[Paleopsych] Edge Annual Question 2003: What are the pressing scientific issues?

[Premise Checker]

Edge Annual Question 2003: What are the pressing scientific issues for the 
nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal 
with them?
http://www.edge.org/q2003/question03_print.html

The following message is the basis for the 6th Annual Edge Question. I
sent individualized emails to the third culture mail list as in the
example below, addressed to Steven Pinker, the first participant to
respond.

From:"John Brockman" <address restricted>
To: "Steven Pinker" <address restricted>
Subject: THE EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION -- 2003
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Importance: Normal
Steve,
This just in from Washington...

From: "George W. Bush" <address restricted>
To: "John Brockman" <address restricted>
Subject: Science Advisor
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002
Dear John,

I appreciate your taking the time to recommend the appointment of
Steven Pinker to be my next science advisor and I am pleased to
hear of his interest in the position.

I am impressed with the resume of Dr. Pinker which you sent
earlier. Could you please ask him to prepare a memo which answers
the following question:

"What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the
world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with
them?"

In addition to obvious issues that have dominated the headlines
during my first two years in office, I would hope to hear about
less obvious scientific issues as well.

I need the memo by the end of December.
Thank you for your help.
Sincerely,

GWB

I wish the above was really an email from President Bush. It is not.
It's the set-up for this year's Edge Annual Question -- 2003, and
because this event receives wide attention from the scientific
community and the global press, the responses it evokes just might
have the same effect as a memo to the President....that is, if you
stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have
expertise.

I am asking members of the Edge community to take this project seriously 
as a public service, to work together to create a document that can be 
widely disseminated to begin a public discussion about the important 
scientific issues before us. Address your memo to the President and very 
briefly add your credentials (as in the example below). I will post the 
responses as they come in. Please email your response to me on or before 
January 1, 2003 for publication the week of January 6th. I look forward to 
hearing from you.

Best,
JB

Happy New Year!

John Brockman
Publisher & Editor
January 6, 2003

p.s. A selection of the responses below were excerpted by The New York
Times Op-Ed Page on Saturday, January 4, 2003.
______________________________________________________________________

New Todd Siler o Philip Brockman o George Smoot o John McWhorter o
Sherry Turkle o Gregory Benford o Vera John-Steiner o Paul MacCready o
Margaret Wertheim
___________________________________

Ian Wilmut o J. Craig Venter o Steven Pinker o Ray Kurzweil o Gino
Segre o Stephen Schneider o Oliver Morton o Rodney Brooks o Seth Lloyd
o Denis Dutton o Freeman Dyson o Philip Campbell o Kevin Kelly o
Lawrence Brilliant o Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi o Paul Davies o Robert
Shapiro o Jaron Lanier o J. Doyne Farmer o Colin Tudge o Marvin Minsky
o George Dyson o William H. Calvin o David Gelernter o Janna Levin o
Howard Gardner o Martin Seligman o Richard Nisbett o David Lykken o
Alison Gopnik o Marc D. Hauser o Eric R. Kandel o K. Eric Drexler o
James J. O'Donnell o Michael Shermer o Daniel Goleman o Richard Saul
Wurman o Andy Clark o John Horgan o Roger C. Schank o Nancy Etcoff o
Gerald Holton o Judith Rich Harris o Brian Goodwin o Karl Sabbagh o
Joel Garreau o Susan Blackmore o Leo Chalupa o Jordan Pollack o David
Myers o Ernst Pöppel o Lisa Randall o Stuart Pimm o Eduardo Punset o
Lee Smolin o Rafael Nunez o Timothy Taylor o Mike Weiner o Leon
Lederman o Bart Kosko o Adam Bly o Randolph Nesse o Terrence Sejnowski
o Mary Catherine Bateson o Alan Alda o Cliff Barney o Douglas Rushkoff
o Donald D. Hoffman o Steve Giddings o Lance Knobel o Piet Hut o
Robert Aunger o Christine Finn o David M. Buss o Beatrice Golomb o
Rupert Sheldrake o Delta Willis o Clifford Pickover o Eberhard Zangger
o Steven Quartz o Keith Devlin o John McCarthy o Gary F. Marcus o
Justin Hall o Stephen Reucroft & John Swain
Press Suddeutsche Zeitung o Arts & Letters Daily o SlashDot o The New
York Times o The Wall Street Journal
_________________________________________________________________

