The Ongoing Transformation

On Science Policy IRL, we talk to people in science policy about what they do and how they got there. We’ve shared stories of how people have found their way into science policy careers at places like the White House, Congress, and federal agencies. In this episode, we’re exploring a different way into science policy: getting involved with your local government. Taylor Spicer, the executive director of Engineers and Scientists Acting Locally (ESAL), shares how her organization helps scientists and engineers get involved in local policy. In a discussion with host Lisa Margonelli, Spicer talks about her path from international development to leading an organization dedicated to local civic engagement. She emphasizes that it’s important for people with STEM backgrounds to get involved with policy in their backyards, and describes how ESAL’s network can help you get started. Resources: Visit the Engineers and Scientists Acting Locally (ESAL) website to learn more about making a difference where you live, and subscribe to the newsletter to find opportunities in your area. Want to join ESAL’s online community-building platform? Sign up here to be the first to hear when it launches in July.

What happens in your brain when you hear your favorite song? In our Music and Health podcast miniseries, we’re exploring how music affects our minds, bodies, and communities. On this episode, host J. D. Talasek is joined by Sweta Adatia, a neurologist practicing in Dubai, and Fred Johnson, a community engagement specialist and artist in residence at both the National Academy of Sciences and the Straz Center for Performing Arts. They discuss their paths into combining music and science, how music impacts the brain, and how music can go beyond entertainment to create stronger, healthier communities. This series is produced in collaboration with Susan Magsamen and Leonardo journal.Resources:Listen to Fred Johnson’s version of “Nature Boy,” and check out his website and his Instagram to listen to more of his music and mantras, and to see Johnson in an upcoming show. Visit Sweta Adatia’s website to learn more about her work. Listen to previous miniseries episodes: The Creative Arts and Healing with Renée Fleming and Susan Magsamen.Dancing Together with David Leventhal and Constantina Theofanopoulou.

Fungi are ubiquitous in nature—in fact, you’re likely breathing in fungal spores as you read this. Most fungi are harmless to healthy people. But changes in the global climate, in human settlement patterns, and even in our own body temperatures have made fungal pathogens an increasing health threat.On this episode, host Jason Lloyd interviews Angel Desai, an infectious disease specialist and associate professor at the University of California Davis Medical Center. Desai and George R. Thompson III cowrote “Foiling the Growing Threat of Fungal Pathogens” in the Winter 2025 Issues. Desai discusses what fungal pathogens are, why they are becoming more dangerous, and how the public health community can respond. Resources: Learn more about fungal pathogens by reading Angel Desai and George R. Thompson III’s Issues article, “Foiling the Growing Threat of Fungal Pathogens.” Angel Desai and Maimuna S. Majumder’s October 2020 Issues article, “How Contact Tracing Apps Could Help Prevent COVID-19 Super-Spreader Events,” offers lessons about contact tracing and disease surveillance that can be applied to future outbreaks. How can wildfire smoke spread disease? Read Leda N. Kobziar and George R. Thompson III’s “Wildfire Smoke, a Potential Infectious Agent” in Science to learn more. Check out “Infectious Diseases in a Changing Climate” by Matthew C. Phillips, Regina C. LaRocque, and George R. Thompson III in JAMA to read more about the impact of climate change on infectious diseases.

More than half of US states have legalized cannabis for recreational or medical use. Regulations on cultivation, production, and marketing vary from state to state, and most of these policies were developed without a robust public health strategy. Because it is not federally legal, Washington has provided only limited guidance to states on how to control the variety of cannabis products on the market. What’s more, the dazzling arrays of gummies, vapes, and chocolates are available with much higher concentrations of THC (the psychoactive component of cannabis) than have been previously available.A recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, Cannabis Policy Impacts Public Health and Health Equity, examines the connections between public health and marijuana legalization. On this episode, host Sara Frueh talks to Yasmin Hurd, vice-chair of the report committee, Ward-Coleman Chair of Translational Neuroscience, and director of the Addiction Institute at  Mount Sinai. They discuss the research on the complex landscape of modern cannabis products, what’s known about their public health impacts, and strategies policymakers could use to minimize harms. ResourcesRead the National Academies’ report, Cannabis Policy Impacts Public Health and Health Equity.Visit the Hurd Lab and Addiction Institute websites to learn more about Yasmin Hurd’s work on addiction.

“People always say, ‘Well, if I could only do one art form, what would it be?’ And I always say dance.” —Susan Magsamen In our podcast miniseries Music and Health, we’re exploring how music impacts our minds, bodies, and communities. In this installment, we’re learning about the power of dance. Host J. D. Talasek is joined by David Leventhal and ConstantinaTheofanopoulou. Both began their careers as dancers and use dance to inform their current work. Leventhal is a program director and one of the founding teachers of Dance for PD, a program that offers people with Parkinson’s disease research-backed dance classes. Theofanopoulou is a research assistant professor at Rockefeller University. Her research focuses on understanding the neuroscience of complex sensory motor behaviors. They discuss how dance is helping patients regain movement abilities, and what neuroscience research says about dance as a form of healing. This series is produced in collaboration with Susan Magsamen and Leonardo journal.Resources:  Listen to the first episode of the mini-series, Music and Health: The Creative Arts and Healing, featuring Renée Fleming and Susan Magsamen.  Visit the Dance for PD website to learn more about the program, and find classes in your area or virtually.  Learn more about Constantina Theofanopoulou’s research by visiting her website. 

Vaccines, oil spills, genetic engineering, and stem cells—anywhere there’s science, there’s also misinformation. It muddies our ability to make good decisions, ranging from far-reaching ones like creating policy to simple ones like what to buy at the grocery store. Misinformation also undermines trust in scientific institutions and across society. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine tasked an expert committee with addressing misinformation. Their report,Understanding and Addressing Misinformation About Science, is out now. On this episode, hostMonya Baker is joined byAsheley Landrum, one of the authors of the report and an associate professor at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Landrum’s research focuses on science, communication, and media psychology. She discusses what exactly science misinformation is, how to tackle it, and the unexpected places it can arise. Resources: Learn more about science misinformation by reading the full National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, Understanding and Addressing Misinformation About Science.ReadIssues’ collection of articles about “Navigating a Polluted Information System.”Check out thePsychology of Misinformation special issue to learn more about misinformation in different domains, including Landrum’s research on “Entertainment media as a source of relationship misinformation.”VisitAsheley Landrum’s website to learn more about her work. 

