A call to arms for defending science
On Monday, March 27, 2017, I had the honor of delivering the William D. Carey Lecture at the Science & Technology Policy Forum hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Here’s the text of my remarks, edited lightly for clarity:
Thank you, Dr. Rush Holt, for your long friendship and your remarkable leadership on science policy. Thank you to the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the honor of this award. More than anything, I appreciate the chance to actually talk about science for 30 minutes — in Washington! — to a room full of people who I think will be interested.
Many AAAS Science & Technology fellows have been vital to my work, and each of them has brought an important scientific perspective to every aspect of the policymaking process here in Washington.
An understanding and appreciation of science is more important than ever today because America’s ability to lead the world in innovation is deeply at risk .
An understanding and appreciation of science is more important than ever today because America’s ability to lead the world in innovation is deeply at risk. I say this not to be melodramatic about the current political environment, but to make clear how serious the challenge is, not just today, but for years and decades to come.
I’d like to explain just how daunting our challenge is and offer some suggestions for where we go from here. I intend to deliver to you today a call to arms for the defense of science.
To start, we’ll need to explore some dark matter.
As many of you know, this lecture was established to honor William D. Carey, a leader of AAAS, who exemplified the best of leadership in science policy. He knew that policy and engagement were absolutely essential to the role science would play in our society. As I was looking through the previous Carey Lecture honorees, I came across Congressman John Brademas (D-IN). He was a tireless defender of science, education, and the arts, and the intersection between science and the arts.
Congressman Brademas was a leading supporter of the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I reference these two agencies not just because the Congressman’s support reflected an understanding that science, technology, engineering, art, and the humanities are complementary. I also mention them because they are on the very long list of federal agencies targeted for elimination under the President’s Fiscal Year 2018 budget proposal.
We need qualified STEM advisors in the administration and across agencies to carry out their core missions and to help communicate and advocate for the direction of research and innovation that is vital for sustaining our economic growth and our national security.
Everyone in this room needs to understand the severity of this administration’s disregard, as expressed in their budget proposal and in a range of actions, for both the arts and sciences. As a chemistry major, I just simply want to say, don’t take my word for it. Let me offer some observations to back up my hypothesis.
For one, the Trump administration has been achingly slow to nominate key appointees. Only one of the 46 key science and technology positions in the federal government, including the president’s science advisor, has been nominated so far, suggesting a real disconnect between the new administration and the fundamental role of science and technology in federal policymaking.
We need qualified STEM advisors in the administration and across agencies to carry out their core missions and to help communicate and advocate for the direction of research and innovation that is vital for sustaining our economic growth and our national security.
But let’s not take just one example. Here’s a few more. Some of the reasons I’m skeptical of this administration’s commitment to science include the President’s own tweets. He’s tweeted that climate change is a hoax and that “the concept of global warming was created by the Chinese,” for their own benefit.
Our EPA administrator recently said human activity is not “a primary contributor to global warming.” And our new administration doesn’t seem intent on just muzzling dissent — it is also committed to erasing data that doesn’t fit its agenda from a wide range of agency websites and databases.
Let’s dig even deeper into the White House’s proposed budget cuts, which are historic and poorly informed. This budget would have serious consequences for major DOE, EPA, NOAA, NIH, and other agency research programs across the entire scope of federally-funded research. This isn’t just trimming bloated “waste” or imposing efficiencies on a few agencies or departments. The programs impacted by these proposed cuts are longstanding programs with long-proven returns on investment of tax payer’s dollars.
Let me give you a few examples. NOAA, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is responsible for everything from warnings of impending severe storms to daily weather forecasts to work on coastal restoration, would see its budget cut by $250 million. That includes the Sea Grant Program, on which Delaware, among many states, depends. It protects our ecosystems and our economy, supporting sustainable fisheries, resilient communities, and ecosystem protection. The program only cost taxpayers $67 million but generated an estimated economic impact of $575 million in 2015.
Let’s take the Environmental Protection Agency. It would see more than a 30 percent cut in this budget. The new Administrator, Mr. Pruitt — his goal seems to be to hamstring the agency, something he’ll likely accomplish if he slashes his budget and staffing by a third.