The Engine of Prosperity
Academics Demand a New Science Policy from Bush
by Andrian Kreye
January 14, 2003
Because the last decade brought forth not only scientific successes,
but also a new scientific culture, the struggle for the future no
longer takes place in privileged circles, but on the public
stage...The worldview with the greatest profile in this regard is the
"third culture," because it attempts to find scientific answers to the
most important questions facing humanity. New York literary agent John
Brockman coined the term...and conducts its most important debating
club on his internet platform, Edge (http://www.edge.org).
______________________________________________________________________

Ideas -- Criticism -- Debate
January 6, 2003
Essays and Opinion (Lead item)
If you had the President's ear, what would you advise him was the most
urgent scientific issue the country faces? Energy? Stem-cell research?
Bioterror? Science teaching?... more»
______________________________________________________________________

2003 Edge.org World Question

The Media Posted by timothy on Monday January 06, @04:15AM
from the what-would-sauron-do dept.
murky.waters writes "The responses to this year's Edge.org question
have been published; basically, people were asked to imagine they were
nominated as White House science adviser and the President asked them
what are some important issues in science and what we should do about
them. There are 84 responses, ranging in topic from advanced
nanotechnology to the psychology of foreign cultures, and lots of
ideas regarding science, technology, politics, and education. The
responses were written by academics (e.g. Roger Schank, Marvin
Minsky), journalists (Kevin Kelly), Nobel Laureates (Eric Kandel), and
others (Alan Alda). Some of responses are politically loaded but the
majority has either a more specialised proposal, or general remarks
about our world. Many are absolutely fascinating: funny, insightful,
interesting, hell even informative. ... One of the most public
supporters of the Singularity 'religion', Ray Kurzweil, is a regular
at Edge, and currently discussed issues range from said transhumanism
to early-universe theories, and many other kinds of exciting and novel
science." ( Read More...)
______________________________________________________________________

New York Times, January 4, 2003

Today's Visions of the Science of Tomorrow

A t the end of every year, John Brockman, a literary agent and the
publisher of Edge.org, a Web site devoted to science, poses a question
to leading scientists, writers and futurists. In 2002, he asked
respondents to imagine that they had been nominated as White House
science adviser and that President Bush had sought their answer to
"What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world,
and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?" Here
are excerpts of some of the responses.

Mapping the Planet o Professor PlayStation o Little Geniuses o Think
Small o Science Without Secrets o Fending Off the Big One o
Intellectual Globalization o Cassandras of the Labs o Really Popular
Science

______________________________________________________________________

[wsj.jpg] 
SCIENCE JOURNAL 
By SHARON BEGLEY
December 27, 2002
Dear W: Scientists Offer
President Advice on Policy
DEAR READER,
Congratulations! President George W. Bush is considering asking you to
serve as his science adviser. He asks that you write him a memo
addressing, "What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation
and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with
them?"
So begins this year's online question from Edge, an e-salon of leading
scientists and members of the "Third Culture" (in answer to C.P.
Snow's scientists vs. humanists)...
This year--with smallpox vaccination, bioterror, stem-cell research,
climate change, energy policy and missile defense dominating news--the
annual question eschews intellectual posturing and gets down to
practicalities...

