is nothing if not argumentative. Both as a way of thinking and as a wellspring of novel ideas and products, science is a tumultuous truth-seeking process and even further, we contend, a revolutionary force for human liberation. This understanding of science as progressive does not deny that the power of science may be misused. Nor does it exclude the importance of other sources of inspiration or belittle the need for guidance and even regulation to ensure that the products of our progress are distributed fairly. But it does assert that the core values of science are democratic and antiauthoritarian. And it reflects a philosophical commitment to perpetual change and improvement over certainty and stasis.

The very words “science” and “progress” took on their modern meanings in the nineteenth century, and it should not be surprising that they came of age around the same time. It was an era in which microscopes and telescopes were drilling down and up into nature, while stethoscopes were revealing the body’s mysterious inner space. Systematic investigation involving the careful manipulation of isolated variables was beginning to prove itself superior to mere observation, speeding the shift from mere anecdote to real evidence. The possibilities that could emerge from human insight were beginning to seem endless.

Science as progressive, however, boasts philosophical and political skeins stretching much further back into the American historical experience. Francis Bacon’s utopian New Atlantis is often credited as being the first literary work to express the modern idea of progress in terms of advancing science and technology. It was a vision that was to have a profound effect on later seventeenth-century thinkers, including those who provided the intellectual justification for the American Revolution. For all the founders’ disagreements, they shared the conviction that the new nation’s promise was necessarily bound up with its innovative genius. Even those bitter rivals Jefferson and Hamilton were of one mind as they made their synergistic contributions to America’s identity as a nation dedicated to modernity: Jefferson through the patent statute and Hamilton by laying the foundations for history’s most successful capitalist economy, which together have so rewarded and nourished inventiveness.

It is no coincidence that so many of the concepts at the very heart of how America has come to understand itself—ideas such as the frontier and the West—demand an experimental attitude in grappling with novel challenges. The optimistic “can do” spirit; the approval of bigness, boldness, and adventure; the lure of “the road”—all are associated with this sensibility and are at the heart of our veneration of this country’s great inventors, people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, and Bill Gates. We hold these truths of perseverance and perspicacity to be, if not self-evident, at least within our grasp.

Even as America’s western frontier has vanished, the pioneer spirit and the virtues and values associated with it have maintained their powerful hold over the American psyche. Inspired by that vision, Americans have repeatedly heeded the call to cross new and ever more challenging frontiers—including those well beyond the comforts of our cozy planet. Indeed, few government initiatives have been so wildly successful in capturing the public imagination as the space program of the 1960s, which explicitly drew upon the American frontier spirit. “[W]e stand today on the edge of a New Frontier,” John F. Kennedy exhorted in 1960 as he clinched the Democratic nomination for president. “Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”

Generations of Americans have come to characterize the United States itself as an experiment, a romantic and visionary theme compatible in orientation with pragmatist philosophers and early progressives. In this view, the only sure path to social and scientific advancement is as an iterative process of hypothesis, systematic experimentation, and data-gathering, followed by reform in light of experience. That the human condition can and should be improved by any means necessary—whether through government or private enterprise or some combination of the two, but with government as the ultimate guarantor of the public interest—has come to be the essence of progressivism, ever grounding those alleged improvements in the best possible evidence.

America’s emergence as a nation of perpetual progress is all the more impressive given that this historical theme is not an inherent element of Western culture. The Greeks tended to think of their own time either as inferior to the mythical Golden Age or as part of a cycle of advance and decline. Imperial Romans saw themselves as in stasis since the establishment of the empire. Medieval Roman Catholic thinkers largely gave up on worldly progress in favor of spiritual improvement while awaiting Armageddon.

And perhaps reflecting these cautious and frankly depressing roots, the conjunction of science and progress in the modern era has not always been welcomed as an unalloyed good. Just as the words’ modern meanings were coming into consciousness there were also the first signs of alarm, in a tradition that began famously with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and continues to exert a powerful hold on popular culture today. Taken to an extreme, this view holds that far from being a guarantor of progress (a promise that even progressives could not reasonably make), the potentially inhumane and even dehumanizing drift of science threatens the furtherance of progress itself.

One common criticism of progressive science policy is that it naively adopts an instrumental view of science without reflection on the goals of innovation. At Science Progress, we appreciate that progressives have too often appeared to worship at the altar of change, and we reject the notion that a philosophy of innovation must be dumb to moral values. As you will see, Science Next considers ends as well as means, moral values as well as instrumentalities, as it explores the places where new ways of thinking can inform good governance.

Similarly, at the risk of invoking a hackneyed reference to spirituality, we also believe that science occupies an exalted dimension, that the growth of reliable knowledge is in effect an expansion of consciousness. Science may not be the only path to a greater grasp of reality, but it makes a unique contribution to enhanced understanding of the cosmos and our place within it. To be sure, science is a social enterprise, conducted in the service of the metaorganism—We the People—that is funding the work, and it bears a profound responsibility to respect its roots. But to distort the process of inquiry through the imposition of political or religious filters amounts to a narrowing of vision, a corruption of imagination, and a threat to our freedom as beings endowed with intellect.

One need not hark back to Copernicus or Galileo to see how such distortions can affect the arc of progressive science. It seems to many Americans that in recent years the respect for evidence and the spirit of open inquiry has been undermined and even sabotaged for the sake of short-term political advantage. The complex machinations of the American electoral system have recently placed the United States under new management, and there is reason to hope that science may once again find a more respected place at the policymaking table. It should be obvious to all that it is in the nation’s long-term interest to have the best evidence available—evidence that in many cases only science can provide—to foster commercial innovation, economic growth, energy efficiency and environmental stewardship, educational advancement, military defense, and the best possible array of intelligence options.

In the twenty-first century, more than ever, it is no exaggeration to assert that only free and rigorous inquiry, and not authoritarian dicta, can provide the reliable information required for our physical survival. Open inquiry is also the best ticket to developing the tools that will allow us to fulfill our moral obligations to others in need, and to the planet itself. Perhaps most important, progress in science is essential for a continued sense of our national purpose as participants in a historic experiment in freedom and self-governance, as one people joined by a common future rather than a common past, a future we cherish not only for ourselves but for the sake of the generations of Americans to come.

Now we invite you to dip into Science Next, where our future may be written.

—Jonathan D. Moreno and Rick Weiss

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The greatest potential for making advances in regenerative medicine lies in the ability of scientists to tap into the process of cell differentiation and development. This requires studying the development of a wide variety of human cells from their very beginnings—something U.S. scientists have been hard-pressed to do under the Bush policy, which made fewer than two dozen cell lines available out of the hundreds that have been cultivated worldwide.

Although details have yet to be released, the next steps are likely to involve a formal promulgation of guidelines for ethical research. And happily, Congress also appears to be moving apace to codify the essential elements of ethical embryonic stem cell research—something legislators did twice during the Bush administration, only to see the President veto the law twice—which will prevent future presidents from obstructing this important work.

Basic research in stem cell science promises to offer revolutionary new ways of treating diseases, but the process of getting these technologies out of the labs and into clinical trials is sure to be slow. Only recently, after more than a decade of basic research, did the FDA approve the first clinical trial for a stem-cell based therapy. The new U.S. policy will let more scientists get to work on the basic studies that will serve as the foundation for tomorrow’s new medical treatments.

Jonathan Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Editor-in-chief of Science Progress.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

Read the latest from the Center for American Progress and Science Progress in stem cell research policy:

Report: A Life Sciences Crucible: Stem Cell Research and Innovation Done Responsibly and Ethically (CAP)

News: Stem Cell Science Takes and Ambitious Step Forward (CAP)

Timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research (SP)

Top Eight: Eight Reasons to Applaud Action on Stem Cells (CAP)

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One set of questions has to do with the use of brain scanning technologies to identify deception. Although brain researchers largely doubt the validity of such applications of, for example, functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, investigations of these uses of neuroimaging are ongoing and are stimulating a growing scientific literature. Another, and arguably more promising, approach is the artificial induction of brain chemicals associated with trust, like oxytocin. It has been theorized that stimulating the production of this naturally occurring hormone would be an alternative to more indirect ways of developing emotional bonds with interrogation subjects.

The use of these kinds of technologies would obviously raise disquieting associations with abuses uncovered by the Church Committee nearly 25 years ago, including clandestine experiments with hallucinogens. At the request of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a National Research Council committee (of which I was a member), reported on the implications of cognitive neuroscience last summer.

There is no national security exception to the rules governing human experiments. So unless authorities held that the normal rules don’t apply to suspected terrorists (a theory I have speculated about elsewhere), even experimental forays in this area would require intensive prior review and—hold onto your hats—informed consent. Ironically, the notorious LSD “experiments” of the cold war-era themselves contributed to an atmosphere that led to the current rules. The scandal has even been associated with the decay of the CIA’s human intelligence capacity and the failure to detect the events of 9/11.

There is no evidence that any such practices have taken place in recent years, but it would make sense for well-informed interrogators to note the provocative possibilities of the new neurotechnologies for their craft, if not now, then someday. Are there circumstances in which relatively benign but invasive techniques may be used for the sake of national security? The cause of public education in these matters could be advanced were the Senate to raise the issue before another generation of revelations cripples intelligence capacity and undermines public trust—with or without oxytocin.

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Conservatives with a limited understanding (or, it seems, interest) in economics have decided that do-nothingism is a fair 21^st century complement to know-nothing ancestors. But not only do economists agree that funds injected into the economy is exactly what is needed now, investments in science and technology are perhaps among the most stimulative for the long and the short term. Among the package’s goals are to preserve and create jobs and promote economic recovery and to provide investments that will increase economic efficiency by spurring technological advances in science and health.

As we recently pointed out, a raft of studies has shown that science and technology incubators are among the best ways to create jobs, most recently one from the Department of Commerce. But basic research not only leads to technologies that can be applied, it also creates and supports jobs right away. As Senator Harkin emphasized during the Senate debate on the president’s proposal, “[E]very time a researcher gets a grant, it supports an average of seven jobs.”

Dr. Kington’s pointed out that the responsibility of all the agencies receiving these funds is to ensure that their effects are felt within the next two years. Among the buckets he described will be short-term grants, targeted supplements to current grants, and new challenge grants with expectations of progress within two-years.

This unprecedented opportunity for American science has been met with great excitement in universities around the country, many of which are experiencing severe retrenchment that will make it difficult for them to fulfill their missions, even as more people decide to seek degrees until the recession passes. At the same time, talking with colleagues around the country, I note the grave sense of obligation to meet the president’s goals.  Over the next few weeks we will continue to follow the plan’s specifics and the scientific community’s progress in meeting the goals of the package.

Image: flickr.com/gregclarkephotography

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If so their anger is misplaced. The issue here is not reproductive freedom but the responsibilities of the fertility specialists to make judgments about the appropriateness of assisting a woman who already has children and of implanting so many embryos. As our Science Progress advisory board member (and my UPenn colleague) Art Caplan put it in his typically direct way, “With all due respect, the idea that doctors should not set limits on who can use reproductive technology to make babies is ethically bonkers.”

