Unscientific America

OCTOBER 4, 2007, MARKED THE FIFTY-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE SOVIET launch of Sputnik, the event that catalyzed the U.S. government to make a massive investment in science whose impact lasted for decades. It is profoundly disheartening to contemplate how far we have fallen since.

And so, hoping for nothing less than to reintegrate science into the broader public discourse and pull it back to the center of our culture, we went to work—roughly a month after the Sputnik anniversary and a year before the 2008 presidential election—on a grassroots initiative called ScienceDebate2008. In essence, it was a collective, nonpartisan call for the presidential candidates to publicly debate science and technology policy on the campaign trail, before a national television audience.

The idea for this push originally came from Matthew Chapman, a screenwriter, movie director, author, and science aficionado who also happens to be the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. It was spearheaded by a motley group of people throughout the country who organized out of common interest and motivation without any initial funding or institutional structure, and who were centrally led by another screenwriter and political strategist, Shawn Lawrence Otto. The initiative’s message was splendidly direct: Science matters, to policy and to the economy. Therefore, politicians ought to debate science policy if they aspire to be president.

After eight years of enduring George W. Bush’s hostility to science and amid growing fears that the United States could be falling behind in science and innovation, the idea of ScienceDebate2008 resonated deeply with the American scientific community. Before long, we had brought on board, as cosponsors, the leading institutions of American science—the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences—as well as the umbrella Council on Competitiveness, which represents university presidents, labor leaders, and corporate CEOs. In addition, ScienceDebate2008 had garnered endorsements from scores of Nobel laureates and scientific luminaries, such as biomedical innovators David Baltimore and Harold Varmus, and physics pioneer (and now Obama energy secretary) Steven Chu; prominent political figures ranging from Newt Gingrich to Obama transition team head John Podesta; and 38,000 individual Americans. Virtually the entire community of American science rallied behind the cause, and with an extraordinary speed and passion that demonstrated how much this community, after the Bush years, had come to yearn for a higher profile in decision making.

Alas, when it came to science, the presidential race showed little hope of improving on the past. By early 2008, for example, TV’s top five Sunday talk-show hosts—the late Tim Russert, George Stephanopoulos, Wolf Blitzer, Chris Wallace, and Bob Schieffer—had interviewed the various candidates more than 175 times and asked some 3,000 questions. Yet only six of those exchanges even mentioned “global warming” or “climate change.” And the candidates didn’t want to talk about science policy any more than the media cared to ask about it. Despite securing broadcast partners in PBS’s Now and Nova, locking down a desirable venue—Philadelphia’s illustrious Franklin Institute, named after the great scientist and founding father—and suggesting an ideal date of April 22, just before the Pennsylvania primary election, ScienceDebate2008 found its invitation declined by the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns and ignored entirely by the John McCain campaign.

And just as ScienceDebate2008 couldn’t get any traction with the campaigns, so the group also struggled with the political journalists who set the national agenda. ScienceDebate2008’s formation, and its demand for a presidential debate on science policy, represented news by any reasonable standard: It was both unprecedented and highly policy relevant. The nation’s brain trust wanted to hear from the politicians, and that’s not the kind of invite John F. Kennedy or Dwight D. Eisenhower would have turned down. Yet although blogs, foreign media, and science journalists were fascinated by the story—Le Monde covered it, for instance, as did Radio New Zealand; and of course outlets like Scientific American and NPR’s Science Friday dug in—the American mass media largely ignored it, presumably lumping the scientists together with all the other interest groups demanding attention from candidates.

Although Clinton and Obama were perfectly willing to attend a “compassion forum” to discuss “faith, values, and other current issues” at Pennsylvania’s Messiah College during the primaries, and McCain and Obama both appeared at a “civil forum” at celebrity pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church during the general election, no science debate ever transpired. Obama and McCain did eventually respond in depth to fourteen written science policy questions posed by Science Debate2008, but there were no live speeches, no interviews, no chances for follow-up from the candidates, and no televised events to put science on the national agenda during one of the most closely followed elections in American history.