...You can improve your own science education at www.edge.org, where
the Edge memos will be available January 6.
[Click here for article--subscription required]
________________________________________________________________


There's a simple story that sums up the perils of global terrorism.
"Once there were two people sitting in a rowboat. One suddenly started
making a hole on his side of the boat. The other screamed. The first
countered and said, 'What do you care what I do on my side of the
boat?'"
Todd Siler

In your search for a new Science Advisor, I strongly recommend that
you select an individual who has as much common sense as he or she has
accomplishments in the sciences. Equally important, this open minded
advisor needs to approach our world of interrelated problems with a
systems view of things, which is something compartmentalized thinkers
struggle with conceptually. This systems view is essential for
effectively dealing with the web of gnarly problems that entangle
nations and strain international relations.
In reviewing the list of challenging scientific issues that need your
immediate attention, few strike me as being as important as fighting
the war on terror. But fighting it to win in both the short and long
run. As the world wrestles with how to best respond to terrorism in
the wake of September 11--and as our nation grapples with the lethal
threats of tyrants and their irrational actions--your advisory board
needs to be as agile and open to the possibilities of a "chance
discovery" as an inventor on the verge of a major breakthrough.
Sparking breakthrough thinking and accelerating innovation are two of
my specialties and passions. If I was fortunate enough to serve as a
member of your ad hoc committee on terrorism, I would suggest taking
the following course of action:

I'd help organize a maverick group of professional thinkers
(scientists, engineers, artists, educators, scholars, policy-makers,
and polymaths), and invite them to delve into a pool of obvious and
deep questions concerning national security.

I'd compare this exploratory work to the adventurous endeavors
undertaken by the American military strategist and futurist, Herman
Kahn, founder of the Hudson Institute think-tank and author of On
Thermonuclear War. Ideally, I would hope to see the creative energies
invested here parallel that of other intensely focused
science-technology-civil society-oriented projects in the past;
imagine a sort of Manhattan Project for Peaceful Solutions or a small
scale Pugwash Conference (without any formal conference which comes
with a certain structure that can inhibit the free exchange of ideas).
Our group would scope out a long-term strategic vision for securing
our nation and safeguarding the world from the projected charges and
potential damage of "rogue elephants."

Note that we would engage in this collaborative envisioning activity
using some unconventional, yet proven, techniques of communication
that involve symbolic modeling. One outcome of this work would be a
set of tactical, implementation plans. These practical plans could
then be evaluated and contrasted with the research-based
recommendations of groups such as the Rand Corporation, among other
solution providers.

They could also be run through the mill of Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis, a business practice I'm quite
familiar with having facilitated many strategic planning sessions for
executive officers of Fortune 500 Companies.
The types of open-ended questions this ad hoc group might consider
responding to could include the following:

o How do we foresee the forces of terrorism growing during this
decade? How will this growth impact our collective future? Describe
these forces.

o What are some non-military solutions for stemming further acts of
aggression against our principles and practices of democracy?

o How will this constant presence of terrorism profoundly affect
the American way of life as well as our dreams for improving the
state of the world?

o How will terrorism affect our advanced warfare programs and
defense policies?

o Is there any way to avoid the inevitable build up of weapons of
mass destruction in defense of by attacking civil liberties and
basic human rights for all?

o How can our world community do a better job of policing renegade
groups of people and organizations whose raison d'etre seems to be
to spread anarchy and other forms of social unrest?

o Other than U.N. disarmament resolutions, what additional
agreements would we need to have securely in place in order to
begin to abolish of chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programs?
Specifically, how will the advancement of these programs help our
prospects for a lasting peace?

o What benefits will the next generation of nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons "offer" us which an improvement in human
communication cannot?

These are merely a handful of basic questions that come to mind at the
moment. Any one of them could be explored by this group of thinkers
using the tools of science and common sense to solve this gravest of
problems: fighting a war on terror that doesn't perpetuate the cycle
of violence but rather prevents it by fostering a new understanding.
The main task of this group would be to find more ingenious ways of
dismantling this Gordian Knot of political, ideological and religious
beliefs other than reaching into that old Pandora's Box and taking out
another weapon to whack away at our worst primal fears.

Clearly we have much more scientific work to do to better understand
the nature of fear and terror, and to recognize the patterns of
ineffective responses to these phenomena. Whenever our brute fears
overpower our rationality trouble abounds.