Rather, public anger should be directed at a fertility industry that puts mothers and babies at risk. One good outcome of this episode could be the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s investigation of whether the physicians followed its guidelines for in vitro fertilization. A strong statement by the ASRM would act as a warning and seems preferable to legislation, which would be exceedingly difficult to write in a way that did not prejudice tougher cases.

As the saga of the octuplets unfolds, we were struck by a Wall Street Journal report that another LA fertility clinic (what is it about those Angelenos anyway?) is planning to offer the service of testing embryos prior to implantation for traits like gender or hair color. Reading this story, thirty years of teaching and writing about bioethics flashed before my (brown) eyes. Using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to make babies with various skin tones may make for delightful bus stop advertising but distressing public policy. Advances in genetics, such as the copy number variation technologies described previously in SP, appear to be leading in the direction of fairly complex trait selection, if not in the near future then someday not so far away.

Leaving aside the question of whether the genetics is as far along as the clinic believes (perhaps it will offer a money-back guarantee), progressive politics entails respect for differences. Skeptical as we are about casual slippery slope arguments, practices that implement and institutionalize attitudes that reduce persons to pigments should at the very least be discouraged. Societies may justifiably limit technologies that are wholly cosmetic while threatening to do harm to innocent bystanders.

In the final analysis, both of these incidents call for the establishment of international standards for reproductive services that draw a line between procedures that are medically appropriate and scientifically compelling, cosmetic but innocuous, or downright dangerous and divisive.

Jonathan Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Editor-in-chief of Science Progress.

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Georgia State University Law Professor Paul Lombardo’s book, Three Generations, No Imbeciles, explores the harrowing case (which has never been overturned) and the American eugenics movement, which enabled more than 60,000 involuntary sterilizations in the United States. Science Progress Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Moreno talked with Lombardo about the history of eugenics, its misuse of science, and the implications for contemporary progressivism. This interview transcript has been edited and condensed.

Jonathan Moreno: It always seems to me that the case that is the basis of the book, namely the case of Carrie Buck, is in the pantheon of medical ethics and indeed in the history of American culture. But sort of like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a lot of people think they know about it and understand it but really don’t. In the case of Carrie Buck, perhaps she’s unfortunately been lost in the mists of time. Could you explain to us who Carrie Buck was, and why her 1927 Supreme Court case about her sterilization was, and continues to be, important.

Three Generations, No Imbeciles (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

Paul Lombardo: Well, Carrie Buck was a girl from Charlottesville, Virginia. She was about 17 at the time this case started. She had been chosen as a resident of the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and the Feeble-Minded in Lynchburg, which is about 50 miles south of Charlottesville. She’d been sent there when she was taken out of her home, because she was pregnant and wasn’t married. She was basically an unwed mother. Many girls like Carrie were sent to the colony because they were supposedly people possessed of hereditary defects, “moral degeneracy” they called it. So Carrie became, unfortunately for her, the subject of very bad timing. The state of Virginia had just passed a law in 1924 that would allow for sexual sterilization of people with hereditary defects. She was at the colony; her mother had already been committed to the colony several years earlier; and she had a baby that people looked at and said there is something strange about the baby too, so this looked like a pattern. It looked like there was some kind of hereditary anomaly that was passed down through the generations.

So Carrie becomes the person chosen to test the Virginia law by the people who wrote it. They wanted to take a case through the courts to demonstrate that the law was constitutional. And Carrie is the person who eventually ends up as the named party in the lawsuit of Buck vs. Bell, Bell being the doctor at the Virginia colony who eventually sterilizes her. And the case becomes famous only after Oliver Wendell Holmes, at that time the most famous judge in the country, maybe in the world, writes an opinion describing Carrie, her mother, and her daughter as three generations of imbeciles. And Holmes says in ending his very brief and pointed opinion, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Moreno: And that was, of course, a majority opinion, with one dissent, with no content to the dissent. Is that right?

Lombardo: Correct, it was an 8-1 decision. The only dissenter was a man named Pierce Butler, a somewhat obscure justice, and he left no opinion, so we’re not exactly sure why he dissented.

Moreno: This case was taking place in the context a social and scientific movement that we know as eugenics. Isn’t that right?

Lombardo: Correct. The eugenics movement had really picked up a lot of steam from about the first decade of the 20^th century, when it was introduced to America by scientists—people like Charles Davenport who ran the Eugenics Record Office in Long Island. Davenport had been a scholar. He studied at Harvard; he taught there and at the University of Chicago; and he was the recipient of a fair amount of what today we would call grant money from the Harriman Foundation and later the Carnegie and the Rockefeller Foundations to set up a place called the Eugenics Record Office, which would study heredity. And it was that office that really brought the whole idea of eugenics as the science of good breeding into the public eye, along with other groups like the Racial Betterment Foundation of Battle Creek, run by Dr. Kellogg, and groups such as that.

Moreno: Of Kellogg’s fame, the Kellogg’s cereal.

Lombardo: Same family, correct.

Moreno: This biological philosophy was also reduced to law in a number of states, including Virginia.

Lombardo: Yes, the first laws were really developed as early as the late 19^th century to prevent marriages among people who were “feeble-minded” or people who had epilepsy. Then the first sterilization law—which was the next step marriages don’t always prevent births—preventing somebody from actually having a child, first occurred in Indiana in 1907, the first sterilization law was passed. Between 1907 and 1924, the time of the law that was tested in the Buck case, there were another dozen or so states that passed laws. But Buck was the one that cast the national and really international light on this process, because it’s the one that the Supreme Court endorsed, again by an 8-1 decision.

Moreno: And we should point out that these diagnoses of “feeble-mindedness,” for example, or the notion of “hereditary drunkenness,” or “heritable excessive sexual pathology” have all been debunked by more recent science. Is that right?

Lombardo: Pretty generally. I think that the length of the list that the people in the Buck case focused on was extraordinary; it included people who were orphans, people who were criminals, people who were in any way possessed of chronic diseases, drunkards, “n’er do wells,” and the poor.

Moreno: So rich drunks and rich n’er do wells probably weren’t sterilized in these systems.

Lombardo: There tended to be a pretty clear class distinction here. People who could afford to hire a lawyer to fight these things didn’t get sterilized, even when the laws were on the books.

Moreno: When we teach about eugenics, we tend to talk about both negative eugenics and positive eugenics. And positive eugenics, actually once in a while it serves as again. Wasn’t it about 20 years ago that the leadership in Singapore advocated that only rich people should marry and have babies?

Lombardo: Yeah, the Singapore law was a tax incentive for giving tax credits to the people who were employed and paying taxes and not giving tax credits to other people. The assumption was that if you got a tax credit for children and you were working, that was a good thing.

Moreno: So in this sort of gross way, this positive eugenics notion is still very contemporary, and of course the darkest results of the eugenics movement in the United States manifested themselves in both positive but also negative eugenics in the Holocaust. I don’t think many Americans really understand the role or the priority that American eugenics had in influencing Nazi biological philosophy. Can you explain that?

Lombardo: Well, deciding which is the chicken and which is the egg is often difficult. But in this case you’ve got two things going on at the same time. The Germans, as far back as the Weimar Republic and even into the 19^th century, were very interested in studying heredity and had some of the first scientists who did so. They were also interested in this new idea of eugenics very early on, the first decade of the 20^th century. They and their American counterparts, scientists with this kind of interest, were in touch from 1900 on. But America led the way in the law.

America passed the first sterilization law, as we said, and passed the stronger laws, also in 1924, prohibiting immigration on the basis of ethnicity, and that was certainly eugenics law as well. And then the United States eventually went on to pass other laws or to change other laws and put a scientific spin on the old anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited people of different races from being married. So in that sense America was first and the Germans paid attention to those laws. Eventually, the Germans actually gave an award, gave an honorary degree, to Harry Laughlin, the man who wrote the model sterilization act which was the basis for the Virginia law. It’s pretty clear that the German scientists who stood at Hitler’s elbow knew all about eugenics— they certainly knew all about genetics as well—but looked to America for precedents that they could rely on and justify some of their own activities.

Moreno: At one point, they were even concerned that the Americans were getting ahead of them with respect to purifying the race.

Lombardo: Yes, well Hitler writes in Mein Kampf that the German law on immigration, for example, is really silly. They let anybody in at all, and that America is leading the way there. So that’s early in the 1920’s, and then later on when sterilization laws are in effect, the Germans print out maps showing how they learned from America this way and they were concerned that they were behind the curve.

Moreno: After the war, the popular thinking is that the eugenics movement, particularly the aspect of the eugenics movement that resulted in the Holocaust and in those pre-WWII sterilizations, was pretty much on the decline but I think your view is that things are little bit more complicated that that after WWII. Isn’t that right?

Lombardo: Well, I think a good deal more complicated. Obviously there was revulsion when the films of the liberation of the death camps came out in the 1940’s. But I don’t think very many people made any direct connection between things like American sterilization laws—or for that matter the immigration or anti-miscegenation laws that stayed on the books in America until the 1960’s—and the idea that those things were somehow reflected in a social policy that was part of Nazism. I think we had a clear revulsion against Hitler’s excesses, but understanding the intellectual foundations for those things is something that didn’t come until much, much later.

Moreno: Many listeners are familiar, for example, with the so-called “Bell Curve” movement. You argue that there is a connection to the pre-WWII beginnings of eugenics in that movement as well—this notion that there are racial differences that are inherent and discernable with respect to IQ.

Lombardo: Yes, the biological determinism that is the basis really of the argument of Bell Curve is in place by the 1920’s. The person who is the first President of the group which advances that perspective even today, the Pioneer Fund, was Harry Laughlin, the same man who got the Nazi honorary degree for his work in what the Nazis called the “science of racial cleansing.” So there are some clear historical connections between these very old ideas and contemporary directions as well.

Moreno: Talk a little bit about contemporary ethics and genetics. It is not as easy to make moral judgments, as you and I know, about what’s going on right now, for example, in pre-natal diagnosis, in family planning, and so forth. Although you write with the careful pen of an historian, nonetheless one senses your outrage, if I might say, in the pages of this book about the Buck case and the consequences of the Buck case. But you’re not as clear about the implications of Buck for all the different work that is going on right now in genetics. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Lombardo: Yes, I think it’s a much more difficult question to address. I try to address what I consider the clear issue of coercive surgery. I mean the Buck case is the first time in the history of the United States in which the Supreme Court says that it’s appropriate to operate on someone who doesn’t need surgery, for purposes of state. This is eugenic statecraft in the operating room. And I think that’s outrageous. It was then. It was then not only because I think it violates some of the most cherished principles of bodily integrity that are imbedded in our law, but also because the case was bogus. Carrie Buck, it turns out, was raped; she wasn’t just another unwed mother. Her lawyer essentially threw the case. So there are a lot of very nasty facts in the Buck case.

It’s, to me, much easier to talk about the ways in which we try to cling to old-fashioned eugenics today by continuing to try to sterilize people who are on welfare, for example. This comes up regularly—judges try to make this declaration to deadbeat dads or to mothers who are on drugs. And that sort of thing goes on even today. That’s not like what happened in Buck. That’s exactly what happened in Buck. So to me to make that parallel is not so hard.

