But there’s another niche in which China’s scientific research is rapidly accelerating, and this has far greater ramifications. The Beijing Genome Institute (now called just “BGI,” since its operations extend beyond Beijing) just announced that they placed an order for 128 new high-performance DNA sequencing instruments from the U.S. firm Illumina. This is the largest order of sequencers ever, anywhere. At a retail price of $690,000 each, even if the machines are discounted, the purchase of this instrumentation alone is a phenomenal investment of at least $60 million in a single year. This purchase will bring the total number of sequencers at BGI to 157, nearly twice the number of instruments at the largest sequencing center in the United States, the Broad Institute at MIT, which will bring its total to 89 this year.

Why is this important? DNA sequencing is destined to become the major tool for developing new diagnostic tests, developing drugs, and understanding the causes of human disease. Led by the United States, the first full sequencing of all 3 billion “letters” in the human genome took 13 years and billions of dollars. With this new capacity, BGI could completely sequence several individuals’ genomes in just a couple of weeks.

The cost of running these instruments includes the reagents and the cost of personnel. China will have to pay full price for reagents, but the cost of labor is far less than it is in the United States, and with China’s high standards for science education, there is no shortage of highly trained technicians.

What’s the bottom line? The Chinese government has made a decision to invest in a technology that is clearly the way of the future. The Chinese will be able to achieve with DNA sequencing just what they attained in the manufacturing industry: the ability to do it cheaper and faster than anyone else. This potential for technical superiority raises two important issues for American academics and businesses.

First, there is the simple matter of economics. I predict that U.S. scientists and companies will find in the next few years that their funding goes further if they subcontract sequencing projects to China. As the demand for DNA sequencing for medical applications grows, we will be sending more and more of our money, and our jobs, to China.

Second, China’s sequencing power has the potential to tip the balance in innovation, the inventions and ideas that currently underlie the success of U.S. biotechnology. For a while, at least, Americans will still have the edge in publishing scientific papers using sequencing, because in the Western-dominated scientific publication industry, explaining the importance of the data is as critical as producing the data. However, China’s investment in sequencing will allow the country to build a valuable intellectual property portfolio because new discoveries will be made at a furious pace.

An example of an emerging field of scientific discovery that is dependent on sequencing power is epigenetics. Almost all the cells in the body have the same DNA sequence, and epigenetic modifications of the DNA are responsible for controlling which genes are turned on and off in different cells. The first complete human “epigenome” maps of normal cells were published in scientific journals just in the last few months. Epigenome sequencing requires more intensive sequencing and computer resources than genome sequencing; BGI is one of a handful of genome centers worldwide that can take on these large projects.

How will epigenome sequencing pay off? Epigenetic changes play a role in many human diseases, including cancers. A key discovery, such as an epigenetic modification that is common to particular cancers, could lead to better diagnostic tests, which could in turn lead to more precise, more effective treatments. The scientific group that makes such a discovery could reap millions from licensing patents alone.

This means that an investment of millions in sequencing power now could easily pay off many-fold in the near future. I’m certain that the Chinese government did not have strictly academic interests in mind when they decided to make their country the most powerful sequencing machine in the world.

Jeanne F. Loring, Ph.D., is a professor and the director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

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Human activity generates heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide that are warming the planet and changing the climate. In framing the conversation, Romm summarized an MIT study concluding that on our current emissions path, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will more than double from pre-industrial levels and the median temperature increase at the Earth’s surface in the 2090s could be 5.2˚C, or nearly 10˚F. “We’re talking about a completely different planet,” he said.

MacCracken emphasized during his panel presentation that our understanding of the fundamental physical science behind climate change is sound and has been for decades. In fact, the idea that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide could warm the planet is more than a century old—the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius explained the concept in 1896. The first official report submitted to a U.S. president on the impact of atmospheric carbon dioxide arrived on Lyndon B. Johnson’s desk in 1965.

Human-generated emissions enhance the natural greenhouse effect and disrupt the planet’s carbon cycle, MacCracken explained. Observations of carbon dioxide levels since the middle of the 20th century show a clear annual oscillation: concentrations of the gas go up and down with the “seasonal breathing” of the biosphere. Part of that cycle is plants absorbing carbon from the air during spring and summer and releasing it during the fall and winter; part of it is ocean absorption. But increasing human emissions mean that the cycle is no longer balanced, and the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere is climbing steadily. “We’ve had a huge subsidy for our carbon,” Field said, because so much of it absorbed by “sinks” on land and in the water.

When sunlight strikes the atmosphere, MacCracken explained, some of its energy is reflected back into space, and some of it passes through, warming the surface of the planet. A small portion of that surface heat radiates back into space again, but greenhouses gases absorb most of it, recirculating the energy back to land and the lower atmosphere. As concentrations of carbon dioxide and other gases increase, more of that heat stays within the atmosphere, leading to a warmer and warmer planet.

Moreover, the warming effects of carbon dioxide in particular are long lasting and the increased concentrations already in the air would continue to warm the Earth for decades to come, even if emissions were immediately reduced to zero. That’s why it is the most important emissions product under consideration by governments around the world.

Surface temperatures and ocean temperatures are rising, MacCracken said, summarizing multiple lines of evidence that confirm the climate is changing now. Sea ice is shrinking, glacier and permafrost are melting, and snow lines are creeping toward mountain peaks. Consequently, sea levels are rising, and increased amounts of evaporated water in the air lead to more intense precipitation where rain falls. And plant and animal species are retreating toward the poles as their original habitats get warmer.

Field reemphasized the importance of focusing on carbon dioxide as the leading cause of these changes because it is intimately linked to human prosperity. “We haven’t figured out how to make people rich without associating that with a high-carbon lifestyle,” he said. Historical data indicates that there is a linear relationship between national wealth and carbon emissions. The question, he said, is how to move from an environment where this relationship is strong to one that breaks that link, creating the “opportunity for more economic activity with lower carbon emissions.”

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that the global “warming is unequivocal,” and Field emphasized that analyses cannot look selectively at merely a few years or even a single decade within the climate record to see this trend. It requires a longer view, but multiple independent temperature records confirm the fact that the planet is getting warmer.

In explaining the process that generates these massive reports on climate science, Field said that, “The IPCC is the most ambitious, thorough, and successful assessment of anything that I think has ever been done.” The process is designed to keep errors to a minimum, but he spoke from personal experience in describing the particular frame it creates for presenting information.

Author teams draw scientists from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and from countries all over the world; they then absorb and synthesize a huge amount of information. For the chapter Field worked on for the last IPCC report, two rounds of expert review each produced 250 pages of notes.

Representatives from all of the United Nations countries later approve, line by line, the IPCC summary chapters for policymakers that synthesize the scientific reports. Field described displaying sentences on a board for a room of participants and being unable to proceed before there was total consensus on the characterization of the science. This produces a “very tight boundary” around what appears in the final summaries, and the characterizations of the science are therefore very measured, not extreme.

MacCracken said that some critics of the process have suggested that scientists simply give policymakers the original research and leave the interpretation up to them. He compared the folly of that approach to giving a cancer patient all of the available medical research on his or her condition, expecting them to make a decision independent of a doctor’s advice. The IPCC summaries are the record of a conversation in clear terms, he said, between scientists and government policymakers.

Most recently, the IPCC came under fire for erroneous projections published in a scientific chapter on the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers are melting. The dubious information originated from a piece of “gray literature,” that is, a report that did not come from a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Addressing the use of gray literature in the IPCC process, Field explained the value of this information in understanding the impact and implications of climate change. These sources include insurance company research, unpublished scientific work, observations of impacts in various publications, and industrial and corporate reports. It is hard to imagine how the IPCC could tackle the range of subjects it is tasked with understanding without access to this gray literature, he said.

Video: “The Science of Climate Change” (Download presentations)

Video: Interview with Christopher Field, Ph.D. “Climate Change Is a Clear and Present Danger”

Video: Interview with Michael MacCracken, Ph.D. “How We Know Humans Are Changing the Climate”

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Alzheimer’s, after all, affects such a large part of the brain that treating it with injections of cells would almost certainly be futile. (Parkinson’s disease, by contrast, involves a very small area in the brain so has real of hope of being helped by injections of replacement cells there.)

But that doesn’t mean that research involving human embryonic stem cells might never play a crucial role in developing treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s. The reason: because stem cells can develop into any kind of cell in the body, scientists can potentially use them to grow model tissue samples and test drugs without the need to experiment on a human subject.

Stem cells are powerful tools for developing treatments not just because they can regenerate damaged tissue, but because as they grow, scientists can use them to understand the basic biology of a disease.

Researchers at the University of California San Deigo have recently taken just such a step forward in their ability to understand the development of genetic diseases. The scientists substituted an altered cancer-causing gene and a gene for a rare movement disorder in the genomes of embryonic stem cells. Since embryonic stem cells perpetually renew themselves and can differentiate into any type of cell in the human body, this afforded them the opportunity to study the development and behavior of the diseases. Future research can test new drugs and therapies on these human cell models before moving to a clinical trial, making it possible to develop safe and effective drugs in a cheaper and faster manner.

The researchers note specifically in their article in Cell Stem Cell that these two hESC disease models “will become valuable resources to study human tumorigenesis and develop more effective therapeutic interventions for human cancer.”

For years, scientists have studied human genetic diseases with what are known as “knock-out” mice. In this process, scientists “knock-out” or disrupt a gene of interest in mice so that they can observe the effect of the disease on its cells. Since mouse biology is different from human biology, these models present limitations.

Scientists have also tried to use induced pluripotent stem, or iPS, cells. In this process, a mature body cell, for instance from the skin, that carries a genetic disease is converted into a stem cell by adding a combination of genetic and chemical factors. The problem with these cells is that since they are diseased to begin with, they usually have other genetic defects that complicate the study of the disease in question.

The study was funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and utilized cells from the lab of Dr. Doug Melton at Harvard. Some of the Harvard lines have recently been approved for NIH funding so we should all stay tuned for more of these revolutionary breakthroughs with hESCs.

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(transcript, YouTube, mp4)

For more information, see:

• Event information: The Science of Climate Change
• Video interview: How We Know Humans Are Changing the Climate: Joe Romm Interviews Michael MacCracken

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(transcript, YouTube, mp4)

For more information, see:

• Event information: The Science of Climate Change
• Video interview: Climate Change Is a Clear and Present Danger: Joe Romm Interviews Christopher Field

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The 1998 paper hit the British public like a thunderclap, triggering a decline in use of the MMR vaccine as well as a resurgence of the measles. It was the opening shot in the vaccine-autism controversy that still rages today (albeit in varied forms, not all of which still focus on the MMR vaccine). But the credibility of Wakefield’s work has since taken a steady stream of hits, culminating in this last devastating blow.

On a scientific level, the most severe undermining of Wakefield’s study came in the form of a 2004 analysis by the Institute of Medicine, one wing of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The IOM examined no less than 16 separate studies on the purported dangers of the MMR vaccine, in addition to Wakefield’s. The latter they found “uninformative with respect to causality”; overall, they concluded that “the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between MMR vaccine and autism.”

Even prior to that, ten of Wakefield’s original coauthors (out of twelve in total) had backed away from the work in a 2004 letter to The Lancet. “We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient,” they wrote. “However, the possibility of such a link was raised and consequent events have had major implications for public health.”

Meanwhile, a series of investigative stories published in The Times of London unearthed Wakefield’s undisclosed ties to vaccine litigation in the U.K. The full Lancet retraction that occurred yesterday builds on all of these developments, including, most recently, an investigation into Wakefield by the U.K.’s General Medical Council which declared him “irresponsible” and questioned, among other matters, the risks imposed upon children in the original study.

Let’s pause for a moment here. We’re talking about a single, small study—on just 12 children—that stirred a mass anti-vaccine movement and a trend away from vaccination that threatens public health in some wealthy counties. Already, you should be wondering how it could be possible to build so much upon such a slender reed. But if you then consider the subsequent fate of the study, and the scandal that has attended it, a reasonable person would surely conclude that the original scare about the MMR vaccine and autism had no serious foundation whatsoever.

Here’s the thing, though. It seems obvious to all recent commentators—myself included—that the latest Wakefield news will have virtually no impact on Wakefield’s passionate followers, the anti-vaccine ideologues in the UK and United States who have long cheered him on, and will continue to do so. If anything, it will probably only make them still stronger in their convictions.

Following its original efflorescence in 1998, modern vaccine skepticism has taken many other forms than a focus on the MMR vaccine. In the United States, there has probably been much more concern about the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, which used to be in many vaccines (however, thimerosal has long since been removed from most vaccines, and autism rates have not dropped). The movement is much bigger than Wakefield; but the continuing allegiance to Wakefield, despite all that has occurred, shows that we’re really dealing with something very irrational here, what Michael Specter calls “denialism.”

In a feature story for Discover magazine a year back, I surveyed the vaccine-autism debate and tried to pose a question I felt few others had adequately considered. What would it take—beyond the overwhelming scientific evidence, which already exists—for this battle to finally go away? A Lancet retraction isn’t going to do it, that’s for sure. For vaccine skeptics, that’s just more evidence of corruption and collusion in the medical establishment. Indeed, I doubt any individual scientific development has the strength to move these folks—because we aren’t dealing with a phenomenon that’s scientific in nature.

Instead, I believe we need some real attempts at bridge-building between medical institutions—which, let’s admit it, can often seem remote and haughty—and the leaders of the anti-vaccination movement. We need to get people in a room and try to get them to agree about something—anything. We need to encourage moderation, and break down a polarized situation in which the anti-vaccine crowd essentially rejects modern medical research based on the equivalent of conspiracy theory thinking, even as mainstream doctors just shake their heads at these advocates’ scientific cluelessness. Vaccine skepticism is turning into one of the largest and most threatening anti-science movements of modern times. Watching it grow, we should be very, very worried—and should not assume for a moment that the voice of scientific reason, in the form of new studies or the debunking of old, misleading ones, will make it go away.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Scienceand Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

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SACGHS has formed a task force to address the clinical utility of genetic testing—that is,.the usefulness of genetic tests for helping doctors choose more effective interventions for their patients. Assessing clinical utility is an important component of both personalized medicine and comparative effectiveness research, which analyzes interventions head-to-head to see which work better for different patients. The goal is to improve comparative effectiveness research by incorporating genetic tests, which would allow physicians to tailor treatments to individual patients based on their own DNA.

The Personalized Medicine Coalition held a conference last fall to promote the alignment of comparative effectiveness research with personalized medicine. This alignment is also a crucial aspect of the recommendations issued by the Institute of Medicine, which promoted research on both “diseases and conditions with the greatest aggregate effect on the health of the U.S. population, but also less common conditions that severely affect individuals in vulnerable subgroups of the population.”

The Center for American Progress has also recognized the importance of ensuring that CER can “accelerate the discovery of approaches to individualized medicine and help providers cater to the specific needs of patients.”  This will move medicine beyond the “one size fits all” therapies that result from the research provided by pharmaceutical companies to the FDA.  SACGHS is taking an important step forward by identifying ways to assess the clinical utility of genetic tests. This was one of several recommendations CAP has made not just for advancing personalized medicine but also for improving the quality of genetic testing in the report, “Genetic Information Non-Discrimination.”

Genetics education and training will also be a major part of the SACGHS meeting agenda. The task force outlined its action plan in July of 2008 and has since set out to identify the needs of healthcare providers, the public health workforce, and the general public for genetic education. The task force also identified various types of case studies that it will use to analyze the current information gaps in genetic testing. This will require exploring the best way to gather and disseminate information about pharmacogenomic testing, newborn screening, diagnosis of single gene disorders, direct-to-consumer testing, and population genetics. The task force plans to release their report in the coming months.  This is an important step, as the public must be “informed and educated about personalized medicine through outreach efforts, opportunities for public comment or input, and most importantly through transparency.”

Data sharing is also a major component of the agenda.  Representatives from government, academia, health care systems, industry, and consumer groups will present different models for sharing genomic information. This will be followed by a discussion of health information technologies that aim to efficiently connect the data among these multiple sectors.  In “Paving the Way for Personalized Medicine,” my co-author and I addressed both the positive developments as well as the missed opportunities on this front.  In particular, we noted that HHS’s Health IT Standards Committee has not properly collaborated with outside networks that are working to devise consistent nomenclature so that genomic data can be utilized through health IT.  We recommended this kind of collaboration so that HHS can leverage the expert resources available for combining cutting-edge genomic science with health IT.

The face of medicine is changing at a breakneck pace and a forum like the SACGHS meeting allows scientists, policymakers, innovators, service providers, and patients to work together to ensure that this new era of medical innovation serves the common good by being safe, effective, efficient, and equitable.

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Fortunately, the budget request for fiscal year 2011 that the Obama administration released on Monday includes foundational investments that will help the United States remain the leader among innovative nations. Congressional leaders should support the president’s vision by adopting these investments in their budget later this year.

In keeping with the president’s pledge to freeze domestic discretionary spending, the overall increase in research and development is only a modest 0.2 percent increase over FY2010, but by trimming defense-related research, the budget requests a 5.9 percent boost for non-defense R&D for a total $147.7 billion for federal R&D. This is an important step toward investing 3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in public and private R&D—a goal President Obama laid out in a speech last spring to the National Academy of Sciences.

This also continues the about-face in funding trends begun last year. The Bush administration allowed the federal R&D investment to decline in real dollars after FY2004. Some sectors were hit harder by this neglect than others. Flat funding for the National Institutes of Health from 2004 through 2008 led to a situation in which the purchasing power for the inflation-adjusted budget actually declined 13 percent over the course of those five years. In addition to the two-year, $10 billion boost the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act directed to NIH last year, the president’s budget calls for a $1 billion bump in annual funding, for a total of $32.1 billion.

The budget expands support for R&D over the next fiscal year, but it also continues laying the foundation for sustained advances in science and technology by moving along the path to double the budgets for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Commerce Department’s National Institutes of Standards and Technology. The Center for American Progress advocated this doubling effort in the 2007 report, “A National Innovation Agenda.”

To that end, the request expands the DOE Office of Science budget by 4.6 percent to a total of $5.1 billion. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy would receive $300 million to fund high-risk, high-return research. ARPA-E funds blue-sky projects in advanced energy technologies, and is modeled on the fabled Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where bold thinkers have the resources to “aim for the fences.” The DOE budget also includes $107 million for the three existing Energy Innovation Hubs, and adds a fourth Hub focused on batteries and energy storage.

Jonathan Sallet, Ed Paisley, and Justin Masterman noted in their Science Progress report, “The Geography of Innovation,” that the hubs will help “spur the development of the innovation clusters that will help solve our national energy challenges, create jobs, and promote widespread economic growth.” Targeted regional innovation support is also a focus of president’s budget for the Economic Development Agency, with $75 million to support innovation clusters that leverage local competitive strengths. The “Geography of Innovation” authors explain wisdom of this place-specific approach, writing that “regions that are bound together by a network of shared advantages create virtuous cycles of innovation that succeed by emphasizing the key strengths of the local businesses, universities and other research and development institutions, and non-profit organizations.”

“One of the changes that I would like to see,” the president told an audience at Georgetown University just a few months into his administration, “is once again seeing our best and our brightest commit themselves to making things—engineers, scientists, innovators.” This budget pours more resources into that goal, with $3.7 billion for science, technology, engineering, and math education. This builds on the administration’s public-private Educate to Innovate partnership that will enhance STEM education in schools across the country.

The NSF budget would also support the next generation of scientists by increasing the number of Graduate Research Fellowships. An 8 percent increase in the requested NSF budget, totaling $7.4 billion, maintains its doubling trajectory.

An 18.3 percent increase over FY2010 in NASA’s R&D portfolio would bring the total to $11 billion. Writing last year in Science Progress, former presidential science adviser Neal Lane and former Director of the NASA Johnson Space Center George Abbey advised reversing a trend of neglect for the agency’s scientific work. They recommended that scientific research, including earth observations, should be a top priority for NASA. This budget embraces the same priorities, reflecting the administration’s commitment to “to deploy a global climate change research and monitoring system.” As well, a 21 percent increase (for total of $2.6 billion) for U.S. Global Change Research Program, which spans 13 agencies, will advance our understanding of global warming and enhance our ability to adapt to a changing climate.

In short, as Science Progress editor-in-chief Jonathan D. Moreno points out today on the main website of the Center for American Progress, “We observed in Science Progress on several occasions that the founders of our country appreciated the new nation’s need for strength in science, oftentimes more than some of their benighted successors in government. That’s why it is encouraging that we have a president and an administration with a vision in the founders’ spirit. Now Congress needs to do its job to ensure that the United States of Science rescues America—and perhaps the assumptions behind the global stability on which we depend—from a decade of financial mismanagement.”

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor for Science Progress.

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The administration is asking for $75 million “to support the creation of regional innovation clusters that leverage regions’ competitive strengths to boost job creation and economic growth,” a goal Jonathan Sallet, Ed Paisley, and Justin Masterman championed in the Science Progress report, “The Geography of Innovation.” Part of the key to this approach is that is allows policymakers to pay close attention to regional strengths. As the report authors explain: “Geographic regions that are bound together by a network of shared advantages create virtuous cycles of innovation that succeed by emphasizing the key strengths of the local businesses, universities and other research and development institutions, and non-profit organizations.”

As well, the Department of Energy budget includes substantial investments in research and development to spur clean energy innovation. That includes $107 million for three existing and one proposed Energy Innovation Hub. The Hubs, as the full DOE request says, “establish larger, highly integrated teams working to solve priority technology challenges that span work from basic research to engineering development to commercialization readiness.” These hubs, write the “Geography of Innovation” authors, are forward-thinking centers that will “spur the development of the innovation clusters that will help solve our national energy challenges, create jobs, and promote widespread economic growth.”

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The Science of Climate Change
February 3, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:30pm

An overwhelming quantity of direct observations and analyses published by scientists in various disciplines around the world demonstrates that human activity has warmed the planet and altered the climate. The severity of the projected impacts of continuing on our current greenhouse gas emissions path has only increased in recent years.

Please join the Center for American Progress for an educational event featuring two respected scientists who have both helped author reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr. Michael MacCracken and Dr. Christopher Field will explain the IPCC’s assessment process, how we know what we know about human-caused climate change, what we have learned since the 2007 IPCC report, and why the science must inform public policy in the United States.

Featured Speakers:

Christopher Field, Director, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Professor of Biology and Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford University, and a coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment

Michael MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs, Climate Institute, and co-author/contributing author for various chapters in the IPCC assessment reports

Moderated by:

Joseph Romm, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

Click here to get more information.

Watch a live stream of the event.

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For the definitive account of what some are now calling “GlacierGate,” I refer you to Climate Science Watch’s Rick Piltz, whose exhaustive investigation and explanation shows clearly that the IPCC made an inexcusable error in the Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation, Vulnerability) volume of its Fourth Assessment Report. The peer review process broke down, and very dubious (and, indeed, plagiarized) claims were published about the likelihood of the Himalayan glaciers vanishing, due to climate change, by the year 2035. The central offending sentence is the following:

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

Not only is this business about 2035 an exceedingly dubious assertion, but part of the error seems traceable to a simple typo—an original source made predictions for the year 2350, not 2035.  When doubts were raised about the passage, however, the IPCC failed to respond either quickly or well. IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri even reportedly referred to a November Indian government report that questioned the IPCC’s findings about the glaciers’ vulnerability as “voodoo science.” Actually, the voodoo was all the IPCC’s, but the U.N. body only acknowledged its error several months after questions were first raised in the Indian report. “In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly,” the IPCC coughed out on January 20.

As a result of these flubs, the “Glaciergate” scandal has grown vastly larger than it should have, and skeptics are calling not only for the resignation of Pachauri, but even the revocation of the body’s 2007 Nobel Prize. There are also allegations that the erroneous content was added to the IPCC report for stark political reasons, but this seems questionable.

So without exonerating the IPCC in this instance—there is no defense for such shoddy work—let’s attempt to inject a little sanity here. The IPCC goofed, but we should keep matters in perspective. We’re talking about one tiny section of a 938-page report on how climate change will affect different parts of the world. It would be amazing if errors did not slip into such a vast document, whatever the professed peer review standards may be. And the mistake was originally caught not by skeptics, but by scientists, including an IPCC report co-author. In the broadest sense, the scientific process is actually working here, even if the IPCC stumbled in this case.

Moreover, Himalayan glaciers are retreating, even if they’re not doing so faster than glaciers in other parts of the world, and even if they won’t be gone by 2035. As a team of scientists who exposed the IPCC’s mistake in a letter to the journal Science judiciously put it:

This was a bad error. It was a really bad paragraph, and poses a legitimate question about how to improve IPCC’s review process. It was not a conspiracy. The error does not compromise the IPCC Fourth Assessment, which for the most part was well reviewed and is highly accurate.