From lullabies to movie soundtracks to workout playlists, music has the capacity to change how we feel. But what is the evidence that music’s effects can transform physical health? On our new podcast miniseries, Music and Health, we’ll explore the power of music to heal our minds, bodies, and even communities.  On the first episode of this series, host J. D. Talasek is joined by Renée Fleming and Susan Magsamen. Fleming is an opera soprano, actress, and long time advocate for the healing powers of the arts. She recently edited a book called Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. Magsamen founded the International Arts + Mind Lab, and created the NeuroArts Blueprint. They discuss health and arts research, current initiatives to use the arts to heal, and how this vital approach to care can be expanded.  This series is produced in collaboration with Susan Magsamen and Leonardo journal. Resources Read Renée Fleming’s book, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, to learn more about how music and the creative arts are being used for health. The book was also recently reviewed in Issues by Susan Fitzpatrick, who called Fleming’s introduction “beautifully written, providing a lyrical and comprehensive summary of the main ideas in the book.”  Learn more about Susan Magsamen’s work by visiting the International Arts + Mind Lab website, and check out Magsamen and Ivy Ross’s book, Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.  Visit the NeuroArts Blueprint website to find information on how the creative arts impact the brain. You can also find more information about and apply for the Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Award.  Visit the Sound Health Initiative website to learn more about the partnership between the National Institutes of Health and the Kennedy Center to research the potential of music to treat a wide range of conditions.  Listen to the Real Young Prodigys’ song “Where My Bus At” and learn more about how the song helped inspire change in Louisville. Thank you to the Real Young Prodigys for allowing use of their song in this episode! 

In Alaska, reindeer are much more real than the fantasy animals that pull Santa’s sleigh. Introduced to Alaska from Siberia by the US government in the 1890s, reindeer were part of a strategy to solve food shortages among the Native peoples after the gold rush. Today, reindeer provide food security and economic opportunities for the Alaskan Native community. Even more so than farming, reindeer herding requires a deep understanding of the needs of Indigenous communities and academic science—as well as how to navigate and influence local, state, and federal policies. On this episode, host Lisa Margonelli is joined by Jacqueline Hrabok and Bonnie Scheele of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s High Latitude Range Management program to learn more about the interplay of science, policy, and community in reindeer herding.  This is our final episode of 2024. We’ll be back in late January for an interview with opera singer and actress Renee Fleming and neurology professor Susan Magsamen on the intersection of music, art, and health. And we would love to explore more local science policy issues in our upcoming episodes! Write to us at podcast@issues.org about any policy developments happening near you.  Resources: Learn more about the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ High Latitude Range Management program.  Visit Bonnie Scheele’s reindeer farm at the Midnite Sun Reindeer Ranch website and Facebook page. 

The word "bureaucracy" conjures up images of red tape and long lines at the DMV, not cutting-edge innovation. But some of the most significant scientific and health innovations of the past century have actually come from scientist-bureaucrats at government research institutes.  On this episode, host Jason Lloyd is joined by Natalie Aviles, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia and author of An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the US National Cancer Institute. Aviles explains what the National Cancer Institute does and how the mission and culture of the agency have enabled its scientist-bureaucrats to conduct pioneering cancer research, such as the invention of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccine.  Resources: Check out Natalie Aviles’s book, An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the U.S. National Cancer Institute, to learn more about the NCI.  Read “How Federal Science Agencies Innovate in the Public Interest” at Issues.org to learn more about the development of the HPV vaccine and the importance of agency discretion. 

New York City is the perfect place to understand the importance of modern engineering, but the most valuable lessons won’t be found at the Empire State Building or in Central Park. To truly discover what makes modern life tick, you have to look at the unloved, uncelebrated elements of New York: its sewers, bridges, and elevators.  On this episode, host Lisa Margonelli talks to Guru Madhavan, the Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and senior director of programs at the National Academy of Engineering. Madhavan wrote about the history of this often-overlooked infrastructure in a trilogy of Issues essays about New York City’s history. He talks about how the invention of the elevator brake enabled the construction of skyscrapers and how the detailed “grind work” of maintenance keeps grand projects like the Bayonne Bridge functioning. He also highlights the public health and sanitation-centered vision of Egbert Viele—the nearly forgotten engineer who made New York City livable.  Resources:  Read Guru Madhavan’s New York Trilogy: “The Greatest Show on Earth” about the invention of the elevator brake. “The Grind Challenges” about the Bayonne Bridge and maintenance grind work.  “Living in Viele’s World” about the contrast between Egbert Viele’s and Frederick Law Olmsted’s competing visions of New York City. Learn more about the invisible work that undergirds modern life by checking out Madhavan’s latest book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World.  Read the 2019 article Madhavan cites about how engineering benefits society.  Lisa mentioned riding on a tugboat pushing a barge full of petroleum, but she misremembered!  The repairs were then occurring on the Goethals Bridge, not the Bayonne. Here’s the whole story of “A Dangerous Move” from the New York Times. 

The United States spends more on healthcare than any other high-income country, yet we have some of the worst population health outcomes. Our health care system is designed in such a way that racial and ethnic disparities are inevitable, and the differences are extreme: the life expectancy difference between white women and black men is over a decade. How can we fix the system to ensure health care equity for all?  A new National Academies report called Ending Unequal Treatment: Strategies to Achieve Equitable Health Care and Optimal Health for All tackles this question. Building on a 2003 report on racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, the new report finds that little progress has been made in closing those equity gaps over the past two decades. On this episode, host Sara Frueh talks to Georges Benjamin, cochair of the report committee and executive director of the American Public Health Association. They discuss how the health care system creates disparities and how we can fix them.  Resources:  Read the National Academies reports on health care inequality: Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care (2003), and Ending Unequal Treatment: Strategies to Achieve Equitable Health Care and Optimal Health for All (2024)

Check the end of any recent study, and there will be a list of study funders and disclosures about competing interests. It’s important to know about potential biases in research, but this kind of transparency was not always the norm. Understanding bias in research and helping policymakers use the most reliable evidence to guide their decisions is a science in itself. Lisa Bero, a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, has been at the forefront of understanding how corporate funding biases research and how to assess what scientific evidence is reliable. She talks to host Monya Baker about her investigations into the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, techniques industries use to shape evidence to favor their products, and the importance of independent research to inform policy.  Resources:  Read The Cigarette Papers to learn more about Lisa Bero and others’ investigations of the tobacco industry.  See this analysis of industry documents about insider knowledge of health effects of PFAS and related chemicals.  Visit the Cochrane Library to find more systematic reviews of clinical research.  Learn more about Adrian Traeger’s investigation of spinal cord stimulation research by reading Corporate Influences on Science and Health—the Case of Spinal Cord Stimulation. Read Lisa Bero’s summary of how industry forces suppress unfavorable research.  Lisa Bero and others are developing a tool to screen for signs of fraud in clinical research. Learn more about it in The Conversation. 