It’s more difficult to say what things are like eugenics, and to try to make an analogy. The notion of pre-natal genetic diagnosis is something that raises the question: “Is this like eugenics?” Some people would say, “Of course this is, it’s choosing in advance who should live and who should not be born.” Others would say it’s not, because there’s no heavy hand of the state here deciding who will be born or who will not be born, it’s an individual choice. So it’s a much more nuanced discussion. It’s no less controversial I think, but as a historian it easier for me to point out the parallels that are exact as opposed to those that are analogies

Moreno: We’ve talked about class as a factor. Obviously an old-fashioned platonic notion of race was more of factor—the idea of race is much more ambiguous now that it was 50 to 60 years ago.

Lombardo: Clearly. Even though we know if we look back at the history of that idea that it morphed over and over and over again. In the 1900’s the things that we would consider ethnicity, like being Slovakian for example, were considered race. So today we have a very different perspective on what race means than what we did then.

Moreno: I want to end by talk for a few minutes about the implications of all this for contemporary progressivism. You and I well know that the Buck case and the eugenics movement are taken by many conservative commentators as a very clear failure and warning for progressive policy. Talk about that for a couple of minutes. What can progressives learn from the story you tell in Three Generations, No Imbeciles? What are the implications for progressives in the 21^st century?

Lombardo: Well I think that people from the conservative side would say that progressivism embodied the worst kind of reliance on science, and reliance on experts, and elite professionals. And I think to a certain extent, they’re right. Buck was sold as the triumph of science—we could clean up the streets, get rid of all those loose women, those drunkards, those poor people—if we just applied science through eugenics. So clearly that’s a cautionary note that sounded, and its not completely wrong. I think it goes overboard. I think it goes overboard significantly when people try to make very facile and sometimes really simple-minded connections between the ideas that fed into eugenics and current social issues.

For example, there is a trend to attempt to link in a very facile way Darwinism, eugenics, and then the current debate over abortion. The Nazi card is played pretty regularly there by people who want to argue against Darwinism, want to argue against eugenics, which they say—I would disagree—is the straightforwardly direct descendent of Darwinism. Eugenics is much more complex than that. And we could spend a lot of time talking about the progressive era and what it meant, but we might as well talk about the industrial movement that made automobiles on the assembly line. The efficiency movement of people like Henry Ford was as much a part of progressivism as was eugenics.

So I think this argument of who gets to claim eugenics and what should it be remembered for sometimes becomes to simplistically an argument about the good guys and the bad guys. There are some bad guys in my book, clearly. But most of the people are trying to do what they think is the right thing. Their motives are not always pure, nobody’s are, but they end up with a result that is terrible. The conclusion that I draw from that is that we need to be most suspicious, as good conservatives usually say they are, of government when government tells us who should have children and who should not.

Moreno: Well said. So we’ve been talking with Paul Lombardo, author of Three Generations, No Imbeciles. Lombardo is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University. The book is published by Johns Hopkins. Paul, thanks very much for joining us today.

Lombardo: Thank you, Jonathan.

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I bring some personal authority to this question. In 1926 my father emigrated from Vienna on the promise of a contract with the General Phonograph Company in Elyria, Ohio. Back in the old country he and his then-girlfriend’s brother had developed the design of a sound-recording device they called radio-film. Their idea was original enough to win a patent and a brief mention in The New York Times, where my father was referred to as “an Austrian inventor.” Alas, dad’s relationships with his collaborator and the young woman turned sour, and in any case others accomplished their goal with more technical efficiency.

Matters worked out better for my father anyway, as he settled in Manhattan rather than Elyria, where it would have been much harder to build his psychiatric practice. It turned out that his new country gave him the opportunity to be both patentee and innovator, as his pioneering work on sociometrics and group dynamics was recognized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a private meeting at Hyde Park—just 15 years after he arrived in New York with nothing but ambition.

My father’s American story is not unusual. His mode of entrance to the United States and rapid climb to success gave him a profound sense of the uniqueness of a country that valued personal initiative. America’s use of the patent system has a special quality beyond rewarding the individual, one that the founders perceived more clearly than previous champions of intellectual property—as a way to construct the common good through socially shared innovation.

The idea of IP itself is not new, originating probably in ancient Greece when it occurred to certain poets that their prominence stemmed from the value of their recitations. By contrast, Socrates seemed to object to the notion that the poets deserved any credit for their creations, attributing them instead to divine inspiration. Philosophical reservations notwithstanding, the Romans later developed the trademark and Hebrew scholars decreed against the theft of another’s words. In the Middle Ages, nations and guilds alike enforced artisans’ trademarks, and in 1474 Venetian legislators required inventors to register their creations so that the prospering city could both attract talent and benefit from the value of their work.

Britain’s Statute of Monopolies enacted in the 17th century set out the first modern intellectual property rules, limited in time to the “true and first inventor.” While the Venetian goal was public benefit, motivation for the British statute was closely tied up with the developing ideas that could be commercialized with new capital to boost national economic development. Over the next two hundred years, bilateral agreements arose to protect inventors from the appropriation of their ideas by other states, concluding with a series of late 19th century conventions from which finally emerged the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization.

While the WTO is famously wrestling with problems of fairness and need with regard to biomedical IP in the developing world, our nation’s patent system needs a 21st-century redesign to cope with both the scale of idea production and the novel character of the items being produced, from nanobots to strands of DNA. Americans concerned with intellectual property have addressed challenges at least as great. Thomas Jefferson took primary responsibility for the approval of the first patent applications, a job for which he confessed his lack of preparedness. The “subjects,” he complained, “are such as would require a great deal of time to understand and do justice to them, and not having that time to bestow on them,” he was “oppressed beyond measure by the circumstance under which he has been obliged to give undue and uninformed opinions on rights, often valuable, and always deemed so by the authors.”

Science Progress has therefore made the more efficient identification and application of intellectual property one of its signature topics. And with our national economy under stress, the problem of distributing opportunities for innovation throughout the country becomes more pressing. If Jefferson was perplexed, we’d better start bending our collective efforts to these tasks as best and as soon as we can.

Jonathan Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Editor-in-chief of Science Progress. He would like to thank University of Pennsylvania undergraduate student Markley Foreman for her research on the history if intellectual property for this introductory essay.

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Granted that this fantasized exchange is both silly and perhaps too close to legislative reality, it does illustrate the fallacy. Now a Turkish opposition leader has gone one better, accusing 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 thinks she’s nailed it. The acid test: Aritman wants Gül to take a DNA test to prove his pure Turkish origins, or disprove his impure Armenian ones.

Whether President Gül is a genetic Armenian or not (whatever that could mean), the notion that such a question is relevant to political discourse evokes ugly associations with National Socialist eugenics. 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. And that is no ad hominen argument.

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Taken together, the seven science advisers he has so far appointed are surely the most distinguished group of scientists at the highest levels of government in decades. They would make the founders of our republic—the most technology-oriented pantheon of revolutionaries in history—proud.

Steven Chu is the first Nobel laureate in science nominated for a cabinet position, Secretary of Energy. Chu has the ability to recognize good science and, just as important, sees our energy and environmental problems within a larger framework of the innovation economy. To coordinate energy and climate policy in the White House Obama has selected former Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner. Former New Jersey environmental commissioner Lisa Jackson will run EPA. And L.A. deputy mayor Nancy Sutley will direct the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

All these impressive credentials are a beginning, not an end. But at the very least they say to the American people that respect for evidence will once again have a central role in government science policy.

As the Passover ritual says, if this is all the president-elect had done for science and our country that would have been sufficient. But he is also expected to name the highly respected Harvard University physicist and climate expert John Holdren as his White House science adviser. Holdren, a former board chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is a vigorous supporter of efforts to put innovation back on our national agenda, as it is crucial to all aspects of our national security and prosperity.

Obama will apparently also name Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lubchenco, also much admired in the scientific community, is a member of both the National Academy of Science and the British Royal Academy.

Again, all these impressive credentials are a beginning, not an end. But at the very least they say to the American people that respect for evidence will once again have a central role in government science policy. The role of regulatory agencies—to create a level playing field of safety and opportunity—will be restored to its proper place in government, in the context of a public policy that builds the cleaner, green economy that must be the foundation of the new American prosperity.

Especially striking is the turn away from the tiresome, divisive and dispiriting culture wars that so politicized science—a sorry trademark of the past eight years. Americans can now look forward with pleasure to further smart appointments, including new leadership for the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

At Science Progress we are committed to the proposition that sound public policy requires taking evidence seriously. If democracy is to thrive, we must find new and better ways to integrate the spirit of open inquiry into our policy process. That’s why we cover the latest research and discussions shaping science policy and develop pragmatic proposals that promote science and innovation that ensures greater freedom, justice, and quality of life for all people. We celebrate the new appreciation for the contributions of science to policy and to shaping a better world.

Yet the outgoing Bush administration has left us with a parting shot: a midnight regulation that could clear the way for new coal-fired plants not restrained by greenhouse-gas rules. Just one week ago today I experienced the “sunniest” day of a stay in Beijing. That was a bright, noxious haze in which I could roughly make out the rim of the sun. The seven for science named so far can’t alone protect us from the future we can read in the Beijing sky, but they can help show us the way.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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In July 2008 a committee of the United States Senate revealed that, beginning in 2002, Guantanamo Bay interrogators had based their methods partly on a chart that appeared in a 1957 paper prepared by an Air Force social scientist. The chart represented a summary of the types of coercive measures used by Chinese Communist interrogators against American P.O.W.’s during the Korean War, causing them to make a number of false confessions of U.S. war crimes. These measures fell under headings that included “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.” At the time, consternation about the effectiveness of the Chinese methods led to vague but deep-seated fears of “brain washing.”

The irony that information gleaned from circumstances involving the torture of American soldiers over 50 years ago could be used against detainees in the war on terror was not lost on opponents of the Bush administration’s policies. Yet this incident is but the tip of the iceberg of a much larger set of questions for 21^st century neural and behavioral science and their role in national intelligence operations, and for an increasingly globalized scientific community.

The American intelligence establishment’s infamous Cold War forays into various experiments with hallucinogens and other mind-altering processes can be attributed in part to worries that Eastern bloc Communist governments were both ahead of the intelligence game and less likely to respect ethical constraints than the West. One scenario was that an American nuclear physicist with a high security clearance attending a conference abroad could be invited to an apparently innocent meal and made “indiscreet” with LSD. The CIA’s MKUltra and other top-secret experimental programs were among the excesses that were revealed by government investigations in the mid-1970s.

Some believe that the United States continues to pay the price for these excesses—or, perhaps, for their revelation—even to the extent of blaming intelligence failures prior to the 9/11 attacks on the resultant weakening of the CIA’s covert operations capacity. What does seem indisputable is that the American intelligence community’s internal expertise on matters of the brain and behavior is not what it was in the 1950s. Some of the world’s top scientists were then deeply engaged advisors to military and civilian intelligence agencies, including Harvard University psychologist Henry Murray and Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital’s Henry Beecher, continuing relationships that began during World War II. Whether or not that expertise actually improved performance of national security activities or not is another question.