That seems like a very balanced take on “GlacierGate”—which itself follows just months after the devastating “ClimateGate.” It is impossible not to compare the two—even as it is also extremely disheartening to do so.

Once again, this flub and its aftermath raises deep questions about how climate scientists respond to crises and scandal. One of the simplest rules of public relations is that the cover-up is worse than the crime, and that certainly seems to describe what happened in this instance.

More generally, in the case of both GlacierGate and ClimateGate, it needs to be understood that while many science defenders will seek to set the record straight in these instances, and put whatever failing has occurred in proper context, that’s not really enough to distract attention away from a scandal. True, the larger picture of climate science doesn’t change because of the various “-Gates”; but in each case, that larger picture isn’t the story of the moment. The scandal is; and shifting out of the scandal frame, once it has been firmly established, is difficult or impossible to do. You can’t rewind a punch to remove a black eye; you have to wait for the black eye to heal. That’s why these messes should be avoided in the first place, or defused immediately when they happen. (It is hard to believe that, with skeptics out to find anything they can to undermine the IPCC, they could ever vanish completely.)

In broadest perspective, it is time to recognize that it is all-out war right now in the climate research arena. Climate scientists are under concerted attack, as is the scientific information they produce and defend. Moreover, it’s a nastier and, in many ways, a worse situation than what obtained while George W. Bush was president. We’ve swapped a centrally organized government effort to distort climate science for a kind of grassroots, guerilla war against it, driven by blogs and skeptic scientist amateurs who nourish a powerful sense of self-motivation, a generous helping of anger and outrage, and seem to smell blood in the water.

Climate scientists must take this new threat with the utmost seriousness. Frankly, I’ve never seen things this bad, or climate research so vulnerable in the public eye. It is crisis time, folks. And the attacks are just going to keep on coming.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

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In my view, the picture here remains pretty dismal. But perhaps out of academic evenhandedness (and also in part by avoiding at least two very problematic areas), NSF paints a more mixed picture.

On the positive side, for instance, the report consistently shows that Americans are not so scientifically benighted as one might think, at least in comparison with the rest of the world. We go to science museums more frequently. We claim a higher level of interest in “new scientific discoveries” than citizens in South Korea, China, and many parts of Europe. And in terms of sheer factual knowledge, we perform pretty much on par with Europe, and ahead of other countries like Japan, China, and Russia.

Through such international comparisons, the latest NSF report suggests that if your preferred standard for judging a nation’s engagement with science is to see how it stacks up next to other comparable (e.g., developed) countries, then the United States really doesn’t fare so poorly. Furthermore, NSF emphasizes that Americans profess to have very positive views about science. They overwhelmingly think science makes our lives better and that it deserves federal funding. And they have an apparently abiding trust in the leaders of the scientific community.

All of which is certainly to the good. And yet  the image of an America little informed about science, and little engaged with it, still shines through in the latest report.

As Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 itself admits, seeing how the country fares on science in comparison with other nations isn’t the only possible means of judgment. If one’s standard is more ambitious—emphasizing, in the latest report’s words, “what a technologically advanced society requires (either today or in the future) to compete in the world economy and enable its citizens to better take advantage of science progress in their own lives”—then it is very hard to feel good about the current state of affairs in the United States.

For instance, just 13 percent of the public now claims to follow science and technology news “very closely,” and this number has been on a downward trend for the past decade, ending with the current low. So while Americans may profess great admiration for science in the abstract, they hardly feel compelled to pay it much attention.

Similarly, there has been little apparent improvement over time in Americans’ basic ability to answer factual questions about science correctly. Moreover, the vast majority of our citizens have scant familiarity with key emerging scientific fields that will dramatically shape the future, such as nanotechnology and biotechnology—and it is important to note that these are the only such fields that the NSF report focuses in on. Ask Americans about other coming scientific technologies or quandaries—say, geoengineering, or synthetic biology—and I imagine the responses would be even more dismal.

And then there are the egregiously politicized issues, like climate change or the teaching of evolution, where the gulf between the scientific community and the public is unbelievably vast. For instance, according to a 2009 Pew study, 84 percent of U.S. scientists think the earth is getting warmer due to human activities, versus 49 percent of the public.

Rather surprisingly, Chapter 7 of the latest Science and Engineering Indicators report doesn’t discuss evolution. Neither does it address another increasingly critical topic, and another central area of breakdown between science and U.S. society: vaccination. Americans are currently in the extremely dangerous throes of vaccine retreat, a growing movement that is based on little more than scientific misinformation.

The latest Science and Engineering Indicators report performs a great service—it gives us all the best data, and it frames it in such a way as to keep us honest. Not everything is rotten when it comes to the state of science in America, and we should remember that. But at the same time, there is much, much to worry about. One year ago, President Obama pledged to restore science to its “rightful place” in American life, and the administration has done much to achieve this goal—but as the latest figures show, none of us has any excuse to feel satisfied or complacent.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

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The story of Perry’s Orchard represents an exception to the dominant narratives of consolidation, unsafe food, and lack of transparency in America’s food system. Perry’s Orchard also represents a contradiction worth exploring in detail. Despite century-long policymaking that has supported the growth of large farms and concentration of power in food production and processing within each agricultural commodity sector, small farms persist. Ninety-one percent of all the farms in the United States—1,995,133 farms—are small farms, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines as those that produce under $250,000 in annual sales. Furthermore, the USDA 2007 Census of Agriculture shows that the number of farms across the nation has increased for the first time since World War II, by 4 percent, and the new farms that have entered agriculture since 2002 have tended to be smaller than the national average and more diverse, producing under 50 percent of sales of more than one commodity. These striking figures make a question that has beleaguered scientists still relevant: If the story of modernization is one of movement towards efficiency and economies of scale, why do small farms persist?

Small farms supply products in increasing demand, including locally grown and organic food. This food, by and large, is traceable and healthy—two of the main goals of HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act, currently before the Senate. But these small farms are limited by infrastructural constraints and a messy regulatory environment that make it difficult to get their goods to market, and the current situation is untenable. They are hamstrung and marginalized by federal regulations that, while intended to support food safety, concentrate power in the hands of corporate processors—particularly when it comes to meat processing.

The Obama administration made a commitment to addressing national food safety, and just appointed Michael R. Taylor to a new post at the Food and Drug Administration to oversee the issue. And the Food Safety Enhancement Act, the long-needed comprehensive reform in food safety regulation, seeks to expand FDA oversight of non-USDA regulated agricultural products in order to create a federal registry of food processors both in the United States and countries that export products to the United States, to require a food safety plan and to improve traceability of foods. These are worthy goals, but the legislation does not actually address the root problems of food safety, particularly those dealing with confinement of livestock, overexposure of animals to manure, and all-grain diets—the source of many of our fatal E. coli outbreaks—nor does it support the farms and food processors that already produce safe and traceable food. The Food Safety Enhancement Act provides exemptions to USDA regulated food products, which include meat, poultry and eggs, to farms that grow and process their own products if consumed on farm, and to farms that sell the majority of their products directly to consumers. For small farms that produce cheese, jams, ciders, or lacto-fermented foods, for example, they would have pay to register with the FDA and follow the reporting procedures outlined by the act. Small farms and processors are typically understaffed and do not have dedicated employees to deal with record keeping and reporting, so the Food Safety Enhancement Act would allow for a grace period of two to three years for small businesses to comply with new standards.

Small farmers don’t need more loopholes to squeeze through. What they need is comprehensive federal policy, spanning the USDA and the FDA, which will support an infrastructure for getting safe, fresh food to market. This would promote economic and environmental efficiency, as many producers must currently drive small quantities of goods long distances to reach customers. It would also promote competition and build trust and transparency into a national food system plagued in recent years by outbreaks of food-borne illness.

A better system would:

• Reward those who produce safe, healthy food in a transparent and accountable manner instead of only penalizing those who don’t
• Build regional transportation systems to get produce to market efficiently. This could include rail, water, or shared truck-shipping solutions
• Support increased local and regional produce sourcing in supermarkets as well as independent distributors and cooperatives that work directly with local farms
• Facilitate interstate commerce by synchronizing state and federal food safety rules for produce and meat processing and promoting more state oversight of food inspection.

These steps would both nurture an ecosystem of small, entrepreneurial farms, and steer our food safety infrastructure away from the systemic problems that led to outbreaks of food-borne illness in meat, tomatoes, and peanut products in recent years.

Small farm economics

To return to the question of why small farms persist in spite of unfavorable federal legislation, it can be tempting to explain the persistence of small farms in terms that render them “out of date” with modern life. While I don’t agree with these explanations, they exist. Some critics say small farmers are economically irrational: they privilege household reproduction over material profit and will rely on self-exploitation of the family unit to ensure it. Thus they are not, and may never be, entrepreneurs, which is disadvantageous because farming is ultimately a business. Another explanation is that small farms are remnants of the past. They will surely and swiftly become subsumed by industrial agriculture. Their days are numbered.

The persistence of small farms is not antithetical to other types of farms; they are simply viable institutions in their own right. This is what I, and many other researchers, have deduced from empirical work. Small farms persist because they can adapt, albeit not easily nor without risk or failure, to changing markets, changing technologies, and changing environmental parameters. In our current times of dynamic economies as well as climates, small farms will play a larger role in the future. The USDA is beginning to recognize this and has created the umbrella initiative “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” to highlight programs that support small farmers and local food systems. Using Perry’s Orchard as an example of an adaptive operation, I must note that Perry isn’t actually only an orchardist. Like many small farmers, he is diversified. He raises chickens, sells eggs, apple wood, holiday turkeys and cows—some butchered to sell at his farm shop, and others, as he prefers it, sold by order and pre-payment. Turns out the pre-pay scenario reflects another loophole in the law on which Perry depends, that livestock sold by pre-pay can be slaughtered and butchered on-farm, rather than at a USDA-inspected facility, of which there are few around. This loophole greatly reduces the cost of meat processing, which can be up to $2 per pound, as well as alleviates the pressure for farmers to transport their animals to processing facilities.

Since small farms are viable institutions, it is unfortunate that they have been at the mercy of state and federal policies and, like Perry’s Orchard, surviving in spite of dominant policy prescriptions by finding loopholes and margins to exist in. Living at the regulatory margins, small farms have little support, and the infrastructural challenges that farmers in the northeast face are a result of this. Currently the exploding interest in local foods has hit a bottleneck due to processing and distribution infrastructure. Isn’t it time that we help small farms move from the regulatory margins back into the spotlight in order to provide the structures they need to get their product to market?

Small farms at the regulatory margins

The surge of interest in direct farm-to-consumer sales has been a boon to small farmers around the New York and Vermont state border where I currently live. In both states, direct sales through farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture, commonly referred to as CSA, have increased in rural towns as well as cities, particularly in New York City, the largest market in this area. The demand is so great in New York City that CSA shares are bought and sold in an informal market that is hotter than real estate. Going on vacation for two weeks and worried about missing your CSA pick-ups? Sell your two-week share on Craig’s List as a “vacation share!”

As wonderful as direct markets have been for consumers and producers in the New York City region, there are real infrastructural constraints that prevent farmers from being able to fully benefit from, and engage in, direct markets. The first constraint is distribution. Farms are left to find their own distribution networks because intermediary distributors are not common in the New York–Vermont area. The problem is that it is not cost effective, nor energetically efficient, for farmers in Southern Vermont and the upper Hudson River Valley to truck small amounts of produce to New York City 180 miles away. A creative way that Lewis Waite Farm, a grass-fed beef and pork operation in Washington County, New York, has dealt with this dilemma is to act as a distributor of farm goods from neighbor farms. They make monthly deliveries of their, as well as seventeen other neighbor farms’ products, to CSAs all over New York City. Lewis Waite essentially uses CSAs as their retail outlets, taking orders from members and making monthly deliveries. It is a smart model; their retail space has no overhead. CSA organizers as well as the CSA vegetable farmers are more than happy to accommodate them, even provide them with free labor for access to their products. I was one such CSA organizer. I did get a free steak once in a while, but the reasons that I organized the Lewis Waite portion of our CSA is because I liked buying their products, wanted my CSA to have more varied groceries at its disposal, and wanted the Lewis Waite partner farms to have access to NYC markets. As some researchers are finding, local and organic agriculture promotes civic engagement by consumers, as in this case. But is it sustainable to base the livelihood of small farmers on the good citizenship of CSA organizers? My CSA always struggled to find new volunteers to take over the first generation of core group members’ duties. It is not easy to recruit new volunteers, and we have had to pay people to help.

In addition to the challenge of distribution, meat-processing facilities are also not common in the New York–Vermont area. It is the major bottleneck for meat producers, especially those that are organically certified. They need to use a meat processor that is organically certified to label their meat “organic” and they need to use a USDA-licensed meat processor to sell meat over state lines. Currently there are two USDA certified butchers within 85 miles, and no organic smokehouse, so bacon and smoked meats cannot be certified organic. The two processors typically have waits of up to a month to get animals in, and it can take another month to get butchered meat back. They do not do specialty cuts, or use requested sausage recipes, nor do they always return oddities like innards, heads, or hoofs when requested. Most distressing to farmers is that they are not sure if they get all of their animal back, or if the cuts that they get back are from their animal. Traceability is not just something we should worry about for consumers; farmers are in need of help here too. If the people who produce the meat are not sure if the meat they get back from the butcher is their own, then consumers certainly can’t be sure.

Vermont passed legislation in January of 2009 to address the lack of meat processing facilities. In Section 5 of Act 207 they approved on-farm slaughter by itinerant butchers. In order to butcher on farm, however, the final customer must already own the animals. This is attractive to Perry, who sells beef as a sideline to his apple orchard, but not to Tilldale Farm, a conventional dairy that transitioned to organic pork and beef in Rensselaer County, New York. They cringe at the thought of using an itinerant butcher. Where would they set up, how would they clean up? Would it be cost effective? Tilldale Farm aims to sell 40-50 cows per year—that’s roughly 4 animals per month. The barriers to using the method of itinerant butchering seem so great that they would rather keep up the 85-mile drive to the processor that they are currently using. The cost of processing alone is $2 per pound, not including transport and labor, but it is still a more attractive option that on-farm slaughter. In spite of the costs, they like the final product they receive from their current butchers. But the numbers just don’t make sense. What shocks Dan Tilley is when center cut pork chops are sold for $1.99 per pound in the local supermarket, “How is that price even possible?” he wonders.

The Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1987 mandated that all state processing facilities be “at least equal” to national standards and banned interstate sales of meat inspected by state agencies, leading to the death of many state inspection programs. Today only 27 states have an inspection program, but for many producers, especially those who live near state borders like the New York–Vermont region, interstate sales are very important and so state-inspected facilities are not a viable option. If state inspected facilities are supposed to be “at least equal” to that of the USDA, then why the ban on interstate sales?

Supporting the institution of the small farm

While direct markets have fostered new opportunities for small farmers, the reliance on farmers themselves to deliver their goods to market, or on customers to go to the farm themselves to buy products, should not be the only way to structure a food system to include small farms. The latest legislation seems to be focused too much on enabling on-farm processing and sales. The Vermont Farm Fresh Milk Restoration Act that went into effect in January of 2009 increased raw milk sales to 40 gallons per day. Sale of raw milk on farm is not going to make up for the price reduction of $1 and imposition of production quotas set by all of the organic milk companies in the state. Nor are raw milk sales going to make up for the lowering of conventional prices for milk to below the costs of production. In the world of meat processing legislation, allowing pre-slaughter sale of meat to enable on-farm slaughter may be a well-intentioned policy for small farms, but how many people want to buy a half, let alone an entire, cow? How many farmers really want to butcher on-premises, or use an itinerant butcher?

Small farmers need more enhanced distribution markets, from farm to processors and farm to market. Tilldale farm is on a train line—imagine if they could ship their meat by rail? It would save 170 miles of fuel and driving time. Scott Stringer, Manhattan borough president, proposed the use of biodiesel for truck transport of agricultural goods to the city, but why have we become so reliant on roads? Waterways first enabled food distribution in this country, then the rail transformed food distribution. Why not revisit rail and water transport? Imagine if Hudson Valley farmers could send their goods down the Hudson to a pier on the west side of Manhattan where CSA members could pick up their shares. This is an old-fashioned, but yet progressive idea. We should also encourage cooperative transport to market, like Lewis Waite is doing. Carpooling is a great way to commute to work, why not to market? Finally, to increase the number of markets available to small farmers, we should consider requiring supermarkets and wholesale distributors to source a percentage of their products locally. There is a fundamental disconnect in a food system that has grocery stores in agricultural areas that sell more (if not all) of their products from across the country and overseas.

Small farmers also need more regionally based processing and packing facilities. It is economically and environmentally inefficient to drive 85 miles to the nearest USDA inspected facility, or to have to forgo organic labeling because there is no organically certified meat processor or smokehouse within range. Furthermore, the meat producers have all pointed to poor service at their processors. They routinely have to wait a month to get their meat back, and they might not even get it all back. They pay $2 per pound just for processing and they are not even sure if they are getting cuts back from the animals that they dropped off! The lack of competition keeps price high and promotes unfair treatment of farmers. If Congress is seriously considering improving the traceability of our food system in the Food Safety Enhancement Act, then the lack of confidence that farmers have towards their processors needs to be addressed. How can we be sure what we are eating if the person who produced it is not sure? Finally, the federal ban on interstate sales has crippled state inspected facilities and farmers.

The institution of the small farm has been relegated to the margins of agriculture in the United States, but it has not been relegated to the margins of our collective consciousness. The small farm still remains at the center of this nation’s agrarian ideal. I have observed many small farmers trying to carve out a life for themselves and for the people they grow food for, and they need help. Vermont and New York have long been renowned for dairy. The crisis in conventional milk prices in the past years was met with a push towards organic certification. Now there is a crisis in the organic dairy market. Farmers who are again responding to economic change deserve a favorable political environment to help them. One of the reasons that the Tilleys are still in business is because they shifted from a conventional dairy to an organic dairy, then to organic, grass-fed pork and beef. When I asked Dan Tilley what practices make his operation sustainable he responded, “by running grass through the animals, allowing them to fertilize the fields, making my own hay, and rotational grazing.” When I asked Joanne Tilley what their thoughts were about policies that affect them she said, “the problem with farmers like us is that we don’t organize ourselves to make our needs known.” The conundrum is clear, the Tilley’s are adept at running their farm, but influencing policy is outside of their line of work.

Valerie Imbruce is the Director of Environmental Studies at Bennington College; her research focuses on small farm participation in local and global food systems.

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Not surprisingly, environmentalists detest MTR, and have been outraged to watch it gain momentum thanks to regulatory policy changes made by the Bush administration. In fact, greens aren’t very happy with the Obama administration’s environmental regulators on this topic, either. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently granted a permit for another mountaintop mine in West Virginia, arguing that the environmental impacts of the project would be adequately mitigated.

But now, a group of prominent environmental scientists are lending their expertise to the case against MTR and, further, are questioning the very idea that mitigation of its damaging impacts is possible—or in other words, whether there is any such thing as a “mild” or “safe” mountaintop removal. In a recent “Policy Forum” article in the journal Science, a team of twelve environmental researchers survey MTR’s many nasty effects, which range from the destruction of ecosystems and the attendant reduction in biodiversity and species endangerment, to stream pollution, fish deformation, the befouling and dangerous pollution of human drinking systems, the increased risk of flooding, and so forth. Then, at the end of the paper, the scientists step beyond the mere “facts” of the case to denounce MTR in uncompromising terms, calling for policy changes to prevent its further use. What started out as pure science became, for these researchers, a clarion call to action:

Clearly, current attempts to regulate MTM/VF [“mountaintop removal mining with valley fills”] practices are inadequate. Mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for losses. Considering environmental impacts of MTM/VF, in combination with evidence that the health of people living in surface-mining regions of the central Appalachians is compromised by mining activities, we conclude that MTM/VF permits should not be granted unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems. Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science. The United States should take leadership on these issues, particularly since surface mining in many developing countries is expected to grow extensively.

Such outspokenness is hardly typical, even for a “Policy Forum” in Science. In general, the standard scientific mode is to provide factual analysis, and then to step back and let policymakers process its implications and proceed, on that basis, to action. We report, you decide. Anything else, it has long been thought, means crossing over into the dreaded realm of “advocacy” and undermining a scientist’s claim to the coveted mantle of objectivity.

And yet there can be little doubt that, in part because it is so outspoken and so direct, the Science paper has had a major media impact. Indeed, the paper has put the Obama EPA in the hot seat: On the one hand, the agency seemed to embrace the latest findings (for how could it argue with the best available science?); on the other, it had just let another MTR permit go through. It suddenly seemed caught in an embarrassing contradiction.

Granted, there were also predictable swipes at the outspoken scientists from the right wing. An American Spectator writer even gloried in this YouTube clip of an MTR explosion. (Yay, destruction!) Scientific outspokenness will always trigger brush-back pitches from those adversely affected by it—that’s an unavoidable consequence of being out in the public arena.

But to me, the most intriguing question is this: How did the 12 environmental scientists on the Science paper managed to achieve such an impact? Did they plan for it, or was it just fortuitous?

So I called up Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the article’s lead author. I was something like her 30^th media interview on the topic, but unlike other journalists, I didn’t want to ask about either the policy or the science of MTR. Rather, I inquired about the communication strategy that had been employed to disseminate news about her paper. And thus unfolded a striking story of a group of scientists, with extremely important research in their hands, doing everything pretty much right to ensure its maximal impact.

As Palmer explained, the project out started as pure science. Her team of researchers began by synthesizing a wide array of data from different scientific fields on the consequences of MTR, in a more thorough way than had ever been done before—a process that consumed many months in the peer review process. But as the truly alarming results started to manifest, members of the scientists’ group soon coalesced around a strong, unanimous position about what they were finding. “Rather than just reporting the science,” says Palmer, “we all agreed that the consequences were so huge, we were very comfortable saying, ‘This just has to stop.’”

Resolved upon its message, the team then sought to disseminate it. They booked the National Press Club, bringing along 6 of the most media-savvy members of the 12-scientist group to make the case. And their message, as in the paper, laid out plainly the policy changes they felt needed to happen on the basis of their work, and upbraided the current administration for ignoring science.

“What’s significant about this article,” Palmer remarks, is “the overwhelming nature of the findings, the demonstration for the first time really clearly the cumulative impacts—but also, scientists making a policy statement. It’s not that common.”

And then came fortuity: Almost simultaneous with the paper’s release, the EPA permitted another MTR project, as mentioned before. That gave journalists double the angle they might have had otherwise, and boom: The result was overwhelming press attention to the case, made by scientists, for why this destructive procedure must end. Scientists made a very positive media splash, and one whose policy effects are likely to long reverberate.

“We’re at a point now where we really can’t afford not to speak up,” Palmer concludes of her efforts. “We’ve got too much at stake.”

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

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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 in the current economic downturn, the primary bioethical issue on newspaper front pages is health care reform. Bioethics issues like end-of-life care, cloning, and other “culture war” matters are on the back burner. But at a Center for American Progress event yesterday on “Progress in Bioethics,” Michael Tomansky, panelist and editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, argued that once the economy improves and is no longer taking up all of the nation’s “anxiety oxygen,” Americans will “have to find other things to argue about.” And those other things are likely to include bioethics. The rest of the panel generally agreed: Something—perhaps a decision from the Obama administration, a court ruling, or a controversial clinical case like Schiavo’s—will eventually capture the media’s eye and bring debates over bioethics and public policy back to fore. It’s not a matter of “if,” but “when,” Tomansky argued, and progressives need to be ready.

The event highlighted the release of Progress in Bioethics, a new book co-edited by CAP Senior Fellow Jonathan Moreno and Sam Berger. The volume maps the current landscape of bioethics and public policy, where progressive ideas are ascendant after more than a decade of conservative dominance. As a panelist, Berger explained that “progressive bioethics” is best understood as the application of the scientific method to policymaking, emphasizing data-driven decision making and transparent methodologies. He also outlined the four central values of a progressive bioethics.

The first is “critical optimism,” which Berger explained means that while progressives tend to view change as a positive thing, their support for innovation and the advent of new technologies must come with a dose of skepticism and an awareness of potential problems. The key to safeguarding against potential harms lies in careful policymaking.

The second principle is “human dignity.” Berger said that while this important, resonant phrase has been co-opted by conservative bioethicists in recent years, progressives should not cede the term to the right. Instead, they should work to redefine it for the public to indicate the respect we afford to moral equals in our society.

“Moral transparency” was the next value Berger explained. The role of bioethicists is not to dictate morality to the public, he said. Instead, the purpose of public debate over bioethics is to inform citizens about the complexities and nuances involved in these issues, and to in turn better inform citizens about how we can formulate policies that reflect cultural values.