The ScienceDebate2008 experience should give pause to any scientist—or civilian—who feels that the election of Barack Obama will singlehandedly solve the problem of America’s scientific illiteracy. It’s true that our current president evolved, over the course of the campaign, into a leader who shows a deep appreciation of science—in significant part, we believe, because he and his advisers were continually dogged by ScienceDebate2008—and has now begun to govern that way. Still, the problems encountered between scientists and politicians during the 2008 election were structural and systemic in nature, and not likely to disappear simply by virtue of any single candidate’s victory.

Politicians, political strategists, and political journalists either didn’t grasp the importance of talking about science in an electoral context or, worse, they feared it. ScienceDebate2008 CEO Shawn Otto says of his interactions with the campaigns: “[They] were terrified of [the debate idea]. They saw it as a high risk proposition, and maybe a sandbagging. Even if it wasn’t, it would require lots of prep time and huge political exposure in order to move a relatively niche audience. If someone made a mistake, the thinking went, they would open themselves up to potentially fatal ridicule.”

Scientists thought a presidential science debate was a great idea because they assumed that the rational airing of policies and differences should lead to better decision making and wiser voting, not to mention higher-profile treatment of critical science issues. Yet politicians viewed it as a lose-lose proposition; and since it clearly wasn’t going to happen, political journalists viewed it as irrelevant—not a story.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were, after all, a time when prevailing geopolitical circumstances sent the nation’s leaders running to scientists for help and the scientists answered. As Sputnik faded from view, however, the politicians went back to being politicians. And the scientists, now the recipients of heavy federal funding from the taxpayer for their research, pursued a strategy of studied political detachment virtually unique in American public life: They would remain “on tap” to deliver their advice to politicians but aloof from direct electioneering. As longtime science journalist Daniel Greenberg puts it: “With very rare exceptions, [scientists] don’t run for office or organize under their professional identities, as lawyers, physicians, bankers, and others regularly do.”

Such a stance made perfect sense when it originated in the 1950s. But since then, as politicians have grown less needy and solicitous, it has fueled science’s declining political influence. In the absence of a clear and urgent need for scientists and politicians to work together closely, the two groups have instead largely settled into operating as separate cultures with far too little understanding of one another or productive interchange.

In part, the divorce of science and politics can be explained by the very different worldviews that inform each field. Scientists look at the world and see order, and generally assume rational actions will (or should) be taken. They go to painstaking lengths to prove or justify their recommendations by quantifying and calculating possibilities, by modeling and accounting for as many inputs as possible within a system. They study universal principles and global problems. And as C. P. Snow observed fifty years ago, they have the “future in their bones”: They take a very long-range outlook on where things are headed, even modeling what’s to come through the haze of uncertainty. A classic example is the 100-year or longer projections now used by climate scientists to forecast the catastrophe we are courting if we don’t do something—fast—about our greenhouse gas emissions.

Politicians live in a very different world, one in which they are more often rewarded for playing to voters’ emotions rather than their intellects. Even if they themselves know better, they recognize that particularly in the television age, charisma, charm, and personal appeals will get them a lot further than logical argumentation. Unlike scientists, politicians respond to constituencies that are local—a city, a congressional district, at most a nation that covers only a small percentage of the world’s landmass—rather than global. Scientists study forces with outcomes ten, 100, even 10,000 years hence, whereas politicians function in the relentless and unforgiving world of election cycles and the permanent campaign.

These differences alone would be sufficient to explain the current chasm between America’s scientific and political communities. But there is also the problem of specialization. Whereas good science is rewarded for being painstaking and nuanced, politics is the enemy of subtlety—political battles are fought out in sound bites, decided in up or down votes. In this context, the politician often suspects that the scientist cannot see beyond his or her narrow specialty and spends too much time on minutia. And politicians find nothing more maddening than when scientists refuse to come out and say what they really think, hiding behind a veneer of “objectivity.” Hence the recurrent congressional joke about the need to find a “one-handed scientist” to give testimony: a scientist who won’t constantly say, “On the one hand . . . on the other hand.”

