If the science establishment performs according to form, it will effectively sit out the coming presidential election. Too bad, because the influence of science in Washington has been on a downward slope for decades, to the detriment of science and wise national policy making. The cause of decline is an absence of the political bite that comes with organized participation in the political process.

Wake up, mandarins and boffins! The pols don’t even know you’re there.

They once did, but that was back in the early post-World War II days, when scientifically illiterate politicians humbly invited scientists to the inner councils for guidance on the mysteries of the atom, space flight, exotic treatments for disease, and research as a creator of jobs and prosperity. The illiteracy continues to this day, but through repetition and familiarity, policy making for science has usually followed an annual routine of more of the same for next year, with heavy helpings of appropriations earmarks — pork — to share the wealth. In recent years, however, as politics has been distracted by war and economic stresses, attention to science has declined — and so have overall appropriations.

Lawyers, physicians, real-estate brokers, business, and industry have long poured money into elective politics to gain their goals. But science, intoxicated by delusions of purity and determined to be loved by all, stayed aloof from politics. The one exception came in the 1964 presidential election, when scientists, aroused by Republican Barry Goldwater’s wise-guy remarks about nuclear warfare, organized against him in large numbers. The morning after, chagrined at what they had done, the leaders of the political mobilization vowed never again. Splinter groups — on the Democratic side — have occasionally stood up in subsequent presidential elections, but never to any significant effect.

Within the scientific community, the 2008 election has produced an unusual level of political rumblings, but of the naive, tame, and polite sort characteristic of the scientific culture when it confronts politics. The most prominent effort to date is a quixotic campaign for the presidential candidates to hold a debate on science, for which invitations have gone out for April 18 at the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia. Science Debate 2008, as it is known, is backed by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a claimed 140 universities, and at least 12,000 petition signers.

If candidates accept — which they haven’t yet — the debate will take place at the height of the Democratic primary campaign in Pennsylvania, scheduled for April 22, and therefore may attract some notice. But for the general public, there are few soporifics that can compete with the intricacies of science policy. In surveys of what’s bothering the public, the budget and responsibilities of the National Science Foundation are yet to register.

Science is an ahistorical enterprise, with its recruits trained to value what’s in this week’s journals and not to waste time on old stuff. The tendency to ignore the past obscures the string of serious rebuffs and defeats inflicted on the scientific enterprise in recent times.

In 1993, the long-reigning particle physicists suffered a historic loss when Congress declined to continue funding of their dream machine, the Super Conducting Super Collider — after over $2-billion had been spent on digging a hole for the SSC in Texas. Though Democrats are rated as the better friends of science in Washington, the SSC debacle was wrought by a Democratic Congress and accepted without a fight by the Clinton White House.

Two years later, shortly after Republicans took control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment — a cherished bastion of scientific sense on Capitol Hill — was gleefully abolished by House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his new majority.

For well over a decade, Congressional pledges for rapid doubling of the NSF budget have casually been forgotten. Supporters of the National Institutes of Health, playing on medical fears and hopes, were successful in doubling the NIH budget between 1998 and 2003. But even the sainted NIH has run out of political steam as war and economic decline consume political attention. For the fifth successive year, the NIH budget remains flat, and therefore sinking in purchasing power.

While the biomedical research community is in anguish about declining resources and missed opportunities, political Washington seems barely aware of its distress. Among politicians, there’s an impression that scientists are always complaining, no matter how much money they’ve got.

The Bush administration’s record on stem-cell research, climate change, creationism, and suppression of scientific dissidence comprises the bleakest chapter in relations between science and government. The White House science adviser, John H. Marburger III, serves as an ever-alert apologist for his boss, facilely explaining away every depredation as a misunderstanding or unauthorized misstep by an administration flunky.

The response from science has been tepid: petitions, with the customary cadre of Nobel laureates signing on, editorials in Science expressing dismay and hopes for the future, plus a few Congressional expressions of indignation. That’s about it.

The resources and hopes invested in Science Debate 2008 are touching. The best that can be said about the debate, if it takes place, is that it can’t hurt, and might possibly illuminate politics’ neglect of science. There are better ways to do that, and better ways to get results, but the scientific psyche doesn’t take to them.