Upgrading anthropology capacity

Nevertheless, there are some indications that American security officials are concerned that U.S. intelligence capacity has been somewhat degraded in recent years by a failure to integrate the best and most up-to-date academic work in fields like anthropology and cognitive science. Cultural insensitivity is often cited as one of the reasons for the early failure of the occupation of Iraq. Soldiers have often had to learn the nuances of communication with locals themselves. Sometimes failures to make intentions clear, as for example in passing through checkpoints, may have had tragic consequences due to cultural variations in the meaning of seemingly simple hand gestures for “proceed” and “halt.”

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, formerly president of Texas A&M University who has served as deputy director of the CIA, recently announced a new initiative called the Minerva Consortium. Minerva is intended to provide a group of universities with funding to assist the Department of Defense in areas such as Chinese military and technology studies, perspectives on terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere, religious and ideological studies, and “new disciplines” including history, anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary psychology. In an April 14, 2008 speech the secretary also elaborated at length on the history of complicated relationships between the defense establishment and academic anthropology. With candor that surprised some, Gates noted that, “Understanding the traditions, motivations, and languages of other parts of the world has not always been a strong suit of the United States. It was a problem during the Cold War, and remains a problem.” He associated these difficulties with a tension that has persisted between the American military and academia since the Vietnam War era.

As the American military establishment reaches out anew to the university system, what will be the reaction? Although Gates urged rapprochement and cited several institutions that have created special programs for injured veterans who might not otherwise qualify for admission, this is a far cry from the kinds of close relationships that characterized the World War II and post-war era. In an era in which federal funding for medical science has in real terms diminished, American academic research leaders have more motivation than patriotism alone to take an interest in a lucrative new government funding source for the generally under-supported “soft” social sciences.

Neuroscience and National Intelligence

Neuroscientists cite evidence that cultural differences may extend even to the way that members of different groups process information, and that these differences are measurable. If it is true that scientific understanding of culture and group dynamics has deepened in the past half century, necessitating renewed interest on the part of security officials, how much more must that be the case for the scientific study of the brain and its functions. Neuroscience conferences now rival the world’s largest medical meetings, bringing together a wide range of disciplines, from psycholinguists to electron microscopists. Even taking into account the hyperbole that seems to accompany much modern science, it’s a good bet that our basic understanding of the brain and its functions is on an impressive growth path.

Smart defense planners are well aware of the buzz about the brain. During the summer of 2008 a U.S. National Research Council committee of which I was a member issued a report on “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies.” The bland title belies the fact that this was, I believe, the first time that the American intelligence community sought systematic and rather public advice on the future of brain research from a group of scientists and academics. Just before being named to this committee I published a book that included a reconstructed history of national security interest in the brain (Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense, 2006), so I found this turn of events particularly intriguing.

I cannot speak for my colleagues on the committee, but I think we all found the charge compelling, which was in part to “review the current state of today’s work in neurophysiology and cognitive/neural science, select the manners in which this work could be of interest to security professionals, and trends for future warfighting applications that may warrant continued analysis and tracking by the intelligence community.” We were to have special sensitivity to work that might be done in selected other countries.

Over about a year and a half, the committee’s deliberations congealed around several themes reflected in the final report. In each case the national intelligence implications were paramount: Could new devices overcome challenges to the detection of psychological states and intentions, so that deliberate deception could be identified far more reliably than with traditional “lie detectors”? In what directions might neurologically active drugs take us, perhaps as tools for cognitive enhancement that exceeds normalcy? What if computational biology leads to intelligent machines, or aids in creating human-machine systems that combine and leverage the abilities of both? What are the prospects for acquiring intelligence on cognitive neuroscience developments that might be accomplished by our competitors and adversaries? How will culture and ethics influence both the hypotheses that other countries might find of interest and their willingness to engage in human experiments? Readers should of course consult the report itself for details; none of it is classified. Predictions of specific technical breakthroughs are kept to a minimum, and where disagreements arose among committee members, as for example over the genuine prospects for advances in lie detection, they are duly recorded.

As important as any of the report’s particular findings or recommendations is the fact that it lays a predicate for a series of critical social questions that we must face even if the more extravagant expectations for emerging neuroscience are not realized. For some we may rely on familiar territory, like risk-benefit assessments for clinical research involving implants or more powerful magnets. As advances in imaging and computing establish more reliable correlations between neural activity and behavior, privacy limits may stretch. Governments may have to amend international conventions to establish whether interrogations of prisoners may include investigation of psychological states through real-time measurements of neural function and spatial localization. As the report notes, unethical applications of neuroscience should be at the forefront of our concern.

Professional and Political Ethics

The environment of modern science is far more public and transparent than ever before. Simultaneously, the role of applied science in the manner and methods of political violence (for non-state as well as state actors), seems to be accelerating. Scientists are therefore under far more pressure to assess what “professional ethics” means as they participate in addressing great societal and political challenges. Perhaps only nuclear physicists have previously faced such scrutiny, though biologists, too, have in the past several years been drawn into relatively novel problems like those involving publications concerning biological weapons.

Moreover, in the 21^st century the community of science is less localized than ever. Modern communications and publication technologies make data sharing vastly more efficient. Obstacles to international collegial exchange have largely fallen, with the significant exceptions of government control of web access or the granting of visas. In an abstract sense the culture of science has always resisted political boundaries, a cosmopolitanism that has long earned the suspicion of jealous dictators like Hitler and Stalin. But now a globalized scientific community is a functional reality. Inevitably, that community will be obliged to assess its cultural role and political responsibilities in a far more focused fashion than has previously been the case.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor in Chief of Science Progress.

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Wagner, a research scientist at the George Washington University Center for International Science and Technology Policy, examines the complex international system that drives science and innovation in her new book, The New Invisible College. The current system has its roots in the “invisible college” of Enlightenment thinkers who laid the foundations of the modern scientific community. Published by the Brookings Institute, the book explains that the present system is not flat, as Thomas Friedman claims, but limits developing countries from collaboration on the international scientific stage. Because scientists in those countries are not familiar with the rules, norms, and nomenclature of the system, or the “new invisible college,” of the contemporary era, they cannot access the global community that propels research and innovation.

Recently, Science Progress editor-in-chief Jonathan Moreno spoke with Wagner about her book, ranging across topics from international government funding of science to intellectual property rights and the future of scientific policy for the next hundred years. Here are some highlights from the discussion, which has been edited and condensed.

Jonathan Moreno, Science Progress: What was the “invisible college” and what do you mean by the “new invisible college”?

Caroline Wagner: The “invisible college” is the term that’s often used to describe the very earliest times of what we think of modern science. If you think of modern science beginning in the 17th Century in Europe, the original folks who found each other through a network of interaction—trying to identify like-minded thinkers and so on—began to realize that they were approaching knowledge creation and thinking about knowledge in a similar way, by experimentation. So one of them coined the term, “invisible college” and said “we’re like an invisible college, operating outside of academia.”

The way we came up with the “new invisible college” is by recognizing that during the 1990s and the early 2000s, the world system of science has really changed in revolutionary ways. And yet the way in which we make and create knowledge hasn’t changed. It is still in the process of interaction, external experimentation, and checking of facts and passing that information along. But the structure and organization of that has changed. The very first title I started with was “Science Beyond the Nation-State.” Because I was trying to show that we’ve moved science now beyond the nation-state. We were really basing the book on the concept of a network structure, and so we got into this and we said, “you know this is a lot like the very first days of science.”

In a way, science has moved from this very elusive network of people in the 17^th century, through a period of professionalization, through in the 20^th century, a time of nation systems where nations captured science and thought of it as a national asset.

JM: You point out in a very interesting way, for example, through the Jefferson Patent Statute, that this notion of intellectual property evolved. It was the the property of individuals but then it became the property of the nation-state, so what are you implying about the future of intellectual property in your views?

CW: It’s one of the big questions in science policy in our time: how to deal with this question of intellectual property. We come from an era—and for a long time preceding—when the ideas you created were considered to be to some extent yours, and people claimed some rights over their own ideas. I’d love to do another book on intellectual property of the future because even in the book I say, I think we’re coming into a post-patent era. I think we are moving beyond a time when individuals will claim ownership over ideas. Even in our own lifetimes, we’ve move from a time when we had knowledge scarcity, and it was hard to find information—you had to cobble it together through a great deal of effort.

We have moved into a time of knowledge abundance, and a time when people like Eric von Hippel at MIT point out that a lot of innovation is being driven by the user. So as we move in that direction—and if my vision that I propose in the book in which we have much more expansion in the science in developing countries—I think that this is going to break loose this concept that there’s ownership over knowledge and ideas. Sadly, some industries are still very, very, very stuck in this idea that we have to have ownership of ideas, but my feeling is that over the next 50 years, we’ll move beyond that.

JM: I want to go back to this systems concept that underlies this book. Talk about this idea of a “complex adaptive system.” That’s the technical term you use in the book. What is a complex adaptive system, and what are some metaphors people who don’t know about this can think of, and how does that apply to science?

CW: Complex adaptive systems are around us everywhere, so we’re intuitively aware of them: Mother Nature, the invisible hand, the financial crises we’re dealing with. These are all parts of complex adaptive systems in which we interact all the time.

They are complex in that there are many different interacting pieces, and they are adaptive in that each piece of a system can adapt itself or change as it looks around it’s environment even if its not a conscious object, like an atom. And it’s a system in that there are multiple levels. The great thing is that physicists have found that complex adaptive systems operative by underlying probabilities and regulations and rules. That opens up a world of opportunity to help to not govern these systems—because you can’t govern a complex adaptive system—but you can regulate and incentivize the behaviors you would like to see.

So if we have moved science beyond these national systems and now we’re really dealing with a global system, now what we need to do is learn from complex adaptive systems structures to say, “what do we want that system to look like?” Just as the financial system, we know it doesn’t necessarily always turn out in an optimal way. You do have to provided incentives and guide and nudge that system in different directions, and I believe that’s the same for science. We shouldn’t just let science run rampant. We need to find ways to target that science and help to move it especially to help the poor, to help people in poor countries to join this system. I do think that we need to govern it, but we can’t control it.

JM: As we’re looking toward a new administration in Washington, which will be very limited in terms of it’s extent to fund new science, particularly basic research, what is your approach counsel about the role of government in science as against “letting a thousand flowers bloom”?

CW: Well first you have to look at why government funds science to begin with. And one reason that remains is the defense and military aspects of science. The second is that sometimes science is just too expensive for any single entity to fund. Who has big treasuries? Governments. That’s exactly how governments started funding science in the 19^th century. Then in the 20^th century we saw, rightly so, that if the public is paying for it, they want to know what they’re getting. Therefore government kept asking “what are we getting for this kind of investment”?

So that part of science funding, the need for large scale funding, the attachment of science to the military and so on, that probably will remain a part of the system in the future. But at the end of the book, I say if were going to govern science in the 21st century, one of the changes we should seek is to remove science funding from the interests of nations alone. Anybody who wants to fund science should fund simply the best science, merit only. That would mean that if you were in Canada and you receive a proposal from Argentina, you consider it equally, because the knowledge provided and created should be available to others and should be able to diffuse into the system.