Octopuses are famously smart: they can recognize individual humans, solve problems, and even keep gardens. They are also a popular food for humans: around 350,000 tons of octopus are caught worldwide each year, and demand is only growing. Some governments and start-ups have invested significant resources into domesticating octopus, and the world’s first octopus farm may soon open in Spain’s Canary Islands.  But should octopus be farmed at all? That question is being debated in several pieces of legislation right now, including a bipartisan US Senate bill. For Jennifer Jacquet, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, the answer is a resounding no. For the last decade, she has worked to end octopus farming before it begins, as she wrote in Issues in 2019. On this episode, Jacquet discusses why octopuses are poor candidates for farming, the growing social movements around octopus protection, and why we need public conversations about new technologies before investments begin.  Resources: Read “The Case Against Octopus Farming,” Jennifer Jacquet’s Issues piece, co-authored with Becca Franks, Peter Godfrey-Smith, and Walter Sánchez-Suárez.  Learn more about US legislation to end octopus farming:  Washington HB 1153: the first state to pass an octopus farming ban.  California A.B. 3162: the second state to pass one.  The OCTOPUS ACT of 2024: a bipartisan US Senate bill currently up for debate.  Check out the Science letter authored by 100 scientists and experts calling for congressional support of the OCTOPUS Act.  Read this Guardian article to learn more about the potential octopus farm. Explore a recent survey of American attitudes towards animal issues, including octopus farming on page 18-19. 

In this installment of Science Policy IRL, host Jason Lloyd goes behind the scenes of the White House Fellowship program with Lav Varshney, associate professor of engineering, computer science, and neuroscience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Varshney served as a White House Fellow from 2022 to 2023, where he worked at the National Security Council with Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology. In this episode, Varshney describes the day-to-day experience of working at the White House, gaps in the innovation system that science policy can help fill, and how making artificial intelligence systems more transparent could define the future of AI applications. Resources:  Want to become a White House Fellow? Applications open November 1, 2024.  As a White House Fellow, Lav Varshney contributed to the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. Read Varshney’s contributions to Issues: a review of a biography of the information technology pioneer Claude Shannon and an assessment of how intellectual property rights can keep up with advances in artificial intelligence with coauthor Deepak Somaya.  Visit Kocree to try out AI music generation and Ensaras to learn more about using AI to monitor wastewater.  Visit the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research to learn more about Varshney’s work on making AI systems more transparent through information lattice learning.  

In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The miniseries has explored how economics can be used to advance environmental justice, how solar-powered canoes can protect the Amazon from deforestation, and how refugees create communication networks to respond to climate change. On the final episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU professor Melissa K. Nelson. Nelson shares her thoughts about the impacts of climate change on Native American communities, agriculture, and what can be learned from Indigenous sustainability practices.  Resources:  See more of Melissa K. Nelson’s work on her website.  Listen to the Cultural Conservancy’s Native Seed Pod, a podcast hosted by Nelson about Native foodways, ancestral seeds, and traditional ecological knowledge, and visit their Native Foodways page.  Visit the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and the Traditional Native American Farmers Association websites to learn more about Indigenous farming techniques. Learn more about indigenous practices and environmental sustainability by reading Traditional Ecological Knowledge Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Daniel Shilling. Check out the other episodes in our Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer mini-series!

In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change.  On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU assistant professor Faheem Hussain to learn about how Rohingya refugees are using social technologies and what they can teach the rest of the world about communicating in disasters. Hussain is a researcher whose trajectory was changed when he visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. There, he learned how the community uses an innovative combination of online and offline technologies to create networks to share information.  Resources: Infrastructuring Hope: Solidarity, Leadership, Negotiation, and ICT among the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh Gendered effects of climate change and health inequities among forcibly displaced populations: Displaced Rohingya women foster resilience through technology

In our new miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer, we're working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change.  On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU associate professor David Manuel-Navarrete to talk about his Solar Canoes Against Deforestation project. Working closely with Ecuadoran engineers and the Kichwa and Waorani people, Manuel-Navarrette’s team has been helping to develop a solar-powered canoe that can bring renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure to the Amazon. The story of the canoe offers lessons about how to meaningfully work with communities to understand their needs and co-produce solutions.  Resources:  Learn more about Solar Canoes Against Deforestation and watch this video to see the canoe in action.  Want to learn more about co-producing sustainable climate solutions? Check out some of Manuel-Navarrete’s recent publications. Embodying relationality through immersive sustainability solutions with Indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon.  Fostering horizontal knowledge co-production with Indigenous people by leveraging researchers' transdisciplinary intentions. Leveraging inner sustainability through cross-cultural learning: Evidence from a Quichua field school in Ecuador. Co-producing sustainable solutions in indigenous communities through scientific tourism.

This has been a record-breaking summer all over the world. Many cities have recorded their hottest days ever, and June 2024 was the hottest month on record worldwide. Mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change, including extreme heat and long summers, will require a lot of bold new ideas.  This summer, we’re highlighting some of those ideas in a mini podcast series, Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer. Over four mini-episodes, we’ll explore how faculty members at ASU’s Global Futures Lab are working with communities to develop cool techniques and technologies for dealing with climate change.  In the first mini-episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU assistant professor Danae Hernandez-Cortes. Danae shares how economics can be used to advance environmental justice and how policies can affect communities who are most harmed by climate change.  Resources:  Visit Danae Hernandez-Cortes’s website to learn more about environmental economics and environmental justice. 

Since 1973, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellowship (STPF) has brought thousands of scientists and engineers into the policy world. The fellowship is a very popular pathway into science policy, and AAAS fellows have featured in several episodes of our Science Policy IRL series.  In this episode, we talk with the STPF fellowship director, Rashada Alexander. After completing a chemistry PhD and postdoc, she applied for an STPF fellowship that placed her inside the National Institutes of Health, where she worked for 10 years.  Alexander talks to us about how her fellowship experience helped her look up from the lab bench and find meaning in her life. In particular, she found ways to build relationships, learn how to read a room, and navigate organizational structures—skills that are not always valued in scientific labs. She explains why scientists and engineers should apply for this transformational experience.  Resources:  Learn more about the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship.  Applications are now open for the 2025–2026 STPF cohort. Apply by November 1.  Want to hear more about how fellowships can help launch scientists into a career in policy? Listen to our episodes with Quinn Spadola (another AAAS fellow) and Zach Pirtle (a Presidential Management Fellow).  Are you doing science policy? Take our survey!

