Wednesday-Night

Frank Kinnelly writes: Here’s a link to the candidates’ responses to a series of questions on science policy.  Note that you can click on a link giving the responses side-by-side.  Note that Obama’s goals for reducing GHG are far more ambitious than McCain’s.

The world’s poor deserve better US leadership
The US election has implications for science and foreign aid policy, and so for the poorest people across the developing world.
(SciDevNet) The US government already does much to promote science and technology in the developing world. In biomedicine, for example, it is by far the largest supporter of international efforts, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Other US programmes boost collaborative research in key development areas such as agriculture, water management and low-carbon energy. The State Department has also taken steps towards raising the profile of ’science diplomacy’ — advancing foreign policy objectives by supporting scientific activities.
But resource shortages have limited many of these efforts. In recent years, for example, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has suffered sharp cuts in its science and technology capacity, particularly in its overseas missions — capacity that is essential to making its foreign aid programmes respond to local needs.
The new administration will not lack suggestions for improvements. Sensing the possibility of a significant change of tack, particularly if a Democrat is elected, several recent reports have proposed how the US can better manage its international scientific affairs.
28 October
Opinion: Palin’s Anti-Science Rhetoric
(MIT Tech) Palin agrees with scientists that understanding human diseases is important, but she doesn’t like the strategy scientists have been taking toward this goal:
“Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? … some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.”
As if it is not outrageous enough that our dollars are going to waste on scientists’ play with fruit flies! No, to top it off, it’s going to the particularly unruly French fruit flies, that probably sip a shot of espresso prior to metamorphosis, in their Rive Gauche, crêpe-padded vials.
It is of no use to mention, when arguing with Republicans, that much of what we know about how genetics and molecular biology work comes from work in ‘lowly animals’ like fruit flies and worms. Genetic linkage, recombination, and regulation, sex-linked inheritance, the cell cycle, or programmed cell death, … the endless list that forms the most beautiful discoveries of how we work and where we come from.
This would be intellectual and elitist — an appeal to knowledge that we have, and they don’t. It would require the curiosity and education that members of the other party conspicuously lack.
27 October
Sarah Palin’s War on Science
The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.
By Christopher Hitchens
(Slate.com) In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”
It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully “cultured” in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature “issue” of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It’s especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.
In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as “unbelievable.” As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a “paternity” or “criminal” issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)
8 October
2008 Chemistry Nobelist Endorses Obama bringing the number to 63!
One of the first things Martin Chalfie wanted to do after learning that he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States. That brings the total number of Nobel Prize winners in science endorsing Obama to 63. Originally 61 winners came out and endorsed Obama, but soon after the release of the letter, Murray Gell-Mann, who won the Prize in Physics in 1969 came forward to add his name.
Chalfie won the prize for his early work on using green fluorescent protein to mark cells. This is by far the largest number of Nobelists to ever endorse a candidate for President. I do not know of any Nobelists in science that have endorsed McCain, so if anyone hears of one, please let me know.
The American Anti-Intellectual Threat
By Jeffrey Sachs
Project Syndicate
September 2008
NEW YORK – In recent years, the United States has been more a source of global instability than a source of global problem-solving. Examples include the war in Iraq, launched by the US on false premises, obstructionism on efforts to curb climate change, meager development assistance, and the violation of international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions. While many factors contributed to America’s destabilizing actions, a powerful one is anti-intellectualism, exemplified recently by Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s surging popularity.
By anti-intellectualism, I mean especially an aggressively anti-scientific perspective, backed by disdain for those who adhere to science and evidence. The challenges faced by a major power like the US require rigorous analysis of information according to the best scientific principles.
Climate change, for example, poses dire threats to the planet that must be assessed according to prevailing scientific norms and the evolving capacity of climate science. The Nobel Prize-winning global scientific process called the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has set the gold standard for scientific rigor in analyzing the threats of human-induced climate change. We need scientifically literate politicians adept at evidence-based critical thinking to translate these findings and recommendations into policy and international agreements.
