This week's question is "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?"
That's a tough question. I'm going to go with mental health. Until relatively recently (i.e., the 1960's), our mental health institutions were illiberal asylums, mass penatentaries for the psychotic, schizophrenic, depressed, autistic, retarded, etc. They were Foucaultian prisons where we sent anyone who couldn't quite manage the real world.
But thanks to the discoveries of science, we now know that the mad are sick and that mental illness is really an illness. Of course, we still don't have very effective treatments (electro-shock therapy remains inexplicably effective), but at least we no longer lock people up for life, or give people malaria to ward of dementia (Julius Wagner-Jauregg won the Nobel Prize in 1927 for this sadistic treatment.) In fact, one could argue that we have shifted too far in the other direction, and have created a population of mentally ill homeless. But I think the discoveries of modern science have led to a much more humane and effective public policy in the field of mental health.
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I almost picked the same thing. The reason I did not, is really a technicality. The thing is, the deinstitutionalization movement was not so much guided by science, as saved by it. That is, deinstitutionalization was going to happen regardless of what happened to the patients. Fortunately, there were dramatic advances in both psychotherapy and psychopharmacology, so it turned out for the better, for some people.
Have we gone too far with deinstitutionalization? Many think so.
http://mhawestchester.org/advocates/opromise81303.asp
Now, some persons who formerly would have been in state mental psychiatric hospitals are homeless, or in prison. Ironically, although the institutions were closed to save money, it is far more expensive to have the people in prison than in a hospital.
So while I agree that we now have "a much more humane and effective public policy in the field of mental health," I don't think that is was science that guided the policy changes. Rather, scientific advances prevented the policy from being a complete catastrophe, and actually led to some very significant improvements for a lot of people.