This is a problem Sheril experienced personally as a fellow in the 109th Congress, where she observed that the groups arriving at her senator’s office to make their case on science-related legislation seemed completely out of touch with the environment on Capitol Hill. Technical experts touted significance values and statistical figures that were at times so obscure that even Sheril couldn’t understand the data, despite her experience in academia. Other science lobbyists promoted idealistic solutions without a grasp of the socioeconomics or people involved in the situation. Meanwhile, those on the “other side”—global warming “skeptics” and oil lobbyists, to name a few—were articulate and well organized, with a far better understanding of how to appeal to a congressional audience. They worked with each other, seeming to agree on goals, methods, and the take-home message. They were effective.

The fundamental problem was apparent: Too many scientists had internalized the idea that in some fundamental sense, they had to stay “above” politics, as though it were something dirty. Indeed, in the research community there’s a commonly held belief that involvement in the legislative process tempts one to “become an advocate”—the enemy of objectivity. Political engagement, many scientists fear, can damage one’s reputation. And of course it can also detract heavily from the time spent on research.

Many scientists also believe that political engagement is a waste of time, and unfortunately, they are often right. Politicians are notorious for their cynical use of scientific information; in the U.S. Congress, where only 8 percent of elected officials hold a science or medical Ph.D., scientific studies are regularly used as an excuse for doing nothing. Calling for “more research” is an excellent way of punting. At the same time, politicians are notorious for digging up scientific “facts” that appear to support what they already wanted to do anyway.

Such cherry-picking is easy to do, even inviting: Congress is awash in information, much of it questionable or self-interested, emanating from think tanks, advocacy groups, bloggers, journalists, lobbyists, and many others. With so many reports, agencies, and institutes on hand providing “expertise,” information overload makes for a constant struggle, on the part of non-scientists, to weed through it all and determine what to trust. There’s no official sifting mechanism, either: The previous one, the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), died at the partisan hands of the Gingrich Congress in 1995, and thus far hasn’t been resurrected by the now-majority Democrats. And even OTA, it was often complained, worked too slowly most of the time to serve the congressional schedule—as do universities and the National Academy of Sciences.

In all of these ways, scientists and politicians regularly reenact the problem of the “two cultures.” Sometimes the consequences of the disconnect are vast and egregious, such as the twenty-year failure to address climate change. And sometimes they’re simply comical. For instance, Representative Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), one of three physicists in Congress, describes having to rush to the floor to prevent fellow members from killing science programs they haven’t understood—assuming, for instance, that “game theory” research involves sports.

Nonetheless, the idea of game theory being debated, however ignorantly, on the floor of Congress is less frightening than a much more common problem: the massive difficulty of getting science on the political radar in the first place. According to a 2008 report from the Keystone Center, a Colorado-based policy institute that interviewed leading members of Congress and their staffs to assess how they thought about science, most members “seem to have little care about, interest in, or attention to technical and scientific matters in particular, and to legitimate and credible sources of information to guide Congress on such issues when it chooses to take them up.” In fact, the Keystone report found that because many decisions about science policy are made not through decision or analysis but on ideological and political grounds, “even if a credible, centrist analysis is conducted on a particular issue for Congress, it might not matter much in the current way decisions are made.” The report even quoted one congressional interviewee as follows: “No one in Congress senses the need for science in their daily lives.”

It’s important to remember that when it comes to their treatment of science, politicians reflect their constituents and the rest of society. They rarely denounce science outright, any more than average Americans do. Rather, they use it and abuse it as convenient, because too often, that’s all science means to them: It’s a tool to achieve an end. On the surface, science appears beloved; beneath it, hardly considered, save among those few legislators who work directly on setting science policy and funding levels.

And so despite indications that the relationship between Washington and the scientific community will greatly improve under the Obama administration, this is no reason for scientists—or the rest of us—to feel complacent. Scientists shouldn’t stake their political future, or that of the country, on the vicissitudes of changing administrations. Having painfully witnessed their political vulnerability, they should work actively to reduce it and to reach out to politicians, rather than assuming they’ll come around simply out of duty or interest.

The politicians should heed science, and care about it, without anyone asking or beseeching. But as we don’t live in a perfect world, scientists must also strive to make their knowledge relevant, something that hardly happens automatically. It takes a lot of work and experience to shape scientific information in a politically useful way; and in general, the scientific community has not invested much energy in creating specialists capable of carrying out this culture-crossing endeavor.