Most people are familiar with DNA, but its cousin, RNA, has become widely known only recently. In 2020, of course, RNA was in the news all the time: the COVID-19 virus is made of RNA, as are the vaccines to combat it. Technologies based on RNA could lead to innovations in biology, medicine, agriculture, and beyond, but researchers have only scratched the surface of understanding what RNA is capable of.  A new report from the National Academies, Charting a Future for Sequencing RNA and Its Modifications: A New Era for Biology and Medicine, proposes an ambitious road map for coordinated projects to understand RNA. This large-scale effort is inspired by what was achieved for DNA two decades ago by the Human Genome Project.  On this episode, host Monya Baker is joined by Lydia Contreras, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, and one of the authors of the report. Contreras talks about what RNA is, the challenges and potential of this effort, and what lessons could be learned from previous efforts with the Human Genome Project.  Resources:  Read the full National Academies report: Charting a Future for Sequencing RNA and Its Modifications: A New Era for Biology and Medicine. Visit the Contreras Research Lab website to learn more about Lydia Contreras’s work.  Retrospectives on the Human Genome Project.

The Ongoing Transformation will be back next week with a fantastic episode on RNA and the future of biology. This week we are sharing a podcast from the Progress Network that we think you’ll enjoy. On What Could Go Right?, Progress Network founder Zachary Karabell and executive director Emma Varvaloucas talk to experts about the world’s challenges—and developments that could lead to a brighter future.  In this episode, Karabell and Varvaloucas tackle an issue at the top of many people’s minds: climate and energy. Specifically, how can the green transition move the global energy system away from fossil fuels? They're joined by Jigar Shah, the director of the Loan Programs Office at the US Department of Energy. Shah shares his insights into the current landscape, future potential, and challenges for the successful commercial deployment of clean energy technologies. Subscribe to What Could Go Right? wherever you get your podcasts.

On this installment of Science Policy IRL, Lisa Margonelli goes behind the scenes of Congressional policymaking with Brent Blevins. Blevins is a senior congressional staffer and staff director of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, which is part of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Space, Science, and Technology.  Blevins talks about his unusual path into science policy (he didn’t study science, and he wasn’t a AAAS fellow!) and what staffers in the House and Senate do in the science policy world. He also talks about the incredible experience of getting to set policy for things like sending humans to Mars while also having a staff job that can end with any two-year election cycle. Resources: Want to learn more about what it’s like to work as a congressional staffer? Check out our Science Policy IRL episode with Amanda Arnold.  Learn more about the House Science Committee by visiting the House Republicans Science Committee website and the House Democrats Science Committee website. The Senate version of this committee is called the Senate Committee on Science, Commerce and Transportation.  Have thoughts you want to share with Blevins? He tells us his email in the episode, and he really wants to hear from you! Listen to the end of the episode to get his email.

Caregiving is a nearly universal human experience, but it’s not often thought of as an issue with implications for our nation’s science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) enterprise. A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM: A Call to Action, seeks to change that. In some academic STEMM environments, devoting time to care for family members is still seen as a taboo subject because it clashes with the idealized notion of scientists who focus exclusively on their work. The lack of legal and institutional support for caregivers drives many people to leave STEMM fields altogether. What can be done to change this inequity? On this episode, Issues editor Sara Frueh talks to Elena Fuentes-Afflick, chair of the report committee and a professor of pediatrics and vice dean for the School of Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital at the University of California San Francisco. Fuentes-Afflick talks about the pressures of balancing caregiving with a STEMM career; how complex and poorly implemented policies are hurting workers and the economy; and steps that the government, universities, and others could take to make a difference. Resources: Read the Supporting Family Caregivers in STEMM: A Call to Action report and find more resources.  Learn more about federal policies and practices to support STEMM caregivers by reading the National Science and Technology Council’s report.  Find more of Elena Fuentes-Afflick’s work on her website. 

In this installment of Science Policy IRL, Kei Koizumi takes us inside the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP. As the principal deputy director for policy at OSTP, Koizumi occupies an unusual position at the very heart of science policy in the United States. OSTP provides science and technology advice to the president and executive office, works with federal agencies and legislators to create S&T policy, and helps strengthen and advance American science and technology. Koizumi talks to Issues editor Lisa Margonelli about what he does at OSTP, how he got there, and the exciting developments in S&T policy that get him out of bed every day.  Are you involved in science and technology policy? From science for policy to policy for science, from the merely curious to full-on policy wonks, we would love to hear from all of you! Please visit our survey page to share your thoughts and provide a better understanding of who science policy professionals are, what they do, and why—along with a sense of how science policy is changing and what its future looks like. Resources: Visit the Office of Science and Technology Policy website to learn more about OSTP’s work.  Read Issues’s interview with Arati Prabhakar, current director of OSTP.  Also in Issues, learn more about the creation of the National Nanotechnology Initiative from Neal Lane, science advisor to President Clinton.    Check out Science’s Uncertain Authority in Policy by John Marburger, science advisor to President George W. Bush, to learn more about the interactions between science and the political process. 

When tackling the problem of misinformation, people often think first of content and its accuracy. But countering misinformation by fact-checking every erroneous or misleading claim traps organizations in an endless game of whack-a-mole. A more effective approach may be to start by considering connections and communities. That is particularly important for public health, where different people are vulnerable in different ways.  On this episode, Issues editor Monya Baker talks with global health professionals Tina Purnat and Elisabeth Wilhelm about how public health workers, civil society organizations, and others can understand and meet communities’ information needs. Purnat led the World Health Organization’s team that strategized responses to misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic. She is also a coeditor of the book Managing Infodemics in the 21st Century. Wilhelm has worked in health communications at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, and USAID.  Resources  Visit Tina Purnat and Elisabeth Wilhelm’s websites to learn more about their work and find health misinformation resources.  Check out Community Stories Guide to explore how public health professionals can use stories to understand communities’ information needs and combat misinformation.  How is an infodemic manager like a unicorn? Visit the WHO Infodemic Manager Training website to find training resources created by Purnat and Wilhelm, and learn about the skills needed to become an infodemiologist.