Finally, he explained what he called “ethical practicality.” Not all issues in bioethics get equal attention from the mainstream media. Often, it is those issues that are most pressing, such as access to quality health care, vaccinations, and adequate nutrition—particularly on the global scale—that remain on the sidelines of media’s attention. However, because of their importance and immediacy, these issues must remain a primary focus of progressive bioethics.

While progressives have historically dominated academic  bioethics, said panelist Clay Risen, managing editor of Democracy, that there has been a lack of substantive, contemplative articles from the left intended for mainstream audiences. Changing that has been one of the goals of the publication, he said.

In contrast, the past decade has been a period of great success for right-wing bioethics. Conservative dominance, Berger argued, is not simply attributable to the political power wielded under the Bush administration, which gave prominence to the bio-conservative philosophical positions of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Panelist Kathryn Hinsch, Founder and Board President of the Women’s Bioethics Project and a contributor to Progress in Bioethics, said that in recent years conservatives have gained considerable ground in framing many of the public debates within bioethics. A major success has been to define the vocabulary of debates with phrases like “designer babies” and “death panels.” Moreover, Tomasky said, conservatives project their ideas with clarity and have a passionate, unified position that appeals to both the religious and secular right.

What progressives need to do, Hinsch argued, is to present to the public an “alternate world view” that contrasts with the conservative position. In agreement, Risen argued that the left’s frequent absence from the public debate has resulted in the mischaracterization of the progressive position as merely being the opposite of the right’s stance. The assumption is then that the left holds a libertarian, “no holds barred” approach to bioethics issues, particularly when it comes to the use of emerging biomedical technologies.

But by no means do progressive approaches to bioethics necessarily align with libertarian principles, said Marcy Darnovsky, the Associate Executive Director of the Center for Genetics and Society, also contributor to Progress in Bioethics. Instead, she said that progressives ought to move forward with a careful eye towards how to best balance considerations of the common good with individual liberty. A clearly articulated precautionary principle must keep enthusiasm for emerging biomedical technologies in check, she said, echoing Progress in Bioethics’s call for to proceed with  “critical optimism.”

Hannah Zale is an intern with the Progressive Bioethics Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

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Timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research
One of our most popular features ever, this interactive timeline marked key moments, beginning the in the 1970s, from the interrelated stories of human embryonic stem cell research and the policy governing that work. The piece collects research featured in the Center for American Progress report, “A Life Sciences Crucible: Stem Cell Research and Innovation Done Responsibly and Ethically.” The Obama administration’s final stem cell policy closely resembled the one recommended in the paper.

Dude, Where’s My War on Science?
By Chris Mooney
Conservatives tried to expose what they claim was a case of science suppression by the Obama administration—and in the process demonstrated how little they know about science in the first place. The attack on EPA’s policy process, Mooney explained, fails peer review.

The George Will Scandal
By Chris Mooney
When The Washington Post ran a column by Will rife with errors on climate science, Mooney asked: If a major media outlet can’t even correct facts about global warming, is it still socially relevant?

What Does This Generation Think it Means to be a “Scientist”?
By Chris Mooney
Many students don’t see a life of academic specialization as the best way to employ their scientific talents. They want to do something more to bring science to the rest of America. Changing definitions could entail a changing relationship between science and society, wrote Mooney.

How the Global Warming Story Changed—Disastrously
By Chris Mooney
Skeptics didn’t need good science to make another attack on climate change research. Their strength has always been in communication tactics anyway, and not scientific exactitude or rigor, wrote Mooney, examining the fallout from the “ClimateGate” scandal. And the U.S. public, never overwhelmingly sure about climate change, has long been susceptible to their smokescreens and misinformation campaigns.

Throwing the Baby Out With the Amniotic Fluid
By Michelle N. Meyer
One important distinction that is not made often or clearly enough by either ethicists or lawyers is that between decisions to procreate and decisions not to procreate. Witness, for instance, the reaction to Nadya OctoMom™ Suleman.

Hold Off On Holdren (Again)
By Chris Mooney
Conservatives found another ludicrous charge to hurl against the president’s science adviser. It was just the latest attempt to distract from actual science policy.

Autonomous Contraception
By Lisa Campo-Engelstein
A recent discovery, wrote Campo-Engelstein, might open the door to an effective male contraceptive drug, a technology that could have been developed decades ago, were it not for social factors that enable women but not men to effectively regulate their fertility outside of sexual activity and without their partner’s participation or knowledge.

Regional Centers of Innovation 101
Regional centers such as Silicon Valley and Boston cultivate technology-based economic development through a dynamic mix of researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and infrastructure. Drawing lessons from their success can help revitalize the U.S. economy. This feature marked the beginning of our ongoing project developing policies that support innovation clusters around the country.

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This address was part of an awards ceremony for over 100 science teachers and mentors from across the country who have demonstrated outstanding work. President Obama also announced the creation of five new public-private partnerships aimed at raising U.S. students to the top of international math and science rankings in ten years.

These initiatives are the newest component of the administration’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign, which kicked off in November with an initial commitment of $260 million from philanthropic organizations and individuals. The initiative is designed to unite and engage citizens, institutions of higher education, non-profits, and businesses alike in the effort to propel STEM education in the United States. Obama has outlined three goals for the campaign: increasing students’ STEM literacy and critical thinking, improving math and science teaching, and expanding opportunities for groups underrepresented in STEM fields like women and minorities.

The new initiatives total an additional $250 million and include efforts by companies like Intel, Texas Instruments, PBS, and a coalition of 75 presidents of public universities, which has committed to train 10,000 science and math teachers annually by 2015.

As further evidence of the federal government’s commitment to improving STEM education in the United States, the president also cited the “the largest investment in education by the federal government in history” in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as well as specific initiatives such as the Department of Education’s $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” fund, and the Department’s plan to provide $10 million in grants to support innovative teaching and $43 million in grants for 28 Teacher Quality Partnership programs at colleges of education and in high-need school districts.

While the president recognized the government’s responsibility to provide greater support for the recruitment, preparation, and retention of quality teachers to improve the nation’s education in the sciences, he also reaffirmed his challenge to the scientific community to “to think of new and creative ways to engage young people in their fields.” In response to this, the scientists at NASA will organize a multi-year “Summer of Innovation” enrichment program in which NASA scientists and engineers will work with thousands of teachers and students to work on cutting-edge STEM learning opportunities.

Other companies and organizations involved include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which are recruiting private sector leaders to advocate for STEM education in the states; Time Warner Cable, which is running a public service campaign; Sony Computer Entertainment America, which is launching a contest to design the best STEM-related video games for children; and the grassroots “National Lab Day” effort which is committed to working with 10,000 teachers and 1 million students this year.

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The tradition goes back to Wisconsin Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who distributed “Golden Fleece” awards to identify government profligacy, and frequently targeted scientific projects or grants for ridicule. Today, Proxmire has an heir in Senator John McCain (R-AZ), notorious for carelessly dismissing grizzly bear research on the 2008 campaign trail, even as his running mate Sarah Palin did the same for fruit fly studies.

And now, in a new twist on the old theme, McCain has teamed up with Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma in a fleece war on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, targeting 100 of its projects, many of them scientific in nature, as examples of wasteful spending.

When Congress passed the economic stimulus bill of early 2009, $21 billion was appropriated for science funding, including research, equipment, development, and construction. This was just a small portion of the $787 billion total stimulus outlay, and of the science funds themselves, by far the largest slice went to the National Institutes of Health ($10.4 billion). Other major gains went to the Department of Energy Office of Science ($1.6 billion), the National Science Foundation ($3 billion), and NASA ($1 billion).

The result was a profusion of science and research capacity development, much of it generating jobs as well as innovations. Consider, for example, a nearly $1 million NIH stimulus grant to Johns Hopkins University for a study on treatment options for drug abuse following inpatient care (such as counseling and follow-up care), which brought with it 86 jobs to support the large project. In other words, in this instance, medical knowledge and economic recovery will advance simultaneously.

And that’s just one of many such stories helpfully compiled on the ScienceWorksForUs website. It is important to remember that whenever major research projects get funded, the dollars tend to create a variety of university-based support jobs and graduate student livelihoods to carry out all aspects of the work. They also enable the retention of existing jobs that may otherwise have gone away, and perhaps also the hiring of professors and researchers.

In the face of all of this, what do McCain and Coburn do in their latest report? They nitpick, ignore the big picture of science funding in the stimulus, and focus in on a few individual grants, which they attempt to trivialize. Thus, for instance, their report mocks a project funded by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $1.57 million: Teams of researchers from Penn State University and other universities are traveling to Patagonia to look for plant fossils, in an area where major dinosaur finds have occurred before. “Move over Indiana Jones!” write Coburn and McCain. The innuendo seems to be that studying plants is for wusses, and can hardly be considered stimulative of the economy. But of course, there is much to be learned about past climates from such a project, and especially about what happened to plants during the extinction of the dinosaurs—and any $1.57 million grant will certainly create jobs to support the research project.

It’s important to recognize that, in the rush to get stimulus funds out the door quickly, agencies like the National Science Foundation unleashed the majority of their dollars on already filed grants. This certainly meant funding a lot of pure science, like the study described above, with stimulus dollars. However, awardees are required by NSF to report how many jobs they created or preserved based on each grant. And again, with almost any major scientific research project, such positions would tend to be created—although with many research projects only now beginning, the number of jobs created may not be known yet in each case.

McCain and Coburn also target various medical studies: For instance, a malt liquor and marijuana study in Buffalo, New York, funded to the tune of $389,357. Coburn and McCain turn this entirely legitimate public health research inquiry into a joke, simply because the substances may have particular lifestyles associated with them. But so what? Young adults abuse these substances, and it is quite legitimate to study the associated effects. This is particularly the case for malt liquor, as the grant reports that it has received little research attention. Understanding early alcohol abuse patterns, as well as the deaths and injuries that result from drug abuse among young men, are clear public health benefits. Moreover, as with any major medical study, it’s inevitable that jobs will be created to support the work.

Something similar goes for another NIH-funded study on sexual behaviors of young women in college, determining whether they are more likely to “hook up” after drinking—once again, public health research that is greeted by McCain and Coburn only with a sneer. And on it goes: They dismiss a public health study on why young males don’t like wearing condoms, along with research on the “Icelandic Arctic Environment in the Viking Age,” the “Learning Patterns of Honeybees,” and so on.

In the end, McCain and Coburn can certainly enjoy their yucks at the expense of science. But there’s virtually no substance to their complaints. In each instance, closer investigation reveals that the research is legitimate science. Moreover, McCain and Coburn never show that a particular grant fails to stimulate the economy, either—they just assume as much, even though scientific grants are known to create jobs.

In the end, while it is certainly worth exposing and rooting out government waste, you need something far stronger than uninformed swipes to get the job done.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

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The restoration of the program is an apt example of the scientific and intelligence communities working together. Not only can the tools for satellite reconnaissance support critical scientific Earth observations, officials recognize that climate change and national security are interrelated policy issues. As Dr. Christopher Tucker argued here at Science Progress, an effective Earth observation strategy is crucial to confronting issues in both arenas:

A comprehensive approach to developing, deploying, and utilizing our eyes in the sky can ensure more effective and efficient use of precious intellectual and financial resources as we struggle to address traditional national security challenges, the array of transnational threats that plague us, as well as the complex, looming menace posed by global climate change. But this will require significant attention paid to national security reform, the governance of Earth science, a fundamental rethinking of the programming and budgeting process, and—not least of all—leadership.

Reviving the Medea program is a low-cost step in the right direction, as it merely re-purposes images already gathered for intelligence purposes. The pictures are degraded before they are released in order to mask the capabilities of the satellites.

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“It,” of course, was the year 2009—and for science in the United States and beyond, it featured developments and revelations variously exciting, disturbing, and above all, political.

It was the year of H1N1 flu, an unsettling test run with a less-than-catastrophic pandemic. The response called into question our capability, and our infrastructure, for dealing with the next threat.

It was the year the Large Hadron Collider finally got those protons smashing—despite being interrupted by various maintenance problems and, yes, even by bread dropped by a bird flying above the machine, which led to overheating.

It was the year of great scientific anniversaries—200 years since Darwin’s birth, 150 since his publication of the Origin of Species, and 400 since Galileo raised his telescope to the heavens. Unfortunately, some sought to exploit these occasions. Creationist Ray Comfort distributed thousands of special “editions” of the Origin to college campuses, each featuring his lengthy anti-Darwinian “introduction.” Only then came the words of Darwin himself, almost unreadable due to their tiny font size.

It was a year of complete U-turns in science policy. President Barack Obama reversed George W. Bush’s dramatic restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, and the first 13 new stem cell lines were approved for federally funded research since 2001. Meanwhile, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency moved to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, finding that they do indeed endanger the public.

It was also the year of the first-ever passage, by a 219-212 margin in the U.S. House of Representatives, of a cap-and-trade bill that would cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions—but not the year for any parallel action in the U.S. Senate.

It was the year that everyone seemed to own an iPhone and use the word “app” in regular conversation. It was the year Twitter went from being a mere annoyance to the epitome of web-based communication.

It was a year that saw the very first Nobel laureate scientist assume a cabinet position, in the figure of U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu.

It was the year in popular culture when science ceased to be nerdy and became world-saving cool. The disaster film 2012 epitomized the trend. Despite the plot’s scientific incoherence, the lead character is a scientist who is described in the film as a “deputy geologist” at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

It was the year of new calls for science communication and public engagement: The Year of Science 2009 movement was launched, the second installment of the World Science Festival was held in New York City, and three books came out exhorting scientists to kick off their shoes and speak to real people, including Randy Olson’s Don’t Be Such a Scientist, Cornelia Dean’s Am I Making Myself Clear?, and my own (co-authored) Unscientific America.

It was the year in which scientists captured the first ever images of an exoplanet—a planet orbiting another star far from our own solar system.

It was the year that Russian scientists upped the ante on the increasingly prominent subject of geoengineering. They did so by running a small-scale field trial that blasted sulfate aerosols out of the back a helicopter and then measured their effect on diffusing sunlight at ground level. On a vastly larger scale, such an intervention could cool the planet.

It was the year that several groups across the country celebrated the 50-year anniversary of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture. There was general agreement that those cultures are as divided as ever, if not more so—but also that a newer and more important rift may like not between scientists and humanists, but rather, between scientists and intellectuals on the one hand, and everybody else on the other.

It was the year of the “largest single investment in clean energy in American history” in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The government put $80 billion into clean energy across a range of sectors, ranging from the construction of a smart grid to the weatherization of homes, as a means to jumpstart economic growth and create jobs.

Sadly, and finally, it was the year for the rebirth of what is now a wide-ranging war on science. Some of us may have thought it ended with the previous administration; but we underestimated the momentum that crusaders against the Obama administration, and against climate change action, could gain on this front. With “ClimateGate,” a smear against climate researchers so damaging that it may even have impelled a measurable drop in public trust of environmental researchers, we enter a new stage for political conflicts over science—one in which the gloves are off as never before.

But if that’s a sobering note to end on, we can make a more uplifting new years’ resolution. As the push to defeat global warming continues to eke out small bits of progress (most recently in Copenhagen), it is time to recognize that our scientists need aid and defending—which includes helping them help themselves through better public communication efforts.

The battle to restore scientific integrity isn’t over. It has only begun.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

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A team of researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed this limited genetic diversity in a paper published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine. They investigated 47 lines including 13 of the 21 Bush-era lines and 22 of the 27 newly approved Harvard lines.

The research team estimates that there are about 700 hESC lines available in the world, but that the 47 they investigated are the most widely used. The authors conducted a genotype analysis for the stem cells, looking at 500,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms along each line’s genome. Each of these represents a point in the DNA sequence where notable variations occur. They then compared the cell line genotypes to those of 2,001 subjects from the HapMap Project and Human Genome Diversity Project, which map human genetic diversity around the world. Two of the Bush-era lines, which came from labs in Singapore, are of East Asian origin, and three others were of mixed Middle Eastern and European origin. According to a University of Michigan press release, “none of the lines were derived from individuals of recent African ancestry, from Pacific Islanders, or from populations indigenous to the Americas.”

This unfortunate reality underscores the need for not only expanded hESC research, but also for more diverse research. The Bush-era policy was clearly inadequate and the new policy fortunately allows for much more freedom in conducting research. But if we really want to realize the promise of stem cells, scientists will need to work with lines from diverse genetic origins. That is the only way to design treatments and therapies that work for all populations. Diseases manifest themselves differently in different populations, whether because of genetics or environment. There are also the problems of side effects and treatment effectiveness that scientists can only properly assess when treatments are tailored to specific populations.

Jonathan Moreno and I recently wrote about this very issue as it concerns the Latino community at the Lationvations website.

Michigan’s new Consortium for Stem Cell Therapies plans to attack this issue of limited genetic diversity in the cells head-on by deriving lines that carry the genes responsible for inherited diseases and by also deriving lines from underrepresented groups like African-Americans.

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But the story of the H1N1 vaccine has spawned other public relations wreckage. Notably, it provided a new vehicle for the anti-vaccine movement to launch attacks on some of our most vital tools for protecting public health. Other factors compounded the problems. The federal government set high expectations for how many vaccine doses it could deliver in a few short months and failed to meet its promises. Moreover, it appears that the severity of the H1N1 pandemic this season is much less than public health officials anticipated, leading to claims that the government unnecessarily exaggerated the crisis.

The Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC are fighting fears about vaccines and rumors about the dangers of the H1N1 vaccine more specifically. Fortunately, concerns about a pandemic have abated somewhat of late—due to improved treatment and vaccinations, it seems like the number of deaths will not be any higher than those caused normally by seasonal flu, and may even end up being lower. This is good news, but complacency would be dangerous, especially as the H1N1 virus could re-emerge in a more lethal form and young adults, one of the at-risk groups, are the most apathetic about getting vaccinated. The government should push drug companies and researchers to develop new, more efficient ways to produce the vaccine and enforce distribution policies to ensure that those most at risk get the vaccine. Long-term, health officials face a trust gap that may continue to undermine future public health campaigns. Too many people are skeptical of the safety of this vaccine and others. Efforts need to be focused not only on ensuring and publicizing vaccine safety, but also on educating the public that the small risks associated with vaccines pale in comparison to the dangers associated with illnesses like the flu.

If someone had told me a year ago that talk show hosts, provocateurs, and political polar opposites Glenn Beck and Bill Maher would publicly agree on something, I would have thought they were crazy. Then, just a couple of months ago, there Beck and Maher were—denouncing the H1N1 vaccine on their syndicated television programs and Twitter feeds as unsafe and foolish. Apparently, frustrations over the H1N1 vaccine have what it takes to promote bipartisanship. How can this be?

A recent ABC News-Washington Post poll shows that a clear majority, 62 percent, of the American public believes that the government has not exaggerated the dangers of the H1N1 flu virus (more commonly known as swine flu). The World Health Organization, or WHO, the CDC, and HHS have all heavily promoted the vaccine. In spite of these efforts, many Americans are unsure about whether they are in one of the at-risk groups. More importantly, the same ABC News-Washington Post poll indicated that nearly half, 45 percent, of all parents do not plan on having their children vaccinated, and two-thirds, 66 percent, do not plan on being vaccinated themselves. The backlash to the vaccine seems to be primarily driven by questions regarding safety and availability. Strangely, the way the government handled the H1N1 vaccine has managed to unite both vaccine foes and those desperate to get it. The former have exploited the newness of the vaccine to rehash concerns about preservatives, adequate testing, and the necessity of vaccines for public health. The latter have grown frustrated with a lack of access to vaccines when sufficient numbers were originally promised.

By June, WHO had raised the pandemic alert for H1N1 to its highest level and governments began to prepare plans for vaccine manufacture and distribution. Typically, flu vaccine design is an imperfect and slow process that relies on educated guesswork about which flu strain(s) will be present during the flu season. The H1N1 virus was robustly characterized, so this aspect of the process was not a concern. However, production was sped up in order to avert a pandemic and this has people concerned that it has not undergone sufficient, thorough testing. The vaccine has in fact been evaluated (in all age groups and in pregnant women) in a series of clinical trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, and since distribution began, careful monitoring has taken place to ensure that any irregularities are reported quickly. This system seems to be working well. Just this week, almost one million doses of a special H1N1 vaccine for infants (lacking preservatives) were voluntarily recalled because the vaccine manufacturer noticed that the potency of the vaccines had dropped since shipment.

But roughly one third, 33 percent, of the American public is not confident in the safety of the H1N1 vaccine. In 1976, vaccinations for a different strain of swine flu led to an inexplicable spike in diagnoses of Guillain-Barré syndrome (a rare autoimmune disease). While flu treatment options and vaccine design have improved since then, the CDC is aware that the general public may associate swine flu vaccines with adverse side effects. Bad news, like a novel virus, has a tendency to spread rapidly. For example, a clip of an Inside Edition piece on a young, healthy cheerleader who supposedly developed dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes uncontrolled muscle contractions and contortions, a few days after receiving the H1N1 vaccine already has more than 900,000 views on YouTube. Upon video evaluation, neurologists expressed doubt and dystonia advocacy groups distanced themselves from the report, but the story has already done its damage, judging by the comments posted on the video (and duplicates of it). As well, numerous anti-vaccine groups and blogs have distributed the cheerleader’s story, including Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey’s group Generation Rescue.

Widespread safety concerns seem largely specific to this vaccine, suggesting that past associations with Guillain-Barré syndrome and the perception that the vaccine was not adequately tested have affected its image. However, the release of the H1N1 vaccine also comes at a time of severe and growing distrust of vaccines in general, due to a supposed causal link with autism. Anti-vaccine advocates have grown particularly vocal in the past few years, despite repeated research demonstrating there is no credible evidence whatsoever linking vaccines to autism.

About one-third of people unconfident in the safety of the H1N1 vaccine also said they were not confident in the safety of any vaccine. In spite of numerous studies countering their claims, the anti-vaccine movement has managed to convince significant numbers of parents and guardians that routine childhood vaccinations are not just risky, but also unnecessary. Many of the medical students I spoke with believe that the anti-vaccine movement has contributed to the backlash against the H1N1 vaccine. In response to an emailed question, one student wrote: “The anti-vaccination movement has stepped up their efforts during this time, both on the Internet and in the mainstream media. They see this as an opportunity to further their agenda of casting doubt on the safety of vaccines.”  The success of the anti-vaccine movement in vilifying one of the greatest advances in modern medicine highlights the wide gaps in communication between researchers and the general public, the increased use of the Internet as a source of potentially untrustworthy information, as well as a general lack of familiarity with how horrible diseases such as flu can be.

In order to ensure protection for entire societies, vaccination rates for certain diseases must reach very high thresholds in order to protect people who either lack immunity or did not develop immunity from prior infection or vaccination. If enough people are vaccinated, the odds of the disease being present and spreading are significantly reduced, an effect called “herd immunity.”

Anti-vaccine advocates point to preservatives such as thimerasol, a mercury derivative that is present in the inactivated, injected H1N1 vaccine but not the intranasal spray vaccine, as a potential danger. Concerns stem from a study conducted by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and published by the medical journal Lancet in 1999. The study contended that the measles-mumps-rubella, or MMR, vaccine was linked to autism. Blame was immediately placed on thimerasol and although the initial report was refuted by numerous follow-up studies (and additionally, reports surfaced that Wakefield manipulated the data), the anti-vaccine crowd won—most vaccines no longer contain thimerasol. First, the mercury present in these vaccines is trivial when compared to the levels present in fish (and yet anti-vaccine activists do not recommend that we all stop eating fish). Second, preservatives are in fact very important for preventing multi-vial batches of vaccines from getting contaminated with bacteria, viruses, and fungi. In fact, vaccines without preservatives have led to serious complications and even death. This is not general knowledge and according to several medical students I spoke with, patients wary of the H1N1 vaccine have often cited concerns about preservatives. But so far, significant safety concerns have not materialized.

On December 4, the CDC released a safety review documenting the number and kinds of adverse reports received after administration of the H1N1 vaccine—both the inactivated, intramuscular shot and the weakened nasal spray. Through November 24, 46.2 million doses had been distributed and 3,783 reports of adverse effects had been received—almost 1,000 fewer than those reported for the seasonal flu vaccine—and 13 deaths, 9 of which were likely due to underlying illnesses in the victims. One of those deaths was due to a car crash and three are pending review. It will be interesting to see whether this report reassures worried Americans. Invalidated research and a few very loud voices have tarred the reputation of vaccines. It will take time and effort to restore public faith.

