Policy

As of this morning, the situation surrounding the Senate confirmations of John Holdren as head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Jane Lubchenco as NOAA Administrator is somewhat confused. A number of new news articles and blog posts have appeared over the last couple of days. Unfortunately, some of them seem to be presenting new information, while others are several days behind the current situation. In the interest of trying to inject a bit of clarity, I'm going to review the full chronology, not just the latest information. 20 December 2008: President-elect Obama names…

Yuval Levin has an editorial in today's WaPo that makes a very good point: Science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. In science policy, science informs, but politics governs, and rightly so. There are, of course, different ways for politics to exert authority over science. To distort or hide unwelcome facts is surely illegitimate. But to weigh facts against societal priorities -- economic, political and ethical -- in…

I am reluctant to use the term "power couple" in reference to a pair of Minnesota leaders in the area of science and politics, but considering the contributions of Rebecca and Shawn Lawrence Otto, the term moves past cliché and into double entendre. Rebecca is the Minnesota State Auditor, an elected constitutional office that I consider to be second only to the governor in terms of authority and importance. Shawn has been one of the key figures involved in the organization Science Debate 2008, originally formed to spur the large field of 2008 presidential hopefuls to have at least one…

Watchmen is great. Dana's review is basically right, so consider this a "me too" and an expansion on certain themes. As all nerds now know, the movie changes key events from the end of the graphic novels. I think that the major change was the right decision: giant psychic squid are awesome, but pretty random. What director Zach Snyder did is better, but he should have worked through the consequences of those changes better. For instance, did the scientists in Antarctica still have to die? Leaving that needless death makes Adrian Veidt more of a monster than he is in the comic, a change…

President Obama has lifted the ban on embryonic stem cell research enacted by Bush, but I'm left feeling that this intervention came many years too late. Pledging that his administration will "make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology," President Obama on Monday lifted the Bush administration's strict limits on human embryonic stem cell research. ... But Mr. Obama went on to say that the majority of Americans "have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research; that the potential it offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight the perils can be…

In what was widely seen as a needless politicization of science, President George W. Bush announced early in his presidency that he was forbidding federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells (with certain exceptions). This episode, and the way he sold his decision to the public, is the prime example in Chris Mooney's excellent The Republican War on Science. In particular, he oversold the exceptions, claiming that up to 60 lines of usable stem cells existed, when only 21 were viable, and when those were contaminated in various ways, and could not be used to research certain…

Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4 --- Part 4 with Christopher Henke, discussing his book Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. WF: What do you make of the intersection of STS and agricultural studies? CH: STS folks aren't often citing rural sociology, and vice-versa. I think the connections between these realms are greater than it might at first appear. Historians of science like Margaret Rossiter, Charles Rosenberg, and Deborah Fitzgerald were writing about agricultural science some time ago (as a sociologist…

Obama has made href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/02/AR2009030200371.html?wprss=rss_nation">two important appointments, to positions that will influence healthcare policy.  The attention so far has been focused on href="http://www.governor.ks.gov/">Kathleen Sebelius, who is in line to become Secretary of Health and Human Services, assuming she is confirmed by the Senate.  Sebelius already has href="http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/03/03/kathleen-sebelius-and-the-fight-over-whos-truly-catholic.html">attracted controversy,…

Read this, weep, dry your tears and get on the phone. From the still reliable news pages of the WaPo: The nominations of two of President Obama's top science advisers have stalled in the Senate, according to several sources, posing a challenge to the administration as it seeks to frame new policies on climate change and other environmental issues. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) has placed a "hold" that blocks votes on confirming Harvard University physicist John Holdren, who is in line to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Oregon State University marine…

It appears that yesterday's reports that New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez was holding up the confirmation of both the Science Advisor and the NOAA administrator were not entirely correct. He may well be delaying these confirmations, but he's apparently not the only one. CQ Politics is now reporting that the nominations are being held by multiple members of the Senate. Due to the holds, there is currently no confirmation vote scheduled on the floor. This is a very reliable report. CQ Politics is not basing this on anonymous sources. They are quoting Commerce Committee Chairman John…