The budget doesn’t spare the Department of Energy, either, by eliminating Loan Guarantees, Weatherization Assistance Programs, the State Energy Program, and ARPA-E, and by shifting some of these funds to the National Nuclear Security Administration. These programs that would be eliminated are programs critical to our domestic energy landscape and our international leadership.
NASA, an iconic science-related agency, was lucky — it was only targeted for a 1 percent cut, but even those cuts, in the details of the budget proposals, are ideological and nonsensical. Take the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, for one. This observatory has already been launched and is designed to look at both space weather and take images of the earth. Just to be clear, this spacecraft has already been launched. It’s in space now. But the White House budget eliminates funding for just one small part of it — for the “earth-viewing instruments” on the spacecraft that might help show the impacts of climate change. Folks, that’s the kind of “science” we’re dealing with here.
I could go on. But the point is much bigger than just the priorities of the President’s budget. These proposed cuts that go across science and engineering, health and innovation programs have a relatively trivial impact on overall federal spending. The absolute dollars as a percentage of the total federal budget are really very small. But they reflect a more profound willingness to move away from facts and data that don’t fit a political agenda. Yet these cuts would come at a time of unprecedented need for science, for research, and for our global leadership in innovation.
These cuts would come at a cost to our environment, just as climate change is becoming an increasingly real and obvious part of our experience. In my home state of Delaware, literally the lowest-lying mean elevation state in the country, we’re already seeing the impacts of sea level rise.
These budget cuts would come at the cost to our competitiveness. At a time when 200 came together and agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the Paris Agreement, and at a time when clean energy technology investments are projected to be $60 trillion or more over the next 25 years, for the United States to give up on our global innovation leadership role in clean energy would be to swear off an enormous economic opportunity.
This budget comes at the cost of data that allows us to better understand our world, data on which real science is based. Our agencies that rely on this data use internationally-lauded processes for gathering data and information, essential for establishing neutral ‘facts’ and providing analytic basis used throughout our economy. Reducing support for vital federal statistical agencies would willfully reduce our understanding of the world around us. I can think of no better summary description of what it means to be “anti-science.”
Congress also lost a vital science and technology resource through the disbandment of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), now two decades ago. Since that time, the National Academies, the Government Accountability Office, and some outside bodies have partially filled that deep and real void. But it was an institutional role that surely informed past legislative work. We need to ensure that other entities like this — vital to the whole federal role in science and policymaking — aren’t similarly plucked away.
Republicans and Democrats in public statements in response to the President’s budget have made it clear that we oppose many provisions of President Trump’s budget proposal. But these draconian budget cuts, reckless statements, and unfilled personnel vacancies, send a clear message that R&D isn’t a priority, and scientists aren’t at the table informing this administration’s decisions.
Scientific progress has long faced opposition from the status quo.
Unfortunately, a lot of what we’re seeing today, I think, stems from a broader change in attitude towards the role of science in our world. That’s not just a partisan, Republican problem — it’s an issue pervasive across our entire society.
I’ll remind you, to be fair, that some of my Democratic colleagues — those who strongly believe in anthropogenic climate change and who insist that anyone who doesn’t accept the scientific consensus on climate change is an apostate — they may unfairly question the safety of genetically modified food or refuse to use vaccinations, despite a comparably strong scientific consensus on their safety.
That’s why, for example, whooping cough is today back in force, reaching a 50-year high in 2012. That’s how we can see, in pop news, celebrities who claim they’re actually treating AIDS with herbal remedies. That’s how it’s possible for Shaquille O’Neill to make a public declaration that the Earth is flat because he drove from Florida to California.
When we have figures making statements like these — when we have a wide range of all partisan backgrounds rejecting scientific consensus — folks, we have a much larger problem.
To be fair, scientific progress has long faced opposition. Back to Galileo, we have faced opposition from the status quo. Skepticism of scientific inquiry and methodology is a deeply human tradition. But today science and facts themselves, like so many of our norms and institutions, are threatened by a widespread loss of trust and regard.
In part, the loss of confidence in the media as an independent source of repeatable, confirmable, baseline facts is creating a follow-on loss of confidence in other sources of evidence-based information, such as research institutions and scientific societies. This has a real cumulative impact on our ability to work together to address challenges of human health, national security, environmental safety, and economic opportunity.
So, given all of this bad news I’ve just shared with you, let me tell you why I’m here: to defend science and tell you what we can and what we must do to fight for science.
