I'm not going to Boston this year for the AAAS meeting--Sheril will be my eyes and ears--but I didn't have to be there to hear about what Nobel laureate David Baltimore said during his president's address yesterday. He began by prominently highlighting ScienceDebate2008. Here is an excerpt from his remarks:
We have a Presidential election coming. Science and technology have played at best minor roles in the primary campaigns. Now that we have a limited candidate pool, it is time for our community to be heard.
A debate on science has been proposed and some 15,000 people and many organisation have signed onto the proposal. We should write to the candidates and encourage them to participate.
Their view of science, whether they want to hear its conclusions or want to hide from them, whether they want to have the thinking of our community represented in the White House or relegated to a distant office, whether they will support intensive investigation of alternative energy sources, whether they will liberate the biomedical community to fully investigate the power of stem cell technology, whether they will face the reality that abstinence is not the only way to protect people against HIV transmission, whether they will provide leadership or bury their head in the sand when tough choices must be made, whether they will leave a better country than the one they inherit, all of these are critical questions with which they should be faced.
And there is one question they should be asked, which is of particular interest to me: will they support an increase in funding for NIH?
It is criminal that at a time when the opportunities in biomedical research outstrip any other moment in history, there has been a 13 percent real decrease in the buying power of the health research budget between 2004 and the 2009 proposal.
The President must believe himself immortal, or in the hands of God, to have presided over this decimation of one of the jewels of American science, a science jewel that has spawned the biotechnology industry, the one industry in which America is the unquestioned leader.
How can we cede that lead to others by reducing support for the research that made it possible?
Meanwhile, yesterday the National Wildlife Federation, with a staggering 5 million members, endorsed SD08...
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Intersection readers, it is time for some intercession. I was just counting the number of Congress critters who have endorsed Science Debate 2008. It is distressingly small. There are only 12. We should all have the names of our congressional reps on this site. I do (Jerry McNerney.... a natural as he holds a Ph. D. in Math.) However, it did not happen until I called his offices to suggest that he take this action.
I would urge everyone else to do the same. Pick up the phone and call. Now I have to work on my Senator... Barbara Boxer.
Sciencedebate 2008 is being advocated all over the place here at the AAAS meeting - former Illinois Congressman John Porter just told us to go join (after calling the scientific community "pathetic," for not standing up for science sooner - he doesn't mince words)!
Unfortunately I think most of us in the room already support Sciencedebate 2008.
Live from a AAAS panel on Science Communication...
SD'08 has made an impact--People are talking, asking questions, and interested to make ScienceDebate 2008 happen! The initiative has encouraged folks to think more about where science is on the national agenda and I'm feeling optimistic.
The next few days in Beantown will be interesting and we sure wish you were here.
My question to Congressman Porter would be this:
Where has this Congress been for the past 7 years while LOTS of scientists (eg, Union of Concerned Scientists) have been standing up for science?
I'll tell you where: MIA.
Not to diminish the role of people like Chris Mooney over the past few years in making an issue of politicization of science or anything, but scientists HAVE been documenting the political abuses of science and making a stink about it for some time now.
But very few people in Congress have been listening -- and those few who have been listening have done almost nothing about it.
Scientists are not the ones whose responsibility it is to ensure that politicization of science does not occur.
Politicians are!
Good grief, Charley Brown.
Although an outside observer, I'm quite interested in how this will turn out, simply because it may serve as an interesting case study as to the nature of the interaction of science and politics.
If/when the debate occurs, I'm a bit skeptical as to how it will actually go down. That is, hopefully it won't look like an evolution/creationism "debate", which, if one can use scienceblog discussions on this topic as an example, looks pretty much like an attempt to mix oil and water, and/or a mouse running on a treadmill.
Hi, Chris-- You might want to contact Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine:
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/02/science_debate_2008_a_good_i…
Maybe with a bit of help and/or material, she could write something up for the print magazine?
Just a thought...
Intersection readers, it is time for some intercession. I was just counting the number of Congress critters who have endorsed Science Debate 2008. It is distressingly small. There are only 12. We should all have the names of our congressional reps on this site. I do (Jerry McNerney.... a natural as he holds a Ph. D. in Math.) However, it did not happen until I called his offices to suggest that he take this action.