Earth & Sky

Is science under siege?

Alan Leshner says there’s a new tension between science and society.

Alan Leshner is Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Executive Publisher of the journal Science. Earth & Sky’s Marc Airhart spoke to him in early February, 2006, shortly after the OMB and federal agencies released their budget requests for fiscal 2007.

Airhart: In the past couple of years, scientists have been censured for speaking out on climate change. Intelligent Design has been making inroads in public school classrooms. Is science under seige?

Leshner: Over the last four or five years, the relationship between science and society feels to us to have deteriorated. There is a feeling of greater disengagement between science and society, a new kind of tension that we don’t much like.

Some of that has come about because of an encroachment of scientific findings onto issues of either core human moral values – such as in the issue of Intelligent Design vs. evolution – or issues of economic values, such as climate change.

Many people in the scientific community feel as if there is this sort of rising tide of fundamentalism that is an overlay to their views of science. And, of course, only scientists are required to believe what science shows. If you’re a member of the general public, and you don’t like where science is taking you, you’re free to say, okay, I don’t believe it.

But the values of science – the benefits accrued from science – have been heavily dependent on science telling us about the nature of the world, whether we like the answer or not. And there is a change going on where people aren’t liking some of the answers, as in the case of global warming.

Airhart: How about funding? Has the new tension between the public and science resulted in less funding for science?

Leshner: One of the problems is that when there is tension between science and society, some members of society are less interested in providing adequate financial support for science.

Now in the last couple of months, there actually has been a rising tide of recognition of the importance, the centrality of science, to economic prosperity. One result is the President’s new American Competitiveness Initiative. There are also several bills before Congress now to augment science and education, with the goal of fostering innovation and economic competitiveness into the future.

So, at the same time that there is tension around what I’ll call :values issues,” on the other hand, there is increased recognition that science is critically important to the economic future of the country. That’s why we’re seeing this recent increase in support for science.

And now of course with the President’s new fiscal 2007 budget, a major initiative to increase support for the physical sciences and science education of all people.

Airhart: Is science responding well to the needs of society?

Leshner: For hundreds of years, science has been one of the main engines fueling the development of civilizations and the development of society. Anyone can give you a very long list of ways in which advances in science have benefited society at large.

And in return, society overall has been very supportive of the scientific establishment, has understood the importance of science to modern life and to the future of our country and any country. So, the general relationship has generally been quite good.

It’s only in the last few years that we’ve begun to feel this huge tension. And there are those who will say the tension comes about because science is getting too close to things that people hold most strongly. And others will say we need to have other priorities right now. But of course, science is essential to economic security, the national security, the health of the public, the quality of life. There is not an issue in modern life for which science and technology are not right in the center.

Airhart: Is the right kind of science being funded? Why are we sending men to Mars when we can’t feed everyone on the planet or cure malaria?

Leshner: There are a couple of problems. One problem is that money doesn’t get moved from one area to another. So, trading off from one agency to another is not a helpful approach. People don’t take money from the defense sector and say, okay, now we’re going to invest that same money into the health sector or the criminal justice sector. Money isn’t movable in that way. That’s a byproduct of the way Congress appropriates money into little committees that get allocated funding.

But the overall priorities have been to be supportive of science in the last few years with the need to devote more resources to national security issues. So, instead of seeing more of the money going to fundamental research and biomedical research, we’re now seeing it going in large numbers to homeland security, and to national security issues.

We all understand the need to provide the resources to ensure that our country is secure. Nobody questions the importance of that. But at the same time, we have to face our economic security and the security we’ll have for the future.

So it’s a balance issue. It’s always a balance issue.

Airhart: What do people think of science and scientists?

Leshner: Every study that’s been done in recent decades, of overall public value or appreciation of science, show that between 70 to 90 percent – depends on how you count – of the public believe that the benefits of science far outweigh the risks of science and therefore they’re in favor of a healthy scientific establishment.

And in fact recent surveys by groups such as Research America show that the public really is in favor of investing heavily in all areas of research: both fundamental and applied research. So there’s an overall appreciation. The disagreements, the tension, develops around the specifics. We don’t want it to be that if science is moving into an area that makes a subset of the population a bit uncomfortable, we sayk okay, let’s not study that stuff because we may not like the answer that we get.

If the purpose of science is to tell us about the natural world and the way it actually is, we shouldn’t be saying, tell us about the nature of the world as long as we agree with it . . . and so long as it doesn’t’ make us uncomfortable.

Airhart: Thank you, Dr. Leshner.