The first step, I believe, is explaining to the American people exactly what science means and why it’s so important. Here, in this room, when I talk about NASA, or DARPA, or ARPA-E, or NIH, or NSF, it makes sense. Your heads may nod in agreement. But in much of the rest of the country, when I talk about science agencies and science policy, most eyes will either roll, glaze over, or turn to check Facebook.
What we have to make the American people understand is this: federal investments in science and human capital have unleashed significant economic growth, catalyzed tens of millions of jobs, and returned taxpayer money invested many times over.
I’m wearing a special pin in recognition of the Golden Goose Awards, a fantastic recent initiative to hold up and recognize the products of federally-funded science. Once mocked as wasteful exercises, if you look hard at the unintended or unforseen consequences of federal science research over time, they are dramatic, they are demonstrable, and they are worth celebrating. To the folks involved in the Golden Goose Awards, thank you.
When we take a look at the difference that federally-funded science has made, it’s remarkable. NASA, for example, has spurred innovations from prosthetics and food safety to telecommunications, clean energy, and firefighting, up to and including the image sensors in millions of smartphones.
DARPA has led to innovations like the Internet and GPS. ARPA-E is transforming clean energy ideas into realities. NIH and NSF have helped develop lifesaving vaccines for devastating diseases from smallpox to polio. As this room knows better than any, the national laboratory system — an incredible jewel of our nation — has created revolutionary ideas and trained generations of scientists who now contribute to basic science that has advanced understanding and safety for the entire world.
Like many of you, I’ve seen firsthand what can happen when we give dedicated researchers world-class facilities and reliable, sustained investment.
DOE’s national labs have been instrumental discovering and developing almost every modern area of energy. Fracking, for example, has transformed the United States into a world leader in oil and gas production. Nuclear energy, despite seeing relatively little new construction for decades, still generates 60 percent of our nation’s carbon-free energy. Renewable energy technologies like wind and solar are transforming our country and world, with 2.5 wind turbines and 30,000 solar panels being installed globally every hour. In all of these developments, federal funding and national labs played a critical role. Further, the Department of Energy is helping to advance things I’m passionate about as well, from energy efficiency to energy storage to grid reliability and cybersecurity.
Energy is just one area — one of many — in which science and investments in science have revolutionized the world. For decades, America has played a leading role in catalyzing that revolution. Think of all the other things we’ve done — and I’ll try to be brief:
- We’ve built high-performance computers that can model things from weather to polymers to nuclear fusion.
- We’ve developed techniques for high-throughput DNA sequencing and genome editing.
- We’ve developed GIS mapping, which has led to precision agriculture.
- We’ve made new discoveries that have led to cross-cutting applications, like imaging advances in astronomy that are applied to help fight cancer.
- We’ve even built a computer that can beat humans at Jeopardy!
For all of this, Americans are unquestionably safer, healthier, and more prosperous because of these innovations. And how did we do it? How did we match these investments in science to policy innovation?
We promoted cooperation between universities, government labs, nonprofit research centers, and for-profit companies — a legacy visible in your participation here tonight. We made sustained investments in R&D through federal institutions and labs. We put in place strong intellectual property laws to make sure that anyone can protect and advance and market an idea. We recognized the vital need to support and invest in women and minorities participating in STEM fields. We enacted immigration laws that welcomed anyone willing to work hard, helping us attract the best and the brightest from the entire world.
Albert Einstein was a refugee. Steve Jobs’ father was a Syrian refugee. All six of the U.S. Nobel Laureates in 2016 were immigrants to the United States. When we let fear of refugees and immigrants dictate public policy, we may well be stopping the next Einstein or Jobs or Nobel Laureate from calling the United States home.
Albert Einstein was a refugee. Steve Jobs’ father was a Syrian refugee. All six of the U.S. Nobel Laureates in 2016 were immigrants to the United States. When we let fear of refugees and immigrants dictate public policy, we may well be stopping the next Einstein or Jobs or Nobel Laureate from calling the United States home.
That’s how we got where we are today. But these accomplishments, although known to this room, aren’t going to defend themselves. That brings me the second step in defending science, which is congressional leadership.