Small efforts can go a long way, however—after all, effective communication isn’t rocket science (or neurobiology, or particle physics). Thrust scientists into political contexts often enough, and they’ll pick up a great deal. Programs like the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s congressional fellowships or the John A. Knauss Sea Grant fellowship program do precisely that by inserting scientists into congressional offices. But what they bring about informally should be done far more systematically, as a central priority of the scientific community. The goal should be nothing less than to redefine the role of the scientist in public affairs. This requires a shift away from the identity of a lobbyist or special interest who simply wants more research funding and toward that of a trained communicator and options broker who provides politically feasible ideas and can help politicians succeed through the use of science, and recognize why they need it.

In other words, as Daniel Yankelovich has suggested, we need a new caste of savvy scientists who can act as “framers” of policy issues. These scientists would understand the varied socioeconomic and political pressures that impinge upon the legislative process and know how to integrate accurate scientific information with a range of achievable and realistic policy options to facilitate the process of decision making. Rather than testifying before Congress or briefing legislators from a “just the facts” perspective, these scientists would be ready to address the questions most relevant to political leaders, questions involving American competitiveness, employment, innovation, and national security.

To succeed, such scientists will have to understand how to communicate effectively with politicians. To this end, they might take a page from Canadian politician Preston Manning, who has written incisively about the science-politics divide, differentiating between “sourceoriented communicators” and “receiver-oriented communicators.” Most scientists are source-oriented communicators: that is, they communicate in whatever way feels most comfortable to them, irrespective of the audience and usually in scientist-speak. Receiver-oriented communicators, in contrast, think about an audience and how to reach it, and only then determine the appropriate message to use. For scientists to play an effective role in American politics, they will need representatives skilled in this latter mode of interaction.

What are some “receiver-oriented” communication strategies that will help scientists in the political arena? Scientists, Manning argues, need to “establish a relationship with the political community on grounds other than the milk cow-milking machine relationship.” In other words, they shouldn’t merely reach out to politicians when they want research funding. Rather, they should establish long-term personal relationships that are multidirectional in nature, so that they are helping as much as being helped.

Second, in a world dominated by the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in which elections are won and lost not through personal outreach but by media appearances, scientists will have to find ways of presenting science issues in such a way that politicians will instantly recognize their media communicability. Scientists will have to accept that their advice is being judged not on its substantive content—at least not at first—but explicitly on the utility of its packaging. Politicians, Manning notes, are always thinking, “If we adopt that position, how will I explain that to the television reporter who is waiting outside this room when she sticks her mike and her camera in my face?”

Carl Sagan is the perfect example of a scientist who knew how to do this; indeed, he did it so well that he once contributed scientific language to President Jimmy Carter’s farewell address. When needed, Sagan could put on his scientist-speechwriter hat. There ought to be many more scientists with this ability, and far more recognition in the scientific community that having such a valuable skill is in no way inferior to excelling as a researcher. The best way to ensure such recognition, of course, would be to explicitly count successful political outreach as part of a scientist’s credits for job advancement—in other words, it should be favorably weighed in university tenure review. Meanwhile, young scientists in training should receive courses in public speaking and become acculturated to the idea that this is part of their job description.

Scientists who have many political encounters may develop such abilities independently, but simply assuming they’ll do so on their own leaves far too much to chance. Instead, these skills should be systematically cultivated among a group of effective science communicators who can do this critically important work on behalf of their community.

And even as initiatives of this kind would go a long way in preparing scientists for public roles, a little innovation and experimentation can also achieve wonders. The experience of ScienceDebate2008, while disappointing in its failure to secure a national science debate, nonetheless reveals a great deal about how much can be accomplished with imagination and hard work.

The organization had almost no funding or staff. It was literally run by two screenwriters who needed something to do during the 2007-2008 Hollywood writers’ strike. Yet precisely this fact—that the organizers hadn’t been through the rigors of the scientific training process, didn’t have to guard their objectivity all the time, could politically strategize and innovate, and were willing to try off-the-wall approaches—probably made them the most effective emissaries to the political arena that science could have. As the organization’s CEO Shawn Otto (who, when not organizing scientists, writes films such as House of Sand and Fog) puts it: “It may be telling that it was two screenwriters—mass communicators—and not scientists themselves who got behind this initiative to get it rolling. We, as ordinary citizens, saw the problem very clearly; as mass market writers we knew how to engage the public on it, and because of the writers’ strike, we had time to take a flier and try to do something about it.”