Health officials have tried hard to educate the public about the H1N1 virus and vaccine in order to encourage people, particularly those in at-risk groups, to get vaccinated. However, in promoting the vaccine the federal government promised too much and this likely contributed to the H1N1 vaccine backlash. It was unrealistic to expect that a few companies could produce and test enough vaccines in just a few months time to cover everyone in the at-risk groups, particularly as the number of people at risk is much higher than that for seasonal flu. Additionally, vaccines provided to Europe and Canada are not sanctioned here in the United States due to the inclusion of adjuvants, which improve the potency of the vaccine but have not been reviewed adequately, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Anecdotes from medical students indicate that many people are in fact eager to get vaccinated (one poll estimated that at the time of the vaccine release, 52 percent of Americans wanted it), but limited supplies and the necessity of first vaccinating at-risk groups have meant that many have been turned away from clinics. This is understandably frustrating.

While the H1N1 situation has provided an opportunity to knock vaccines and their distribution methods, the facts remain: vaccines are a safe and vital tool for protecting our health and well-being.

Saheli Sadanand is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Immunobiology at Yale University.

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• “Applying science and technology strategies to drive economic recovery, job creation and economic growth”
• “Promoting innovative energy technologies”
• “Applying biomedical science and information technology to help Americans live longer, healthier lives, while reducing health care costs”
• “Assuring we have the technologies needed to protect our troops, citizens, and interests.”

These challenges focus on the knowledge flow, diffusion of information, and technology transfer required for effective application and commercialization of science and engineering advances. To exploit the competitive advantage that the United States has in basic R&D, we must make a major commitment to knowledge and technology transfer efforts, and support innovation in its fullest sense.

To be responsive, federal agencies need to prioritize a coherent strategy for knowledge transfer and application and address intermediate organizational structures that accelerate the transfer and application process. This is no easy task. Decades of focusing on research and the outputs it generates, such as journal articles, patents, and licenses, has not prepared the agencies to identify organizational structures that translate knowledge and measure impacts, such as jobs created or lives improved.

As a former research administrator in the National Science Foundation (Sociology) and at Cornell University and Washington State Universities, and as an agricultural experiment station director and then dean of agricultural, human, and natural resource sciences, I know the disciplinary mindset of research administrators as well as scientists and engineers. Within universities, we also must work to change this mindset.

Processes of knowledge translation, transfer, and communication are often unique to each agency or very specialized even within departments of each agency. Take the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its Rural Development outreach programs, the Agricultural Research Service with its technology transfer function, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture with its State Cooperative Extension programs. Coordination of strategy even within a single agency is exceedingly difficult.

One approach, however, is to strengthen the links, cooperation, and partnerships of the technology extension and outreach programs and functions of the federal government and universities around the country. USDA and state Cooperative Extension programs, the SBA Small Business Development Centers, and the Department of Commerce Manufacturing Extension Partnerships, administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, all need more professionals co-located in communities where they meet the four challenges set by OMB and OSTP every day. As place-based organizations, they would have a distinct competitive advantage to achieving the desired outcomes.

At the same time, the federal government needs to embrace the open innovation model as a way to accelerate the technology and knowledge transfer process from idea to execution, from laboratories to businesses and consumer use. The open innovation model assumes high levels of communication, careful listening, reciprocity among the parties, mutual commitment, and serious engagement to achieve the goals. It also requires proximity, as well as virtual connectivity, to accomplish place-based programming, as Orszag points out.

Innovation and knowledge transfer have a rich history in America. An early application was the state Cooperative Extension Services, which sent county agents into agricultural areas to demonstrate new methods to farmers, their families, and communities; to listen to farmers about local problems; and to link relevant university faculty and researchers, who provided research-based solutions. The goal was to provide educational and technical assistance about agriculture, natural resources, and nutrition and consumer economics, as well as community-building skills to rural residents who could not attend the university.

A similar philosophy created the Small Business Development Centers, often co-located in universities, community colleges, or nonprofit organizations, to provide technical assistance, access to capital, coaching, and counseling to strengthen local small businesses. In North Carolina, the governor’s office recently called on our Small Business and Technology Development Center to lead a statewide job retention and growth initiative which will help the state’s existing small-to-medium-sized businesses enhance their competitiveness.

A third example reflects the commitment to manufacturing from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, called the Manufacturing Extension Program, in which nonprofit organizations and universities provide engineering outreach and technical assistance, training, and educational support to the manufacturing sector. Professionals in this program reside within local communities and support economic growth.

Each of these organizations practices the translation of expert knowledge into usable knowledge for their constituencies.

The 21^st century goals of economic development, “green” energy lifestyles, improved health and well being, and better national security do not require new extension services. Rather, they require agencies to revisit organizational mechanisms already in place, to be creative in adopting what works, to fund, and to deliver needed programs.

The Department of Energy does not need to invent an Energy Extension Service to achieve energy conservation in homes, agricultural, commercial, and industrial sectors. The adoption of new technologies, the use of energy conservation practices, and the implementation of renewable energy strategies could benefit from added investments in Cooperative Extension, Small Business Development Centers, and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership to focus on these priorities. Inter-agency grants or cooperative agreements could provide funding. These well-established programs have already earned the trust of consumers, community leaders, business and industry leaders, non-profits, and governmental partners.

Universities also must reciprocate with innovative programs of their own. And they are. Witness the establishment of incubators for new startups, business accelerators, and joint venture efforts at commercializing inventions. The federal government provides much of the basic R&D money, to be sure, but universities and the private sector are now working more closely to commercialize the results.

Programs exist at many public universities to provide targeted educational programs. An example at North Carolina State University is the Small Business and Technology Development Center, which provides startups with training on “Becoming an Investor-ready Entrepreneur.” It also provides investors with a course called “The Power of Angel Investing.” Bringing these two sectors together can yield increased capital for new startups. Additionally, the SBTDC provided 48 workshops in 2009 on “Business Success in Tough Times” in which strategies for marketing, managing finances, and improved manufacturing processes are the focus.

With over 70 active startup companies and 110 commercialized products adding to the global economy, NC State, and its Centennial Campus, is among the nation’s most significant entrepreneurial universities. An example is the success of LaamScience, a startup company developing a textile coating that kills most viruses and bacteria when exposed to light. The technology, licensed from NC State University, has multiple markets—surgical and respirator masks, hospital disposables and supplies, and filters and air purifiers.

NC State’s Industrial Extension Service, which manages the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, provides training and technical assistance to increase the competitiveness of manufacturing firms, the health sector, and state agencies through Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, and the International Standards Organization, or ISO certification.

These organizations, as well as others within the university, can also provide consulting services, feasibility studies, market analysis, supply chain analysis, and access to student internships.

An integrative approach might establish a research collaborative in which private companies join and annually provide funds for pre-commercial research, advise the faculty and graduate students on industry priorities, and evaluate the results at annual reviews, for example, in the NC State’s Nonwovens Cooperative Research Center.

Evaluation is also useful for feedback to companies. The evaluation of company processes and continuous improvement can lead to greater efficiencies and awards of excellence such as the Shingo Prize in North Carolina and the National Baldridge Award.

Examples of impact from the Industrial Extension Service include the North Carolina Department of Environmental and Natural Resources, which implemented lean office processes and increased the number of air quality permits processed by 52 percent, and provided them 40 percent quicker, with no added staff. Another example is the nonprofit RLCB, formerly the Raleigh Lions Club for the Blind, which showed a $4 million increase in sales, gains in productivity, and new products as a result of IES services. RCLB also added 40 jobs in one year, including a full R&D department.

Demonstrations, educational efforts, and technical assistance have a long track record of generating successful diffusion and adoption of innovations. It is the practical application of science and technology via these knowledge transfer mechanisms and partnerships that builds on research and drives economic recovery, job creation, and economic growth.

These programs deserve high priority for continued and additional funding as agencies and universities prioritize their budget requests for 2011.

James J. Zuiches is Vice Chancellor of Extension, Engagement and Economic Development at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.

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No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap… The net of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.^[1]

Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria principle, which he abbreviated as “NOMA,” was more an effort to find common ground on which the warring parties might both stand in the evolution debates than it was to clarify broader questions about the organization of knowledge. Even so, the NOMA proposal generated its fair share of reaction from across the political and philosophical spectrum, from religious fundamentalists to atheist philosopher Richard Dawkins.^[2] This is not surprising, given the strong feelings evolution debates generate. But as I’ll show, taking the NOMA point of view presents critical challenges for science policy development at the dawn of the 21^st century. For more than four decades, many of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements—recombining DNA, transplanting organs, in vitro fertilization, mapping the human genome, mammalian cloning, embryonic stem cell research—have benefited from robust discussions about science and values. Now, as science presents even more opportunities to use technology to help, heal, cure, and enhance, it continues to evoke ethical, legal, and social responses—confirming that neither science nor the humanities alone can adequately guide policy. Earlier this month, we saw the conclusion of a long process of bioethical work that combined science and values when the National Institutes of Health approved 13 new lines of human embryonic stem cells, making them eligible for use in federally funded research.

While Gould’s NOMA principle may be useful to explore some of the more challenging bioethical topics of our day, it is important to understand precisely how ethics informs scientific debate, and what challenges remain by uncritically conflating secular ethics and religious ethics “magisteria” as Gould seems to do in his essay. Conflating these is both dangerous and counterproductive, for it is unarguable that these two areas of value inquiry are partially, but certainly not completely, overlapping. In fact, the field of bioethics plays a significant role in many of these debates by occupying the space between the magisteria. Gould’s suggestion that science, on the one hand, and religion/values/ethics, on the other, occupy separate isolated intellectual domains has enormous appeal for quelling arguments over hot-button issues like evolution. But this idea—that science and values do not intersect—has serious implications that impede contemporary science policy debates, particularly some of the messier ones that have preoccupied society in recent years: those that focus on questions about moral status and how persons can be treated; abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and euthanasia are typical examples.

The real action can be found at those places where these two magisteria touch, where for perfectly sensible reasons that arise from the necessity of science policy construction, society finds itself trying to reconcile two completely different types of input: those about facts and those about values. In fact, the major bioethical challenges of the past few decades demonstrate that neither science nor ethics alone can effectively answer many science policy questions. Uncritically separating these questions into separate domains (as NOMA would have us do) will inhibit, not promote sound science policy. Progressive bioethics brings them together.^[3]

Challenges from all sides

Gould published “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” in 1997 after spending a few nights at a Vatican conference sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He writes at length about how he had engaged Catholic priests in lively debates, which he found exciting and to some extent comforting (since the priests did not seem to be questioning the theory of evolution, but were more intent on questioning the political status of the creation science movement in the United States). The essay was his proposal to resolve what he took to be the perceived conflict between science and religion, especially with respect to evolution. It was a sincere effort to find common ground on which these apparently warring parties might both jointly stand on matters of intellectual inquiry generally, and on the evolution debates in particular.

Certainly Gould was not seriously proposing that no possibility existed for those trained in the study of morality to delve into matters scientific and vice versa; nor could I imagine that he held to the view that no serious exchange of ideas between these two groups was possible. As a philosopher trained in ethics but with a particular focus on health care and research issues, I was troubled by this implication at first reading more than a decade ago. I also remember thinking that he wasn’t really speaking to me because, after all, he was referring to religiously-based ethics not secular ethics (my own moral stance), and certainly not bioethics—the study of moral issues in the life sciences where I undertake my main research, teaching, and policy work.

Apparently others from both ends of the ideological spectrum had the same reaction, suggesting that he may not only have stepped into shallow water, but that there were some hungry fish swimming around his ankles. In a Google search for the phrase “Non-overlapping Magisteria,” the 5^th of the more than 53,000 hits comes from Conservapedia [The Trustworthy Encyclopedia]:

This theory is demonstrably faulty because it is obvious that the intelligent design of the universe would leave behind perceptible evidence allowing the existence of God to be inferred without reference to faith. Furthermore the NOMA principle would directly contradict Biblical evidence of miracles which if observable by scientists would be demonstrably true. To embrace NOMA would be to consign the entirety of scripture to metaphor and storytelling.^[4]

At the other end of the spectrum, Richard Dawkins spends close to eight pages in The God Delusion taking direct aim at what he calls Gould’s “confident, almost bullying, tone,” before metaphorically shaking his head and concluding, “I simply do not believe that Gould could possibly have meant much of what he wrote…”[5] I happen to be more sympathetic to Dawkins’ moral point of view than I am of those at Conservapedia, but when an idea is attacked from both sides it suggests that there is something more than meets the eye.

I want to explore the fact that Gould’s defense of NOMA is open to at least two challenges. The first challenge is about the content of the religion magisterium itself: notably that Gould refers to the conflict as between science and religion, apparently leaving no room for secular ethical contributions to the “non-scientific” magisterium. The second challenge is about the implications for science policy if we took NOMA seriously.

Where’s the secular ethics?

With respect to the first challenge, Gould’s explication of NOMA as a response to the conflict between science and religion may have been a shorthand route for referring to a broader category of moral investigation. But referring to the content of the religion magisterium as including “questions of moral meaning and value” was either sloppy or intentional. If we rule out “sloppy” on the grounds that whatever one thinks of Gould, sloppiness is not something normally associated with his writing, then we are left with this description as intentional. Yet Gould offers no reason for why he has cast this net in this way.

In this formulation Gould may be drawing a circle around the subject of morality that at once may be too large and too small: conflating under one uncritical umbrella two similar but not identical domains of teaching about ethics and morality strikes me as casting an uncritically large net, particularly since not all of religious teaching is about morality. At the same time the net is too small because he inadvertently restricts discussion about morality only to those who are theologically trained or inclined. If we took Gould seriously I suppose non-religiously based moralists could simply ignore NOMA on the grounds that Gould wasn’t talking to them. In the extreme that’s somewhat disingenuous, but at very least it makes conversation on these issues next to impossible.

Ethics, which is the academic study of morality, enjoys many roots, both secular and religious. Admittedly, the distinction between one’s own morality and its origins (which may come from one’s parents, schools, religious institutions, civic organizations, and the like) is different from the academic (one might even say scientific) study of ethics.^[6] Whether for pragmatic or benevolent reasons, why don’t we simply agree that Gould might have intended to refer to those who work in the area of ethical inquiry—whether secular humanists, evangelical moral theologians, true believers, or atheists—may all be qualified to comment on and investigate deeply “questions of moral meaning and value”?

A further aspect of this challenge concerns the need to come to agreement about of what Gould “could possibly have meant” (as Dawkins wondered) or, said another way, what he was hoping to describe. Gould may have been describing a benevolent approach designed to achieve a type of respectful accommodation. He may have been thinking of NOMA as a truce between science and religion—an effort to achieve a form of peace following a tough battle that no one really won (or will win). In such a model, the accord provides the necessary space to allow the two magisteria to co-exist by setting the rules of any subsequent engagement to avoid unnecessary (and unproductive) skirmishes in the future.

Evidence for this runs throughout Gould’s paper, the most obviously near the end of the article, when he writes “I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution.”^[7] This may have been his belief, but Gould tips his hand a little that he has more in mind than a mere accord when he further says, “NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance.”

It is also plausible that Gould may have been describing something less diplomatic, more like intellectual isolationism. In this account NOMA is a type of Maginot Line or a Berlin wall—a fortified barricade that is erected to keep one group out of the others’ territory. He provides us with an example by referring to Pope Pius XII’s 1950 Humani Generis, which cautions that evolution is just a theory not yet proven and one should be very cautious about drawing any premature conclusions about its veracity.^[8]

I’m prepared to admit, in the spirit of the “concordat” model Gould was promoting, that he wasn’t trying to discriminate on the basis of secular vs. religious ethicists, nor was he seriously suggesting that only “ethicists” can talk about ethics, or that only “scientists” can talk about science.^[9] (Besides, he spends four paragraphs in his paper offering his own moral point of view on science). And finally, let’s agree that Gould was not as scientifically precise as he could have been in describing this magisterium, and that were he alive today he might take up the challenges of both Conservapedia and Dawkins and consider at least revising this particular aspect of NOMA to refer to the magisteria of values or perhaps a magisteria of ethics. I’d like to think he’d be open to these gentle revisions to NOMA. Yet even with these compromises, a second serious challenge awaits, and this is where the real action is.

Science, ethics, and public policy

Whatever one’s interpretation about the scope of these two magisteria, the real action for science and ethics is not at the level of big questions such as whether God exists, or how do proteins fold. (Despite Dawkins’ protests, I’m prepared to grant that there are questions that substantially belong to one and not the other magisterium simply because it makes sense to place them there). The real action can be found at those places where these two magisteria touch, where for perfectly sensible reasons that arise from the necessity of science policy construction, society finds itself trying to reconcile two completely different types of input: those about facts and those about values.

It is at this location where taking Gould seriously may actually have profound and immediate effects on the interplay in civil society between science, ethics, and policy. What would contemporary science policy debates look like if we took NOMA seriously?^[10] Gould himself recognized this issue when he wrote:

This resolution might remain all neat and clean if the nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) of science and religion were separated by an extensive no man’s land. But, in fact, the two magisteria bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border. Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult.

I believe this somewhat passing comment is actually the key to understanding the nature of the line-drawing activity he proposed in NOMA. This is the space at the border where the magisteria touch—and it is precisely where the bioethics and policy action takes place.

I would suggest that it is at this horizon between the magisteria that NOMA faces its greatest challenge, where neither magisterium alone is sufficient to determine the proper course of action. Indeed, for more than four decades, some of science’s greatest accomplishments occurred in concert with a parallel ethics conversation, including both secular and religious ethics perspectives. Let me relate two well-known examples.

In the late 1980s, when James Watson testified before the U.S. Congress, requesting $3 billion to undertake the human genome project, he made a further request that 3 percent of this money be spent each year to study the ethical, legal, and social issues arising from the effort to map and sequence the genome. When Francis Collins took over as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, that amount was raised to 5 percent. This apportionment of the larger genome project appropriation was more than just a funding decision; it was a statement about the fundamental, necessary connection between science and ethics. As entwined as the double strands of the helix, science was trying to map and sequence the genome while simultaneously mapping and sequencing the ethical issues. Indeed, our job at the Genome Institute, where for a period I was a program director in the ELSI program, was to support research that anticipated and addressed the ethical issues.^[11]

Indeed, it may only be stretching the point a little to suggest that if Congress had not been assured that experts were addressing the ethical issues at the same time as the scientific ones, I doubt very much that Francis Collins and Craig Venter would have stood together in the East Room of the White House with President Bill Clinton in 2000, announcing the completed rough draft of the human genome.

The second example occurred in 1997—a little less than a decade after Watson’s congressional testimony, in the very year Gould published his NOMA paper—when the world was captivated by the announcement from the Roslin Institute of the birth of the first adult mammal born as a result of somatic cell nuclear transfer—commonly known as cloning. Dolly hit the international stage like a thunderbolt. Upon learning the news, President Clinton issued an Executive Order to all federal departments and agencies declaring that “no federal funds shall be allocated for cloning human beings,” and suggested legislation in the U.S. Congress that would have prohibited “the attempt to create a child using somatic cell nuclear transfer.” Clinton then directed the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to “undertake a thorough review of the legal and ethical issues…and report back to me in ninety days.” NBAC completed this task, considering both scientific issues focused on safety and ethical dimensions of the research, and recommended to the president that human reproductive cloning should not be undertaken at that time.^[12] More than a decade later, both Congress and the American public appear committed to the same objections as those expressed by NBAC and subsequent bodies, that human reproductive cloning is still a bad idea for the same reasons.

NBAC’s deliberations on human cloning, like the deliberations on embryonic stem cell research a year later (with which I was involved in my capacity as NBAC Executive Director), were instances in which science and ethics were jointly enlisted to examine a profound matter for any civil society—determining whether a scientific practice should be banned, permitted, or encouraged. In reflecting on the Dolly story, NBAC Chair Harold Shapiro and I observed that:

Thus, while the various philosophical approaches provided substantial inspiration and guidance to our discussions, we knew that we would not be able to arrive at a set of recommendations solely through a process of philosophical reasoning and deliberation. [13]

Our point was simple but profound: the Dolly story is not intended as a defense of the role of bioethics as a perfect arbiter of tough cases that neither science nor ethics alone can resolve. It is a story about the nature of the conversation between science and ethics that is necessary for science policy to proceed in a democracy.

Moreover, this conversation does not always result in granting permission for the use of a technology. Embryonic stem cell research went through similar conversations—supported by President Clinton, then severely restricted by President Bush before President Obama reversed a Bush executive order and permitted federal funding. The stem cell story is equally worthy of a magisterial analysis, particularly given the near obsession in the United States with debating the moral status of the developing human embryo. But that will have to wait.

Can we update NOMA?

Gould’s description of two magisteria faces both conceptual and practical challenges. In particular, serious problems arise when policymakers attempt to develop science policy through an appeal to either magisterium alone. That much we’ve learned from NOMA and the evolution debates. So long as we envision NOMA as a concordat or a line on a map, it is not up to the task of helping resolve difficult matters of policy. Enter bioethics. If anything bioethics occupies the space between the magisteria, a position that acknowledges the necessary and close connection between science and ethics.^[14] Placing bioethics in this position is an example of progressive policy development, in which we seek solutions to even deep policy problems using a pragmatic approach, without appeal to ideology.

Perhaps we should think of bioethics as something more akin to a translation device, like the famous Rosetta Stone. An approach that attempts to bridge these magisteria, unlocking some of the stories that they are each trying to tell may be a more productive way of engaging the warring parties.

Eric M. Meslin, Ph.D. is the Director, Indiana University Center for Bioethics, Associate Dean (Bioethics), Indiana University School of Medicine, and Professor of Medicine, Medical and Molecular Genetics, Public Health, Philosophy at Indiana University, Indianapolis.

This article is adapted from a talk presented at the conference “Darwin’s Living Legacy—a Conference on Evolution and Society” Bibliotheca Alexandrina, November 16, 2009.

Notes

[1] Gould, S.J., “Nonoverlapping magisteria,” Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16-22.

^[2] Dawkins, R. The God Delusion (New York: Mariner Books , 2008).

^[3] Moreno JD, Berger, S. eds. Progress in Bioethics: Science, Policy and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

^[4] See http://conservapedia.com/Non-Overlapping_Magisteria. Accessed on November 12, 2009.

[5] Dawkins. R., The God Delusion, pp. 77-85.

[6] Here again, another loaded point: is ethics amenable to “scientific” study? Consider the statement above by Conservapedia “ Other examples exist of whether ethics can be the object of study (even empirical study). In a thoughtful paper on the concept of the “common morality” the philosopher Tom Beauchamp describes the design of an empirical study that might prove the existence of his view of the common morality. Beauchamp, T. L., “A defense of the common morality,” Kennedy Inst Ethics J 13 (3)( 2003): 259-74.

[7] But there is other textual evidence of this interpretation when Gould describes his response to a priest who had asked him about whether evolution was facing any intellectual challenges, especially from creationism, Gould replied, “no” and then went on to say:

“…We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief”. [italics added for emphasis]

^[8]It is pretty clear from Gould’s own writing that his inclination is towards the respectful accommodation perspective than of intellectual isolationism. For example, his reading of Pope Pius XII was that the pontiff came very close to making threatening noises to those who might permit any incursion by science into religion (Catholicism in particular). This is more than mere isolationism, and starts to look like coercion. Indeed, Gould goes to great lengths to praise Pope John Paul II, whose October 22, 1996 statement to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences made clear that evidence for evolution was sound and proven.

Maybe Gould thought that John Paul’s statement, which he clearly preferred over Pope Pius, was a move to shore up the respectful accommodation approach.

Maybe he thought that the Pope’s words would mean that creationists might now leave well enough alone.

Maybe he thought he could devote more time to his research on evolutionary theory rather than having to defend evolution.

So much for what we may think Gould meant, or what his real motivation was. I am not inclined to overly analyze this. Besides, I thought he was pretty clear about his views. What about the challenges.

[9] Dawkins asks this in a delightfully acerbic way: “What are these ultimate questions in whose presence religion is an honored guest and science must respectfully slink away?” p. 79.

[10] I am well aware that I have altered the focus from “science” to science policy. This is not a trivial distinction.

^[11] Meslin EM, Thomson EJ, Boyer JT, “The ethical, legal, and social implications research program at the National Human Genome Research Institute,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 1997; 7:291-298.

[12] National Bioethics Advisory Commission. Cloning Human Beings (1997).

[13] Shapiro, HT and Meslin, EM., “Relating to History: The Influence of the National Commission and its Belmont Report on the National Bioethics Advisory Commission,” in JF Childress, EM Meslin, and HT Shapiro, eds. Belmont Revisited: Ethical Principles for Research with Human Subjects (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), pp. 55-76.

[14] Moreno JD, Berger, S. eds, Progress in Bioethics: Science, Policy and Politics.