When it comes to what Congress must and should do, we should focus, I think, on three simple things:
- First, we should call for the federal government to continue to make critical data available from statistical agencies and leading labs.
- Second, we should work on a bipartisan basis to secure long-term, sustained federal investments in research and development.
- Third, we should push back on discriminatory bans and come together to pass an immigration reform bill that makes it easier for innovators, for scientists, to come, to study, to invest, and to innovate here.
In short, I’m calling for all of us to work with Congress and to fight for open data, open minds, and open arms. Open data unleashes the innovative potential of the world’s brightest scientists and inventors. Open minds gives us an assurance that long-term investments in scientific research will pay future dividends we can’t even imagine. And open arms welcome those who want to study, start a business, and change the world as Americans.
I’m calling on all of us to fight for open data, open minds, and open arms.
Republicans and Democrats, folks, have to be able to work together. These days, that might sound difficult, even implausible. But by pursuing areas of common ground — manufacturing, infrastructure, job creation — we can actually get things done.
I’ll give you one very small example of bipartisan cooperation that’s exciting to me. This week, I’ll join a few of my colleagues to announce the creation of the first-ever Senate Chemistry Caucus. Led by Republican Senators Shelley Moore Capito and Steve Daines, and joined by Democrat Gary Peters and myself, the Chemistry Caucus will serve as a bipartisan forum for Senators to work together on issues dealing with the role science plays in policy and our lives.
Some of you have heard me speak on science before, and for years I told the sometimes-tedious joke that the Senate Chemistry Caucus consisted of me, that I was the president, founder, secretary, and treasurer, and we met in my car, and I took notes on own. But as of this week we will have four Senators — two Republicans, two Democrats — committed to working together to advance the contributions to policy and our lives that the toolkit of chemistry can bring.
I know these bipartisan caucuses can have a real impact because even during some of the most challenging years for legislation in Congress, I’ve been able to get legislation introduced, enacted, and signed into law. I’ll give you a few quick examples:
- New efforts to increase the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science across the federal government.
- An improvement of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
- A stronger I-Corps program within the National Science Foundation.
- New efforts to promote sustainable chemistry as a federal enterprise.
- An expanded R&D tax credit for startups and small businesses.
Working across the aisle doesn’t mean giving up our principles or our commitment to facts. We can and should continue to make an unapologetic case for fighting climate change or investing in research and development, but we can and should seek out targeted, bipartisan ideas, such as these bills. Each of the bills I just mentioned, these five, had Republican co-sponsors, were passed by a majority-Republican House, and were signed into law by a Democratic president. So, I simply say, don’t lose hope that we can make real progress in science policy and in legislating. In each of those cases, it was a AAAS fellow who was at the center of drafting, advancing, and seeing enacted those legislative initiatives.
Sometimes, making progress like this starts by changing the conversation or shifting the perspective. If someone says, for example, that “green” energy is the agenda of coastal elites and liberals, point out that more than 90 percent of wind power today has been built in red states in rural America, with thousands of high-paying jobs and local tax benefits to boot.
If someone says we can’t possibly afford to spend more on R&D, we have to make clear not only how little an impact R&D has on total overall federal spending — but the remarkable return on investment that federal taxpayers have seen in innovations and improvements in our daily lives.
We should, together, be talking about science and innovation the way both parties talked about infrastructure during the recent presidential election: as a function of government that requires significant investment and public-private partnerships, and is worthy of enduring support. But we have to make that case in ways that allow us to find common ground and communicate with people on a local and tangible level.
I’ve been able to find Republican partners when I take this approach in the Senate, like Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, with whom I worked to reauthorize the energy initiatives in the America COMPETES Act to boost funding for ARPA-E and the DOE Office of Science.
Pursuing areas of common ground and making my case in ways folks understand is how I’ve been able to get things done. I see no reason why we can’t apply the same formula across our entire country and throughout our Congress. That’s where you come in because by far most important step in defending science depends on each of you.
From the R&D tax credit to Commerce COMPETES, none of the recent pro-innovation progress enacted in Congress would have made it to the President’s desk without input, advocacy, and action from the scientific community.
None of the recent pro-innovation progress in Congress would have made it to the President’s desk without input, advocacy, and action from the scientific community.