'Holds' on NOAA Administrator & Science Advisor Confirmations. Call Senators Now.: The Washington Post is reporting that Senate votes to confirm Jane Lubchenco as NOAA Administrator and John Holdren as Science Advisor are currently being obstructed by a Democratic Senator. Quoting multiple unnamed sources, the Post says that New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez has placed an "anonymous hold" on the nominations in order to try to gain leverage for some issues related to Cuba that he's interested in. The Latest Outrage: Holds on Holdren, Lubchencho: The Washington Post (the news part)…

The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California (MIT Press, 2008), with its author Christopher Henke. Henke is an assistant professor of sociology at Colgate University, an STS scholar, and a contributor to Colgate's environmental studies program. Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power, says its publisher, "explores the ways that science helped build the Salinas Valley and California's broader farm industry." In doing so, Henke provides an account of "how agricultural scientists and…

This is big stuff--and thank goodness the Washington Post still handles global warming well in the news pages, if not on the editorial/op-ed page. The Obama administration has made an ingenious move: Its soon to be revealed budget relies, for revenue, upon the idea that Congress will pass cap and trade legislation, and this will be bringing big money into the government by 2012. Moreover, the budget commits that money to achieving core administration policy objectives. Or as the Post puts it: "Sources familiar with the document said it would direct $15 billion of that revenue to clean-energy…

"The [Environmental Justice (EJ)] movement," writes Gwen Ottinger, "was galvanized in the early 1980s by the observation that toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards are concentrated in communities of color. EJ activists, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, began to argue that social equality demanded an end to this 'environmental racism.' Currently, however, it is not equality but health that dominates grassroots activists' campaigns against chemical contamination." Ottinger is a fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation's (CHF) Center for Contemporary History and…

For the last couple of decades, perhaps beginning around the time of the publication of Laurie Garret's excellent thesis (The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance) on disease and politics and continuting through Gina Kolata's "Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic" there has been increased attention on the 1918 flu virus and pandemic, as well as subsequent outbreaks. This interest has probably been fueled by increased knowledge of (or incidence of?) tragic and highly newsworthy outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, and so on. More recently, the perception has grown…

For more than a decade, Rick Weiss covered science (and its politics) for the Washington Post. When he left the paper last year, the news organization lost one of the top two or three science journalists in the business and perhaps the very best at covering the intersections of biomedical research and policy. Weiss now serves as a fellow at the Center for American Progress, contributing articles to the think tank's Science Progress site. In today's Washington Post, Weiss pens a guest op-ed weighing in on the continued culture war over evolution. While Darwin himself never took his findings as…

someone has dumped the entire collection of Congressional Research Service reports to wikileaks this incidentally totally slashdotted their servers, but being good geeks they spawned copies to pirate bay and bittorrent primary link is here the congressional research service provides apolitical reports to congress at the request of representatives, the reports are public, in principle, but most are withheld at the request of congress - some because they contradict policy or politics, some because of some perceived inconvenience, principle or other issue over 6,000 new reports were released…

Williams has long held a dominant position in a number of categories of blogging: Dan Drezner on economics and politics, Marc Lynch on the Middle East, Ethan Zuckerman on the developing world and really cool conferences, Derek Catsam on history and Red Sox fandom, yours truly on canine physics. And I'm sure I'm forgetting several people. The number of blogging fields with prominent Eph contributions has increased this week, with the entire Williams math department making the jump into blogging. It's a bold move, but math blogging has always been more respectable than other types. At this…

I guess even the Vatican responds to public pressure, if it's intense enough. Last week, I noted an extremely disturbing story, a story that outraged me, a story that I would have found even more disturbing were I still a practicing Catholic but that I found disturbing enough even though I no longer am one. I'm referring to the difficult to explain decision on the part of Pope Benedict XVI to rehabilitate four heretical bishops who had been ordained without the Vatican's permission and who all belonged to a conservative Catholic organization known as the the Society of Saint Pius X. This…

On Sunday DailyKos frontpager, DemFromCT (who is also a founder of the FluWiki and a pulmonary specialist) finished up his two part interview with us. It's cross-posted here below the fold. If anyone doubted we were academics, the display of watching us argue with ourselves would have but those doubts to rest. Scientists cherish the hope that we will make difficult things simple, but often we wind up making simple things difficult. We see complications in everything, even the simple question of what is public health infrastructure. Witness: Q. Last week I asked you about public health…