 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
About the Author
Dan Greenberg is a longtime observer of science policy and politics. He is the author of "Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism" (University of Chicago Press), as well as other books, and has published widely in newspapers and popular and professional magazines.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Marty Nemko, guest blogger
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Bob ZemskyRecent Posts
Ripe for the Gripe | Comment [9]
'Rebranding' Engineering | Comment [13]
Prizes Won't Beat the Energy Crunch ... | Comment [8]
Detecting Scientific Fraud | Comment [4]
Countering Big Pharma's Misuse of Academic Prestige | Comment [7]
Featured Articles By the Author
A Talk With Bush's Science Adviser
(Image from APS Physics site)
John H. Marburger III, President Bush’s science adviser, invited me to come by his office for a conversation, which we held on April 23. Marburger, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is one of the administration’s longest-serving officials, having arrived in October 2001. A physicist, and nominally a Democrat, he formerly was president of SUNY Stony Brook and came to Washington from the directorship of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Following is Part One of edited excerpts of the conversation.
Q. There’s more hostility between the scientific community and this administration than has ever occurred before. I gather you share that perception.
A. Yes, yes.
Q. What is the origin of this hostility?
A. We have an unpopular administration in general. I came in immediately after probably one of the most, if not the most, bitterly divided elections, 2000, there ever was in our country. And the person who lost that battle was identified not only with science but a particular piece of science. And so it was inevitable that there would be tension at least over the issue of climate change. And of course the issue of reproductive technology was already contentious and the previous president avoided it as much as he could, as far as I could tell. So we had some ready-made conditions for contentiousness, and finally the impact of the Internet was accelerating pretty rapidly just about the time this administration came into existence. I sense that the bitterness and the political polarization that was already very apparent during the last years of the previous administration, and the election itself, was a very important factor in the perception of increased hostility between the science community and the administration. The media played an important role here. There was a tendency to politicize things in a particular way in the media, especially those media covering science. And scientists tend to be more on the liberal side anyway. So I think there was a natural tendency to blame things on the administration if they didn’t go well. So there were probably pre-environmental aspects of the culture coming into this administration that led to a heightened tension.
Q. There were specific issues in which scientists clashed with the administration or were highly critical. A large number of Nobel laureates petitioning about this or that. Stem cells. The administration’s many assertions, never always the same, but generally supporting the position that intelligent design deserved some —
A. I think that’s a bogus issue. I think that this administration has never been very visible on that issue. The president himself said as little as he could possibly say on it.
A. If you go back and look at the circumstances of the way he made a statement, it was hardly a statement. It was a little press roundtable and someone asked him what I would regard as a gotcha question, and he answered it about as innocuously as I think he felt he could. And I think the media was prepared to sort of — a community of watchful observers on this issue jumped on it and built it into something much more than it could be. I’ve never had any problem in responding to questions.
Q. Did you feel comfortable? Essentially, you became, if not the apologist then at least the explainer for the administration.
A. I should be. Yeah, I feel comfortable doing that. In my experience, this president is actually quite positive about science. And he’s curious, he believes that science and technology are important. And more than most presidents, he believes that basic research is important. It’s important for the long-term health of the country and that it has intellectual value. And furthermore, neither the president nor anyone else has ever told me what to say or suggested that I should take a certain line on a certain issue.
Q. So, you voluntarily stepped forward to offer an explanation for this little remark that he made that was over-interpreted?
A. My statements about intelligent design are pretty straightforward. It’s not science and in no way should it be compared with science or discussed as a science topic. And as far as evolution is concerned, it’s inconceivable that we could be where we are in our understanding of biology if we didn’t have evolution as a guiding intellectual tool. So, I have no problems speaking about those things. I’m not trying to defend something — anyone’s belief on this or to attack it. But I don’t think the president needs very much defending. This is not an issue that he has tried to make anything of.
Q. It becomes an issue in the minds of many scientists, and I would say appropriately so, when you have school boards —
A. Oh, absolutely —
Q. And the administration has not, apart from your remarks, come forward to say that evolution is the bedrock of modern biology and there is no competition, no competing theory that should be equated with it.
A. Is that surprising?
Q. I would say, given the lay of the political land, it’s not surprising that the administration says the less said the better about this. But if it is as pro-scientific as we hope it would be, it seems to me that that would be an opportunity to come out in support of science.