My suggestion would be, while it requires quite a significant change over time, is that we move toward a much more open system of funding science and that governments provide funding into that system, but offer it blindly. What governments should do is seek ways to bring that knowledge back home, to make that knowledge locally useful.

JM: What’s your view of open access? What does open access do in this system? Is it necessary to fulfill your vision, or is there only one way to do that?

CW: What’s interesting right now is that there are many different experiments out there already to test different ways of doing this.

India, for example, has made most of its journals freely available online in order to encourage knowledge diffusion. In the physics community, they have arcix.org online, where people can post work in progress. There is still a need for peer review in this global system.

At the same time, there is also this continual need for access. From the point of view of the developing countries access is critical. It’s going to be there lifeblood and it is right now one of the great barriers from entering the science system.

JM: And you point out that there are 15 or 20 countries that do 90 percent of the science? It’s expensive to get into the international science club. But what I thought was one of the most interesting points from the book was that the Internet has not been the driver of access. Explain that. Because based on the other points you are making about knowledge diffusion, you would think it has been very important in helping the have-nots get into the science community. But you say that really wasn’t what was critical in the 90s.

CW: In fact, it’s counter-intuitive, isn’t it? This came out of work I was doing for the World Bank. The bank wanted to lay fiber-optic cable all over Africa in the hopes of bringing African scientists into the global system. And what we found—this was work I was doing work for the RAND corporation—when we got into it is that this system is not flat like the Thomas Friedman concept—that only if you could gain access you’d be in. And this is where the network concept becomes so important. It is an open system in the sense that new people can come in, but it’s not flat in the sense that I can just pick up the phone call Einstein and get access to collaboration with that person. In fact it is a very highly structured system, and the structure itself, and the way in which interaction happens, is invisible. Which is why we get back to this concept of this new invisible college. The rules by which people will operate within science, the way in which they come into and operate within the system is pretty much invisible to those outside of that system and especially to people in developing countries.

When I was working with the White House science office, people would come and say “we want to sign an agreement with the United States in science so that we can have access to the science system.” And that’s not the way it works. You know that these people want to break into the system, but if they don’t understand the rules, the norms, the nomenclature that goes along with it, they can’t get in.

JM: Although the college is invisible to the people on the outside, the insiders, who rub elbows with each other, who’s in somebody’s lab may be very important 10 years down the road. And who their students are, and who their student’s students are. So there’s this old fashion sociometry of science that continues, that contributes to its invisibility if you’re not part of it. And if you are in an undeveloped country, you may be a very good scientist, but you may not have access to those kinds of relationships.

CW: The thing that we’ve found in developing countries is that most of the time, the people doing science in those countries are doing excellent science. Most of the time their connections are with people outside of their own country. So there are people, for example, I’ve interviewed in Uganda who are working with their colleagues at Sussex University in England. And so while they are a part of an invisible college, the ability to diffuse the knowledge locally is so very limited because the connection and the connectivity locally just aren’t there.

JM: So, Uganda may not benefit from the work being done, but the UK may benefit.

CW: Exactly.

JM: We’re now in the mists of this financial crisis, and it looks like we’re going to be in the midst of it for years to come. What does the new invisible college have to offer us as far as guidelines for doing science policy, investing in science in the midst of this unprecedented period in which capitalism—some of the fundamental notions of one kind of capitalism—seem to be at risk?

CW: One element of that question that is relevant is time that it takes for a new idea or innovation to enter into common usage in the marketplace. So that’s one place where it shows that that cycle can take 15 to 30 years time, depending on the innovation, the scale and scope of the production, and so on required. On the other end of that, science is really very good at solving problems, at solving even local problems.

For example, the work I did on the UN Millennium Development Task Force—we were looking at the Millennium Development Goals and trying to identify ways in which science and technology could help to solve those problems now—clean water, maternal health, getting textbooks to student who need them. These are critical needs that will transcend any financial crisis and providing for those needs will really contribute to global stability, and will contribute to the reduction of war.

We need to rethink science. We tended to think of science as the trip to the moon, as the AIDS vaccine. These are great things and I love them too. The difference is now, as opposed to previous periods, is that we have this cadre of knowledge that we can’t loose it. It’s so critical to our potential as a civilization. We have this knowledge. We can use it, if we can make it available so that people can solve problems locally.

One of the great unsung stories of science success is the agricultural extension service in the United States. It is a case where local loops and experimentation, along with integrated learning, diffused information over time. This is a beautiful example, and shouldn’t be lost on us so that we’re focused on questions like “are we funding the greatest physics ever?” Let’s look at funding that answer the question, “how do we make individual people’s lives better?”

So I think science policy now should focus on local learning. Make it a feedback loop. Hopefully we won’t loose the Internet; it’s a great tool. It is a way in which people can use this knowledge that can solve local problems.

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There is no American progress without science progress.

We entered the scene against a backdrop of deep concern. Was our government truly committed to policymaking based on the best available evidence? Did elected officials appreciate that not a sector of a modern society can be sustained without constant efforts to innovate, that the very future of the country hangs in the balance? Is there freedom of speech for those appointed to protect the public from disease and improve their prospects of a society that promotes human flourishing?

Now, to top it all off, the current financial crisis is not reassuring about the future of funding for research and development, either by government or the private sector.

It will be years before we know whether we have turned the corner on these worries. Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that a serious conversation has begun. The ScienceDebate 2008 movement did not result in a presidential debate on science policy, but it did stimulate renewed interest in the importance of getting these issues on the radar at the highest levels of our leadership. Several major organizations have published analyses and recommendations for enhancing the role of White House science advice, and there is buzz about reviving some version of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The organized scientific community is making a greater effort to communicate with the public, including an increasing number of public events.

It seems to us that the movement to put the direction of American science back on the map is quickening and, through our contributors and readers, Science Progress has become part of that movement. We are pleased that traffic to our site has steadily increased over the year, as have subscribers to our weekly email. But the most important measures of our success are the dynamism and intelligence of our articles and blog posts and the feedback we receive from readers around the country. Besides several highly visible panels at the Center for American Progress and the National Press Club, we have helped sponsor such events as the World Stem Cell Summit. Several weeks ago Science Progress columnist Chris Mooney and I participated in a science policy panel at Ole Miss, as part of the run up to the first presidential debate. And of course the first hard copy of Science Progress was widely distributed to science policy experts in Washington, and we have organized a group of experts on financing science and technology to advance our understanding of the elements needed to promote regional centers of innovation.

We are excited about the new opportunities to make our case that will come with a new administration and a new congress. And next year Bellevue Literary Press will provide us with another way to reach the public with the first book to emerge from Science Progress. You can expect to hear more about this project, entitled Science Next, in 2009.

I’m very grateful to the people who do the heavy lifting, especially assistant editor Andrew Pratt and editorial director Ed Paisley. Kit Batten and Mike Rugnetta are two CAP staffers who guide and write for us, and we scored a real coup in recruiting the wise and experienced science reporter for The Washington Post, Rick Weiss, as a regular columnist along with Chris Mooney.

Ultimately, it was the leadership of the Center for American Progress, especially CAP’s president John Podesta, who took what we think was a winning gamble on this endeavor. Like our contributors and readers, they know that there is no American progress without science progress.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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But those who wish to be our nation’s leaders need to consider the implications for the 21^st century power of a citizenry that lacks confidence in science and indeed is taught to denigrate its most basic precepts. History teaches that the most technologically sophisticated powers have vast advantages even over more numerous and desperate adversaries, from Spanish conquests of Central America to Israel’s victories over its Arab neighbors.

Our ability to defend our freedoms is directly tied to our longstanding scientific and technological advantages, not just in the military arena but also in our economy.

This reality has not changed. Our national security is thoroughly bound up with our ability to maintain our lead in understanding and managing the world that surrounds us. Long-term threats to Americans could result if our elected officials decide to pander to antiscientific tendencies among their most forceful constituents. As an adviser to national security and intelligence agencies, I am impressed at the concern repeatedly expressed by military officials and scientists that the gravest threats to our country, and the most promising defenses in the 21^st century, lie in emerging fields of science, especially those related to biology.

One concern is that an enemy state or a terrorist organization could genetically modify a biological agent that spreads silently until timed to achieve maximum lethality in a large number of very mobile hosts. Even if the plot is detected early it may be too late to impose measures that minimize the damage very much. In any case, the psychological, social, and economic consequences would be immense.

There are many other nightmare scenarios for the production of biological and toxin weapons that could give an adversary a distinct tactical advantage in the new kind of asymmetric global warfare we face. These weapons are far less costly and cumbersome to produce than nuclear weapons. Largely useless on a traditional battlefield, they may be most impressive to a civilian population that frequents countless soft targets.

And what, besides a modest set of materials, many commercially available, is required to develop such agents? The main requirement is advanced training in modern biology, the organizing principle of which is, of course, evolution.

The same knowledge base can defend against threats from emerging biotechnologies. It may be possible to modify warfighters’ brain cells so that they are resistant to currently untreatable infectious agents like prions. New vaccines manufactured on powerful biotechnology platforms could better protect both soldiers and civilians from traditional bioweapons such as smallpox or new, genetically modified bacteria.

But if policymakers really doubt that the DNA molecule evolves, then they should urge their followers to disregard their military commanders’ decision to inoculate their soldiers against bioweapons. In fact, these extreme conservatives should ignore their doctors’ recommendation to get a new flu vaccine every winter for themselves and their family—a vaccine needed because of the swift evolutionary changes experienced by the flu virus. But those decisions would be poor choices for a country wishing to protect its military and keep its people safe against pandemics and biological weapons.

Then there are the economic costs of teaching “intelligent design.” Already there are alarming signs of a decline in America’s relative strength in science research and development. Although most people don’t usually think about national security in this way, our ability to defend out freedoms is directly tied to our longstanding scientific and technological advantages, not just in the military arena but also in our economy.

The world is becoming a much more competitive place in the global economy of science. We need successive waves of primary, secondary and post-secondary students of science learning about the efficacy of evolutionary theory and its practical application in our increasingly biotechnology-driven economy. The 21^st century will be defined by the ongoing biotechnology revolution. Our nation cannot afford to handicap its international economic competitiveness or national security by teaching unrelated religious beliefs in science class.

The nation we all love preserves and protects its citizens’ right to believe pretty much whatever they want to believe, or disbelieve. But in defending that nation we cannot afford to handicap good science. The stakes are higher than a single political campaign. The future safety and prosperity of our nation are on the line.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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An upcoming Center for American Progress panel, “Sports Doping and the Age of Enhancement,” will examine these issues from the standpoints of science, ethics, and industry. Join us this Friday, August 8, from 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm.

In one sense there is no issue: No one in any competitive enterprise should have an unfair advantage. So stated the point is a truism, for who is in favor of “unfairness”? However, it is also clear that detection is going to become more of a challenge. One strategy might resort to genetic interventions that result in the production of more naturally occurring proteins that in turn spur the body’s manufacture of oxygen-carrying red blood cells or of muscle cells. “Gene doping” would thus represent an “advance” over the artificial introduction of the compounds themselves, like the drug erythropoietin or EPO, which regulates red blood cells and can be detected.