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Harvard submitted 28 lines for review, but one was rejected, as it was derived with a consent form that came during a lapse of the university’s institutional review board. Researchers at the university had been using the lines for various projects without federal dollars, but the consent forms for the lines specifically state that the lines support diabetes research:

These cells will be used to study the embryonic development of endoderm with a focus on pancreatic formation. The long-term goal is to create human pancreatic islets that contain ß cells, the cells that produce insulin, for transplantation into diabetics.

The NIH prudently chose to abide by the consent forms, so researchers will only receive federal funds to work on the lines if they follow those rules. NIH Director Francis Collins made this decision after the Advisory Committee to the Director recommended the rules to him following its December 4^th meeting. The Committee also requested that the NIH issue guidelines regarding the broader use of embryos derived for a specific purpose, but according to Jef Akst at The Scientist, “the NIH has not responded.”

The NIH did however update its FAQ page, explaining to researchers that the NIH stem cell guidelines require informed consent from embryo donors, which is different from the provisions in the “Common Rule” governing most federally funded biomedical research—the Common Rule does not require consent for de-identified human cells. The NIH has also decided to honor any restrictive language in the informed consent forms regarding the scope of the allowed research.

We should commend the NIH for dealing with these nuances and complexities in an ethically consistent manner that respects the wishes of the embryo donors. This process embodies a genuine understanding of how scientific necessity, administrative transparency, and ethical clarity can lead to sound policies.

Eighty-three more lines are pending review, and we look forward to seeing them receive the same level of serious ethical scrutiny.

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Something big.

There’s just one small problem. Over recent years, as scientists have continued to iterate their climate and economic models—attempting to factor human population changes, economic growth, and national policies into an exceedingly complex and contingent picture of the atmospheric and planetary future—a distressing theme has emerged. It is very possible that warming is now moving so fast that today’s politically viable policies simply can’t avert a serious risk of catastrophic climate impacts occurring, or suffice to keep climate change within a clear “safe zone.” In other words, whatever Copenhagen achieves, it may not be enough. That’s especially the case for low-lying island nations beset by sea level rise, and other developing countries whose calls for climate justice, and the strongest possible precautionary policies, have engendered much sympathy here.

To see the nature of the conundrum, consider the analyses provided by Climate Interactive, a consortium of scientists and modelers who have developed a very useful way of analyzing the science and policy nexus of the climate debate, which can otherwise seem like a confusing quicksand of information. The Climate Interactive model merges scientific projections of how bad global temperatures could be by the year 2100 with the expected impacts of various national and international policies upon those temperatures. As of the most recent analysis, the model presents the following information: On a business-as-usual trajectory, we can expect a cataclysmic 4.8° Celsius of warming by 2100. Meanwhile, the currently confirmed climate policies embraced by nations worldwide—without a Copenhagen agreement—only get us down to around 3.9°C.

So where do the current Copenhagen proposals fit in between these two markers? Well, that’s the real trick. The summit could always surprise us, but as one of the Climate Interactive collaborators, MIT’s John Sterman, recently observed to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, “the negotiations must deliver the high end of current proposals and stretch beyond them, if the world is to have a reasonable chance of containing warming to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, or the 1.5°C goal of many developing nations.”

It’s important to note the truly insidious way in which risk manifests itself in these discussions. Really, we don’t know how bad global warming is going to be in 2100; we only have estimates of the sensitivity of the climate to various carbon dioxide emission levels, surrounded by bars of uncertainty. But fundamentally, the climate system—and especially its potential feedbacks—is incompletely understood. So if all of our projections understate the climate sensitivity, there’s a risk of undershooting even with relatively strong policies, and still failing to reach a safe zone.

This line of thinking necessarily argues for ever-tougher, more precautionary policies—and runs smack into messy political realities. One is that the powerhouse countries at Copenhagen, such as China, India, and the United States, are setting 2°C as the target, and not something stronger, like 1.5°C. Another is that whatever approach heads of states agree upon at Copenhagen, getting the U.S. Congress to support such goals in legislation is something else altogether.

Yet at precisely this time, a growing movement argues that 2° Celsius—which corresponds to roughly 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—simply isn’t “safe.” Famed NASA climate scientist James Hansen and the 350.org movement are pushing the boundaries of the conversation by calling for a return to levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations that we have already passed (we are currently at 390 parts per million), and that correspond to something more like 1.5°C. And in Copenhagen, a bloc of developing nations has also coalesced around this goal, citing the threats of submerged Pacific islands, a scorched Africa, and much else.

Certainly, not all scientists think the situation is as bad as Hansen does, although the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman Rajendra Pachauri has also opined in the past that 350 ppm is really the safe level. (Interestingly, Pachauri seemed unwilling to reiterate that view when asked at a press conference here today.) But in the end, picking a scientific winner in such a debate misses the point: The risk of being wrong ought to be too much to be tolerated when the planet itself is at stake. Precaution is really the only thing that makes any sense.

And that’s the anguishing thing about watching the Copenhagen climate negotiations evolve: If you really, really care about planetary risk avoidance, you can’t like the way things are going.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

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Angel investors aren’t in this game to earn their wings, of course. Wealth is the goal, but so too is job creation for these mostly local serial entrepreneurs who thrive on the thrill of building companies that help their communities grow and prosper. Problem is, these and other very early-stage investors in innovation companies—including the inventors and founders of these new companies and their friends and family who put up their first rounds of cash—often don’t reap the rewards of their early risk taking. The reason: Once a young company reaches a certain point of success it usually stumbles as it tries to bring its new product or service to market—at the very time it needs lots more money to grow.

Enter the professional venture capitalists, who demand a big majority stake in the young company in exchange for the new cash, and then do the same again when the company needs a second and third round of venture capital. In fact, venture capitalists these days are by and large not doing what they once did for the U.S. economy—backing early stage innovation to create the Googles and Genentechs they once did. This job is falling more and more to angel investors.

According to the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds, “venture capital plays almost no role in funding basic innovation, and a relatively small role in funding true startups, with only about 3 percent of the $21 billion VCs invested in 2005 going to such firms.”[1] Long-time venture capital lawyer Joseph Bartlett, who also runs the website VCExperts.com, gives a great example of this problem in action in a forthcoming report:[2]

To illustrate, let me repeat an anecdote which I share with my classes at law and business schools, to wit: In real estate the three rules of successful investing are “location, location, location.” The gag is that they are all the same rule. Transposing that wisecrack to venture capital, I preach that the three rules are: “dilution, dilution, dilution.”[3] I draw an inverted bell shaped curve on the blackboard and show how the early capital, which is the highest risk and therefore should be entitled to the highest reward, can so often be burnt out or crammed down by subsequent rounds of financing, including (as the curve slopes downward to its nadir) the “down rounds” which dilute the founder and the angels to trivial interests in the company. Then, when the company, as companies often do, recovers and is sold or goes public, the result is all too familiar: The VCs who invested in the later rounds, having crammed down their fellow investors, wind up making out like bandits, but the earliest money is left bleeding on the shore.

Angel investors know this, as do the entrepreneurs they finance, and they all take their chances anyway. Such risk-taking is the lifeblood of U.S. economic competitiveness. But increasingly these angels are not stepping up, depriving the U.S. economy of the most critical stage of risk capital formation for the creation of globally competitive new companies and good paying new jobs for their employees. “The economic impact of the seed money gap is staggering,” says Bartlett:

At a conservative minimum, at least $4 billion is lost to the U.S. economy each year. More realistically, the economy losses closer to $100 billion per year because of the funding gap. Socially, the losses are just as great. Products and services that would improve the lives of our country’s people are either never developed, or significantly delayed.[4]

Here’s one way that Congress and the Obama administration could fix the problem, according to Bartlett in his forthcoming report. The United States, he says, needs a tax efficient structure by which angels and founders and other very early stage investors in young companies can mitigate the impact of dilution brought on by subsequent venture capital financings. His vehicle for doing this are what he calls “up-the-ladder” warrants,[5] which would enable early investors in young companies to participate fully when the company eventually goes public or is sold—because of the warrants that will make up for the dilution the angels and entrepreneurs encounter because of follow-on rounds of venture financing. Warrants are financial instruments that allow holders to purchase stock in a company when the shares reach a pre-determined price—stock that can then be sold or held onto for capital gains and wealth accumulation.

The exercise price—the price at which the holder of the warrant can purchase stock—would need to be set at a number that is well “out of the money,” says Bartlett, which in financial parlance means well above the current share price, hence the name “up the ladder.” This would keep the VCs content to leave the warrants in place when they invest. Assuming all goes well with the sale or public offering of a startup financed by angels and VCs, everyone can profit. Here’s how Bartlett thinks the structure would work:[6]

1. Angels invest $1,000,000 for 100,000 common shares ($10 per share) at a pre-money valuation of $3 million, resulting in a post-money valuation of $4 million ($1 million going into the new company in the form of additional stock); the founder and key employees own 300,000 common shares.
2. The package includes 100 percent warrant coverage, meaning there is also a “call” on the company to issue another 100,000 shares of the company’s stock at a pre-determined exercise price.
3. This exercise price must be based on pre-money valuations that are relatively win-win for subsequent venture capital investors so that these later investors do not require the warrants be eliminated as a price for future investments. So, in our example here, the warrants will be based on pre-money valuations which are in fact win/win, say at $30, $40, and $50 a share (33,333 shares in each case).
4. Since the angels have invested $1 million at a post-money valuation of $4 million, they therefore own 25 percent of the company—100,000 shares out of a total of 400,000 outstanding. The three warrants, as stated, are each a call on 33,333 shares.
5. Subsequent “down rounds” of VC investment—a down round means an investment at a share price lower than prior to the investment—later raise $2 million and dilute the angels’ share of the company’s equity from 25 percent to 5 percent—their 100,000 shares now represent 5 percent of 2,000,000 shares (at a cost basis of $10 per share). The founder and key employees own 300,000 shares, or 15 percent and the VCs own the rest (1,600,000 shares at a cost basis of 80 cents a share due the down rounds).
6. The company then climbs out of the cellar and a trade sale is scheduled for $100 million in cash, or $50 per outstanding share.

Absent “up-the-ladder” warrants, the proceeds to the angels would be $5 million. This is not a bad return (5 times their original investment) but nonetheless inconsistent with the fact that the angels provided the initial cash capital (the founder and employee contribution is largely sweat equity). The “up-the-ladder” warrants would add to the angels’ ultimate outcome as follows: 33,333 warrants at $30 per share are in the money by $666,660 and 33,333 warrants at $40 a share are in the money by $333,330. So the angels net an additional $999,999—call it $1 million—out of the purchase price.

The angels’ total gross returns have increased to 6 times their original investment while the returns to the VCs and the founder/employees have slid to $94 million. Even if the $1 million going to the angels comes entirely out of the VC’s share, that’s a relatively trivial result—a gross payback of 39.5 times their investment versus 40 times. If the company sells for just $30 a share, the angels get nothing because the exercise price is not above the actual share price, and the VCs still make out.

Now there needs to be a reason for venture capitalists to offer these warrants not just to angel investors but also to the founders, friends, and family invested in these new and innovative companies, and perhaps also to the employees in the company who are working so hard to make it a success. Bartlett argues that capital gains on the warrants should be treated as taxable under Internal Revenue Code Section 1202, which reduces by half the tax on the gain from the sale of securities issued by so called Qualified Small Businesses, assuming that the investment has been held for five years. And the capital gains would not to be subject to Alternate Maximum Tax.

For this to work, though, there need to be carrots and sticks to persuade venture capitalists to offer and then honor these warrants all the way to a profitable “exit.” One way would be to provide the same capital gains treatment to venture capital investors under IRS Code Section 1202—provided the venture investors offer these “up-the-ladder” warrants to the founders, the angels, and other early -stage investors in the company, and perhaps the company’s employees, too.

Remember, taxpayers will not be out any money if the company is not financially successful, as this tax break only applies after successful investing. And the tax break for venture capital investors would not apply unless they offered these up-the-ladder warrants to all early-stage investors in the company between the original rounds of investments and the final valuation of the stocks upon the sale of the company.

Broad-based wealth creation in the service of stronger job creation to boost U.S. economic competitiveness. Surely that’s a win-win-win.

Ed Paisley is the Editorial Director for Science Progress and the Vice President, Editorial at the Center for American Progress.

Endnotes

[1] NASF, “Fostering Innovation Capital,” Seed and Venture Capital State Experiences and Options, May 2006, p. 4.

[2] “The Great Debate: Half Full vs. Half Empty,” a forthcoming paper by Joseph Bartlett, to be published in early 2010, which will dissent from the idea there is too much investment in venture capital in today’s environment in the United States.

[3] See www.vcexperts.com, Buzz Archive: http://vcexperts.com/vce/news/buzz/archive_view.asp?print=true&id=78.

[4] Bartlett, Keller, Materfis, “An Initial Measurement of the Impact of the Seed Money Gap in the U.S. Economy,” Section 13.1.3, www.vcexperts.com.

[5] http://vcexperts.com/vce/news/buzz/archive_view.asp?print=true&id=109

[6] Summarized from the forthcoming paper, “The Great Debate: Half Full vs. Half Empty.”

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I believe that the federal government can maximize the benefits of science and research parks, an integral part of sparking innovation and creating jobs in the US, by supporting regional innovation clusters to promote a comprehensive, long-term economic growth and development plans across regions in the United States.

My recommendation is that regional innovation clusters should become the centerpiece of a reauthorized Economic Development Administration (EDA), empowering the agency to work with businesses, universities, community colleges, state and local governments and community leaders to foster regional competitiveness strategies. This will help boost job creation and business growth by spurring the creation and growth of successful regional ecosystems, striking exactly the right balance between federal leadership and local responsibility and between the private and public sectors. Science parks and regional innovation clusters are two vital parts to a long-term solution – science parks will drive the clusters forward while the regional innovation cluster will strengthen and support the local framework in which the park can thrive. This broader effort will be the most effective and sustainable.

Read Sallet’s full testimony (pdf).

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Back in 2006, the year of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, it felt as though serious and irreversible progress had finally been made on the climate issue. The feeling continued in 2007, when Al Gore won the Nobel and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that global warming was “unequivocal” and “very likely” human caused. Mega-companies like General Electric were burnishing new green identities, and the Prius was an icon. The Bush administration was widely suspected of having deceived the public about the urgency of the climate issue, and journalists were backing away from their previous penchant for writing “on the one hand, on the other hand” stories about the increasingly indisputable science.

Then came the election of Barack Obama, boasting a forward-looking policy agenda to address global warming and a stellar team of scientists and environmentalists in his cabinet and circle of advisers, including climate and energy expert John Holdren and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu. The United States, it seemed, would finally deal with global warming—and just in the nick of time.

Who could have known, at the time, that the climate deniers and contrarians had not yet launched their greatest and most devastating attack? Certainly, it was hard to imagine how they might pull off such a strike: They had virtually nothing going for them, no raw scientific materials to work with. All the science pointed to a greater-than-ever urgency of addressing the climate issue and a quickly closing window of opportunity for action. Within scientific circles, it was even becoming commonplace to discuss planetary modification, or geoengineering, as an alternative last ditch solution if we couldn’t stop runaway greenhouse warming in time.

But the skeptics were lying in wait. They didn’t need good science to make another sally: Their strength has always been in communication tactics anyway, and not scientific exactitude or rigor. And the U.S. public, never overwhelmingly sure about climate change, has long been susceptible to their smokescreens and misinformation campaigns.

The new skeptic strategy began with a ploy that initially seemed so foolish, so petty, that it was unworthy of dignifying with a response. The contrarians seized upon the hottest year in some temperature records, 1998—which happens to have been an El Nino year, hence its striking warmth—and began to hammer the message that there had been “no warming in a decade” since then.

It was, in truth, little more than a damn lie with statistics. Those in the science community eventually pointed out that global warming doesn’t mean every successive year will be hotter than the last one—global temperatures be on the rise without a new record being set every year. All climate theory predicts is that we will see a warming trend, and we certainly have. Or as the U.S. EPA recently put it, “Eight of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.” But none of them beat 1998; and so the statistical liars, like George Will of the Washington Post, continued their charade.

The public was quite vulnerable to such messages: Americans don’t know climate science very well, and the notion that temperatures aren’t actually “rising” after all must have spurred many doubts. Indeed, I suspect the “no warming since 1998” line of attack helped contribute to an alarming finding released in October by the Pew Research Center: the proportion of Americans agreeing there is “solid evidence the earth is warming” had declined to 57 percent, from 71 percent a year and a half earlier. And those attributing warming to human activities—the robust scientific consensus view—had dwindled from 47 percent to 36 percent over the same time period.

This blow, however, was nothing compared to the “ClimateGate” saga of November, in which a bevy of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom were illegally obtained and exposed, thus generating a dramatic scandal over the climate scientists’ alleged attempts to silence skeptics and thwart freedom of information requests. The truth is that, analyzed in their proper context, there isn’t very much that’s damning about the emails (though some of the scientists may have some things to answer for). But even taken at their worst, the emails do not change one whit the urgency of addressing global warming.

Scientists have pointed this out repeatedly, but to no avail: “ClimateGate” generated a massive wave of media attention, blending together the skeptics’ longstanding focus on undercutting climate science with a new overwhelming message of scandal and wrongdoing on the part of the climate research establishment. This story was not going to go away, and even as scientists put out statements (most of them several days late) explaining that the science of climate remains unchanged and unaffected by whatever went on at East Anglia, the case for human-caused global warming was dealt a blow the likes of which we have perhaps never before seen.

Whether we will recover some necessary momentum in Copenhagen—a formal United Nations venue for deliberation where scientific expertise is respected, and where misinformation will likely have less power—is up in the air. Nevertheless, there’s an important lesson here, for the climate issue and beyond.

In our mass media age, on any politicized scientific topic, there is no reason to assume a correlation between increasing scientific certainty about a problem and increasing public awareness, acceptance, or willingness to take action to address that problem. If anything, the two might well become anti-correlated, as in the global warming case. And that is because—to speak in a language that scientists will certainly understand all too well—the state of the science is only one variable affecting public opinion. And in the global warming debate, there has been an utter failure to control for any of the others.

If scientists, their allies, and their supporters want to better ensure the translation of scientific knowledge into action than we’ve seen in the global warming case, there is simply no choice but to work much, much harder to influence public opinion, and anticipate and thwart the skeptics before they can bring about another “ClimateGate.”

[Clarification: This post originally indicated that climate contrarians seized upon 1998 as the "hottest year in the global temperature record"; it has been changed to indicate that this is the hottest year in some temperature records.]

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

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But the reason is not, as some people say, that young Americans lack the smarts or the skills to succeed in those fields. Instead, it appears that longstanding U.S. policies have destroyed the incentives that used to attract many of the nation’s best young minds into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM fields). And that means that as the United States faces increasing technological and scientific competition from abroad, the country isn’t getting the full benefit of the brainpower it is paying to educate.

“It’s a labor market story,” not an education story, says one of the report’s authors, Harold Salzman, of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Rather than staying with STEM for graduate studies or a first job, many of our most able college graduates are now opting out of the pipeline that the nation used to count on to carry gifted students into STEM careers.

The new findings contradict the argument that some high-tech employers have been putting forward for a decade now: that American education doesn’t produce enough high-quality science and math graduates. This purported talent deficit, they insist, means that the nation, to stay competitive, must import more technically trained workers and massively overhaul K-12 scientific and math education.

But the data suggest something completely different. They show no such deficit. Earlier studies by Salzman and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University establish that American schools turn out very large numbers of students who score at the very top of international math comparisons (while also producing large numbers who score at the bottom, resulting in mediocre averages.). Statistics from the National Science Board indicate, furthermore, that the nation’s colleges each year produce several times as many homegrown holders of STEM degrees as can find work in those areas. And among the STEM graduates of former years, unemployment of American engineers is at historic highs.

But the new study reveals an ominous trend among the scientifically gifted. Although the numbers of young Americans studying STEM in high school and college are as strong as ever, the very best of those students, as indicated by their SAT scores and college grade point averages, are less likely than in decades past to stay in STEM when they leave college.

But the answer to the problem may not be complicated. Higher salaries and more stable career tracks have lured these grads away from scientific jobs, and those same incentives, an author of the study suggests, could draw them back into STEM fields.

A generation gap

In the new study, Lowell, Salzman, and co-authors tracked three cohorts of American STEM students through their educations and early careers. Using standard government data sets, they focused on what young people do at the crucial transitions of their lives. How many of those who study science and advanced math in high school proceed on to college and continue to study STEM fields when they get there? How many of those who earn a STEM degree get a job in a STEM field? How many are still in STEM fields ten or more years later?

The results show that young Americans are as likely as ever to major in science. “On average,” the new report states, “there has been no substantive change in the proportion of high school graduates who go on to complete or enroll in a STEM field of study.” And, encouragingly, “ the highest performers are significantly more likely to major in STEM than the lower performers.” But then, in the late 1990s, the percentage of the students in the top quintile of STEM ability who chose to major in STEM fields took a “striking” drop—from nearly 30 percent to under 15 percent, while the percentages of those in lower ability groups who chose STEM majors remained essentially unchanged. The percentage of the highest performers who earned STEM bachelor’s degrees fell from 43 percent in the classes of 1992 through 1997 to 29 percent in the classes of 2000 through 2005.

But if the drop in high-scoring STEM majors were not discouraging enough, the news from those who did get STEM degrees was even worse. The percentage of those holding STEM bachelor’s degrees who went on either to work in or study a STEM field rose steadily and sharply from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, from 31.5 percent of the 1977 through 1980 classes, to 52.8 percent of the 1997 through 2000 cohort. But, in the late 90s, the percentage begins to fall, particularly sharply among the most able, from 52 percent to 48 percent.

“Given what we know about the state of the economy and the exploding field of STEM occupations in the 1990s”—the period of the runaway tech boom—“it may seem puzzling to see a decline in retention,” the report states. “It is common knowledge that the STEM job market was expanding in the that period, so the drop in retention might seem surprising because the jobs were available for the taking.” And looking farther out along the career trajectory, the data show “declining retention among the top performers” in STEM careers ten years out from the bachelor’s degree. The late 1990s, they say, “marked a turning point…at least for the best students”—and the “decline seems to have come on quite suddenly.”

These results “strongly suggest that students are not leaving STEM pathways because of lack of preparation or ability,” the authors conclude. Instead, the data “suggest that we turn our attention to factors other than educational preparation or student ability” to explain what is going on.

The Rhodes advantage

And, as it turns out, STEM fields are not the only traditional employers of the nation’s ablest young people that appear to be losing their attraction. The Rhodes Scholarship is by far the most prestigious, and probably the most competitive, academic award that a young American can win. The winners, drawn from a broad range of college majors, study a subject of their choice at Oxford University and then return home “with virtually any job available to them,” writes the Rhodes Trust’s American secretary, Elliot Gerson, on the Washington Post op-ed page. For almost a century, these ultimate achievers “have overwhelmingly chosen paths in scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law, the military and public service, [reaching] the highest levels in virtually all fields.”

In recent years, however, increasing numbers of the consummately accomplished Rhodes alumni have eschewed those traditional vocations in favor of “Wall Street, finance [or] general business management”—fields previously considered rather beneath the horizon of America’s most promising young leaders, Gerson continues. Only three of the 320 American Rhodes scholars chosen in the decade of 1970s, for example, opted for the world of commerce. But fully 6 of the 32 chosen in one recent year made that choice. “This break in an almost century-old pattern coincided with great increases in occupational earnings differentials, which have continued to grow, seemingly exponentially,” Gerson continues. “It seems quaint, if not unfathomable, that just three decades ago the differentials in earnings—generally two- to fivefold between business leaders and doctors or lawyers, or five- to tenfold with professors, scientists and public servants—were often rationalized by Rhodes scholars as reasonable additional compensation to balance the lower standing of business jobs among their peers.”

The Lowell-Salzman team doesn’t yet have complete data to show that many of the ablest STEM students who abandoned the pipeline have followed suit, but Salzman strongly suspects that Gerson has at least part of the answer. “Go to top level schools and they’ll tell you of a huge shift at the school level into finance” and related fields, he says. Elite colleges represent a relatively small proportion of the nation’s students, he continues, “but they pull disproportionately from the very top,” presumably many of the students capable of doing topflight science. Meanwhile, he adds, “everything shows that wages and working conditions and career prospects have stagnated and sometimes gotten worse” in STEM occupations in recent years, “and there are other job prospects” for students able to do higher math.