A. Well, that’s a topic that I’ve never — I have always felt that it’s a mistake to use that issue as an attack on religious belief. It is regrettable that there are school districts and people of good faith that are out there who press this issue to the detriment of the education of young Americans in their neighborhoods. And that’s a mistake. On the other hand, I think that like many issues, it has become polarized to an extent that it’s difficult to talk about it rationally. Should a biology teacher in high school or middle school today talk about evolution, making no reference whatsoever to the controversy or whatever it is? I think that would be a mistake. I think that these issues should be confronted. And that there should be a frank discussion about it. That doesn’t mean that you teach it then as if they were equal. It means that you talk about why are people so upset about this.
Q. So you would address it as a social or cultural phenomenon, rather than as a competing theory.
A. You would teach them appropriately, which means —
Q. You’re not suggesting equal time?
A. I don’t think the president has ever suggested that either.
Q. Some extraordinarily hostile remarks have come from the scientific community regarding this administration and science, and even you. I think, in particular, of a remark by Professor Howard Gardner at Harvard [who referred to Marburger on NPR as a “prostitute”].
A. I think those remarks speak for themselves.
Q. I guess you have to develop a thick skin.
A. I didn’t develop my think skin in public office. I developed it when I was the president of a university. And so I’m used to dealing with faculty and the scientists. I don’t think I’ve been burned in effigy, but I’ve been hung in effigy and called all sorts of names by student newspapers and excoriated by faculty committees or movements and so forth. But they’re my faculty, and they were good, and they were important and I loved them. Those things happen. I really take no offense at those things.
Q. A frequent complaint about the administration concerns the so-called litmus tests for appointments, particularly to advisory committees. Numerous cases have been cited, and people of reputation have said they were questioned inappropriately when they were prospective appointees. You have said these are extremely isolated instances, that it’s not systemic. But there have been many, many of these episodes.
A. Yeah. First of all it’s a terrible idea to ask anybody about these litmus-test questions. It’s embarrassing to the administration and it’s just dumb. And I have never been able to find out or to discover any directive or orchestrated approach to that sort of thing. So, it’s a mistake to do that. Since I’ve been in office, I’ve tried to make it clear to people in agencies that that was not a practice that helps anybody. So, yes, I’ve talked to some of those people.
Q. And they’re credible?
A. Yeah, sure. I know those things happen. Foolish things happen all the time in governments The bigger the government is, the more foolish things happen. One of the reasons you don’t want to do those things is it does give ammunition to people who are critical of the administration, and they just grab all of these incidents into one big ball and say the whole thing is bad. That’s not the case.
Q. The tone of these episodes suggests that it wasn’t just simply isolated foolishness, but that these selective approaches to appointees were ideologically driven: We want people who agree with us and we don’t want people who disagree.
A. I would just as soon not get deeply into that, because there are — each one of these has its own story, and some of them involve personalities that I’m not interested in discussing. But in general, whenever I have talked to an administrator or an official who’s in a position to do something about this, they have responded, and said, yes, we need to fix that.
Q. Has this tactic been driven out of the administration now?
A. I don’t know, because new people come in all the time, and I don’t think it’s only this administration. I think that others have had also some prejudice about what kind of people they like having on committees, but that kind of criteria is inappropriate for science advisory committees.
Q. Everybody agrees about that, that it’s inappropriate. The question is, is it enduring or has this tactic been eliminated?
A. I heard a flurry of complaints at a certain period of time. I haven’t heard any complaints since then. So, I presume that people learned their lesson.
Q. The response to global warming remains a sore point. The president gave an address the other day that some people said represented a change in policy. Others said it was pure window dressing, that he offered no means for attaining the goals that he endorsed.
A. Probably no subject that has so great a technical dimension is less understood in the public discourse than this administration’s positions on climate change. Very inadequately portrayed in the media. I would say this administration became much more sophisticated then most people realize about climate change in the very first year, in 2001, when the president, the administration, declined to put the Kyoto Protocol before Congress for ratification. As usual in politics, that created a symbol that was used ever afterwards to characterize in a very shallow way what the attitude was, ignoring completely that the Senate had voted, like 99-0, that they would never agree to anything that didn’t include major emitting countries. So, at that point the president reached out to the National Academies of Sciences. And the National Academies responded very quickly, to their credit, with a very good report about science and the remaining questions. And the president basically accepted that document as the basis for his policies going forward. And even before I came, the decision was made to create a new management structure for climate science and for climate technology. And what was sophisticated was the recognition that this was going to be a technology issue. And, yes, there were remaining uncertainties about the science, but we knew enough to begin and get started. The president actually said that.