Frankly, folks, I know how uncomfortable or unlikely that is. Before entering public service, I spent eight years at W.L. Gore, an advanced materials science company headquartered in Newark, Delaware. Virtually all of my colleagues at Gore were uncomfortable with politics and largely unfamiliar with it. We had more than 1,500 research scientists, PhDs, and engineers, and most of my colleagues who were serious scientists couldn’t believe that decisions in Washington were based on politics, lobbying, campaign contributions, and folks with very short attention spans.
That’s not the whole story, but it’s a significant part, frankly, of how things get done here in Washington. You need to understand that reality. You need to understand how to engage Congress. You need to share that understanding with scientists, and researchers, and innovators across this country. And then you need to help make your case directly to Congress for the value of science.
Right now — just to put it in stark terms — there are possibly only, I think, five currently serving U.S. Senators with any significant training in the hard sciences. (And I’m calling my BA in chemistry significant training, so this is a low bar, folks.) Suffice it to say that not all of my colleagues were breathlessly reading the National Academies’ “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” report in 2007 like I was, or even knew that it was groundbreaking and making positive policy prescriptions.
But it’s not just that they aren’t reading scientific reports or academic journals. More and more of my colleagues are becoming suspicious that science itself is a value, and more believe science and technology is itself associated with a liberal agenda. Rather than a neutral method of investigation for exploring a theory to reach a conclusion, some of my colleagues increasingly fear that science and technology are just a political method to achieve partisan ends.
You might respond by pointing out that science transcends partisanship, that science isn’t an agenda, it’s just about facts and natural laws. Right?
But take a look at the House Climate Solutions Caucus, a caucus devoted to recognizing the reality of climate change and taking steps to fight it. Republican membership has doubled since the start of the 115th Congress — it’s up to 15. But when you consider there are 237 Republicans in the House, and no Republicans on the House Science Committee are members of this caucus, it’s clear, at least to me, that we have some work to do to find those in both parties who might embrace one of the biggest challenges that the scientific community has agreed faces humanity.
These days, publishing is not enough. Your mission must also include increasing public understanding in matters of science, technology, engineering, and medicine.
Look at it another way. Only one-third of all Americans “express the belief that humans and other living things evolved solely due to natural processes,” and only two-thirds of Americans believe scientists agree about evolution. Whether we like that reality or not, it’s where we are. In my view, it’s up to us to change that.
These days, frankly, for a scientist looking at our world, our community, and our culture, publishing is not enough. Your wider mission can no longer be just education and neutral research. Today, your mission should also include increasing public understanding in fundamental matters of science, technology, engineering, and medicine.
Here’s what I’m asking of you today — my way of saying “thanks” for a wonderful award:
- Advocate for the value of scientific issues by communicating what you’re working on in words accessible to average Americans. Encourage your colleagues to do the same.
- Promote scientific literacy by redoubling your efforts to make sure all Americans learn basic STEM skills.
- Publish and then publicize your work by explaining and advocating for the results and impact of your work.
- Make your work accessible to new audiences by meeting people where they are, using the platforms they use, and connecting your abstracts with their real-life experiences.
- Speak out and make the case for investing in science, not just today, but for the long-term.
It’s an honor to have been selected for this award and to have the chance to share with you my perspective. The list of past recipients is truly remarkable — so impressive that I wondered if, in fact, you’d made some mistake in awarding this to me. The past recipients include women and men who stood up for science and represent the very best of our society.
Everyone in this room knows that championing and safeguarding scientific discovery is more important than ever because science holds the promise of solving our most vexing challenges.
That understanding isn’t new. In fact, in some ways it was cemented by an Act of Congress, signed President Lincoln when the National Academies of Sciences were first created in 1863. But today, scientific progress is going to come more from you than from Congress or, dare I say, our President.
The Venturi effect tells us that if you shrink the area of a pipe, the speed of the fluid inside will increase. This represents the current political environment and the reaction I hope to see from scientists.
The Trump administration may be trying to shrink the role of science in public policy, and to dramatically shrink the space for science and for investment in R&D, but every day I see scientists working harder, mobilizing with greater urgency — including a planned and impending science march (something I thought I’d never see) on April 22nd and a climate march on April 29th.
So, take heart — and then take to the halls of Congress, to the streets, to the Internet, to town halls, coffee shops, and more to defend science. Thank you for the honor of speaking with you.