Mathematicians, physicists, astronomers and others with advanced STEM training have, in exchange for incomes many times those available to postdocs or professors, or even to industrial engineers and scientists, become the “quants” (quantitative experts) behind the many elaborate investment vehicles of recent years. The financial collapse may have reduced the number of the ablest students headed straight to Wall Street, but even so, “management, law, medicine, all those fields pay better than technical and science fields,” Salzman says. They also provide greater career security. Students aiming for STEM careers in academe now face daunting prospects. Qualified applicants vastly outnumber faculty openings, and in many fields, a would-be researcher must first spend an average of seven years earning a Ph.D. and several more as a low-paid postdoc before he or she can even apply for one of the hard-to-get academic posts. And in a number of high-tech industries, students worry about work being moved offshore or, in many cases, the need to compete here at home with often lower-paid foreign workers on temporary visas.

Stopping the talent drain

How great a threat to the nation’s innovative capacity—and to its competitiveness—does the loss of these scientifically able students to other occupations represent? It’s impossible to say, Salzman believes. “Innovation is not well understood,” and “no relationship” has been demonstrated between the number of a country’s scientists or engineers and its ability to make major breakthroughs. “Innovation comes out of a small group of people…. if there are small areas of innovative activity, then these broad trends may or may not make a difference,” he says. Some major technical advances have been made by people who would not show up in statistics as scientists or engineers—including college dropouts tinkering with electronic components in their parents’ garages and bicycle mechanics convinced that they could build a machine that would fly. But it’s very likely that at least some of the high-caliber brainpower lately devoted to devising elaborate investment models could just as well have created advances in various scientific or technological fields.

If the nation believes that this threat is real, the answer, Salzman says, appears to be simple market economics. Increasing the size of the scientific pipeline is a highly inefficient way of getting more STEM workers, because the best students are falling off right at the end, not dropping off the middle. “To the extent that they’re leaving the pipeline, they’re leaving when they get to the labor market. It’s not high school or college.”

“Imagine a manufacturer is able to get only 60 percent of this product to market because 40 percent falls off the assembly line,” Salzman continues. “If you know that you’re getting sixty percent off the line, you’d say, ‘Gee how could we get 70 percent?’ ….We’ve got to get more of them coming out of college rather than trying to double the numbers going in.”

And an effective way to do that, he says, is also simple market economics: improve the incomes and careers that STEM fields offer the best graduates. “If the nation really values these fields, show them the money, show them the stable careers,” he says.

“This is one of the areas where we should believe that markets actually work. Let’s be capitalists about this, free market capitalists, and understand that we need to provide market incentives to get the results we want.”

Beryl Lieff Benderly, a regular Science Progress contributor and prize-winning Washington journalist, writes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column about scientific labor force issues for Science Careers, a feature of the website of Science magazine.

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Speaking today with reporters during a press call organized by the Center for American progress, Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, emphasized that despite the uproar, nothing changes about the scientific conclusions on climate change:

From my point of view, the most important issue is whether anything has been added to or subtracted from the scientific picture of global warming that’s emerged gradually over several decades of careful analysis by thousands of experts. The answer is simple. From a scientific point of view, nothing has changed. It remains true that Earth has warmed more than 1 degree Fahrenheit  over last century largely due to the buildup of human-made greenhouse gases…it remains the case that the projections of future climate change are every bit as discouraging as they were before the recent flap began. [Full audio and a transcript of the call are available here.]

Denialist arguments like the one offered in the WSJ are remarkable in that they ignore basic measurable facts about how climate change is altering the planet at this very moment. Global warming is currently melting 18,000 Himalayan glaciers. Wildfires stoked by increased temperatures are burning 7 million acres of the American west every year. Changes in precipitation patterns in the continental United States caused up to $8 billion in agricultural loses last year.

Simply put, we don’t need to wait and see if our planet’s climate will change as a result of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. The change is already happening. As Chris Mooney put it in June, when the United States Global Change Research Program released its updated assessment of the impact of climate change on the country: “We have every reason to expect that these regionally variable changes will steadily worsen, with resulting severe threats to coastal communities, water supplies, agriculture, human health, and more.”

Henninger’s claim that “science is dying” is merely the latest iteration in the continuing conservative war on science, in which naysayers trash the research enterprise without engaging the scientific facts or mounting any credible response to the avalanche of evidence from multiple fields that underpins the work on climate change. As the editors of the journal Nature wrote yesterday:

Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

As for other facts of recent and distant history, Henninger dismisses the significance of 2007 Nobel Prize writing that it “was bestowed (on a politician),” neglecting to mention that the other half of the prize went to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body comprising 2,000 scientists from around the world. He goes on to compare the exchanges in the hacked emails to the Catholic church’s attempt to silence Galileo. Alas, as Mooney points out, the comparison is off-base: “The people who dissented in the history of science, but were overwhelmingly wrong, tend to be forgotten. Galileo dissented and he happened to be overwhelmingly right.” Moreover, like today’s climate change deniers, it was the Catholic church that rejected scientific facts that didn’t fit into its worldview.

The WSJ editorial section would like you to believe that “science is dying,” but the claim proves only one thing: that in the face of climate change science, some conservatives will continue their efforts to ensure the death of reason itself.

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These new policies implemented President Obama’s March 9^th Executive Order, which marked a much-needed departure from President George W. Bush’s policy. The former president’s ethical guidelines for federally funded human embryonic stem cell research were limited simply to a declaration that no government money could support work on lines derived before August 9, 2001. This left scientists with only 21 lines of low scientific quality and ethically questionable origins.

Eleven of the 13 new cell lines came from Children’s Hospital in Boston and the other two came from Rockefeller University in New York and were approved through the NIH’s normal administrative review process. There are 96 more lines awaiting approval either through the same process or by an alternative process for cell lines derived before the new guidelines went into effect. As part of that alternative process, approximately 20 lines will be reviewed tomorrow by the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director. Now that these 13 lines have been added to the NIH Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry, research can begin on the 30 hESC research projects that have received over $20 million in NIH grants for 2009. According to the NIH press release:

This group of grants includes research using hESCs for the therapeutic regeneration of diseased or damaged heart muscle cells, developing systems for the production of neural stem cells and different types of neurons from hESCs in culture, and developing a cell culture system for the large scale production and self-renewal of hESCs.

The approval of the lines could not come at a better time. As Ali H. Brivanlou, a researcher at Rockefeller University who had to segregate privately and federally funded research activities under the Bush regime, told The New York Times, “You can imagine what it meant not to be able to carry a pipette from one room to another.…They even had to repaint the walls to ensure no contamination by federal funds.”

Indeed, Science Progress is glad to see that scientists can now do their work uncontaminated by bad bioethics policy.

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And now, the climate change deniers will claim a scalp.

Yesterday, climate researcher Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the UK—which is responsible for one of three important datasets tracking global temperature trends—announced he would be stepping aside pending an independent review of allegations that have emerged in the scandal variously referred to as “ClimateGate” and the “SwiftHack.” It’s just the latest development in a saga that began when a boatload of CRU emails and documents, obtained through an illegal computer hacking, made their way into the public arena last month. The files were instantly seized upon by climate change skeptics and deniers, who touted them—with a combination of glee and histrionic outrage—as evidence of mainline scientists conspiring to quash legitimate dissent, and to conceal problems with the data and analyses used to demonstrate human-caused global warming.

The truth, however, is that while the CRU emails don’t always look very good—and not all of them can necessarily be defended—in the end this saga amounts to little more than a distraction from the real and burning issues in climate science and climate policy. Moreover, its suspicious timing—coming just weeks before the U.N. Copenhagen climate conference—suggests a strategic attempt to undermine those international deliberations by once again casting doubt on the scientific basis for concern about climate change—a tried, true, and seemingly unending political strategy.

Unfortunately for climate skeptics, the CRU hacking incident fails to support the burden that they have placed upon it. Whatever behavior was revealed in these emails, even its most salacious interpretation can scarcely undermine the global edifice of knowledge about the causes of ongoing climate change—which may be bolstered by, but certainly does not rely solely upon, CRU’s research and analyses. Mainline scientists fully recognize this; thus, following the CRU hacking, the American Meteorological Society reaffirmed its longstanding statement on the human causation of climate change, remarking that “Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true—which is not yet clearly the case—the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.”

In truth, of course, few if any of the CRU emails could legitimately be called scandalous. True, the files show scientists carrying on in a far less guarded fashion than they would in public, and some of them do appear suspicious—but in each individual case, we must also understand the context. Typically, the email-zipping scientists now under massive scrutiny are reacting in the communications to various controversies and scandals in the field—most of which are, in turn, the result of systematic attacks on climate research by conservative think tanks, politicians, and a small group of “skeptic” scientists.

Take, for instance, a rather innocent email from the year 2003 that has been made much hay of, in which climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University opines that “I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” This has been depicted as evidence of some systematic attempt to suppress dissent or manipulate the scientific process, but the conclusion is unwarranted. Mann is referring to an episode in which this little-known journal published a wildly controversial paper on historic temperature trends that was widely attacked and picked apart by mainstream researchers; in the wake of its publication, several editors at the journal actually resigned. No wonder scientists like Mann were upset with Climate Research. That’s especially so given that, despite its flaws, the controversial Soon & Baliunas paper was instantly and inappropriately thrust into political debate at the highest level via a Senate hearing convened by Oklahoma global warming denier James Inhofe, who claimed that the paper “shifts the paradigm” away from the conclusion that global warming is human caused. (Not.)

Or take another email that has been much touted, one in which Phil Jones writes, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The word “trick,” and the phrase “hide the decline,” have been treated as smoking guns by climate skeptics, but once again, the conclusion is unwarranted. As the bloggers at RealClimate.org (including Mann) note, “trick” here is simply a methodological device or innovation, in this case for merging and presenting data. “Hide the decline” might seem more problematic when taken out of context, but what this actually means is the exclusion of one set of climate records (based on tree rings) that do not show warming after 1960, and are known to be problematic for this reason and not considered reliable. Far from being scandalous, then, this is good scientific practice.

Perhaps the most troubling document in the CRU cache is one that shows Phil Jones actively emailing other climate researchers, telling them to “delete any emails” subject to a Freedom of Information request. Jones now claims he didn’t actually delete any; Mann, who received the email in question, says likewise; and CRU itself says that “No record has been deleted, altered, or otherwise dealt with in any fashion with the intent of preventing the disclosure of all, or any part, of the requested information.” It is understandable that climate scientists under such intense and often politically driven scrutiny would bristle at the prospect of having skeptics selectively reanalyze their data with an ax to grind (indeed, such a qualm about selective interpretation is fully borne out by responses to the CRU emails). Still, such an email is troubling, and the inquiry just launched will understandably probe how CRU has responded to a “deluge of Freedom of Information requests.”

But whatever that inquiry shows, this core fact remains: Just because a group of scientists were found to have behaved like imperfect human beings in emails they thought would remain private does not mean that we don’t have to worry about global warming. Anyone arguing otherwise is making a stunning leap based on the most scanty and inappropriate of evidence—and the willingness of climate skeptics to do this has always been, and will remain, the real scandal.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

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The more recent generation of women appears to be taking a different approach to planning their lives, more sensitive to the problems in maintaining a balance of work and family. In a controversial 2005 article in The New York Times, Louise Story reported anecdotal evidence that many women in elite colleges were thinking twice about combining careers and families, and there have been many other books and stories since then about women’s unhappiness in trying to do it all. This is true even in academia, which has generally been more accommodating to people with families, given the faculty’s relative autonomy and the flexibility of work hours. And the problem has been, most significantly, in the natural sciences, where the hours tend to be long and the competitive pressures unceasing throughout a person’s career.

Witness the recent report published by the Center for American Progress and the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic and Family Security on “Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences,” which asserts that “both men and women report a shifting away from the career goal of a research professor, with women’s moves being more pronounced.”

The report focuses its recommendations for institutions on creating more family-friendly policies, including stopping the tenure clock for bearing and caring for children, the provision of child care support and tuition remission, and even the construction of lactation rooms. There is no question that there must be a stronger institutional response of this kind before we lose a generation of American scientists, male and female. And as long as the burden of childcare and domestic life still falls mainly on women, it will be the women that we lose.

But from where I sit, as a dean who oversees the hiring and promotion of faculty across a school of arts and sciences, I see we will have to do more than provide childcare. There will have to be a change in culture in the assessment of academic productivity, which now privileges an unrelenting rate of massive amounts of work over time. Everyone recognizes that the expectations for academic productivity have escalated in the past forty years: what got you tenure in 1970 would certainly not get you tenure now, whether at an elite liberal arts college or a research university.

The CAP-Berkeley report does address the issue of time and work, for example, in its recommendation to “remove time-based criteria for fellowships and productivity assessment that do not acknowledge family events and their impact on career timing.” But what happens when people with and without such extensions are competing for jobs and tenure in the same pool? When at least some people can produce new results and publications at an exceptionally high rate, because they have no other responsibilities or demands on their time, should the same be expected of everyone?

As a dean, I am responsible for making sure that my school is hiring, tenuring, and promoting the very best faculty, who will serve the institution and their field of knowledge in multiple capacities: as scholars, teachers, and citizens over a long career. Science is hard, and it moves fast, and we do indeed want scientists who can handle the work and its pace. But we also want to have faculty who are well-adjusted and good colleagues: we want faculty, indeed, who know how to “have a life.”

I believe that having a family made me a better teacher and colleague, if only because it made me stop working every once in a while, and because it brought me to appreciate a world outside of the library, lab, and classroom. And it made me no worse a scholar. I want my daughter, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in high-energy physics, to believe that she, too, can have a family and follow the passion for science that has driven her since he was in high school. But what can I really tell her about the world she will enter in a year, as she tries to balance her work and personal life? Should she seek a post-doctoral position, or should she go on the job market?

Academic leadership needs to be clear about the signals that we send to our undergraduates, graduate students, and junior faculty—male and female—about what constitutes success and what we value in them as scientists but also as future colleagues and as human beings. We can do this with material support for them to be able to lead full and productive lives, but we also need to give our moral support to their personal as well as scientific dreams.

Dr. Rebecca W. Bushnell is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and the Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor, as well as a Professor of English, at the University of Pennsylvania.

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President Obama said this in the White House press release:

As our nation invests in science and innovation and pursues advances in biomedical research and health care, it’s imperative that we do so in a responsible manner. This new Commission will develop its recommendations through practical and policy-related analyses. I am confident that Amy and Jim will use their decades of experience in both ethics and science to guide the new Commission in this work, and I look forward to listening to their recommendations in the coming months and years.

At Science Progress, we are glad that the president has chosen such distinguished scholars and leaders as Drs. Gutmann and Wagner to chair this commission. The Executive Order provides for a commission comprised of 13 members who will be appointed by the president for renewable periods of two years. We look forward to the announcement of the remaining 11 members.

The commission has been charged with not only identifying and examining important bioethical issues, but also with recommending laws, policies, or regulations. Finally, the EO encourages the commission to engage diverse viewpoints and explore opportunities for international collaboration.

Additionally, the commission is designed so that is will draw members from multiple disciplines ranging from science and bioethics to theology and law. At least one and not more than three of the members will be scientists or bioethicists from the executive branch. Finally, the EO lays out a list of timely, critical issues and ideas that will no doubt change our lives, and many of which staff and contributors have explored in Science Progress:

…the creation of stem cells by novel means; intellectual property issues involving genetic sequencing, biomarkers, and other screening tests used for risk assessment; and the application of neuro- and robotic sciences…the protection of human research participants; scientific integrity and conflicts of interest in research; and the intersection of science and human rights.

Update: The Executive Order establishing the commission is now available in the Federal Register.

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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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What is genetic testing?

Every person’s unique genetic makeup determines many of his or her individual traits. Some of these traits—like the color of our eyes, hair, and skin—are visible to the naked eye and strongly linked to genes in our DNA. But many genes play a role in determining traits we cannot see, such susceptibility to disease or how our bodies react to various chemicals. Scientists have understood for years the direct link between certain genes and specific diseases, but as our understanding of human genetic variation improves and the cost of genetic testing drops, new possibilities for personalized medicine arise. But along with these opportunities come questions about how to interpret the avalanche of genetic information and how to protect it from improper use.

Genetic testing is not new. Scientists identified the genetic mutation that causes Huntington disease, a progressive and fatal brain disorder, in 1993. In recent years, companies began marketing tests for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that indicate an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. But over the past few years, steep reductions in the cost of gene sequencing technology have allowed companies to offer direct-to-consumer genetic testing. These new companies may help drive the expansion of personalized medicine, but proper oversight is necessary because these new tests raise policy questions about privacy, safety, and their usefulness in clinical decision-making. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s GeneTests website, there are now genetic tests available for over 1,800 diseases.

What are the different uses of genetic tests?

Genetic tests serve a variety purposes. Some diagnose a disease after symptoms have manifested themselves. Some are aimed at predicting the likelihood of a disease. Others predict the likely effectiveness of a drug or treatment based on an individual’s genes—this is known as pharmacogenomics. Tests for carrier status look for disease-related genes that parents may pass on to their children even though the parents do not have the disease. Genetic tests for newborns can determine if they need immediate intervention for a preventable or treatable condition such as phenylketonuria, a metabolic glitch that, if left unaddressed, would result in mental retardation or other serious problems, but that can be completely averted with proper dietary adjustment.

Genetic tests can also be conducted on an embryo created through in vitro fertilization before it is transferred into a uterus. This same process is referred to as preimplantation genetic screening when is used to select embryos that have chromosomal defects that may prevent them from surviving an entire pregnancy. This screening process is referred to as preimplantation genetic diagnosis when it is used to select against an embryo with a disease, condition, or—more controversially—an undesirable physical or mental trait. An IVF clinic in California called the Fertility Institute has even advertised that it can select embryos based on gender, eye color, hair color, and skin tone. But after several weeks of heated reactions to this advertisement, the institute suspended its program.

Direct-to-consumer, or DTC, genetic tests allow patients and consumers to bypass their doctors altogether and obtain a test from a company over the internet. These companies include 23andMe, Navigenics, DeCode (which has recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy), and Pathway Genomics. These companies offer whole-genome scans for a few hundred dollars. Some also offer genetic tests for specific diseases or conditions as well as ancestry testing. Usually, these DTC tests utilize statistical techniques that provide a significant amount of information about a genome by only scanning a few hundred thousand molecular units (or nucleotides) out of the six billion units that comprise the human genome. The company Knome will sequence every nucleotide—or chemical unit of DNA—in an individual’s genome for $100,000. The companies that offer these DTC tests do not consider them medical products. Nevertheless, some have been known to tout their employment of on-staff physicians and genetic counselors to review customer orders.

Some Internet-based companies offer nutrigenomic tests, which purport to determine what kinds of foods you should be eating based on your genome. However, a Government Accountability Office investigation led to a scathing 2006 report on the industry. The report found that many of the tests gave recommendations that were “ambiguous” and “medically unproven.” Some of the tests were also attached to advertisements for ineffective dietary supplements, and some of the supplements had price tags of as much as $1,200 a year.

How will genetic tests change medicine and how are they already changing it?

Many researchers and clinicians anticipate that genetic tests will aid in the development of new drugs and treatments tailored to patients with specific genetic profiles. The government, private industry, and the medical community still have lots of work to do on research, administrative reorganization, and devising new protocols to make personalized medicine a reality and to make the incorporation of genetic information into regular medical decision making safe, meaningful, and effective. The recent report, “Paving the Way for Personalized Medicine,” explains these issues in detail.

According to a recent survey, 15 percent of healthcare providers reported that at least one patient brought them DTC genetic test results in the past year. Of those providers, 75 percent changed some aspect of their patient’s care based on the test results. This reaction by the clinicians demonstrates a disconnect between the clinical community and the research community on the perceived effectiveness of genetic tests. The research community believes that current studies have only found a small fraction of the genetic components of most conditions. Additionally, there is scant evidence that genetic tests lead to changes in treatment that improve health outcomes, also known as clinical utility. At this point, there are multiple views concerning the level of encouragement physicians should be giving their patients about adopting DTC genetic testing as a guide for personal health care. Some feel that physicians should wait until there are more comprehensive studies about the clinical outcomes of genomic medicine. Others argue that physicians should encourage prevention with genetic tests and teach their patients about the science as it develops so that they do not seek information from other and possibly less-reliable sources.

Geneticist J. Craig Venter recommends in a recent Nature article that companies report the proportion of disease risk attributable to genetic markers, focus on diseases and traits with high-risk predictions, and agree on a set of strong-effect genetic markers for specific conditions.

What are the privacy concerns?

Thanks to the passage Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, employers and health insurance companies cannot obtain an individual’s genetic information without his or her consent and cannot use an individual’s genetic information to deny that individual a job, promotion, or health insurance coverage. Unfortunately, these federal protections do not extend to disability insurance, long-term care insurance, and life insurance. However, 16 states regulate the use of genetic information in life insurance; 16 states regulate its use in disability insurance; and 10 states regulate the its use in long-term care insurance. Of course, these policies all vary from state to state.

Many of the companies offering direct-to-consumer genetic testing also compile databases of genetic information that they gather from their customers. This is the second major component of their business model, as the data is valuable for advancing genetic research. But informed consent process for this information raises new, complex issues.

In an interview with Science Progress, Stanford bioethicist Sandra Lee explained the consent processes that some of these companies have adopted for using or selling their customers’ genetic data for research purposes. Some have adopted policies of “open consent” where a customer agrees to allow research on their genetic data for any studies in the future. This marks a break with the traditional rules of informed consent in clinical trials where all potential uses of the subject’s information must be disclosed. Navigenics has adopted a policy of asking customers to opt-in to research and then provide new consent forms to customers every time a new study arises. 23andMe also has a similar consent policy wherein they provide individual data to their research partners.

Most informed consent forms for genetic research indicate that a subject’s genetic information will be de-identified by separating the genetic information from the subject’s name and other personal information. Of course, some studies focus on the links between genes and other identifying information like ethnicity, family history, or disease status; and the informed consent forms tend to vary from study to study.

One of the most common types of genetic studies is the genome wide association study, commonly referred to as a GWAS. In a this type of study, scientists take a group of people who possess a certain phenotype—an observable characteristic or a trait like height, a condition like hypertension, or a disease like cancer—and compare them with a group of people without that phenotype. The scientists look at hundreds of thousands of single units of DNA known as single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs. Whichever SNPs are more likely to be present in the people who possess the phenotype and absent in those without it are considered associated SNPs. An associated SNP is not directly responsible for the phenotype, though it does indicate that the genetic sequence that is responsible may lie somewhere nearby on the genome. Scientists will then examine the relevant section of the genome and attempt to identify the exact sequence that is responsible.

The hope of many researchers is that with the passage and enforcement of GINA, more people will volunteer for genomic research. GINA is needed now more than ever since even though researchers remove subject names and other identifiers from the genetic data they collect, researchers demonstrated in 2008 that it is nonetheless possible to work backward from a common pool of de-identified genetic information and identify individuals in a database. As a result, the National Institutes of Health implemented stronger security controls for their GWAS databases.

How do scientists or regulators assess the reliability of genetic tests?

In order for genetic tests to have a meaningful impact on medicine, they need to be rigorously assessed and held to transparent empirical and clinical standards. Not only do the labs and diagnostic manufacturers need to demonstrate that the tests they conduct can reliably find the genes they purport to look for, researchers also need to show that once the genes are detected by a test, they can reliably predict a phenotype and help to inform treatment decisions in a way that improves health. This is a tall order to say the least, but scientists and regulators assess tests according to three criteria: analytical validity, clinical validity, and clinical utility.

• Analytical validity is the ability of a test to find a specific genetic sequence, broadly referred to as the “analyte.” Genes are different from other analytes like proteins, which can be present in varying amounts, since a gene is either present or absent.
• Clinical validity is the probability that you will get a disease if you test positive and that you will not get the disease if you test negative. The probability that a disease will appear if a disease-related gene is found is called the penetrance of the gene.
• Clinical utility is the ability of a genetic test’s results to lead to a course of action or interventions that result in improved health outcomes.

A coalition of researchers has also proposed a fourth criterion called personal utility. Research on this criterion would assess the patient’s or population subgroup’s perception of the advantages of genetic testing and whether it would affect the patient’s behavior and subsequent clinical utility of the genetic test. The social considerations and metrics for this criterion are still under development.

What are the gaps in the oversight of direct-to-consumer genetic tests?