In the US, however, the attitudes of President Bush, leading Republicans, and now Sarah Palin, have been the opposite of scientific. The White House did all it could for eight years to hide the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are contributing to climate change. It tried to prevent government scientists from speaking honestly to the public. The Wall Street Journal has similarly peddled anti-science and pseudo-science to oppose policies to fight human-induced climate change.
These are not isolated albeit powerful individuals out of touch with reality. They reflect the fact that a significant portion of American society, which currently votes mainly Republican, rejects or is simply unaware of basic scientific evidence regarding climate change, biological evolution, human health, and other fields. These voters generally do not reject the benefits of technologies that result from modern science, but they do reject the evidence and advice of scientists regarding public policies.
15 September
GOP wants to close stem cell lab doors
(Boston Globe) STEM CELL research was one issue that many observers thought would fly under the radar in this year’s presidential election. Both candidates have expressed support for research on cell lines from frozen embryos already destined for destruction. Senator John McCain even joined with Senator Barack Obama in voting for legislation that would have loosened President Bush’s stem cell research restrictions. And until recently it appeared that the ultraconservative GOP base would give McCain a pass on the issue.
But American politics is nothing if not unpredictable. Just before completing its work two weeks ago, the Republican platform committee was persuaded to change this sentence: “We call for a ban on human cloning and a ban on the creation of and experimentation on human embryos for research purposes” to this sentence: “We call for a ban on human cloning and a ban on the creation of or experimentation on human embryos for research purposes.” (Our emphases.)
17 April
We Need a Science White House
WSJ op-ed by Nobel prize winners David Baltimore and Ahmed Zewail
Protecting [America’s] future starts with understanding that much of the wealth in this country comes from scientific research and technological innovation. Translating science into commerce has opened up vast new fields of endeavor and has raised the standard of living in America. The country that is on the cutting edge of developing new technology is the country best positioned to benefit from that new technology.
A clear example is biotechnology. The U.S. is a leader here, and is able to capitalize on its pre-eminence with disease-resistant crops, anticancer drugs and much more. By developing a strong understanding of the basic science that underlies advances in biotechnology, we are also creating a good training ground for a future generation of scientists and innovators.
But America cannot simply assume its lead in science will continue. In recent years the science community has been starved of the resources it needs.
12 December  2007
Make science part of the debate
by Lawrence Krauss and Chris Mooney
(LA Times) Which candidate can best analyze issues like global warming and stem cells?
Whether the issue is global warming, embryonic stem cell research, ballistic missile defense or the future of the world’s oceans, the same bass line thumps in the background: Sound political decision-making relies, more than ever before, on accurate scientific information.
As advances in science and technology continually transform our world, policy making will inevitably depend more and more on accurate scientific and technical information. Which means that in order to be a successful world leader today, a politician must have an effective means of accessing and applying the latest science.
Jeff Sachs writes in Project Syndicate
Most governments are in fact ill-equipped to understand the scientific issues, even when they are much less ideological and dogmatic than Bush. Governments tend to be organized according to nineteenth- or twentieth-century topics such as diplomacy, defense, internal security, and finance, not twenty-first century challenges such as sustainable development. They are mostly unable to harness advanced scientific knowledge to protect their citizens or participate in global negotiations on the challenges of climate, water, energy, biodiversity, and the like.
5 April 2005 
An Academic Question
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It’s a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that?
Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new “academic freedom” laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story.
Claims that liberal bias keeps conservatives off college faculties almost always focus on the humanities and social sciences, where judgments about what constitutes good scholarship can seem subjective to an outsider. But studies that find registered Republicans in the minority at elite universities show that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences like physics and in engineering departments as in softer fields. Why?
One answer is self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.
But there’s also, crucially, a values issue. In the 1970’s, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the “party of ideas.” Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the “party of theocracy.”