In this installment of Science Policy IRL, we explore another sector of science policy: private industry. Amanda Arnold is the vice president of governmental affairs and policy at Valneva, a private vaccine development company, where she works on policy for creating, manufacturing, and distributing vaccines that address unmet medical needs, such as for Lyme and Zika.  Arnold has worked in the science policy realm for over twenty years, first as a policy staffer for a US senator, then as a legislative liaison for the National Institutes of Health, and as a senior policy advisor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Arnold talks to editor Megan Nicholson about the role industry plays in the science policy enterprise and what she has learned about the US innovation ecosystem from working across sectors.  Resources:  Read Amanda Arnold’s Issues article, “Rules for Operating at Warp Speed,” to learn about how the government can work to rapidly respond to future crises.  Check out Ensuring an Effective Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise and the Strategic National Stockpile reports to learn more about the issues Amanda thinks about in vaccine development policy.  Want to learn more about convergence? Check out these reports:  (1) The Convergence of Engineering and the Life Sciences (2013) (2) Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Beyond (2014)  (3) Fostering the Culture of Convergence in Research (2019)

Douglas Duncan is an astronomer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. He is also an eclipse fanatic. Since 1970, he has been to 11 total solar eclipses. When April 8, 2024, comes around, he’ll experience his twelfth with his 600 best friends as he leads a three-day eclipse viewing extravaganza in Texas. “It looks like the end of the world,” he says, and a total eclipse can be a source of intense fascination. He uses the emotional experience of the eclipse as a gateway to learning more about science.  On this episode, Lisa Margonelli talks to Duncan about how he has used this sense of experiential wonder, particularly in planetariums, as a way to invite the public into the joy of science. In previous generations, planetariums were seen as “old fashioned” and isolated from the work of modern astronomers. But Duncan pioneered a career track that combined public teaching at a planetarium with a faculty position at the University of Colorado. Now many planetariums have become places where academic astronomers can share their knowledge with the public.  Resources:  Visit Doug Duncan’s website to learn more about his work.  Read about his work at NASA.  Want to photograph the solar eclipse? Duncan has made an app for that called Solar Snap.  Learn more about using eclipses to engage the public.  See the itinerary for Duncan’s “Totality Over Texas” trip, which will be attended by 600 people. The trip offers three days of eclipse-related activities. 

The Science Policy IRL series pulls back the curtain on who does what in science policy and how they shaped their career path. In previous episodes we’ve looked at the cosmology of science policy through the eyes of people who work at federal agencies and the National Academies, but this time we are exploring think tanks.  Walter Valdivia describes how a chance encounter while he was getting a PhD in public policy at Arizona State University led him into science policy. Since then he’s worked at think tanks including Brookings and the Mercatus Center and is now at the Science and Technology Policy Institute, which does research for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this episode, we’ll talk to Walter about what think tanks do in the policy world and how policy sometimes creates inherent paradoxes.  Resources:  Visit the Institute for Defense Analysis’ Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) to learn more about Walter’s current work.  Check out the book, Between Politics and Science by David Guston, to see what inspired Walter’s career in science policy. Here is the first chapter. Visit the Center for Nanotechnology in Society’s website.  Read Walter and David Guston’s paper, “Responsible innovation: A primer for policymakers.” Read “Is Patent Protection Industrial Policy?” to learn more about policy paradoxes.  Check out The Honest Broker by Roger Pielke, Jr. to learn more about the role of impartial expertise.  Interested in learning more about Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs)? Read this primer.

At the age of 19, Monique Verdin picked up a camera and began documenting the lives of her relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Little did she know that she would spend the next two decades investigating and capturing the profound ways that climate, the fossil fuel industry, and the shifting waters of the Gulf of Mexico would transform the landscape that was once a refuge for her Houma ancestors. Based in Louisiana, Verdin is an artist, storyteller, videographer, and photographer, as well as a community builder and activist. She is also the director of the Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange, a project that seeks to create a community record of the coastal cultures and native ecology of southeast Louisiana. Her work, which was featured in the Winter print edition of Issues, seeks to understand home and belonging after displacement and migration. Her stories are laced with environmental concerns, the shifting roles of corporate entities, and natural and human-made disasters. Verdin’s art practice creates space and gives voice to Indigenous and marginalized communities in the South while building bridges with science communities. On this episode, Verdin joins host JD Talasek to talk about using art and science to understand a Gulf that is being reshaped by climate, industry, and more. Resources: Monique Verdin’s website  Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange United Houma Nation Issues: In the Heart of the Yakni Chitto

A lawyer and bioethicist by training, Alta Charo has decades of experience in helping to formulate and inform science policy on new and emerging technologies, including stem cells, cloning, CRISPR, and chimeras. The Warren P. Knowles Professor Emerita of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she served on President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, was a member of President Obama’s transition team, was an advisor for the Food and Drug Administration, and served on more than a dozen study committees for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  In the fourth episode of our Science Policy IRL series, Alta joins Issues contributing editor Molly Galvin to explore how science policy can and does impact people’s lives in real and profound ways. She also describes what it’s like to be one of the only non-scientists at the science policy table, how helping a close friend who died of ALS continues to inspire her work, and why science policy can help us become techno optimists.  Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore? Let us know by emailing us at podcast@issues.org, or by tagging us on social media with the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL. Resources: National Academies Collection on Stem Cell Research Institute of Medicine. 2005. Review of the HIVNET 012 Perinatal HIV Prevention Study National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and National Academy of Medicine. 2023. Toward Equitable Innovation in Health and Medicine: A Framework National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance The Issues Interview: Alta Charo Previous episodes of Science Policy IRL Zach Pirtle Explores Ethics for Mars Landings Apurva Dave Builds Connections Between National Security and Climate Quinn Spadola Develops Nanotechnology With Soft Power

NASA’s Artemis project aims to establish a long-term human presence on the moon—and then put astronauts on Mars. So in addition to designing rockets and spacesuits, NASA is also exploring the ethical and societal implications of living in space. In the third episode of our Science Policy IRL series, Zach Pirtle, who got his undergraduate degrees in engineering and philosophy at Arizona State University, explains how he came to work in the agency’s Office of Technology Policy and Strategy, where he recently organized a seminar on space ethics. He also works as a program executive within the Science Mission Directorate working on commercial lunar payload services. Zach joins Issues editor-in-chief Lisa Margonelli to talk about how he almost accidentally found his way to a perfect career, and how agencies engage hands-on in science policy as they figure out how to implement legislation.   Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore? Let us know by emailing us at podcast@issues.org, or by tagging us on social media with the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL. Resources: Presidential Management Fellows Program National Academies’ Mirzayan Fellowship AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships Daniel Sarewitz, emeritus co-director at ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes NASA Artemis Artemis, Ethics and Society: Synthesis from a Workshop NASA named best place to work in the federal government How Would You Defend the Planet From Asteroids? –an Issues article by Mahmud Farooque and Jason Kessler 

By day, Erica Fuchs is a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. However, for the past year she’s also been running a pilot project—the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment—to give the federal government the ability to anticipate problems in supply chains and respond to them.  The trip from germ of a policy idea to pilot project in the National Science Foundation’s new Technology Implementation and Partnerships directorate has been a wild ride. And it all started when she developed her thoughts on the need for a national technology strategy into a 2021 Issues essay. Two years later, the network she called for, coordinating dozens of academics, industry, and government contributors to uniquely understand how different supply chains work, was a real, NSF-funded pilot project. In this episode of The Ongoing Transformation, Erica talks with Lisa Margonelli about how she took her idea from a white paper to the White House, and the bipartisan political support that was necessary to bring it to fruition.   Resources Erica Fuchs for Issues in Science and Technology: What a National Technology Strategy Is—and Why the United States Needs One. National Network for Critical Technology Assessment: Securing America’s Future report on the pilot project. The National Science Foundation’s press release on the pilot project report. Erica Fuch’s white paper for the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution: Building the Analytic Capacity to Support Critical Technology Assessment.  