Some argue that the whole debate is misplaced, that enhancement already takes place among athletes in many different ways, like using high altitude chambers or special elbow surgery that may improve strength. Others contend that, though it may be hard to draw lines, the point of sport is the combination of personal initiative along with making the most of natural gifts, that our very humanness is at stake if we succumb to the hubristic pursuit of perfection rather than the achievement of excellence. (Writing here at Science Progress, Arthur Caplan also considered the ethical questions of doping, including those involved in recent major league baseball scandals.)

The legal standards applied in both amateur and professional sports make this more than an academic debate. Still more importantly, the enhancement issue in sport is the canary in the coal mine for a much wider societal debate about how far the life sciences can and should take us, a profound question that seems to be unfolding as a key theme of the 21st century.

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SOURCE: AP

The Bush administration has been criticized for downgrading the White House science advisor’s role and that of OSTP.

The Bush administration has been criticized for downgrading the White House science advisor’s role and that of OSTP. Unlike previous administrations, the current science advisor, for example, does not sit in on cabinet meetings and the OSTP has been relegated to a location outside the White House complex. Further, there are only two associate directors, even though the office is authorized to have four.

In its report, the Wilson Center group makes a number of critical observations and recommendations. For example, they urge that the science advisor be appointed along with members of the president’s cabinet, that he or she participate in cabinet-level activities, that a full complement of associate directors be nominated for Senate approval, and that the main offices of the director and associate directors be in the Old Executive Office Building to enable them to interact with senior White House officials. Although the report does not direct these recommendations at the Bush administration, these actions would not be needed had it not been for the neglect of science advice by this White House. Similarly, the report finds that OSTP should be able to play a more active role in ensuring that government science and technology advisory committees have sufficient independence to ensure the integrity of interpretations of the relevant science. They also suggest that OSTP have its own communications staff to help the White House ensure the accuracy of administration statements.

Other constructive recommendations concern the OSTP’s relationship to other executive branch entities and nongovernmental organizations. A particularly timely suggestion recognizes the increased role of states in funding science by encouraging development of mechanisms to “engage with leaders at the regional and state levels.”

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The impetus for Science Progress is the sense within the scientific community that, at many levels, American science policy has lost its way.

Benjamin Franklin’s intensive study of natural phenomena such as such electricity, meteorology, and refrigeration is less appreciated than his particular inventions, like the lightning rod. But Franklin clearly understood that technological innovation should be based on careful, systematic observation and experimentation, a remarkable intuition that would fully flower only well into the next century. His concrete institutional legacies—the American Philosophical Society, the Franklin Institute, and the University of Pennsylvania—all embody Franklin’s enthusiasm for inquiry and innovation.

Thomas Jefferson, whose inventions still fascinate visitors to Monticello, said of himself that “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight.” In more practical terms, Jefferson’s founding and stewardship of the Patent Office reflected his view that America must reward creativity in order to achieve its great destiny.

And Jefferson’s great and equally complex rival, Alexander Hamilton, was set on a career in medicine in college and attended as many lectures on science as he could. As the architect of the American economy, Hamilton shared with the other founders a vision of the importance of invention as a key to the country’s greatness, and sought to facilitate his extraordinarily modern conception of investment, industry, and commerce as an organic system.

In the late 18th century the term science was still virtually interchangeable with natural philosophy. Yet these founders sensed that the trajectory of human knowledge was on a sharply upward course. Influenced by the Scottish and English empiricists, especially David Hume and John Locke, they also seemed to believe that America’s aspirations were naturally implied by human nature, an inborn temperament that included certain inherent capacities for inquiry and understanding.

In the 19th century these notions crystallized into a conception of material progress as inevitable, facilitated by science and industry, and indeed from the perspective of the early American progressives—among them Theodore Roosevelt, Robert LaFollette, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, and William Jennings Bryan—it seemed hard to argue with the idea that progress was steamrolling through history, for all its virtues and vices.

But is material progress also spiritual progress? And in either case is it inevitable? Not all progressives bought into the notion of progress as connected with industry, or do now. Vannevar Bush’s famous post-war characterization of science in 1945 as “the endless frontier” was perhaps the highwater mark of American optimism about scientific research as the foundation of a limitless, bountiful American future. As historians have amply documented, social movements of the succeeding decades have called into question both the inevitability and the spiritual satisfactions of scientific progress expressed by Bush, one of the founding fathers of the military industrial complex.

Thus we have on one hand America’s astonishing ascent, built to a great extent on the intimate relation between energetic scientific inquiry and a powerful modern state that the founders appear to have intuited. And on the other hand, we have grave doubts that true progress as an outgrowth of material improvement can be taken for granted, or even that it has any meaning. What then is the American narrative of science and progress for the 21st century?

In the largest sense, developing this new narrative is the intellectual challenge that Science Progress has set for itself. Th is effort could hardly be more timely. The impetus for Science Progress is the sense within the scientific community that, at many levels, American science policy has lost its way: from doubts about the current administration’s commitment to evidence, to concern about political movements that call evolution itself into question, to worries about our ability to sustain our historic lead in basic research. Since our Web launch in October 2007 we have been gratified by the enthusiastic response of scientists, experts in science policy, and leaders in financing innovation.

Our overarching aim is to continue to work out the founders’ vision of an American future that remains a great and unfinished experiment and thus is, at its core, a nation of science.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

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So far only the first assertion has been confirmed by neuroscience. Katherine Rankin, a University of California, San Francisco investigator, combined fMRI and a test on the awareness of social inference. She found that the right parahippocampal gyrus, previously associated with spacial context, is also involved with the ability to perceive the verbal and visual cues of sarcasm; or, in other words, with social context. Patients with damage to that region lose the capacity to sense social nuances.

As a New York Times piece on the Rankin study notes, understanding someone else’s point of view, even when sarcastically expressed, is tantamount to the appreciation that there are minds and subjectivities other than one’s own, and to ability to relate to them. When this ability is impaired it’s particularly disturbing to family and friends because a crucial element of the relationship with that person has been lost.

Actually the area identified by UCSF study only accounts for perceiving sarcasm, not for a teen’s ability to generate it. I was just being sarcastic.

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The sad news of Senator Kennedy’s brain cancer has made the general question of balancing politicians’ privacy and the public’s right relevant again, especially in a presidential election cycle. In 1992 Sen. Paul Tsongas, locked in a primary battle with Bill Clinton, claimed he had been cured of lymphoma, but he died a day before the end of what would have been his first term, had he accomplished his White House bid. Since then medicine’s ability to diagnose and prognosticate has only grown, but in general effective interventions lag behind.

Presidents and candidates for the office do release the results of their physical exams, but this is voluntary. The press and the public have no way of knowing what information is withheld, nor exactly when it is released. For example, some cancer patients may get checked for suspicious cells every three months, but politicians may not release medical records, and even if they do, they might hand them over to the press just months before election day.

Also challenging is the question of whether the explosion of new drugs now marketed for conditions like insomnia and erectile dysfunction should be part of a presidential medical report. I have often wondered how many highly stressed candidates used Ambien or some related sleep medication, which would likely disable them for that now-legendary “3 a.m. phone call.” Or, to stay awake on 4 hours of sleep amid half a dozen stump speeches, how many use Provigil? If Bob Dole had been elected, would we have been told that he used Viagra? Would we have needed to know?

The answer to the “need to know” question for many of these new drugs is obscure because we don’t know much about the long-term effects of their use. Not only is the system for our follow-up data poor (though perhaps improving with the FDA’s new “Sentinel” program), never before in human history have so many people been on so many drugs for so long. There is virtually no understanding about how these medications might affect an individual’s mood or judgment, especially over the long term.

The question will only become more pressing as genetic knowledge information explodes. The issue is not confined to risks for maladies like cancer, stroke, or heart disease. When more is known about what genes increase the risk of depression, for example, will that screening be reported? George Stephanopoulos revealed that he used an anti-depressant while working in the White House as the Communications Director for President Clinton. There has been much speculation about the effect of steroids on President Kennedy’s mood (though it was probably positive). It is not difficult to imagine that a future president would be prescribed a mood-lightener. What would this mean for his or her conduct in office?

Many will conclude that the imponderables implied by more medical information are so overwhelming that we should not even raise these questions, and that the practice of releasing presidential health records should remain voluntary and unregulated. But when there is one serious incident that could have been anticipated by the medicine of the day, whenever that day arrives, that judgment may change.

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The parliament vote followed an unprecedented national debate, with medical organizations joining in support of the bill and religious groups in opposition. Those opposed claimed that “no other country” had laws allowing this kind of research (though the U.S. government does not ban it), and that it jeopardizes “the ultimate boundary” between humans and animals (though one would have thought that compassion was “the ultimate boundary”), and that the experiment would be of “Frankenstein proportion.”

Scientists have already employed this technique in the UK under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). A team at Newcastle created chimeric embryos in this way last month. No Frankenstein sightings thus far, but Science Progress will keep you posted.

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Gerson’s only example to this effect is the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gerson is right that important progressives of that era favored eugenic theory, and he is correct that sterilization was an important and shameful part of eugenic social policy. Having established a paradigm case of misguided liberalism, Gerson identifies the “new eugenics” of genetic screening, in vitro fertilization and abortion. In this paradigm, the real war is not conservatism versus science but the continuing war of liberalism versus human equality.

The old eugenics movement has become a favorite of conservative commentary, but the commentators in question seem not to know more than the bumper sticker history. In fact, both progressives and conservatives favored eugenics; the most vigorous critics of eugenics were themselves progressives; and after World War II conservatives (who detested FDR and the New Deal) were distressed at the bad odor their movement had come under in the wake of Hitler’s murderous racism and longed for the day that eugenics would be restored. Perhaps the most important source of support of eugenics research for more than 70 years has been the Pioneer Fund, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a hate group.

Apart from these curious historical omissions, Gerson’s careless reference to genetic screening seems calculated to associate it with abortion and even Nazism. Perhaps Gerson has not, as I have, spent many hours in neonatal intensive care units with doctors and nurses who care for infants with severe genetic anomalies and who are destined to live short, painful lives. He is entitled to believe that the aggressive and successful efforts by the Jewish community to eliminate Tay-Sachs disease through genetic counseling and screening are misguided, but he is not entitled arbitrarily to associate those efforts with a moral taint, much less Nazism. I have also seen courageous parents take their babies born with Trisomy 13 home to die. Those who moralize about such matters adopt a perilous course.

Gerson’s selective history might be ascribed to a bad case of amnesia. Concluding his piece with a dire warning to liberals who are blinded by their “war on equality,” he proves not only to be a bad historian of the turn of the last century but a miserable one about the past 60 years. Unless, as a movement committed to a war on equality, liberals simply lost their way when they championed civil rights for African-Americans, women, and gays.

Pardon me, sir, but conservatives are in no position to lecture liberals about human equality.

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Last week, at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania researchers announced that they had used a genetically engineered virus to introduce a gene into the retinas of young adults with a form of congenital blindness that has no treatment, Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). Within a few weeks all three patients had significant improvement in the treated eye, with no apparent side effects.

