Of Particles and Politics

“Science has had a rough eight years.” The speaker was Dr. Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureate in physics and outspoken advocate of science education; the topic was the state of American science on the cusp of the Obama presidency. Outside, the air was cold and (uncharacteristically) still. Lederman’s audience inside Chicago’s Stetson Conference Center, though, buzzed with an energy unknown to America’s scientific community since the turn of the millennium. They crowded into the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The scientists, policymakers, journalists, and other science fans who work to promote progressive science policy and education in the United States were energized by Lederman’s speech. But like the speaker himself, they were more excited about another, earlier talk: Obama’s inaugural address. Recalling that speech, Lederman said with some wonderment, “Obama’s attitude to science is unusual [for a politician]… he seems to be affected by the beauty of discovery.”

On the day he became president, Barack Obama gave real attention—and respect—to science, in the form of eight simple, magic words: “We will restore science to its rightful place.” For scientists, this declaration had the feeling of a parent welcoming home an estranged child, and telling that child that she had been right all along. Frank Press, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, captured the mood in a New York Times article the day after the inauguration. “If you look at the science world, you see a lot of happy faces… [Obama recognizes] what science can do to bring this country back in an innovative way,” he enthused.

The words “rightful” and “back” recognize that US has long been a major player in global scientific research. Yet Obama and Press’ statements mask a complex problem: what exactly is science’s rightful place in American society? Obama appreciates that science already plays a certain role, yet the question of how that role should be defined and by what methods and criteria it will be measured remains murky. Science, yes; but what kind and how much?

GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE POLITICIZATION OF SCIENCE

Scientists were not the only ones struck by Obama’s pro-science rhetoric. Even Dan Savage, the celebrated sex advice columnist, commented on the statement in his Savage Love podcast, wryly observing that when the new President delivered his speech, “Bush shot faith-based daggers at the back of his head.” Savage, Lederman and, indeed, Obama allude to a certain mistreatment of science in the recent past—and connect this abuse to the policies and outlook of the Bush administration.

In early 2004, an ad-hoc association of 64 top US scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates and several science advisers to past administrations (some Republican), published an open letter to President Bush decrying the administration’s manipulation of science for political ends. In the report, the authors, including Lederman, accused the administration of “suppressing, distorting or manipulating the work done by scientists at federal agencies,” and outlined a number of egregious cases, including the censorship of global warming research by the Environmental Protection Agency and the replacement of Center for Disease Control publications on proper condom use with a simple warning emphasizing condom failure rates.

The most serious offense was Bush’s push to politicize the scientific process itself. According to the report, the administration instituted a “political litmus test” for scientific advisory boards, often eschewing the opinions of public or university-affiliated scientists in favor of those associated with stakeholding companies. The piece also attacked the administration’s restriction of federal funding for certain research projects—most notably stem cells and climate change—to which it objected on ethical or political grounds.

It’s easy to see why the scientific community might have felt persecuted during the Bush years. In his last State of the Union address, for instance, Bush said, “we must… ensure that all life is treated with the dignity it deserves,” calling on Congress to “pass legislation that bans unethical practices such as the buying, selling, patenting, or cloning of human life.” This tendency to deploy science for a political agenda frustrated a field that prides itself on producing knowledge through empirical observation, experiment, and proof. From the perspective of scientists, the last eight years were a period of fear and stagnation—a kind of Inquisition. Obama’s election, then, may signal a new Renaissance.

“YES WE CAN”… CAN’T WE?

Now that Bush is out, the mood of the scientific community seems generally hopeful, at least with regard to the new President’s attitude toward science. Obama has made it clear that he supports stem cell research, actually believes in global warming, and wants to keep intelligent design from being taught in America’s classrooms. These positions, in addition to the much-touted inaugural statement, have cast Obama as science’s champion. But the question is not whether the new administration will back science generally and abstractly, but which specific research projects the federal government will choose to support.

Hot topics like health care, sustainable energy and climate change make the priority list, while a large swath of the “basic” research sciences, like particle physics and chemistry, is excluded. Basic research, simply put, is the kind of science that may not have obvious practical applications when first initiated. As such, it often has a more difficult time making a case for its existence than its more readily applicable cousins.

The breakdown of the stimulus bill passed by Congress in February reflects this focus. In the $790 billion package, $21.5 billion is earmarked for federal research and development. According to an AAAS analysis of the package, the National Institute of Health is the biggest winner, receiving $10.4 billion, while the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (the governmental agency that oversees research in basic fields like high energy physics) received $1.6 billion. The DOE’s energy research programs, however, which include areas like biofuel and renewable energy, were allotted $2.5 billion. These allocations work in conjunction with regular federal appropriation figures: NIH’s total FY09 budget is $39.9 billion, while DOE OS’s is about $6 billion.