Early in his career, Apurva Dave was an oceanographer; now he works at the cutting edge of climate policy at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. As the director of the Academies’ Climate Security Roundtable, he convenes cross-disciplinary dialogues on “emerging, abrupt, and understudied risks” at the nexus of climate change and national security.  In this second episode in our Science Policy IRL series, Apurva joins senior editor Megan Nicholson to talk about his nonlinear path to this role, and how his hesitancy to specialize has helped him think about the complexities of interconnectedness in science and policy.    Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore?  Let us know by emailing us at podcast@issues.org, or by tagging us on social media using the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL.   Resources:  Climate Security Roundtable of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Global Trends 2040 (March 2021). Carol Dumaine’s essay “Redefining Security” in Issues in Science and Technology (Winter 2022). Peter Schiffer and Frederick R. Chang’s essay “Academia’s Openness Could Strengthen its Partnerships With the Intelligence Community” in Issues in Science and Technology (Summer 2023). AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowships

Stuart Buck has referred to himself as a venture capitalist for making science more efficient, reliable, and accountable. As vice president at the policy-focused philanthropy Arnold Ventures, he directed funds toward fledgling enterprises that are now major forces shaping scientific norms and infrastructure, including the Center for Open Science and Retraction Watch. He’s now executive director of the Good Science Project, a nonprofit organization working to figure out effective ways to improve science. Buck considers how to make sure that reforms are actually improvements, not performative busywork. He explores what sorts of entities are required to push for positive change in science and still respect the different cultures and practices in various countries and disciplines. It’s not enough to assess scientific practices, he argues; there needs to be a built-in way to assess scientific reforms, including the relative costs and benefits of increasingly popular policies like sharing data and promoting transparency. In this context, Buck joins host Monya Baker to discuss how metascience—the study of science—has fueled reform, and how to make sure reforms produce the desired effects. Resources: Stuart Buck’s recent essay on his work at Arnold Ventures: “Metascience Since 2012: A Personal History” Stuart Buck, “Beware performative reproducibility,” Nature (July 6, 2021)

Since 1984, Issues in Science and Technology has been a journal for science policy—a space to discuss how to best use science for the benefit of society. But what is science policy, exactly? Our new podcast series, Science Policy IRL, explores what science policy is and how it gets done. “Science” is often caricatured as a lone person in a lab, but the work of science is supported by a community of people who engineer its funding, goals, coordination, and dissemination. They include people in legislative offices, federal agencies, national labs, universities, the National Academies, industry, and think tanks—not to mention interest groups and lobbyists.  In this series, we will explore the work of science policy by speaking to people who have built careers in it.   For the first episode in this series, host Lisa Margonelli is joined by Quinn Spadola, the deputy director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, a unique office that coordinates the development of nanotechnology across the entire federal government. Spadola, who has a Ph.D. in physics from Arizona State University,  now uses “soft power” to bring groups together to coordinate their efforts so that taxpayers get the most from their investments in science. In practice, she brings all of her life experiences to bear on the task of shaping technology so that it benefits society.  Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore?  Let us know by emailing us at podcast@issues.org, or by tagging us on social media using the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL.  Resources On science policy: - Harvey Brooks, “Knowledge and Action: The Dilemma of Science Policy in the ’70s,” Daedalus 102, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 125–143. - Deborah D. Stine “Science and Technology Policymaking: A Primer,” Congressional Research Service, RL34454 (May 27, 2009).  On nanotechnology: - The website of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office. - National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, A Quadrennial Review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative: Nanoscience, Applications, and Commercialization (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.17226/25729.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of scientists fled the country and hundreds more remained behind. Those scientists who stayed are trying to continue their research and engage with the global scientific community under often difficult circumstances, with the ultimate goal of being able to help rebuild Ukraine when the war ends.  Since the early days of the war, Vaughan Turekian, the director of the Policy and Global Affairs Division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, has been leading efforts to support Ukrainian scientists and their research, enlisting the help of international science academies and philanthropic partners. Turekian has spent much of his career in science diplomacy. Before joining the Academies, he served as the fifth science and technology advisor to US Secretary of State John Kerry and was also the founding director of the Center for Science Diplomacy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  In this episode, recorded on October 5, Turekian joins host Molly Galvin to discuss efforts to support Ukrainian scientists and why such efforts are important for the future of Ukraine.  Resources National Academies, “Supporting Ukraine’s Scientists, Engineers, and Health Care Workers.” Interview with the president of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Jerzy Duszyński, “What I’m Mostly Afraid of Is That There Will Be Two Sciences—Democratic Science and Autocratic Science,” (Issues, Summer 2022). Daniel Armanios, Jonas Skovrup Christensen, and Andriy Tymoshenko, “What Ukraine can Teach the World About Resilience and Civil Engineering” (Issues, Fall 2023).

The Green Revolution was a program of agricultural technology transfer that helped poor countries around the world increase food production from the 1950s onward. An American agronomist named Norman Borlaug developed and popularized the central innovation of this revolution: the concept of “wide adaptation,” or the idea that plants could be bred to produce a high yield in a variety of environments, rather than in a particular region. Borlaug’s work won him the Nobel Prize in 1970, and his agricultural insights are often credited with saving millions of people from hunger. But the legacy of Borlaug and the Green Revolution is not as straightforward as these accolades suggest.  In this episode, we caught up with interdisciplinary scientist and historian Marci Baranski to discuss her new book, The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution. She talks with host Jason Lloyd about how a more nuanced understanding of the Green Revolution and Borlaug’s work can improve agricultural and economic development policies today. Resources: Marci Baranski’s book, The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution Madhumita Saha’s book review, “Left Behind by the Green Revolution” (Issues, Summer 2023) Marci Baranski and Mary Ollenberger’s essay, “How to Improve the Social Benefits of Agricultural Research” (Issues, Spring 2020)