The only other successful gene transfer therapy trial took place in France, where children without functioning immune systems (”bubble-boy disease”) did achieve results, but several were diagnosed with leukemia thereafter. Following the success at CHOP, geneticists may now turn increasingly to single-gene disorders as the first therapeutic targets.

Katherine A. High, M.D, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and one of the CHOP study leaders, has been investigating LCA for years. For a field that has been racked by disappointment and controversy (the death of a gene therapy subject in 1998 at Penn shocked the scientific community), the good news from CHOP is both a source of encouragement and a reminder of the patience that is required to translate theoretical principles in genetics into practical treatments.

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A distinguished team of Northwestern University researchers has found that a gene called Lefty that is only made in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) suppresses the growth of melanoma and breast cancer cells. They also noted an increase in deaths of the killer cells. The hESC environment might make it possible to develop new cancer therapies.

Of course, the Bush administration and its allies prefer to wait out the clock in order to take the stem cell issue, which polls badly for them, off the table. Will the White House domestic policy council, which appears only to recognize science that vindicates their policy preferences, comment on the Northwestern teams’ result? We can live in hope.

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In this experiment, the nucleus of an abnormal embryo with the DNA from the mother and the father was removed and placed in an egg with only the mitochrondrial DNA remaining. The researchers observed normal embryonic development, though the embryos were destroyed within six days, when they were still balls of undifferentiated cells.

The motivation for the research is to develop techniques that could be used along with in vitro fertilization processes for women whose mitochondrial DNA puts their babies at risk for certain serious genetic diseases.

Pro-life organizations in the UK have expressed their opposition to such research, which took place under the watchful eyes of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has previously asserted its authority over any IVF procedures that go beyond the standard union of sperm and egg, so that fertility doctors would have to fill out an Investigational New Drug Application and file it with the agency.

But this assertion of the FDA’s statutory scope concerning reproductive materials has been challenged by research advocates and has not been fully tested. If the technique described by the Newcastle scientists is adopted by their American counterparts it could provide the occasion for such a test of FDA authority.

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Experts on biological weapons, along with those who worry about novel threats to public health from any source, are watching these developments closely. To address concerns that the bacterium could be a pathogen, the lab disabled a gene that enables the bacteria to attach to human cells.

Reports indicate that Venter and colleagues believe the next step—using the DNA strand to govern a functional cell—could be accomplished within the year. When that happens, synthetic biology will have decisively left the arena of science fiction and could be the beginning of industries based on cellular factories.

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This process, which was made famous by the sheep clone Dolly about ten years ago, would allow research on stem cells with particular traits, such as gene-linked diseases, depending on the genes of the skin cell donor. The stem cells would be derived from the embryos developed through the cloning procedure. Thus laboratory research on specific genetic complexes associated with certain diseases would be markedly advanced. The stem cell products of SCNT might also be used to treat disorders in the donor, called therapeutic cloning. For example, healthy pancreatic islet cells might be produced that are genetically compatible with a diabetes patient and able to encourage growth of normal cells in the patient’s organ. However, the company has not yet been able to extract stem cells from the embryos.

The company, called Stemagen, said it used 25 human eggs obtained with informed consent to obtain five embryos, a fairly respectable success rate, especially considering the difficulties involved in obtaining human eggs. However, because of the shortage of human eggs, that rate would have to be signficantly improved in order for therapeutic cloning to be a realistic option. The five embryos grew to clusters of between 40 and 72 cells.

The announcement is another in a recent spate of important developments in stem cell biology, including the creation of pluripotent stem cells from human skins cells.

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The company received criticism in 2006 for announcing that they had established this technique, but at the time they had not allowed the remaining embryos to be cultured to see if, indeed, they appeared to be normal. This time they went through the process of ensuring that the normal tissues were apparently created by the embryos as they divided.

The uncertainty about damage to the embryo from this biopsy procedure that is used in the private sector is partly due to a lack of federally supported research on in vitro fertilization, a decision made 1980 by the Reagan administration. Ironically, a decision made over 25 years ago out of concern about research involving human embryos now appears to threaten one pathway to alternatives to research that destroys human embryos. (I have previously written about this problem with stem cell biologist John Gearhart.)

Besides the safety issue, some opponents of human embryonic stem cell research object that the single-cell biopsy concept is ethically flawed because the single cell that is removed at the 8-cell stage might itself have the potential to form an embryo under the right conditions.

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But the Leshner-Thomson response is stinging:

Far from vindicating the current U.S. policy of withholding federal funds from many of those working to develop potentially lifesaving embryonic stem cells, recent papers in the journals Science and Cell described a breakthrough achieved despite political restrictions. In fact, work by both the U.S. and Japanese teams that reprogrammed skin cells depended entirely on previous embryonic stem cell research.

And then there is the peculiar notion, also implicit in Krauthammer’s piece, that Yamanaka’s team in Kyoto worked on reprogramming skin cells because of George W. Bush’s U.S. policy. That must have been news to the Japanese.

Krauthammer and others have tried to use the science to make a case for political vindication. Supporters of the president’s policy would do better to follow Yuval Levin’s serious and sober advice not to treat this as a “vindication” of one side or another, but as extraordinary science.

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Also obscured in the past few days is that without human embryonic stem cell lines, the Wisconsin and Kyoto groups would not have known what the earmarks of pluripotency are and therefore could not have accomplished their breakthrough at just about the same time, barely edging out other labs working on the same problem.

But sour notes should not ruin the sweet smell of success of scientists who refused to be distracted by the political and ideological turmoil swirling about them. Prizes and recognitions are sure to come their way in the next months and years, as well they should. Their work will jump start the field of regenerative medicine, which many believe to be the most exciting approach to alleviating human maladies since the burst of accomplishments in pharmaceutical discovery after the Second World War.

What are some of the other implications?

• The development of iPS cells is not only a victory of stem cell biology, it also marks a success for the star-crossed field of gene transfer. The techniques used to reprogram skin cells came straight out of attempts to re-engineer genes by using retroviruses to carry new code into the cells’ DNA. Thus genetic research gets a boost as well.
• As various stem cell experts have noted, researchers will need embryonic stem cells will for some time, both as the gold standard for establishing and recognizing pluripotency and also for determining whether the induced pluripotent stem cells can indeed do all the same work as embryonic stem cells. Considering the multitude of possibilities presented by the concept of regenerating tissues and organs, it could be years before a comprehensive set of answers to the latter question is available.
• Thus rationality should dictate expanded support of embryonic stem cell research in order to advance the science of induced pluripotency. Unfortunately, with these successful experiments as an excuse we can anticipate a hardening of opposition to any expansion of public funding.
• It will take some time, perhaps a year or two, to find transcription factors that do not stimulate tumor formation, and perhaps more time to understand the mechanisms of genetic reprogramming. Safety issues thus now become an important next phase as work in this field becomes the norm.
• On the state level, jurisdictions that were apparently frozen out of the science by local politics but boast substantial assets in scientific research can now be part of the process. However, it will take them some time to scale up to the sophistication of research groups in states that have been friendlier to cutting edge stem cell biology, such as California and Massachusetts.
• Some below-the-radar related issues may now become apparent. For example, one of the common methods for understanding and addressing the genetics of disease and for drug testing is the creation of lab animal models. When the public learns more about these chimeric animals, they may not be comfortable with them, as some grow from cells derived from human sources including, say, cells from people with Alzheimer’s disease that have been stimulated to become neurons. Sen. Sam Brownback has introduced a bill to prohibit some of these experiments and President Bush has raised objections to “human-animal hybrids.”
• Scientists may explore a variety of other technical possibilities. At some point many will realize that pluripotent cells can be programmed to become sperm and egg cells, perhaps from persons who are otherwise infertile. And although the induced pluripotent cells currently lack the ability to divide into embryos, it’s a sure bet that there will eventually be interest in rendering them totipotent. Genetic modification of embryos by the introduction of “designer” stem cells is also in prospect, though how soon no one can tell. Further debates are likely to rage about the propriety of such procedures.

From a long-term perspective, this episode is a reminder of the power over life represented in the new biology. Ironically, this discovery reinforces the larger concerns of those who have opposed human embryonic stem cell research: the production of induced pluripotent stem cells is a giant step in the growing human mastery of biological nature.

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For the record, the scientific community has spoken loudly against attempts to use somatic cell nuclear transfer for reproduction, and even researchers accomplish the feat, the result will be the rough equivalent of an identical twin, but not necessarily one possessed of the same virtues or vices of the “original.” Through no fault or intention of Levin’s, The Boys From Brazil imagery seems to have become one of a clutch of bioscience fiction tales in the tradition of Frankenstein and Brave New World that—pardon the expression—become monkeys on the back of science. Although difficult to measure, public understanding of novel science does seem to be shaped partly by cleverly wrought nightmare scenarios.

The insight is not new. In The Republic Plato advocates exiling the poets because they are so adept at promoting emotion over reason. Two thousand years later, it remains an open question whether we are capable of resisting darkly seductive artistic images in favor of evidence and reason.

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Perhaps the greatest moral burden borne by the historic ties of progressivism to science is the American eugenics movement. The link is frequently cited by critics of progressive politics. As execrable as the consequences of American eugenics were, however, the original movement’s philosophy was not that of the eugenic racism of Nazi ideology. In the United States the victims of eugenic sterilization seem mostly to have been white, as in the infamous case of Carrie Buck. Here the risk factor for sterilization during the heyday of eugenics was not race, but class.

Nonetheless, progressives have special reason to be alert to the misuse of genetic information. A New York Times article notes that the onrush of new genetic information appears to reflect differences in various characteristics that are statistically associated with continents of origin—Africa, Asia and Europe—and even regions in some cases. These associations are gaining causal explanations through identifiable differences in DNA chromosomes. So far these genetic discoveries have to do with broad physical and physiological characteristics like skin color and proclivity to perspire.

Yet as the Times notes, behavioral genetics can’t be far away, including genetic correlations and causal explanations for differences in such hot-button traits as I.Q. As one of the interviewees notes, DNA only confers a range of possibilities with multiple post-conception influences—diet, education, nurturing, exposure to toxins, etc.—determining where any particular individual falls on any given scale. This is a critical, albeit complex, fact about genetics that needs to be communicated to the public before new rationalizations for old-fashioned racism take hold.

My high school probabilities teacher delivered his simple point: Say Group A collectively falls a few points higher on a scale than Group B. The individuals in each group are distributed through the x and y axes. Now lay the curves over each other, so that nearly all of us fall in the overlapping space. And of course the collective divergences depend on which characteristic you’re graphing.

“So none of us,” he concluded with uncharacteristic passion that leafy Hudson Valley fall afternoon, “has a right to feel superior to anybody.”

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The New Jersey vote demonstrates that state-based investment in long-term science can easily get caught up in local politics. Garden State voters apparently decided the issue not on ideology but on the finances. They’re concerned that the state’s fiscal house is in disorder and don’t want Trenton to borrow more money, at least until matters get sorted out.

There’s another local element that makes New Jersey special in this field. It is home to large pharmaceutical companies that will someday get into stem cell-based medicine by buying up small companies that have spun off from basic research that will happen in other states.

So enthusiasm about state stem cell initiatives needs to be tempered by the New Jersey experience, as well as by the inefficiencies that can arise from doing basic biomedical research without coordination by the National Institutes of Health. As I and my colleagues have written before, the states can’t go it alone.