Basic research, while certainly on track to attracting more support than it did under Bush, will take a backseat to admittedly more practical health and energy research. How will this choice impact science in the United States in the coming years? According to a 2009 report by the nonpartisan Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the United States ranks sixth among 40 countries and regions in terms of national competitiveness in the sciences, with Singapore, Sweden and Luxembourg taking the first three slots. Sixth place is not terrible; what is frightening, however, is that in terms of growth over the past decade, the US places last after countries like Malta (24th), Cyprus (9th), and, in first place, China.

Predicting a decline in US domination of technology and sciences has been popular for years now. As the global economy settles into a recession, politicians must make even tougher decisions when it comes to distributing funds. America may feel that it can put basic research (at least outside of energy) on life support for the moment, but that does not mean that the rest of the world will follow suit. As the study indicates, China has steadily increased its funding for basic research over the past 10 years and, according to the R&D Global Funding Forecast from Battelle, China will increase gross domestic research funding (both governmental and private) by 16 percent ($20 billion) this year, far outstripping the United States’ $6.6 billion increase. Meanwhile, the EU has set aside around €50 billion for basic research over the next few years. The recession, it seems, has not dampened the world's commitment to scientific research; if anything, other countries are vying to fill the void left by the US.

As this international contest proves, research done within American borders is only part of a much greater global project, and what happens—or does not happen—in the US depends on other countries’ research trajectories. Science is an undeniably global game.

TOP QUARKS, TAX DOLLARS, AND THE TERAGRID

In the 1996 film Contact, Dr. Ellen Arroway, played by Jodi Foster, discovers just how borderless and political science can be. When she discovers a signal of extraterrestrial intelligent life, science collides with international politics on a massive scale.

On the most basic level, labs from around the world were needed to confirm and track Dr. Arroway’s signal. For real-life scientists, working collaboratively is a daily—and necessary—situation.

The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory just outside Chicago, for instance, comprises over 600 scientists from 14 countries and three continents. It took all these professionals working together to discover the top quark, one of the fundamental particles of nature, in 1994. In more current news, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland will be the site of collaborations for thousands of physicists in the coming years as they search for the so-called Higgs boson particle.

The point here is that science, and particularly science that requires big machines (the $6.4 billion LHC is a whopping 17 miles in circumference) and many people, is necessarily international. And as a common physicists’ joke points out, “Scientists go where the action is.” They move to whichever institution or country best supports their research at the time. This would be fine except for one detail: the majority of scientific funding flows from the national governments, and politicians may not hold such cosmopolitan, transnational views.

Most scientists depend on the federal government to finance large projects like particle accelerators. Indeed, national governments are the only entities with the resources necessary to facilitate this kind of science. However, current economic conditions make billion-dollar checks for finding invisible particles a little harder to come by. It seems that even politicians are being forced to embrace a sort of post-nationalist view of science.

At an AAAS panel discussion, comments from European delegates seemed to suggest, further, that the age of global scientific competitiveness (typified in the 1960s “space race” between the US and the Soviet Union) is over. José Silva-Rodriguez, Director-General of the General Research European Commission, spoke about cooperation as one of the measures that must be taken to prevent science from damage by the global economic recession.

“The current economic crisis does not provide an excuse for reducing research,” Silva-Rodriguez declared. “Fortunately, the US seems to be more committed to international science and technology cooperation. Protectionism will only take us into a deeper recession.” Silva-Rodriguez went on to argue that basic research, like particle physics, must be done through international collaboration: “We shouldn’t be duplicating research tools. We should be sharing the burden.”

After another session, I asked Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr., Director of the National Science Foundation, how he convinces American politicians of the importance of international collaboration. “I like to think of science as a kind of diplomacy,” he said. “Scientists can penetrate the political issues of the past to do important work. In the current economic situation, it is in the interest of nations to leverage resources across political borders.”

Using science as a tool of statecraft is a striking idea, but Bement also recognized the practicality of sharing the burden: “My favorite example [of transnational cooperation] is a cyber-computing infrastructure, like the Teragrid [a global network of supercomputing centers linked to process large amounts of data]. It saves money.”

Despite the post-nationalist rhetoric, we should consider the effects of leaving basic research to other countries. Certainly, the science would still be done, but what about American jobs, education and, more abstractly, the country’s reputation as a global leader of innovation? The great “brain circulation” (the politically corrected version of “brain drain”) has already begun, but scientists don’t seem to be circulating back. According to industry statistics, there are currently not enough accelerator scientists to meet US needs because so many are going abroad.

