This month in Seed Chris Mooney calls for the next president of the United States to be a sort of scientific researcher-in-chief:
As a prerequisite, the next president must grasp how science flows into a democracy at all levels. Whoever wins the electionman or woman, Democrat or Republicanwill face profound science-based challenges and questions. Will space become militarized, or remain a neutral zone of unfettered international access? Will we successfully protect our populations and cities from the threats of nuclear and biological terrorism, as well as from emerging pandemics? Can we bring the AIDS crisis in Africa under control? How can we foster continuing biomedical advancement without crossing moral lines?
Will there be enough jobs available to employ the nation’s scientists? If foreign researchers are better qualified for those jobs, will they receive visas so that US companies can benefit from their skills? And what of research in areas of pure science? As Europe’s Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Genevathe world’s most powerful particle acceleratorheads toward a slated May 2008 startup, will the US revisit the idea of building its own collider, and willingly take on that next phase of research into the very nature of matter? More important, will the next president understand the significance of such scientific questing? And if so, will he or she also know how to tell that story to the public?
Watching as the issues of the future careen toward us, a true national leader will recognize the moral imperative to take what we know from (and about) science and use that knowledge to build a better and smarter America. That’s not to say the next president must be a scientist. Being able to talk shop with the NIH lab workers isn’t a job requirement. It’s far less important that the next president know any field of science in depth than that he or she knows how to learnhow to become informed about scientific or technical subjects where there’s often much uncertainty and yet also a pressing need for a policy decision.
It’s hard to argue with Mooney’s desire for a president who will make a good-faith effort to draw on the expertise of the nation’s scientific community. (Policy decisions based on fact and careful consideration of the evidence? Where do we sign up?) But the scientific issues Mooney highlights — climate change, stem cells and forensic neuroscience among them — are also intensely political. The challenge for the science-based administration will be to keep science from turning into just another interest group (or, more than it already is).
-Greg Dahlmann