Aside from the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act regulations and limited Food and Drug Administration rules, most lab regulation has been left up to the states. Many policymakers, bioethicists, and representatives from the DTC industry feel that this patchwork of state regulations is not sufficient and that the lack of federal oversight has left a gaping hole in the regulatory framework. Two pieces of legislation that would regulate genetic testing and labs have long been on the Congressional back-burner: the “Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act of 2007” sponsored by then-Senator Obama and the “Laboratory Test Improvement Act of 2007” sponsored by the late Senator Edward Kennedy. Ultimately, whether through legislation or simply new regulatory protocols, this regulatory gap can easily be filled by four measures that will allow for the federal oversight of genetic tests, the labs that conduct them, the transparency of their results, and the advertising of direct-to-consumer genetic tests. The Center for American Progress and the Genetics and Public Policy Center have made these recommendations:

1. Have the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, create a “specialty” for genetic testing laboratories.
2. Expand the FDA’s jurisdiction to include the regulation of lab-developed tests in addition to pre-manufactured test “kits” that already fall under its jurisdiction.
3. Create a mandatory genetic test registry so that the clinical validity of all genetic tests is transparent for the public.
4. The FDA and FTC should collaborate on curtailing false or misleading advertising by genetic testing companies in accordance with Section 5 of the FTC Act.

Last year, 23andMe collaborated with Navigenics, de CODE, and the Personalized Medicine Coalition to release a statement outlining the standards they would like to see governing the scientific validity of DTC genetic tests. A recent panel convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NIH welcomed their input but also advocated independent assessments from the Depart of Health and Human Services U.S. Preventive Services Task Force or the CDC’s Evaluation of Genomic Applications in Practice and Prevention. Both the governmental and private groups are moving ahead with their standard-setting and assessment efforts, but it remains to be seen rules will materialize.

Michael Rugnetta is a research assistant with the Progressive Bioethics Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

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Particularly in the post-WWII era, the United States witnessed an explosion of complex, science-based aerospace platforms (both airborne and space-based) and remote sensing technologies. This milieu, however, quickly diverged into two different communities: the Watchmen, who monitored the Earth to ensure security, and the Scientists, who monitored the Earth to develop a better fundamental understanding of Earth processes such as the atmosphere, weather, oceans, land dynamics, and later, meta-level phenomena like climate change. It is important to understand how these two communities emerged, diverged, and that they hold the potential, if they ally, to address some of the world’s most vexing problems. It is a ripe opportunity to adapt American institutions to better exploit the synergies between the Watchmen and the Scientists.

It’s time for the Obama administration to leverage the independent reviews recently conducted for both NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, to develop a comprehensive Earth observation strategy. A comprehensive approach to developing, deploying, and utilizing our eyes in the sky can ensure more effective and efficient use of precious intellectual and financial resources as we struggle to address traditional national security challenges, the array of transnational threats that plague us, as well as the complex, looming menace posed by global climate change. But this will require significant attention paid to national security reform, the governance of Earth science, a fundamental rethinking of the programming and budgeting process, and—not least of all—leadership.

The Emergence of Science-Based Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance

Scientists first tackled the ISR challenges of warfare during World War I. The United States military sponsored the development of infrared-sensitive photographic plates for the purposes of improved aerial photography capable of differentiating between camouflage and the vegetation that it was designed to imitate. Another WWI application was based on British/Canadian research, which led to what ultimately became known as SONAR, enabling the Allies to combat the rising threat of submarine warfare. The interwar period saw a maturation of such technologies, and a continuation of military-sponsored R&D into ISR capabilities. Based on such successes, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Scientific Research and Development in June of 1941 in order to coordinate scientific research for military purposes during WWII. Vannevar Bush, OSRD’s first director, reported directly to the president and was given effectively unlimited resources to help the nation meet a seemingly unconquerable threat. Many of the notable OSRD innovations were weapons systems, like the famed Manhattan Project. ISR technology did, however, flow from OSRD sponsorship, including innovations like RADAR.

Based on the successful contribution of American science to both advanced weapons and ISR techniques and technologies, Bush, in his famous treatise Science—The Endless Frontier, argued to President Roosevelt for a post-war social compact with the science community that called for the long-term federal underwriting of science, with no strings attached. In return, science would yield unspecified and, under Bush’s mental model of basic science, unspecifiable benefits to society. Standing on this foundation, American basic science enjoyed a post-war expansion in support largely undirected by the state.

At the same time, even greater resources went into mission-oriented science and technology, particularly when the mission had benefits to the national security enterprise. The term “space race,” which is widely thought of as a response to the Soviet Sputnik launch, actually began with the American acquisition of Werner Von Braun and his German compatriots from the crumbling Nazi regime during the last days of the Third Reich, under the auspices of Project Paperclip. From their perch at Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, which continues to this day as a center of excellence for the American space enterprise, Von Braun’s team served as the center of a vast space R&D network that simultaneously supported the American drive toward intercontinental ballistic missiles, the quest for space-based military/intelligence reconnaissance, the desire to better understand the science of the Earth’s processes, and ultimately President John F. Kennedy’s goal to land a man on the Moon.

The resources driving these mission-focused programs rapidly eclipsed the resources allocated to Vannevar Bush’s compact with the basic science community. The aerospace-industrial complex managed to institutionalize this resource bias, as everyone reached for space. The coterminous rise of both space-based ISR and space-based scientific Earth observation demonstrate this dynamic quite clearly.

In the wake of Sputnik’s October 1957 launch, the American Cold War rush to space resulted in many scientific successes, as a blinding array of satellites (Explorer 1, Vanguard 1C, Explorer 3, Explorer 4, Vanguard 2D, Vanguard II, Explorer 6, Vanguard IIIc, Explorer 7) demonstrated the ability to observe trapped radiation of various energies, galactic cosmic rays, geomagnetism, radio propagation in the upper atmosphere, solar x-ray radiation and its effects on the Earth’s atmosphere, the near-Earth micrometeoroid environment, and—with TIROS I (Television and InfraRed Observation Satellite)—the Earth’s cloud cover and weather patterns from space using television cameras.

During this same 1957-1960 period, some 12 military/intelligence photo reconnaissance satellites failed to demonstrate operational success, a streak that ended with Discoverer 14 / CORONA 9009 / KH-1 in August 1960. Though enormous resources were spent, the military/intelligence community could only claim the success of a data relay satellite, an electronic intelligence, or ELINT, sensor (the Galactic Radiation Background Experiment), and a two navigation satellites (TRANSIT).

Launches for both scientific and military/intelligence satellites continued throughout the 1960s, leading to the curious episode, in 1972, of the Earth Resource Technology Satellite, later renamed Landsat.

The Divergence of ISR and Earth Observation

Scientific Earth remote sensing and space-based military intelligence ISR have been rivalrous twins from the start. In this light, the Landsat story is instructive. The U.S. Geologic Survey, a bastion of science within the Department of Interior, decided it needed space-based spectral land imaging that could provide a ground truth characterization of the human-scale processes driving change in the Earth’s landscape—e.g., land use and land cover.

In the face of bureaucratic foot dragging, the USGS convinced Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to simply announce their intent to design and launch the first multi-spectral land imaging satellite, though they had absolutely no relevant experience or capability to do so. The ploy succeeded in teasing out the reluctant support of NASA and the Department of Defense for Landsat. And, while at the beginning the National Security Council, the CIA and DOD did not believe that civilians should be capable of observing change on the Earth’s surface, they reversed course when Landsat demonstrated that all of their maps were out of date, and they promptly became the system’s heaviest users.

The absence of vocal support from the defense and intelligence community, along with equivocation from the White House Bureau of the Budget and NASA on the value of Landsat Earth observation, stalled the program. This silence from the defense and intelligence community was a problem, as it led to the serious mischaracterization of Landsat demand while the Carter and Reagan Administrations attempted to privatize Landsat—a distraction that placed the program in suspended animation for over a decade. It was only after DOD’s acknowledgment of the role that Landsat played in Desert Storm that the program received legislative support, a Defense Landsat Program Office, and a comfortable home at the intersection of civilian remote sensing and the national security ISR community. Disagreements over funding and frequent changes in NASA’s overall remote sensing plans saw DOD withdraw from Landsat in 1994. And while the American national security enterprise remained perhaps the heaviest user of Landsat data, the DOD and intelligence agencies have never again served as an advocate for civilian multi-spectral land imaging.

Sources of the Schism

So why did these rivalrous twins diverge in the United States? And why have other countries recognized and embraced the natural synergy between these two domains?

Some might argue that it comes down to “phenomenology,” a term that both Watchmen and Scientists use to describe the nature of the particular sensor that they launch into space, the way it works, and what it allows them to observe. More specifically, some argue that the schism is due to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities’ narrow, though not exclusive, focus on high-resolution, electro-optical imagery—the spy satellite imagery that average citizens identify with.

The Scientists have been first to field a wide variety of complex phenomenologies in space, based on decades of scientific research. In this context, many have observed the limited success of the American national security community to develop exploitation workflows that embrace complex sensor phenomenologies, as they require scientific knowledge. Instead, the Watchmen fall back on what they know best and what they can easily train their workforce to use—e.g., high-resolution, electro-optical imagery.

While doctrine and rhetoric in the national security community have evolved substantially to embrace such sensor capabilities, training and organizational standard operating procedures, by and large, have not. Others would suggest that there exists a culture within the U.S. national security community which views with suspicion any technology that is “not invented here.” Surely, the relatively larger bank account available to the DOD and intelligence agencies enabled them to simply go their own way, with no mandate from the White House or Congress to maximize resources under a “dual-use” regime. The sine qua non of the defense and intelligence ISR community, their high security clearances, also played a major role in this divergence. While a small number of individuals held adequate security clearances (which provided access and standing) to span both the worlds of Watchmen and Scientists, the policy, budgeting, program management, scientific, and technical communities were profoundly divided because of security concerns, real or imagined.

Though the exact source of the schism is unclear, it is quite clear that the Watchmen would benefit greatly if they could manage to exploit the power of the Scientists’ tools.

In the meantime, outside the United States, increasing involvement by other countries and private industry in the remote sensing domain evolved along a strong “dual use” path—e.g. the French SPOT1 satellite in 1986 and the Canadian Radarsat in 1995. It is notable that the dual-use concept is baked into the program name the European Union chose for its Earth observation program back in 1998: Global Monitoring for Environment and Security. A notable exception in the United States that did embrace a dual-use strategy was the CIA’s MEDEA program, a joint CIA-private sector environmental task force involving academics and environmental scientists who were allowed to study environment issues, including global warming, with U.S. spy satellite imagery.

During this same period, the NASA remote sensing portfolio expanded greatly, forming what is referred to as the “A Train” constellation of satellites—comprised of Terra (1999), Aqua (2002), Aura (2004), CALIPSO (2006), as well as EO-1 (2000) on a separate orbit—while defense remote sensing acquisition fell into disarray. Shortly thereafter, a coalition launched the Group on Earth Observations in response to calls for action by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainability and the G8. In this context, many have recognized that collaboration across the international remote sensing community is essential if decision makers around the globe are going to be equipped to deal with an increasingly complex world stressed by natural disasters and crises in health, energy, climate, water, weather, ecosystems, agriculture, and biodiversity.

At the dawn of the 21^st century, the U.S. defense/intelligence ISR community made it their goal to achieve active, purposeful “persistent surveillance,” if not globally, then at least over their major geographies of interest. The idea of persistent surveillance is exactly what it sounds like—the goal of “staring” at a particular geography and watching everything that happens—rather than simply collecting an image every so often. The disarray the U.S. defense/intelligence ISR community finds itself in, in terms of technology acquisition, has made this goal seem almost unachievable. Unfortunately, even in its ideal state, this thrust was still very limited in its phenomenologies.

Meanwhile, the global proliferation of both commercial and civilian scientific remote sensing capabilities has put the global community on an aggressive path toward what one might call “passive” persistent surveillance that spans a rich range of phenomenologies. This notion of passive persistent surveillance is admittedly different from the idea of staring at a particular geography. But with the sheer number of sensors globally scheduled for launch over the next decade, it certainly would be difficult to escape their gaze.

This passive persistent surveillance, if successfully coordinated by a vision such as that animating the EU’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security program, will have enormous positive benefits not only for the “societal benefits areas” highlighted by the Group on Earth Observations, but also for the United States, Commonwealth, and Coalition security posture. That is, if everyone decides to share and participate in such a framework. Unfortunately, the Watchmen have a very bad history of sharing. Indeed, they have bred much distrust and enmity from their historic international partners who, once dependent on the United States for such support, are now coming of age, launching a vast array of remote sensing resources in dual use frameworks.

Reconciling the Tribes, Solving the World’s Problems

So, here we sit with NRO and NASA at huge respective crossroads. What if the deep pockets of the U.S. defense/intelligence ISR community were applied to the acceleration of this emerging model of dual-use, passive, persistent surveillance? What if the Watchmen recognized that we have reached an historic inflection point where their immense resources might better be spent underwriting the world’s quest to achieve a global Earth observing system of systems that could serve both security and environmental monitoring goals? After all, even our national security leaders have come to the conclusion that understanding and dealing with global climate change is perhaps one of our largest strategic national security challenges. Moreover, perhaps the Watchmen could see this as an opportunity to overcome the ongoing “resolution versus coverage” paradox inherent in reconnaissance systems (e.g., the higher the image resolution, the smaller the geographic coverage of the image), which can only be resolved with cross-cueing between both broad area and high-resolution sensors. In this context, doesn’t it only make sense for the Watchmen to make nice with the Scientists, and possibly even learn something that in turn could help national, indeed global security?

At the same time, Scientists could invest more vigorously in learning about national security missions, and how they might better support them. Leaders at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other science organizations could organize proactively to approach the Watchmen with a unified front—a rapprochement, which effectively integrated the Scientists into the increasingly complex national security mission, without surrendering their scientific mission.

Long gone are the days when the Watchmen could lean on their vast financial reserves, in near complete isolation, setting their own ISR priorities and investment strategies. Long gone are the days Scientists can launch Earth observation platforms and sensors outside of a coordinated national and international strategy. The next wave of our national investment for monitoring the planet—for scientific Earth observation, military/intelligence ISR, and increasingly for commercial and civil applications—will require a stark departure from the decision-making processes of the past.

Dr. Christopher K. Tucker is a member of the Board of Directors of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. His email is: Christopher.Tucker@gmail.com

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But thanks to H.R. 3276, introduced by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) with seven co-sponsors, the federal government will now begin to support isotope production here at home. The bill appropriates $163 million for fiscal years 2010 through 2014 to the Department of Energy so that it can support industry and universities in the production of the isotope known as molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), which decays into the medically usable isotope technetium-99m (Tc-99m). Tc-99m is used in tests for cancer, cardiac disease, and kidney function. Some tests determine whether a patient with a coronary blockage needs an angioplasty or a stent. Without it, patients might receive unnecessary surgery. These isotopes also identify the location of tumors in breast and bone cancers.

Medical isotopes can be produced using highly enriched uranium, referred to as HEU, or low-enriched uranium, called LEU. But transportation of HEU represents a national security risk, as it is “weapons-grade” material. Markey noted this in his floor statement: “Shockingly, the United States still allows for nuclear weapons-grade highly enriched uranium to be exported to other countries for medical isotope production. This 1950s-era policy simply does not work in a post-9/11 world.”

Wisely, the bill attempts to curtail the production and export of HEU while also allowing for the usage of HEU for isotope production if it is a feasible and expedient short-term alternative. For the long term, the bill promotes the development of LEU Mo-99 production. Hence, provisions for LEU and HEU Mo-99 production are contained in both the licensing and appropriation sections of the bill.

A National Academies of Science report from January found that eliminating HEU is both technically and economically feasible. Other organizations such as the Society for Nuclear Medicine and the Radiological Society of North America support the elimination of HEU in the long-term but stress the need for short-term solutions to the isotope shortage since the United States cannot get any LEU production sites up and running for approximately five to ten years due to the technical and regulatory hurdles.

Markey emphasized that the bill is technology neutral on his floor statement. “Neither this provision nor the bill as a whole give any preference whatsoever to any technology type,” he said, “The purpose of this provision is to give the Department of Energy the greatest number of options for dealing with the medical isotope crisis while also maintaining the incentive for reactors to convert to low enriched uranium fuel.”

The bill now goes to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

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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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What GINA does not do is require insurers to pay for care that a genetic test indicates would clearly be beneficial. Thus, there are no guarantees that patients will be able to access or afford therapies and screenings that could reduce their risks. Without further reform efforts to ensure that preventive strategies are within reach, GINA’s protections from discrimination will ring hollow.

This is a gap that health reform legislation can close, she argues. But not only can genetic testing help individuals make important health care decisions, she explains, it can help those patients and their families understand and plan for financial risks that might arise from devastating illnesses. In these instances, people may be particularly interested in buying long-term care, disability, or life insurance—three markets that are not covered by GINA’s protections.

Ideally, GINA will also help advance biomedical science. Prior to the law, Rick Weiss explained, “people were likely to balk at requests to participate in genetic research, which depends on large-scale participation by diverse populations to make new biomedical discoveries about propensities to diseases and other aspects of inheritance.” As Steven Greenhouse reports at the New York Times: “In a nationwide survey, 63 percent of respondents said they would not have genetic testing if employers could see the results.” Whether the protections will encourage more participation in research remains to be seen, but in this instance, what’s good for civil rights may also be good for science.

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The critics focused on portions of one chapter in the 1051-page book describing various population control measures tried or proposed around the world—some of them extreme and coercive. Cherry picking language from the text, they claimed that Holdren’s aim was to corral population growth through forced abortions or mass sterilization. As Chris Mooney explained after retrieving a copy of the book from a university library, describing such measures does, of course, not amount to endorsing them. Moreover, the authors in fact concluded that the best way to slow population growth was to increase access to family planning resources like birth control. Just as he did during his confirmation hearing, Holdren explained in response to the attacks that he rejects the idea of government-enforced population controls. In fact, what he said during the hearing was this: “When you provide health care for women, opportunities for women, education, people tend to have smaller families on average,” and in reference to global climate change, “it ends up being easier to solve some of our other problems when that occurs.”

The attacks on Holdren eventually dissipated, but the whole kerfuffle did raise the question of how best to talk about the complex relation between population and environmental sustainability. According to Shira Saperstein, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Deputy Director and Program Director for Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health at the Moriah Fund, many debates over the issue since the 1960s have been simplistic. She summarizes the thrust of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, as “more people equals more damage—and the answer to that is fewer people,” a conclusion she rejects. There is a relationship between population and environment she says, “but it is far more complex than people have acknowledged in the past. I think partly because we looked at these simplistically in the past, we made a lot of mistakes.”

Saperstein spoke with Science Progress about a new framework for thinking about population and sustainability based on social justice in a recent podcast conversation. Joining her were Laurie Mazur, director of the Population Justice Project and editor of the new book, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge, and Brian O’Neill, a scientist with the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “So much of the resistance to talking about population issues comes from a fear of where it’s headed,” Mazur acknowledges, “So many people are legitimacy concerned that concern about the global environment will take us back to the bad old days of population control.” For a full recording of the conversation, please see the audio available at the top of the page.

Population programs of the past, Saperstein says, “were too often focused on demographic targets, on limited births, on controlling population, rather than empowering women to make their own autonomous choices.” The worst programs following this logic resulted in sterilization campaigns in India and policies for forced abortions in China. The proper approach, the three experts say, is to realize that there is a significant unmet demand for family planning and reproductive health services around the world. Providing women with the opportunity and resources to make meaningful decisions about when and how many children to have gives them more control over their economic future while protecting their human rights. Given those choices, women tend to have smaller families. And over the next century, a secondary result of slower global population growth could be a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the three experts explain.

“Population matters,” says O’Neill, “It is not the largest impact on emissions—it’s not zero either.” He admits that while that sounds like a wishy-washy middle-ground conclusion, it’s important because of long-running debates between those arguing that population is the most important consideration for evaluating human impact on the environment and those who say it has nothing to do with it at all. “You’re not going to solve he climate problem—or probably any other environmental problem—just by slowing population growth,” he says. But development pathways and the nature of economic growth around the world provide the context in which societies must address climate change. As Mazur and Saperstein explained in a recent column, “In developing countries, urbanization is associated with rising per-capita emissions; as populations age, their per-capita emissions decline.” So population is one part of that social context.

Explaining the scientific research on the relationship between population and environment is one thing, O’Neill says, but the context for these conversations is equally important. A growing body of technical research helps, but he emphasizes that experts must understand the history and the legitimate concerns that people have about raising the issue of population-related policy as a means to environmental or even other development ends. “I think that a lot of time scientists get in trouble on this issue—and these are scientists who don’t work on population and environment,” he says, “because for some reason they feel free to talk about it as if they know what they’re talking about when they actually don’t.”

O’Neill says this is incongruous because in the case of climate change, “Someone who studies sea level rise would be pretty careful talking about ecosystem change because they know they’re not an ecologist and maybe they don’t exactly know what they’re talking about. But all of a sudden it’s a population issue and they feel free to say anything that comes into their head.”

Scientists, he says, are learning that an informed conversation more attuned to the social justice goals of population advocates is important. “Population, demographic change, does have consequences for emissions—and it’s okay to raise that,” he says, “It does not mean necessarily that it follows that demographically related policies are the best way to respond to climate change.”

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.

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Engineers originally envisioned the network for mostly passive information gathering: subscribers would use sites like they would a catalog or telephone directory. But that changed, Feenberg explains, when hackers broke into a commercial site and used it to send messages to visiting users. Although alarmed at first, the business owners realized the potential for profit from a user-to-user communication system. The result was one of the first commercial instant-messaging platforms.

Feenberg is a professor of the philosophy of technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and he recently joined Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Andrew Light for a podcast discussion about the democratic power of online communities. What happened next in France, Feenberg says, illustrates an important lesson about the evolution of digital communication.

The Minitel computers were developed, Feenberg says, “in order to modernized French society along the lines of a highly rational, efficient, technically sophisticated society.” But rational efficiency was not what a lot of citizens had on their minds. “It turned out that what most people wanted to do with instant messaging was get dates,” Feenberg explains. “It went from cold to hot all of a sudden in the space of a few months. The meaning of the computer was transformed because instead of being an information system it became a communication system.”

This re-imagining of the network as an interpersonal communications tool (or specifically, a dial-up dating service) was an example of what Feenberg describes as “democratic rationalization.” The term “rationalization” refers to modern processes used to improve how people manage and control resources through measurement and incremental adjustment. Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line, where humans and machines work together in a carefully calibrated ballet, is an iconic example. Rationalization in this sense is hierarchical, top-down innovation.

“When you make elaborate plans to rationalize something, it usually doesn’t work exactly the way you intended,” Feenberg explains, and management theorists have understood for a long time that initiatives from the bottom could play an important role in the innovation process. He calls large-scale, bottom-up innovation like the user-generated communication on the Minitel network “democratic rationalization.” This process is non-hierarchical and participants may share different values from top-down innovators, but these distributed users brought together by the network are also very good at getting things done. “Without a lot of input from below, you don’t get anywhere. You don’t have innovation and creativity,” he says. “Even though you could make fun of the French for seeking dates…the idea of human communication on computer networks is extremely important for us today.”

Trained as a philosopher, Feenberg eventually found himself working in applied ethics at an experimental medical center focused on treating neurological diseases. His work expanded into investigating questions about the relations between science, technology, and society, and this led to pioneering work in the field of online education. From there, connections in the personal computing industry bloomed. In 1983, the vice president of the Digital Equipment Corporation, the innovative company behind many of the most popular minicomputers of the 1970s and 80s, invited Feenberg to lunch.

“What do you think the future of the personal computer will be?” the executive asked. “I had this sudden revelation,” Feenberg recalls, “Here I was, a student of Herbert Marcuse, this obscure German Marxist radical philosopher, being asked about the future of technology by somebody who was going to make that future.” It dawned on him that he was now involved in something big and important, and he set out from there to develop his own philosophy of technology.

In the early 1990s, he won grants from the National Science Foundation to study nascent online communities, exploring the groups users formed around shared interests, like hobby enthusiasts, or through shared illnesses—without the support or direction of large corporations or government projects. The trends he observed are now entirely familiar to citizens of a networked world, but this was in the early days of the Internet when subscribers dialed in to far less complex services like Prodigy.

This grassroots community building, Feenberg says, was possible because “the networks didn’t really know what they were for. They didn’t have a fully dedicated purpose yet. They were waiting to see what people would make of them, and that gave opportunities for innovation to ordinary people.”

He also says that these democratic features of open networks are important in the current discussions of rules the Federal Communication Commission is considering to protect net neutrality in the mobile phone industry. Feenberg contends that if the wireless business continues on its present development path, with more people accessing the Internet on mobile devices, then large portions of the network will become proprietary, “And the space for innovation and creation that characterized the Internet in its early phases will disappear.”

The FCC decision on net neutrality is important, he says, because the design and configuration of technology constitutes the “framework of our lives.” “If it is not democratized, at least to some degree…then i think it will become a very oppressive environment.”

Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.

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In a press release, AUTM recognized that the institutions “have relatively little influence over companies’ decisions about the pricing and distribution of drugs, vaccines, devices, and other medical technologies in developing countries. However, they are committed to make every effort to ensure that their intellectual property does not become a barrier to access.”