A decade ago, University of Virginia psychology professor Brian Nosek cofounded an unusual nonprofit, the Center for Open Science. It’s been a cheerleader, enabler, and nagger to convince scientists that making their methods, data, and papers available to others makes for better science.  The Center for Open Science has built tools to register analysis plans and hypotheses before data are collected. It campaigns for authors and journals to state explicitly whether and where data and other research materials are available. Gradually, practices that were considered fringe are becoming mainstream. The White House declared 2023 the Year of Open Science.  Nosek refers to the pyramid of culture change as his strategy to push for reforms: first make a better practice possible, then easy, expected, rewarding, and finally, required. It starts with building infrastructure, then experience, reward systems, and ultimately policy.  In this podcast, Brian Nosek joins host Monya Baker to discuss the movement of scientific ideals toward reality. Resources: Center for Open Science Transparency and Openness Guidelines Reproducibility Project: Psychology Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology Pyramid of Social Change

There is more life in the ocean than anywhere else on Earth. Accounting for over 70% of the planet’s surface, the ocean provides habitat to millions of species, supplies freshwater and oxygen, moderates the climate, and influences the weather. But despite its importance, the ocean is largely unexplored and often misunderstood.  There is growing interest in how art can help people connect with ocean research. The National Academy of Sciences is hosting an immersive video installation called Blue Dreams by Rebecca Rutstein and the Ocean Memory Project. Inspired by the vast microbial networks in the deep sea, the installation is the product of a collaboration between an artist and four scientists. From abstract imagery to stunning undersea video footage and computer modeling, Blue Dreams offers a glimpse into the interconnections and resilience of microbes, our planet’s smallest yet most vital living systems. In this episode, host Alana Quinn is joined by artist Rebecca Rutstein and one of her collaborators, the oceanographer Mandy Joye, to discuss their work and the rich potential of partnerships between artists and scientists to create visceral connections to the deep sea. Resources Register for the DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous at the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, DC, on September 7, 2023, to meet Rebecca Rutstein, Mandy Joye, and their collaborators Jody Deming and Tom Skalak. Download the Blue Dreams catalog to learn more about the immersive video installation on view through September 15, 2023, at the NAS building, 2101 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC. Visit Rebecca Rutstein’s website to learn more about her artistic practice. Watch her Blue Dreams video here. Visit the Joye Research Group website to learn more about Mandy Joye’s research.

Over the last 40 years, US and Chinese scientists at all levels have been engaged in broad-based diplomacy, publishing hundreds of thousands of scientific papers together. Recently, amid tensions between the two countries and official and unofficial government actions to curtail collaboration, joint publications have fallen. Ernest Moniz, Secretary of Energy during the Obama administration, has been a practitioner of science diplomacy at the highest levels. Trained as a physicist, Moniz worked with his Iranian counterpart, Ali Salehi, on the Iran nuclear agreement in 2015.   In this episode, Moniz talks about the ways that science can provide a common language and a sense of trust during diplomatic negotiations. And he emphasizes the importance of collaboration to scientific discovery. Science, he says, is cumulative, extending far beyond the experience of a single person. If collaborations are prevented, we will never know what knowledge we failed to create.    Moniz is president and CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative and CEO and co-chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. He served as the thirteenth US Secretary of Energy from 2013 to January 2017. He is also the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.     Resources   E. William Colglazier, “The Precarious Balance Between Research Openness and Security,” Issues in Science and Technology 39, no. 3 (Spring 2023): 87–91.   Sylvia Schwaag Serger, Cong Cao, Caroline S. Wagner, Xabier Goenaga, and Koen Jonkers, “What Do China’s Scientific Ambitions Mean for Science and the World?” Issues in Science and Technology (April 5, 2021).

Chronic pain, according to a 2023 study, affects more Americans than diabetes, depression, and hypertension. Yet the disease is poorly understood, often undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, and effective treatments are in short supply.   A recent study in Nature Neuroscience provides new insights into how the disease affects the nervous system. For the first time, researchers recorded data from inside the brains of individuals who were suffering from chronic pain and found distinct biomarkers for the disease. These insights are an important first step toward better diagnosing and treating chronic pain.   In this episode, the lead author of that study, Prasad Shirvalkar, a neurologist and interventional pain medicine specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, talks with managing editor Jason Lloyd about his research and how it could transform physicians’ understanding and treatment of what Shirvalkar calls a “multi-dimensional beast.”   Resources   ·     Read the article: Prasad Shirvalkar, Jordan Prosky, Gregory Chin, Parima Ahmadipour, Omid G. Sani, Maansi Desai, Ashlyn Schmitgen, Heather Dawes, Maryam M. Shanechi, Philip A. Starr, and Edward F. Chang, “First-in-human prediction of chronic pain state using intracranial neural biomarkers,” Nature Neuroscience 26 (2023): 1090–1099. ·     Prasad Shirvalkar leads the Shirvalkar Pain Neuromodulation Lab at the University of California San Francisco. ·     More about Shirvalkar’s research in the New York Times: “Scientists Find Brain Signals of Chronic Pain.”   Transcript Coming soon!

Artificial intelligence’s remarkable advances, along with the risks and opportunities the technology presents, have recently become a topic of feverish discussion. Along with contemplating the dangers AI poses to employment and information ecosystems, there are those who claim it endangers humanity as a whole. These concerns are in line with a long tradition of cautionary tales about human creations escaping their bounds to wreak havoc.   But several recent novels pose a more subtle, and in some ways more interesting, question: What does our interaction with artificial intelligence reveal about us and our society? In this episode, historian Deborah Poskanzer speaks with managing editor Jason Lloyd about three books that she recently reviewed for Issues: Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and The Employees by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken). She talks about the themes that unite these novels, the connections they draw with real-world politics and history, and what they reveal about our moral imagination.   Resources   Read Deborah Poskanzer’s book reviews in Issues: ·     “Not Your Father’s Turing Test”: review of Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and The Employees by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken). ·     “Exploring the Depths of Scientific Patronage”: review of Science on a Mission: How Military Spending Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know About the Ocean by Naomi Oreskes. ·      “A Planet-Changing Idea”: review of The Environment: A History of the Idea by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin. ·      “Oh, the Humanities!”: review of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz and College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco.   Transcript coming soon!

The concept of distinct races came from European naturalists in the 1700s and it’s now recognized as a social construct, rather than a biological classification. Nonetheless, genetics researchers sometimes use race or ethnicity to stand in for ancestry. This practice has been criticized for creating discrete categories where none exist and for underemphasizing the ways that environment and other nongenetic factors can contribute to ill health. In March, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine weighed in with a consensus report. It documented the problems of using race as a biological category in genetics studies and suggested more appropriate approaches. One of the report’s authors is Ann Morning, a professor of sociology at New York University. Over a decade ago she wrote the book The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. She spoke with Issues editor Monya Baker about why race is a poor—but persistent—shorthand in genetics studies.   Resources Read the National Academies’ consensus report Using Population Descriptors in Genetics and Genomics Research: A New Framework for an Evolving Field.   Books by Ann Morning: The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference and An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States (coauthored by Marcello Maneri).