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“If I want a graduate student who can do math,” I heard a distinguished scientist remark a few weeks ago, “I’ll go to Germany.”

The beginning of October marked the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, and as we leave that milestone behind, what would President Eisenhower’s science advisers have thought about such a statement? They might well have slapped their foreheads, wondering whether their pioneering National Defense Education Act and its remarkable contributions to our economy, our military preparedness, and our educational system have been forgotten.

There would be reasons for their chagrin. Although the quality of science and engineering education in the United States might still be superior to those of our competitors, the raw numbers are alarming. By 2000 Chinese engineering graduates had increased 161 percent while ours had declined by 20 percent. Fewer than 6 percent of high school seniors taking the SATs in 2002 planned to study engineering, down by a third from the previous decade. In the next few years more than half of the Sputnik generation of trained scientists and engineers will retire. Yet as measured by gross domestic product, federal investment in the physical sciences is half of what it was in 1970.

Twenty-first century America needs to prepare for the century of science and engineering. One pathway is adoption of a new National Defense Education Act. A bill for a 21st-century NDEA was introduced in congress in February 2006 but never became law. A landmark report from the National Academies published earlier this year delivered a chilling conclusion:

Although many people assume that the United States will always be a world leader in science and technology, this may not continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds and ideas exist throughout the world. We fear the abruptness with which a lead in science and technology can be lost—and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost, if indeed it can be regained at all.

Another bill, the America COMPETES Act, includes provisions for math-science education grants programs for schools that serve low-income students and for expanded advance placement programs. House and Senate staffers are now discussing funding levels for these very modest efforts. Even if they are funded, they are at best a tepid response to a deep and ongoing national problem.

Before Sputnik America’s leaders were sure that the Soviet Union, which could barely produce enough food for its people, could never overtake us in a technological race. Today the warning signs are clear. Will it require another national trauma for our current leadership to respond?

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In an interview with the magazine Medline Plus, NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni repeats his call for more embryonic stem cell research. Dr. Zerhouni has made similar statements before, including during congressional testimony in March.

When confronted with this disagreement with its policy on the part of its chief medical adviser, the White House has offered the typical non-denials—”No, there’s no disagreement, we both think embryonic stem cell research should proceed”—without confronting Zerhouni’s point that the research is hobbled by the current policy.

Also familiar is the spin that this is a matter of science versus ethics, a line the president used in the 2004 presidential debates. Now the administration has gone further.

The notion that scientists lack ethical judgment—they’re only trying to cure horrible diseases after all—surfaced more clearly than ever in the reported White House response to Dr. Zerhouni’s latest statement. According to the Washington Post blog The Sleuth, spokesman Tony Fratto said that the president must “draw the line in a different place than Dr. Zerhouni” because he has to take into account “moral and religious views.”

The change of tone is notable. The White House could have said, “Well, we just disagree and the president is the decider.” Instead, as its position has become more untenable the White House has moved from “science vs. ethics” to “scientists don’t worry about ethics.”

Fortunately, those benighted scientists and the rest of us have politicians to do that for us.

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The genetic test for Huntington’s Disease, a degenerative brain disorder, sparked the first such debate. As in the case of the Alzehimer’s test now under development, the test raises serious questions when individuals are asymptomatic or are at risk for a late-onset disease with years of healthy life ahead of them. When the Huntington’s test became available in the 1970s, fewer of those who might be affected chose to know their destiny than many expected. Since then the Huntington’s test has provided a case study and an opportunity to develop positions on the medical, psychological, and ethical problems of predictive testing.

Alarmists will worry about the social effects if large numbers of persons have access to reliable knowledge of their likely medical destiny. Will fatalism and risk-taking increase? Will political pressure for physician-assisted suicide grow? What seems at least as likely is that the same understanding of disease processes that enable predictive testing will lead to interventions that can alter their course, but not without a transition period that challenges our moral framework.

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Science Progress: What is the significance of awarding the peace prize for an environmental issue?

Joseph Romm: I think it’s significant that it’s the Peace Prize. The Vice President and many others have said that climate change is a security issue because it will create millions of environmental refugees and will lead to water scarcity that can cause conflict. Conflicts like those in Darfur have environmental roots and need environmental solutions, along with political and economic solutions.

Gore is trying to prevent a humanitarian crisis; he is trying to prevent regional wars that will be driven by resource scarcity. This isn’t the first time that a major environmental issue has won the peace prize. Winning this Prize proves this isn’t an ordinary environmental issue. It is one of the most important issues of our time. It would be good if this award were part of a trend.

SP: Will this award help to spur a change in U.S. climate change policy?

JR: We’re still stuck with the Bush administration policies. This award will give moral authority to the people pushing for action; it underscores that it is a moral issue. But in a practical sense, if the president of the U.S. won’t agree to mandatory controls, then there’s not much to be done.

There is a lot of legislation in front of Congress addressing climate change, and hopefully this will light a fire under Congress to vote on that legislation. A national plan to address global warming is a major vote. People will be remembered for decades to come for how they vote, or how they filibuster.

SP: What is the significance of giving the Peace Prize to 2,000 scientists as well as the former Vice President?

JR: It’s important that the Nobel committee gave the award to a group of scientists. There have been other scientists, such as Linus Pauling, who received the peace prize, but this is rare. The IPCC has come under much unjustified criticism for supposedly being too political, whereas the rest of us know that they don’t oversell global warming. If anything, they underplay some of the impacts. A lot of IPCC scientists toil away in anonymity and if they say anything, they get attacked. Hopefully this will give them the courage to speak up.

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Science as progressive boasts philosophical and political skeins stretching much further back into the American historical experience.

In another sense, though, the title of this new publication, Science Progress, is purposely argumentative. It suggests that science, both as a way of thinking and as a source of novel ideas and products, is in the main a liberating practice that enables human flourishing. This understanding of science as progressive does not deny that the power of science may be misused. Nor does it exclude the need for guidance and even regulation in the service of equality and solidarity. But it does assert that the core values of science are democratic and anti-authoritarian.

The very words “science” and “progress” came to have their modern meanings in the 19th century, and they did so right around the same time. This simultaneous semantic evolution was, of course, no accident. Microscopes and telescopes were drilling both down and up into nature, and stethoscopes revealed the body’s inner space. Systematic investigations that manipulated variables proved more revealing than mere observation. The possibilities that could emerge from human insight began to seem endless.

Science as progressive, however, boasts philosophical and political skeins stretching much further back into the American historical experience. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is often credited as the first to express the modern idea of progress in terms of advancing science and technology. And this vision was to have a profound effect on later 17th century thinkers, including those who provided the intellectual justification for the American Revolution. For all the founders’ disagreements, there was no doubt that the new nation’s promise was necessarily bound up with its innovative genius. Even those bitter rivals Jefferson and Hamilton made their own contributions: Jefferson through the patent statute that rewards inventiveness; Hamilton by laying the foundations for history’s most successful capitalist economy.

It is also no coincidence that other concepts that have been important to the way that America has come to understand itself, ideas such as the frontier and the West, demand an experimental attitude in grappling with novel challenges. Who, besides the westward settlers themselves, has come more to represent the pioneer spirit than America’s “inventors,” people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, and Bill Gates?

Even as America’s western frontier has vanished, the pioneer spirit and the virtues and values associated with it continue to have a powerful hold over the American mind. Few government initiatives have been so wildly successful in capturing the public imagination as the space program of the 1960s, which resonated with the Kennedy administration’s “new frontier.” The ideas of science and progress are deeply held in America’s self-identity, pervasive in our notions of who we are, what we do and why we do it. The optimistic “can do” spirit, the approval of bigness, boldness, and adventure, the lure of “the road,” are all associated with this sensibility. At our best we hold these truths to be, if not self-evident, at least within our grasp.

And of course generations came to characterize America itself as an “experiment,” a romantic and visionary theme that comported well with the orientation of both pragmatist philosophers and early progressives. The only sure path to social and scientific advancement was seen as an iterative process of hypothesis, systematic experimentation, and data-gathering, and then reform in light of experience. That the human condition can and should be improved by any means necessary—whether through government or private enterprise or some combination of the two, but with government as the ultimate guarantor of the public interest—has come to be the essence of progressivism, but so has the need to ground such alleged improvements in the best possible evidence.

Few government initiatives have been so wildly successful in capturing the public imagination as the space program of the 1960s, which resonated with the Kennedy administration’s “new frontier.”

The progressive theme of history is not, however, self-evident in Western culture. The Greeks tended to think of their own time either as inferior to the mythical Golden Age or as part of a cycle of advance and decline. Imperial Romans saw themselves as in stasis since the establishment of the empire. Medieval Roman Catholic thinkers largely gave up on worldly progress in favor of spiritual improvement while awaiting Armageddon.

Neither has the conjunction of science and progress always been welcomed as an unalloyed good. Just as the words’ modern meanings were coming into consciousness there were also the first signs of alarm, in a tradition that began famously with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, continues to exert a powerful hold on popular culture, and has lately manifested itself in a conservative critique of science. Taken to an extreme, far from being a guarantor of progress (which even progressives could not reasonably assert), the potentially inhumane drift of science threatens the idea of progress itself.

One common criticism of progressive science policy is that it uncritically adopts an instrumental view of science without reflection on the goals of innovation. Although we reject the notion that a philosophy of innovation must be dumb to moral values, we appreciate that progressives have too often appeared to worship at the altar of change. Science Progress will therefore seek to compass consideration of ends as well as means.

Similarly, at the risk of invoking a hackneyed reference to spirituality, we also believe that science occupies an exalted dimension, that the growth of reliable knowledge is in effect an expansion of consciousness. Science may not be the only path to a greater grasp of reality, but it makes a unique contribution to enhanced understanding of the cosmos and our place within it. To distort the process of inquiry amounts therefore to a narrowing of vision, a corruption of imagination, and a threat to our freedom as beings endowed with intellect.

It would be disingenuous to deny that the trigger for Science Progress is the sense among many that in recent years the respect for evidence and the spirit of open inquiry has been threatened for the sake of short-term political advantage. But the larger issue is the long-term national interest, which depends on the best evidence that only science can provide for commercial innovation, economic growth, military defense and the best possible array of intelligence options.

In the 21st century, more than ever, it is no exaggeration to assert that only free and rigorous inquiry and not authoritarian dogma can provide the reliable information required for our physical survival. Perhaps most important, progress in science is essential for a continued sense of our national purpose as participants in an historic experiment in freedom and self-governance, as one people joined by a common future rather than a common past, a future we cherish for the sake of the generations of Americans to come.

The goal of Science Progress is to help identify and realize the elements of that boundless American future. We hope this goal is manifest in our statement of mission:

Science Progress proceeds from the propositions that scientific inquiry is among the finest expressions of human excellence, that it is a crucial source of human flourishing, a critical engine of economic growth, and must be dedicated to the common good. Scientific inquiry entails global responsibilities. It should lead to a more equitable, safer, and healthier future for all of humankind.

—Jonathan Moreno, Editor in Chief, Science Progress, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania

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