Obama and science

President-elect Obama’s recent appointments for Secretary of the Department of Energy (Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winning physicist currently head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and chairman of the president's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (John Holdren, currently Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government), and head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Jane Lubchenco, Professor of Marine Biology at, Oregon State University) suggest that FINALLY we have an administration once again that recognizes the importance of science to the nation, and will appoint people who know their fields to high positions, instead of just political hacks..

The current neocon-dominated administration has been remarkably blind to the importance of science, repeatedly ignoring or denying scientific evidence that didn’t agree with their ideology, or that might obstruct their business supporters, and even apparently ordering government scientific reports to be redacted to modify or eliminate results unfavorable to their policies.

One can hope that Obama’s choices reflect a change of course, and that this administration might even believe scientific evidence and act on it. Now if Obama will just focus as well on improving the quality of elementary and secondary school science education in the U.S., we might be on the way to a reasonable recovery of our nation’s historical preeminence in science, a preeminence currently being maintained mostly by foreign scientists and engineers coming to the US to study and work.

I visited Silicon Valley a few months ago for the first time in a decade and was amazed to find whole sections in which the store signs and even some of the street signs are in Korean or Chinese – this is a telling indication of how dependent we have become on foreign scientists and engineers to drive the technological part of our economy – not a good sign.