What does intuitive, emotional poetry have in common with rational, empirical science? On this episode, host J. D. Talasek talks to poet Jane Hirshfield and neuroscientist Virginia Sturm to understand how they came to work together, and the connections they’ve found between poetry, neural science, and society. They discuss what Hirshfield calls the “mutual delight” they’ve found between poets and scientists as they consider how the microscope and the metaphor can be used to explore the world. Hirshfield and Sturm also explore how poetry affects the brain, and what that reveals about the science of emotions and the complex ways that humans process language. Together they connect the dots on the surprising connection between poetry, empathy, science, and policy change. Resources: ·      Visit the Poets for Science exhibit at the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, DC, until September 8, 2023. Learn more about Jane Hirshfield’s work and find upcoming exhibitions on the Poets for Science website. ·      Visit the University of California San Francisco’s Clinical Affective Neuroscience Lab website to find more of Virginia Sturm’s work.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, growing increasingly accessible and pervasive. Conversations about AI often focus on technical accomplishments rather than societal impacts, but leading scholar Kate Crawford has long drawn attention to the potential harms AI poses for society: exploitation, discrimination, and more. She argues that minimizing risks depends on civil society, not technology. The ability of people to govern AI is often overlooked because many people approach new technologies with what Crawford calls “enchanted determinism,” seeing them as both magical and more accurate and insightful than humans. In 2017, Crawford cofounded the AI Now Institute to explore productive policy approaches around the social consequences of AI. Across her work in industry, academia, and elsewhere, she has started essential conversations about regulation and policy. Issues editor Monya Baker recently spoke with Crawford about how to ensure AI designers incorporate societal protections into product development and deployment. Resources Learn more about Kate Crawford’s work by visiting her website and the AI Now Institute. Read her latest book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Visit the Anatomy of an AI System artwork at the Museum of Modern Art, or see and learn about it virtually here. Working with machine learning datasets? Check out Crawford’s critical field guide to think about how to best work with these data.

The CHIPS and Science Act aims to secure American competitiveness and innovation by investing $280 billion in domestic semiconductor manufacturing, scientific innovation, and regional development. But if past government investments in science and technology are any guide, this will affect American life in unexpected and profound ways—well beyond manufacturing and scientific laboratories. On this episode, Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, talks to host Lisa Margonelli about the CHIPS and Science Act in the context of previous American security investments. Investments in food security and agriculture in the 1860s and nuclear security in the 1940s and 50s created shared knowledge that benefitted all Americans. Early agricultural programs, for example, turned farmers into innovators, resulting in an agricultural sector that can feed many people with very little labor. In similar ways, today’s quest for digital security could make the country more secure, while also changing how individuals live and work with information.   Resources:   Read perspectives on How the CHIPS and Science Act Can Deliver on its Promises   Read A. Hunter Dupree’s Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities   Read Michael Crow and William Dabars on The Emergence of the Fifth Wave in American Higher Education. 

Miami is so renowned for its warm weather that its professional basketball team is the Miami Heat. But extreme heat can be life-threatening, even in cities like Miami that are used to high temperatures. And within cities, lower-income and minority neighborhoods feel the effects of extreme heat more acutely due to a lack of shade and green spaces. What can be done to protect vulnerable communities from extreme heat? The world’s first chief heat officer, Jane Gilbert, who leads Miami-Dade County’s efforts to deal with extreme heat, is working on the answers. She recently spoke with Issues editor Jason Lloyd about the need for win-win solutions (more air conditioning alone can’t solve the problem), the difficulties of planting trees on busy streets, and engaging with citizens on solutions for keeping communities safe in a warmer future. Resources · Miami Dade County’s extreme heat resource page · National Integrated Heat Health Information · Visit Arsh-Rock’s Heat Action Platform to find more resources to combat extreme heat on the regional and municipal level, and learn more about Chief Heat Officers. Transcript Coming soon!

Recent conversations about scientific misinformation have concentrated on what is new: social media and algorithms that spread all kinds of information—reliable and unreliable—surprisingly fast. But misinformation has long been an issue for scientists who study sharks. The Discovery Channel’s Shark Week has anchored the idea of predatory, dangerous sharks in the public consciousness for 35 years, often wrapping its entertainments in the legitimizing cloak of science. In this episode, we talk with Arizona State University marine biologist David Shiffman, who studies sharks and the impacts of misinformation on shark conservation. Resources · Read David Shiffman’s book, Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive with the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator. · Follow David on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. · What are the Odds?Compare shark attacks to other risks.

In 2022, there were more than 2 million electric vehicles, or EVs, on the road in the United States. In 2005, there were only about 1,000. The conventional wisdom credits better batteries with this remarkable growth. In the 2010s, engineers delivered batteries that cost less and could go many miles further. Consequently, driving range increased, costs decreased, and sales soared. EVs now compete with vehicles powered by traditional internal combustion engines. But Matthew Eisler (University of Strathclyde) challenges this narrative. He argues that the US resurgence in EVs had little to do with technology and much more to do with public policies, business models, and social conditions. On this episode, Eisler talks with host Jason Lloyd about the complex history of EV adoption, how a powerful metaphor invited new players into car manufacturing, and what the EV revival might mean for infrastructure such as electric grids. Resources Matthew N. Eisler’s recent book, Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car (MIT Press, 2022) Read an excerpt from the book, published in the Winter 2023 Issues in Science and Technology: “Computers on Wheels?”

How can scientific data be made more tangible, visceral, and experiential? Collaboration! Over the course of a four-year project, Arctic Ice: A Visual Archive, artist Cy Keener, landscape researcher Justine Holzman, climatologist Ignatius Rigor, and scientist John Woods integrated field data, remote satellite imagery, scientific analysis, and art to create visual representations of disappearing Arctic ice. Being deeply embedded in each other’s processes helped the artists and scientists foster new ideas and unexpected outcomes. On this episode, host J. D. Talasek is joined by Keener and Rigor to discuss how to build successful collaborations across different disciplines and how creative practices can contribute to scientific research and communication. Resources: · See images from Arctic Ice and read more about the collaborative project in Issues in Science and Technology. · Visit the Arctic Ice: A Visual Archive exhibition through February 15, 2023, by visiting the National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington, DC. Check out the CPNAS website to learn more about the exhibition and download a virtual catalogue. · See more of Cy Keener’s work on his website. · Visit the International Arctic Buoy Programme’s website to learn more about the program’s buoy maps, data, research, and publications.