The chieftains of science are grumpy. The marathon presidential primary campaigns have appealed, and pandered, to many interests — the jobless, the inflation-pressed middle class, environmental purists, the medically uninsured, the war-weary, and others. But nothing for science, apart from a few perfunctory nods from the campaign trail.
Science is hurting for money and political respect. Budgets — mostly from the federal government — are big but stagnant, crimping new projects, which are essential for a vibrant scientific enterprise. Without letup, the Bush administration has been trampling scientific sovereignty, limiting federal support of stem-cell research, scoffing at global warming and endangered-species protection, bowing to crackpot challenges to evolutionary theory. The President’s science adviser, science’s own man in Washington (it’s always a man), is an invisible man. Bad times for science, going back over seven years.
The science establishment has tried to draw the attention of the candidates. Early this year, it invited primary candidates to ScienceDebate 2008, scheduled for April 18, shortly before the Pennsylvania primary, at the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia. Sponsors included the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, PBS, the Council on Competitiveness, and a couple of hundred universities.
None of the candidates accepted.
The invitation was then recast to May 2, 9, or 16, in Portland, for the Oregon primary. Again, no acceptances. Hard to top for dissing a distinguished sector of society.
The neglect grates on the esteemed figures at the helm of science. “The campaign so far has given too little attention to what science means for our own economy and our status in the world,” said Harold Varmus, as quoted May 29 in The Washington Post (“Experts Bemoan Nation’s Loss of Stature in the World of Science”).
Varmus, a Nobel laureate, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and current president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, is a pillar of the scientific establishment. He spoke at the World Science Festival, a big powwow in New York designed to spread the gospel of science, one among many such efforts that assume scientific carnivals will win public support — and money — for science.
Joining in, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg denounced political intrusions into scientific affairs. Nobelist David Baltimore declared that “what we need is leadership that respects science.”
The occupant of one of the most hopelessly submerged positions in the vast federal bureaucracy, Nina Federoff, science and technology adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was quoted by the Post as saying that science in the U.S. “has really kind of died over a quarter of a century as the importance of science has grown.” Federoff invoked one of the oldest ploys in the sciences’ poignant appeals for public attention and money: the threat that other nations will surpass the U.S. in science. China, she said, is “educating 10 times as many students as we are,” to which she added, “The next generation of scientists in other countries might not speak English.”
For deploying these fears, China has at long last arrived, succeeding the Soviet Union, whose scientific shambles were conveniently concealed in Cold War secrecy. Back then, Soviet scientific hegemony, and language dominance, was just around the corner, or so we were warned by various panic-meisters of American science.
It went unmentioned at the New York festival that China, with five times the population of the United States, lags far behind the U.S. in scientific output. Though coming up fast, China was the home base for 5.9 percent of the world’s scientific papers in 2005; the U.S. accounted for 28.9 percent. Moreover, globalization is soaring in science, with growing numbers of projects involving cross-border collaborations. The old nationalistic measures of scientific standing are obsolescent, as are the warnings about hordes of scientists and engineers pouring out of Chinese and other foreign universities. From distinguished rostrums, the same was said about the ramshackle USSR.
Why don’t political candidates pay serious attention to science? They don’t have to. The science vote is predominantly Democratic; there’s no need to court it, and there’s little chance of changing it. Attention to science will not score points among nonscientists. Science registers low, if at all, on surveys of voter concerns.
A campaign pitched to science does not resonate with the electorate, as was vividly demonstrated in a long-ago attempt to ride science into the White House.
In 1982, Ohio Senator John Glenn, space pioneer and biggest vote getter in his state’s history, embarked on a nationwide campaign for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, with science as his major theme. Scientific organizations happily hosted campaign rallies for Glenn, and he set them cheering with speeches denouncing the Reagan administration for an “R&D crisis in America.” Glenn did not win a single delegate to the convention.
The surest means to political notice is campaign cash. No matter how you define them, scientists add up to significant numbers — easily a million or more. Money collected and disbursed under the banner of science will produce attention. That’s how politics works. But with minor exceptions in recent decades, scientists have refrained from organized political participation. Instead, they rant on with homilies such as, “What we need is leadership that respects science.” How to get it is beyond their understanding.
For a bunch of smart people, they can be pretty dense.