This is almost certainly due in large part to the Bush administration’s stifling policies, as well as recent funding cuts in the particle physics community. The development on the proposed next-generation International Linear Collider suffered an effective freeze, and US physics labs laid off a portion of their staffs well before the economic downturn. James Rosenzweig, a UCLA physicist, feels this anxiety in his own research. “If you look at who I’m collaborating with, it’s guys in Munich [instead of in the US]…We need to be paying attention.”

EINSTEIN IN ALASKA, OR, A TRAIN RIDE WITH AMERICA

What if we still want to do some science here?

This is where the question becomes cultural. Back at the press breakfast, Dr. Lederman discussed the implications of Obama’s stimulus bill.

“Essential activities will have enough funding for two years. In the long run, however, we’re going to have to get ‘Joe Six-pack’ to care about science.”

Lederman strikes at something fundamental by invoking archetypical American citizen Joe Six-pack, so often valorized by defunct Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. In Palin’s rhetoric, Joe was a simpleminded, hardworking, patriot who only cared about politics and policy insofar as they allowed him to live his life in the way he saw fit. He could care less about the Higgs boson or the Teragrid, but he does care about where his tax dollars are spent.

Lederman suggests that if we really want to get science back on track in America, we have to find a way to make it relevant to every American, not just the intellectual elite. Obama’s bias toward healthcare and energy acknowledges this issue. Every American understands that her kids need medicine and her car needs gas, so emphasizing these areas in the stimulus bill is a politically savvy move.

And of course, it’s not as if medicine and fuel aren’t important—they certainly are. What worries scientists uninvolved in those fields is that, while their areas of expertise elude the national focus, America could lose its ability to compete, or even to contribute, in those fields. This intellectual atrophy could be disgraceful for a country that has been at the forefront of science for so many decades. Reputation aside, losing track of the broader questions of science places the US at a practical disadvantage for the future.

Many economists see “knowledge economies” as the next stage in development for wealthy nations. In this system, information is commoditized in such a way that it, rather than goods or services (the management of which is highly automated anyway), drives the economy. Director General Silva-Rodriguez zealously made this argument. He insisted, “It’s smart to move economies to a knowledge and technology base. Investing in these areas fights unemployment by creating jobs.”

I would add that this investment also just makes the country a better place to live as it involves more people in the production and circulation of knowledge. But this type of economic change would demand a more fundamental cultural change: after eight years of simplicity, Joe Six-pack must embrace an undeniably complex intellectualism in which science plays a vital part.

I’ll end with a story.

A few summers ago, I interned as a science writer at Fermilab, which gave me occasional chances to travel into Chicago by train. On the return trip from one of those visits, a drunken man in the aisle across from my group asked us who we were. “Fermilab interns,” we replied. He thought for a moment, and then yelled, “E = mc fuck you!” followed by hysterical laughter.

I worry that many Americans share his attitude. Science, as an intellectual pursuit, is difficult to understand; research benefits often do not “trickle down” until decades after the discovery, or materialize only as unexpected results. The web, for instance, was invented at CERN in 1992 as a tool for sharing physics research; now it is practically essential to daily life. Obama has said that he tries to think beyond election cycles, but most politicians are more interested in the immediate future Science, at least in its time scale, just doesn’t mix well with politics. Decade-long projects costing millions or billions may fall by the wayside as politicians struggle to win votes with shorter-term projects.

But there is an argument to be made that some research, like the hunt for the Higgs boson, should not require any practical justification. America once believed in this logic, sending a man to the moon out of the sheer desire to discover and achieve. Have we moved to a period in which science must be practical to receive governmental support? To remain economically and intellectually competitive with the rest of the world, America’s scientific community must resist this trend.

The classroom is probably the most obvious place to start—it’s well-known that the US lags behind in mathematics and science education. More fundamentally, Americans need to be excited about science again. The quest for scientific truth—not just for better pills or cleaner cars—is something that we should rally around, especially in tough economic times. Scientists have a tendency to keep to themselves, discussing their amazing work in closed conferences like the one in Chicago. While this fortress attitude is understandable considering the siege they’ve been under for the past eight years, it must stop now. The electric atmosphere of that conference space should be shared with the rest of the country.

Obama’s presidency has undeniably inaugurated a new era for American science. Hopefully, it will truly endorse freedom of discovery in all areas, not just those short-term enough to be politically saleable. As our European colleagues remind us, science will be done. We cannot fail to be a robust part of this crucial endeavor.