Q. The Academies presented a research menu. They did not call for any policy changes.
A. That’s true. But remember, one of the precipitating issues then was the extent to which any action you would take might make any difference at all. Was climate change being caused by human activity or wasn’t it? And the question put to the National Academies committee was the extent to which the situation was portrayed accurately by the summary for policy makers in the third IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, and they addressed themselves to that. I think they did a good job with that. They said the summary for policy makers overstated the case somewhat, but in fact, it’s likely caused by human activity. And that’s the phrase that the president used in his speech in 2001, which has really established a policy within the administration ever since. But most of the actions that have been taken on this have been taken in the name of energy security. There hasn’t been any withdrawal of support for climate science itself; in fact, there has been an increase. And there’s a positive attitude toward climate science, environmental science. It was understood early on that the response to global warming has to be through energy policy and technologies that allow you to generate and use energy without putting CO2 into the atmosphere. And there has been a commitment toward developing technologies that have conditions so that the necessary technology will result.
Q. But there was resistance all along the way — or certainly an absence of encouragement — for improved CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] standards, for example.
A. But improved CAFE standards have been proposed by the president.
Q. Not early in the administration. Now it comes along with less than a year to go.
A. Diesel standards were put in place pretty early. I think the record is better than most people think on CAFE standards. People wanted much more. Many people feel that things should go much faster. My view as science adviser is that it’s important to get started and it’s important to be investing in things that can make a difference. I think it’s important to know about climate science, it’s important to have some idea where the impacts will be and how fast they may occur. And as long as we are investing in those areas, that will help us to do that, and I’m happy. Now as far as the response is concerned, I know that whatever administration is in power, it’s going to be very difficult to get agreement on what to do. I don’t think it would be any easier if there were a Democratic president than it is. I think Congress is divided. Although with time, there is more consensus of what needs to be done. And to some extent, there’s been a transition driven by the experience of those countries that did sign up to the Kyoto Protocol with their ability to limit CO2 emissions in their own countries. They’re having a very difficult time. Watching that and learning more about climate science itself has broadened the discussion considerably and made it much richer and more inclusive of all things that people need to know about what do in order to mitigate and adapt than was the case in 2000.
Q. Did the many controversies about the administration’s dealings with science and science policy ever get you to think about resigning?
A. Absolutely not.
Q. You were getting barrages from the scientific community.
A. But you know, that’s only on a tiny fraction of the business of science in Washington. This office deals with everything. And climate change, stem cells, these are — they’re important, but how many hours a day does a science policy office need to spend on those things? There are many other important things that were going on.
Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: 'Science Rattles the Tin Cup' Draws More Fire
Next: Part Two: Q&A With John H. Marburger
If Mr. Marburger relates this administration as containing personalities he’s not interested in discussing, yet continues to support ostensibly, doesn’t it prove Professor Gardner’s accusation?Since the policies this administration has set to destroy constituted practices the rest of the world had been persuaded to adopt, and then in effect aborted, does he realize the ethical dilemma that future researchers will bear trying to justify due to his myopic and blindered tenure? It’s a sad commentary.
— gdwyer2 · Apr 28, 08:03 PM · #
It’s all very convenient for Marburger to talk about it as if the controversy is all about Al Gore, stem cells and climate change, where there is public controversy, even if there is scientific consensus. But, this administration has monkeyed around with all sorts of things that don’t get on the front page much. Suppressing wildlife biology reports on environmental impacts, NASA PR flunkies trying to dumb down web pages about the Big Bang, the militarization of space, there’s just a huge long list of perfectly legitimate scientific grievances. Now, it may be because the Administration is a bunch of hard-driving my-way-or-the-highway politicos, rather than actual villagers with pitchforks. But the outcome is the same. They don’t care about science or doing the right thing, and we can tell they don’t care.
— Ben · Apr 28, 08:49 PM · #
George Wanker Bush has a science advisor? There’s no sign that it’s helping.
— Owen · Apr 30, 07:04 AM · #
Mr. MarredBurger will spend the rest of his miserable life apologizing to civilization for apologizing for the barbarians now enrolled as leaders of the US government. I hope he enjoys escuse making—the rest of his life will be filled with it. He sooooo richly deserves it. Perhaps a rightwing “think“tank will sinecure him away on some golf course where he can eat lunch hearing Jack FruitJuice talk about the latest extensions to his ego.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 30, 08:10 AM · #