Consider Otto’s actions after he was initially rebuffed by the campaigns in his request for a presidential science debate. He didn’t give up: Rather, he set about proving to the candidates that they needed to participate, and that it would be good for them as well as for the country.

The push involved two strategies. First, working with the biomedical science advocacy group ResearchAmerica, ScienceDebate2008 under Otto’s leadership commissioned a poll whose results suggested that science issues aren’t necessarily a “niche” area after all. Eighty-five percent of the public said it supported the idea of a presidential science debate. Although we shouldn’t make too much of this number, it certainly gave the presidential candidates something to consider, and in a language they understand—that of polling. If those results were correct, then maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t be written off as nerds for participating in a science forum.

Meanwhile, ScienceDebate2008 drafted, with the help of its members, fourteen top science policy questions that the candidates ought to answer, such as, “What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?” and “What is your position on the following measures that have been proposed to address global climate change: a cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax, increased fuel-economy standards, or research?” Putting such substantive questions down in print helped to prove that the proposed debate would not be some sort of pop quiz designed to embarrass the candidates if they couldn’t name all the different kinds of quarks. Both steps were, essentially, examples of “receiver-oriented communication,” assuaging the politicians’ concerns about participating in a science debate and showing how that participation could be good for them, not just good for science in isolation.

Otto kept on pushing, and during the general election season, something finally clicked. As he relates:

I made a last-ditch pitch to both of the campaigns saying, “Look, this is not a niche debate and we have the national polling data to show it. The questions are all out there and no matter who’s elected these are several of the key problems you’re going to be facing, and the voters have a right—and you have a responsibility—to assess your positions on these questions. You’ve got to at least answer them online, and ideally also in a televised forum.”

The Obama campaign broke the ice: On August 30, 2008, it answered the fourteen questions in considerable depth, thanks to the help of a star-studded science policy advisory team the campaign had put in place by then. The Obama answers rippled around the Internet, placing pressure on the McCain campaign to do likewise. Two weeks later it followed suit, and then for the first time a science-centered point-counterpoint between the two candidates existed, and citizens could see that Obama’s plans for addressing climate change involved a much more prominent international treaty component and that he wanted to double federal research budgets, whereas McCain looked more to the private sector to spur innovation. Soon the questions and answers were being quoted and referenced widely; ScienceDebate2008 estimates that they garnered attention in most major U.S. newspapers and in media around the world. ScienceDebate2008 didn’t get the televised presidential science debate that it wanted, but in less than a year’s time, thanks in significant part to Otto’s work, it came out of nowhere and injected science policy into the campaign in a major, unforgettable way.

There are many lessons here—and many other forms of engagement with politics that ought to be tried beyond the ScienceDebate push, which will now continue in 2012. Those include getting more scientists to run for public office, perhaps even forming a science political action committee, or PAC, to support their endeavors. The field is wide open: Much remains to be tried.

But for now, let’s give the last word to Otto, the screenwriter who, along with fellow writer Matthew Chapman (whose credits include Runaway Jury), did the most to make it all happen. Otto told us the story of what happened when he and Chapman ventured to Washington, DC, to rally supporters for the cause. They visited the Rayburn Office Building on Capitol Hill, meeting with House Science Committee chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) and Minnesota Democrat Collin Peterson’s staff, and as Otto reported, “They loved it.” Then they left to catch a cab to talk to the National Academy of Sciences, and again, “They loved it.” Maybe scientists and politicians aren’t so hard to bring together after all.

At this point, it so happened that Chris called Chapman’s cell phone, and upon learning what he and Otto were up to, exclaimed: “What a story—two screenwriters going to beg the National Academies to support a public debate on science!” Everyone had a laugh. And then, Otto recalls, “We hang up and I remark how it is a little bit like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The cabbie, who has on this big blue turban, turns around and says, ‘I loved that movie!’”