The statement of principles commits the signatories to “make vigorous efforts to develop creative and effective licensing strategies that help to promote global access to health-related technologies,” affirming that “intellectual property should not become a barrier to essential health-related technologies needed by patients in developing countries.” It goes on to say that the institutions should negotiate agreements that promote access through, for instance, non-exclusive licensing or tiered pricing. It also outlines a commitment to investing in research and development on diseases that affect poor countries.

The document also contains a commitment to developing metrics on the impact of the policies and to revisiting the statement biennially.

Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a student group backed by the Ford Foundation, has been pressuring the schools to change their technology transfer rules since 2001. In its press release, the group heralded the victory, but said it “sees this document as a floor for future policies rather than a ceiling and we hope that other universities will go further still.”

Since Monday, the National Institutes of Health, the University of Illinois Chicago, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have also endorsed the principles.

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Dire warnings like these cue the chorus of population deniers, who assert that growing human numbers pose no problem at all. They point out that Paul Ehrlich’s predictions have not come to pass, and that human ingenuity can keep pace with our growing numbers.

For some, population denial springs from fear that the Malthusians will trample human rights in their pursuit of lower birthrates. Such fears are well founded, as current policies in China and the history of population control in India and elsewhere vividly illustrate. Others are concerned that a focus on human numbers will distract us from bigger issues, like inequality and unsustainable consumption. And then there are the religious conservatives who fear (again, rightly) that family planning and women’s empowerment will upend traditional gender roles.

Now the Malthusians and the population deniers are duking it out about climate change. It’s not hard to understand why this is such a volatile issue—population touches on some of the most intimate and value-laden aspects of life: sex, gender, religion, and culture, as well as questions of equity and social justice. But viewing population in such all-or-nothing terms does little to advance understanding—or action—on this important issue.

So, before we settle in to another round of polarized, self-defeating debate, let’s try to separate ideology from evidence. New research has given scientists a more sophisticated understanding of population dynamics and their environmental impact—which could be the basis for sound and effective policy.

Scientists have learned that population dynamics (not simply fertility rates, but population composition—age and gender, and distribution—patterns of migration and urbanization) have a significant impact on the natural environment. A wide range of mediating factors, including technology, consumption patterns, economic policies and political choices shape that impact, however, and it is neither linear nor uniform.

Americans, for example, comprise only 5 percent of world population, but produce a quarter of all carbon emissions. In developing countries, urbanization is associated with rising per-capita emissions; as populations age, their per-capita emissions decline.

Does that mean human numbers, per se, are irrelevant? Not exactly.

First, remember that population is still growing rapidly. While the rate of growth has slowed in most parts of the world, our numbers still increase by 75 million to 80 million every year. Choices made today will determine whether human numbers climb from today’s 6.8 billion to anywhere between 8 billion and 11 billion by mid-century.

Almost all of that growth will take place in the developing countries, which is also where rapid development must occur so that the three billion people who now live on less than $2 a day can escape from poverty. For us in the affluent countries, the problem is overconsumption—our bankrupt economic system devours natural resources, yet fails to meet human needs. For people in the developing world, the problem is underconsumption; that same economic system fosters poverty and inequity that deprives people of the resources they need to survive. So we need to consume less, they need to consume more, and we all need to consume differently—to find ways to meet human needs without destroying the natural systems that sustain life.

If we take seriously the need to protect the planet and distribute its resources more equitably, it becomes clear that it would be easier to provide a good life—at less environmental cost—for 8 billion rather than 11 billion people.

Take climate change, for example. An analysis of climate studies by Brian O’Neill at the National Center for Atmospheric Research shows that slower population growth could make a significant contribution to solving the climate problem.

Imagine a pie divided into slices—each representing an action begun today that would eliminate 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2050—for example, widespread implementation of energy efficiency measures and the adoption of renewable energy sources. Seven slices are needed to avert disastrous climate change. O’Neill estimates that stabilizing world population at 8 billion, rather than 9 billion or more, would provide one “slice” of emissions reductions. That would eliminate as much carbon dioxide as completely ending deforestation.

Of course, slowing population growth is not all we must do. Current consumption patterns are unsustainable, regardless of our growing numbers, and continued reliance on fossil fuels could easily overwhelm any carbon emission reductions from slower growth. Still, slowing population growth is a piece of the “pie.”

But if we seek to address population growth, we have to do it right. That is, we have to learn from the history of bad population policies, which have veered between top-down “population control” schemes that violate human rights, and ideology-driven “abstinence only” programs that ignore the reality of human sexuality.

We have to focus on what works—and what we should be doing anyway as a matter of basic human dignity and social justice: making sure that all people have the means and the power to make real choices about childbearing.

What does this mean? It means expanding access to voluntary family planning and other reproductive-health information and services. It means promoting education and employment opportunities, especially for women and girls. And it means tackling the deep inequities—gender and economic—that prevent people from having and acting on meaningful choices about childbearing. Each of these interventions is vitally important in its own right as a matter of human rights and social justice.

Today, we have an extraordinary opportunity to make progress on these issues. After eight long years, we finally have a president—and a secretary of state—who are willing to make policy decisions based on evidence, not ideology.

But that opportunity will pass us by if progressives remain stuck in the tired debates of the past. The Malthusians and the population deniers are both wrong. Rapid population growth is not the primary cause of our environmental crises, and slower growth is not a panacea. But addressing population growth by the ethical means outlined above is part of what we must do to build a sustainable, equitable future. It’s time to have a new conversation about population and the environment—one that is grounded in science and guided by values of human rights, equity, and social justice.

Laurie Mazur is the director of the Population Justice Project and editor of A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge. Shira Saperstein is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Deputy Director and Program Director for Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health at the Moriah Fund.

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In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39. “So it’s increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure,” she says. Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, “Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences,” co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline. Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between Ph.D. and tenured positions. “The leak is almost entirely, or at least due primarily to family formation,” said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.

To discuss the report and the choices facing women scientists along their professional pathways, Mason, Goulden, who is Director of Data Initiatives in Academic Affairs at Berkeley, and Association of American Universities President Robert Berdahl joined Science Progress for a podcast conversation.

These decisions, influenced by the family-unfriendly policies at many research institutions, account for the fact that while women now receive more than half of the Ph.D.s in science and engineering fields, they are under-represented in comparison to men at in the faculty level of their academic fields. According to the report women comprised “63 percent and 54 percent of NIH and NSF’s predoctoral awards in 2007, respectively, but just 25 percent and 23 percent of the competitive faculty grants awarded in the same year.”

But both women and men agree that research positions at universities are the most family-unfriendly career choices among a range of options for scientists. “We have a process in which a large number of very talented scientists… are discouraged about a career in science because of some of the demands that it puts upon them,” said Berdahl.

The Obama administration has made investment in science an administration priority, and as Mason points out, losing those women scientists who are so far along the career pathway represents a significant loss of federal grant funding. Training for a young scientist from graduate school through a postdoc can total close to $500,000.

For those women who do decided to start families while moving through the career pipeline, their odds of winning tenure are significantly diminished in comparison to their male counterparts. Married women with Ph.D.s who have young children are 35 percent less likely to get a tenure-track position than men with young children. The necessary time off those mothers need for childcare responsibilities can put principal investigators in charge of research grants in tough positions. “They’re definitely caught between a rock and a hard place on this issue,” explains Goulden, “because if their researchers have children and go on leave, that results in a loss of productivity to their grant. And as it stands, for the most part, they receive no additional supplemental funding in that situation.”

So it’s the responsibility of both federal grant-making agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as research universities, to develop and share policies that remove the tension in hiring decisions for PIs and create family-friendly environments for scientists aiming for the top of their profession who also want to start families. The report suggests policies that provide responsive benefits for all classes of researchers, from graduate students up through full professors; supplemental funding to offset productivity losses when scientists go on family leave; and flexibility in the lock-step timing of the academic science career path.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the managing editor at Science Progress.

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The suit claims that “genes cannot be patented because they exist as naturally occurring products of nature,” an argument David Koepsell made here at Science Progress, writing that “patenting unmodified genes rewards discovery, not invention.”

But Timothy Caulfield argued at SP just last week that despite the claims that gene patents impede upstream basic research, there just isn’t data to back up the charge.

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In 2005, Mitch Morrissey, the district attorney in Denver, Colorado, approached the FBI about authorizing states to share information with one another regarding partial DNA matches uncovered in searches of the Combined DNA Index System. CODIS, which includes genetic information collected by all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government, has long permitted and encouraged states to share information where a database search reveals an exact match between a crime scene sample and an offender sample—indicating that the individual whose DNA matches is likely the perpetrator of a given crime.

A partial match is different. A “partial” match in this context refers to two genetic profiles—one derived from a crime scene sample and the other from CODIS—that share some, but not all, of the thirteen core DNA loci that comprise a CODIS profile. Each locus is a point along an individual’s DNA where scientists look for identifying variants in the genes that make up our genetic code. Each DNA locus in a CODIS profile is made up of two alleles, one inherited from each genetic parent.

This kind of match excludes the offender whose CODIS profile provides the match because that individual’s DNA is demonstrably different from the crime scene sample. But a partial match can implicate an offender’s close genetic relatives as possible perpetrators of a crime because they, like the crime scene sample, share some but not all of the examined loci with the individual whose CODIS profile provided the partial match. In effect, reporting partial matches implicitly incorporates offenders’ close genetic relatives into existing offender databases, even though these relatives have never been convicted of, or arrested for, an offense qualifying them for database inclusion.

The FBI’s CODIS director first refused Morrissey’s 2005 request. But when Morrissey approached the director of the FBI directly, the bureau modified its stance. Under an interim policy issued in July 2006, states are permitted in some instances to release identification information to other states where partial matches are found. The FBI’s interim policy left it up to each state to decide whether it would report to intra-state investigators any partial matches that might turn up in the course of ordinary database searches and, moreover, whether it would deliberately search for such matches.

Since the FBI released its interim policy, states have taken a number of approaches to the issue of partial matches. In April 2008, California’s Attorney General issued a well-publicized memorandum providing not only for the reporting of partial matches, but also for the deliberate search for such matches.^[1] In general, states distinguish between these two practices, identifying the former as partial match reporting, and the latter as familial searching. Shortly thereafter, in May 2008, Maryland enacted a statute prohibiting “search[es] of the statewide DNA data base for the purpose of identification of an offender in connection with a crime for which the offender may be a biological relative of the individual from whom the DNA sample was acquired.”^[2]

Most states, however, have refrained from prescribing rules governing partial match reporting or familial searching in statute, regulation, or well-publicized memoranda. This report represents the first effort to catalog in a comprehensive manner state policies and practices regarding partial match reporting and familial searching.

States that permit partial match reporting or familial searching through written or unwritten laboratory practices undermine efforts to bring these issues into the open. Laboratory policies are hardly known outside the laboratory walls, and so public knowledge about these practices, much less public oversight, is severely hampered. Such policies also lessen the impetus for officials favoring familial identification practices to enact policies authorizing such practices by more public means because many of the benefits of partial match data are already accessible without the need to risk opposing public influences. Although written lab policies are better than unwritten ones, neither is as transparent a means for making policy as the public deserves.

Transparency for search policies

In the face of this transparency gap, there are a number of bodies that could act, issuing some recommended and some mandatory guidance. The FBI’s CODIS Unit, for example, manages the CODIS program and the National DNA Index System component of CODIS.^[3] In this capacity, the FBI may promulgate binding regulations and guidance authorizing or proscribing certain uses of relevant databases. The interim policy discussed above represents the FBI’s current approach, but the FBI could insist in a new policy document that states make their practices regarding familial identification practices publicly known by means of statutory or formal regulatory instruments, or even that states simply not release familial identification information discovered through CODIS searching. The FBI may be limited, however, in its ability to regulate intra-state practices, especially where those practices include methods of analysis beyond CODIS searching—as where states test regions of DNA not among the thirteen core CODIS loci. Moreover, states are likely to view a federal mandate that they undertake particular legislative or executive action as an encroachment on state sovereignty and federalism values.

Here, recommendations and guidelines from the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods may serve a guiding function. SWGDAM is a group of forensic scientists under the guidance of the FBI that, among other things, serves as a general liaison between the FBI and the forensic DNA community. This body has already issued one set of recommendations, identifying circumstances under which it deems partial match reporting or familial matching ethically acceptable.^[4] It should go further to recommend, at the very least, that states make their policies in this arena explicit and easily publicly accessible.

Disparate state policies

The results of the original research conducted for this report reveal a startling lack of transparency in rulemaking. Of the thirty-two responding states that have some policy or practice regarding partial match reporting or familial searching, at least 12 have left these policies unwritten. Most of these states have left unwritten a practice not to conduct targeted familial searches or not to turn over partial match information more broadly. In one sense, we might be unsurprised that such non-practices would remain unwritten. Institutions generally codify policies for the things they prescribe rather than the things they proscribe. Trying to dream up all of things we might do with DNA and then prohibiting most of these might well be an unending exercise.

But states have sometimes been proactive in their regulation of DNA databases to specify not only types of analysis that may be completed, but also types of analysis that may not. As described above, Maryland has codified by statute a prohibition on familial searches. Utah and Rhode Island also include explicit statutory prohibitions on analysis that could predict genetic disease or predisposition to illness.^[5] The failure to address in writing deliberate decisions not to conduct familial searches or disseminate partial match information constitutes a failure of transparency, making it extremely difficult for outside observers—and perhaps even laboratory personnel—to know what exactly the state’s policy is.

Nor is inattention to the issue of partial match reporting and familial searching always the reason that policies are unwritten. In New Mexico, for instance, an unwritten policy not to knowingly report a partial/familial hit was voted and accepted by the state’s DNA Identification System Oversight Committee. This committee is not merely advisory; it wields rulemaking authority. Its partial match reporting policy contains specific, though unwritten, language—prohibiting the knowing reporting of partial match information for familial identification purposes. And the committee chair stated that this policy will remain in place unless and until there is a change in state law either by legislative enactment or court decision clearly authorizing disclosure of familial-identifying information. Yet it seems that the policy is deliberately unwritten.

Moreover, at least four states without written policies have nonetheless reported partial match information to investigators in the past. Most broadly, in North Carolina, while DNA reports note only exact matches—hence a partial match would be designated a non-match—analysts may nonetheless informally discuss partial matches with investigators. In South Carolina, a moderate-stringency candidate match that may indicate a familial relationship between a crime scene sample and an offender profile will trigger additional investigation, and possibly reporting. Two other states, Louisiana and Montana, acknowledged that their labs had turned partial match information over to investigators at least once in the past, but both emphasized the rarity of this occurrence.

These practices indicate that a not-insignificant amount of policymaking surrounding identification of possible family relationships in state forensic DNA databases occurs in a fashion that is nearly impenetrable to public oversight. Unwritten practices of reporting partial match information are particularly disconcerting, considering the genetic privacy interests of individuals who, absent their genetic similarities to individuals properly in the database, would not be identifiable through any database search.

States that have formalized policies in writing, however, are hardly fonts of transparency either. Only two of the sixteen states that confirmed that they have written policies have codified these policies in documents easily accessible to the general public. Again, Maryland has addressed familial searching by means of legislation, and expressly prohibited the practice. California, meanwhile, issued a well-publicized memorandum by the state attorney general that authorizes, under limited circumstances, both partial match reporting and familial searching. The remaining 14 states reporting written policies have memorialized these policies in internal laboratory manuals that are not easily accessible (if accessible at all) to the general public. Ten of these lab manual-based policies permit at least partial match reporting, of which one, Nebraska, reports that it conducts familial searches on a case-by-case basis as well.

Policies placed in internal laboratory manuals are often nearly as inaccessible to the general public as unwritten policies. Indeed, in some instances, state labs were unwilling to share copies of the relevant written policies absent a formal request lodged under the state’s freedom of information act. One state, which was otherwise forthcoming and informative, declined to release a copy of the relevant policy on grounds that the lab documents are subject to outside copyright. Another state, in declining to participate in this survey, expressed concern that any information might become publicly known regarding practices and analyses conducted in the state laboratory. Of course, several states, including Florida, Nebraska, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, helpfully excerpted the relevant written state policies in their lab manuals.

In some cases, states in the process of developing policies in this arena have no plans for public engagement in the process. North Dakota reported that it is currently developing a policy to govern both familial searching and partial match reporting. This policy, when written, will appear in the state laboratory’s standard operating procedures/procedure manual, but with no opportunity for public comment or participation. In Colorado, where a familial searching policy is under development, there has been no consideration as to whether this policy might be published by the state Attorney General (as in California) or the Department of Safety, in addition to appearing in the bureau’s procedures manual.

But to their credit, other states presently developing policies have taken different, more public-oriented approaches. New York has regulations that appear to authorize familial searching. At present, the New York Commission on Forensic Science is in the process of drafting regulations that will govern whether and how partial match reporting or familial matching will be conducted. These draft regulations were discussed this September at a commission meeting that was streamed online, and any resulting regulations will be available for public comment prior to codification.

West Virginia is taking the most public route to regulating partial match information. In March 2009, a member of the West Virginia House of Representatives introduced legislation that would permit at least partial match reporting. This bill died in committee, and representatives from the West Virginia State Police are working with legislators to introduce similar legislation in the next session. It is tempting to speculate that the failure of the prior partial matching bill indicates that, when exposed to public opinion and debate, partial match reporting and familial searching generate sufficient discomfort and concern so as to make such practices unacceptable. That the only relevant statute on the books is Maryland’s prohibition of familial searches certainly supports such an interpretation. But the realities of the legislative process indicate that bills fail for all sorts of reasons, and so we should hesitate to draw substantive conclusions about public opinion from non-enactment.

Several states that, by written or unwritten policy, do not report partial match information—and, as a corollary, also do not perform familial searches—have also indicated that they will await definitive, public authorization for such practices before adopting them. Rhode Island reported, for instance, that its policy not to release anything less definitive than an exact match will remain in place until the attorney general or legislature instructs otherwise. Nevada indicated that it would not alter its current non-reporting policy unless meetings with the public to gauge and address concerns regarding genetic privacy were undertaken first. New Mexico, as described above, affirmed that its policy not to reveal familial information knowingly will remain in place unless and until there is a change in state law by either legislative or judicial action. Vermont reported that it would not provide partial match information pursuant to the FBI’s interim policy absent additional input from the legal channels in the state. Michigan, meanwhile, is waiting to see what the FBI will do in terms of both national policy and software tools available for analysis. And Minnesota, despite permitting release of partial match information, recognized in a January 2009 report to the legislature that familial identification raises serious concerns about genetic privacy, and called for the legislature to address such practices through legislation. The state legislature has thus far failed to do so.

The experiences of Maryland, New York, West Virginia teach that public engagement is not incompatible with policymaking in this arena, and state laboratories calling for public consideration of familial identification practices indicate that there is a felt need for public involvement in such policymaking. Indeed, public involvement, along with transparency and accountability in this arena, are vitally important. Every state in the union created its DNA database by means of legislation, and many have expanded by legislative amendment the range of persons subject to inclusion. Partial match reporting and familial searching implicitly expand the range of persons that may be identified through existing databases. Although DNA profiles are often described as genetic “fingerprints,” partial match practices take advantage of the ways in which DNA is utterly unlike a fingerprint—genetic relatives have similar genetic features in predictable ways, and so family members can sometimes be inculpated through partial matches with the DNA of their offender relatives. As with previous expansions of DNA forensic databases, this new expansion should be similarly subjected to public scrutiny and oversight through the legislative process.

Whether we would oppose or support the substance of Maryland’s enacted statute or West Virginia’s draft legislation, we should applaud their process.

Natalie Ram is a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities. She served as a summer research fellow at the Center for American progress in Summer 2009.

Notes

^[1] Memorandum from Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Att’y Gen. of Cal. to All Cal. Law Enforcement Agencies and District Att’ys Offices, DNA Partial Match (Crime Scene DNA Profile to Offender) Policy (Apr. 25, 2008), available at http://ag.ca.gov/cms_attachments/press/pdfs/n1548_08-bfs-01.pdf.

^[2] MD Code, Public Safety, § 2-506(d).

^[3] Fed. Bureau of Investigation, CODIS, http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/html/codis1.htm (last visited Oct. 1, 2009).

^[4] See Ted Staples, Chair, Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods, Address at the Genetic Info. Working Group (June 24, 2008), available at www.ipad.state.mn.us/docs/geninfo17.pdf (setting forth SWGDAM’s recommendations regarding familial identification practices). SWGDAM recommended that familial identification information be disclosed only where, inter alia, identification involved single-source samples only; investigators searched local databases before larger, more general ones; a match was obtained for a substantial number of core loci (as many as possible); additional testing (Y-STR, mtDNA) was performed and confirmed a possible familial link; and tests for expected match ratio and expected kinship ratio were performed and confirmed a possible familial link. Staples, supra at 33.

^[5] R.I. Stat. 12-1.5-10(5) (DNA samples may never be used for purposes of obtaining info about “physical characteristics, traits or dispositions for disease”); Utah Code Ann. § 53-10-406 (bureau must “ensure that the DNA identification system does not provide information allowing prediction of genetic disease or predisposition to illness”).

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State crime labs can collect and analyze DNA evidence, comparing results to profiles stored in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System. Here’s how the process works in most states:

1. A violent crime occurs: for example, a sexual assault or murder. These crimes are the ones where a perpetrator is most likely to leave behind DNA.
2. The police investigate. They find, for example, hairs, blood, or semen.
3. Police send the sample to a DNA lab for analysis.
4. The DNA lab analyzes the sample. An initial search, looking for an exact match, reveals no match.
5. Later, during a routine database search, one or more partial matches show up as hits. For instance, it may be that at least one of these hits shares at least one allele at each of the available loci with the crime scene profile. Each locus is a point along an individual’s DNA where scientists look for identifying variants in the genes that make up the genetic code. Each DNA locus in a CODIS profile is made up of two alleles. This kind of match excludes the offender whose CODIS profile provides the match because that individual’s DNA is demonstrably different from the crime scene sample. But a partial match can implicate an offender’s close genetic relatives as possible perpetrators of a crime because they, like the crime scene sample, share some but not all of the examined loci with the individual whose CODIS profile provided the partial match.
6. An analyst performs additional testing.
7. If additional testing is concordant with a familial match, the name of the offender whose database profile provided the partial match may be released from the lab to law enforcement.
8. An investigation ensues. Will the new lead pan out? (Probably not.)

States with established partial match reporting policies interpose a range of additional requirements at steps 6 through 8. California has an explicit policy for how to handle “partial” matches and “familial” searches—each imposes several requirements for analysis before a new name can be released to police for further investigation.

First steps in DNA analysis for any California investigation:

1. A violent crime occurs: for example, a sexual assault or murder. These crimes are the ones where a perpetrator is most likely to leave behind DNA.
2. The police investigate. They find, for example, hairs, blood, or semen.
3. Police send the sample to a DNA lab for analysis.
4. The DNA lab analyzes the sample. An initial search, looking for an exact match, reveals no match.

For a “partial” match uncovered in California:

1. Later, during a routine database search, one or more partial matches show up as hits. For instance, it may be that at least one of these hits shares at least 15 of the possible 26 alleles at the 13 CODIS loci.
2. DOJ confirms that case is unsolved, the case investigator attests that all other investigative leads have been exhausted and requests analysis of the partial match(es), and the police and prosecutor commit to investigate the case if a name is released.
3. An analyst checks that the crime scene sample is single-source to ensure there were no mixtures that could cause contamination of the profile.
4. The analyst performs additional genetic testing, checking for identical Y-STR profiles. This is a profile of the Y chromosome, the male sex chromosome. All patrilineal males should have identical (or nearly identical) Y-STR profiles.
5. A DOJ committee reviews the evidence and finds no reason not to release this information.
6. The name of the offender whose database profile provided the partial match is released.
7. An investigation ensues. Will the new lead pan out? (Probably not.)

For a “familial” search in California:

1. No other investigative leads pan out.
2. A written request is sent to the Chief of the Bureau of Forensic Services describing the case, and attesting that all other investigative leads have been exhausted. The police and prosecutor commit to investigate the case if a name is released.
3. An analyst conducts a moderate- or low-stringency search designed to turn up partial matches. Some of the resulting hits share at least 15 alleles with the crime scene sample.
4. The analyst checks that the crime scene sample is single-source.
5. The analyst performs Y-STR analysis.
6. A DOJ committee reviews the evidence and finds no reason not to release this information.
7. The name of the offender whose database profile provided the partial match is released.
8. An investigation ensues. Will the new lead pan out? (Probably not.)

Natalie Ram is a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities. She served as a summer research fellow at the Center for American progress in Summer 2009.

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