Finally, we need to explore our deepest, most ambiguous questions
about the roots of terrorism that have as much to do with science as
they do with philosophy and religion. Naturally, your new Science
Advisor needs to handle this reality with the utmost sensitivity. And
the advisory board needs to value the fact that there's always more
than one viable solution to any given problem, when viewed from many
perspectives. Without this broader and deeper exploration, our world
may remain pinned and pained by the headlock we're in.

There's a simple story that sums up the perils of global terrorism.
"Once there were two people sitting in a rowboat. One suddenly started
making a hole on his side of the boat. The other screamed. The first
countered and said, 'What do you care what I do on my side of the
boat?'" I thank you for caring about the hole in our boat. Now you
need to get the rest of the world on board about caring too.
Todd Siler
Founder & Director, Psi-Phi Communications, LLC.
Former advisory board member of the Council on Art, Science,
Technology at M.I.T.
Author of Think Like A Genius and Breaking the Mind Barrier
________________________________________________________________

The type of research we pursue is not as important as the horizon.

Philip Brockman
Today I retire from 43-year career as a physicist for NASA. I look
back to when I began working at Langley Research Center in 1959. At
that time, NASA research centers had a base program and there was no
expectation that our research was to be applied. My goal at that time
was to work on long term problems and solutions.

The current method in government research is to work on projects with
a one or two year payoff. This is where our nation's corporations have
gone in the last few years. Government is now following corporate
America's lead in pursuing instant gratification rather than research
which reaches over the horizon. It is now an MBA-driven culture, one
which is anithetical to the long horizon stuff that inevitably leads
to future breakthroughs.

I have had a wonderful career at NASA and I've been at the edge as I
watched research from our laboratories change the world. But I am not
pleased with the direction the agency is now pursuing, and I regret
that a young physicist now beginning his or her career will not have
the same opportunities I have had to dream, to explore their vision.
This is to the detriment of NASA and to our nation.

The one big lesson I have learned in 43 years as a scientific
researcher: the type of research we pursue is not as important as the
horizon.

Philip Brockman
Physicist
Distinguished Research Associate
NASA--Langley Research Center
________________________________________________________________

Science and the nation are inextricably intertwined. The economic
and military strength of the county is based upon the technologies
that have sprung from our basic science research. Likewise our
medical system is fully dependent on a mixture of medical research
and physical sciences detector development. Thus the health, well
being, safety of our country's citizens depends very directly on
the technological fruits of scientific research.

George F. Smoot

Dear President Bush,

Standard Long Term Analysis in Style of Business and Government 
Science and the nation are inextricably intertwined. The economic and
military strength of the county is based upon the technologies that
have sprung from our basic science research. Likewise our medical
system is fully dependent on a mixture of medical research and
physical sciences detector development. Thus the health, well being,
safety of our country's citizens depends very directly on the
technological fruits of scientific research.

If the USA is to remain the premier nation on Earth, then it must
maintain a robust scientific research program. The appropriate level
is open to societal debate; however, many businesses, e.g. drug
companies and advanced electronic companies, have developed guidelines
at a few percent of their total budget. The issue is not can the
country afford this level of expense, but whether it can afford not to
continue an active, high-quality basic research program.

In terms of defense this is obvious. One only needs to ask the
question: What would be the consequence if some other country to
develop a new energy-directed or new generation bio-weapon, before the
US did and created countermeasures? However, that same thing is true
for major new technologies in the economic and health arenas? Basic
scientific research is so key to the long-term viability of the
nation, that even though the pay off is often years out, it is current
priority. Change can be so rapid in technology that ten years is often
two generations.

A strong scientific research program is not sufficient alone. Clearly,
there must be sufficient infrastructure. The most key ingredient is a
scientifically literate work force and general population. Just as it
is clearly wise to invest in science, investment in education
(science, mathematics, critical thinking) is better than exporting
technical jobs, electronically or otherwise, to other countries (e.g.
India, Russia, etc.) with stronger educational systems. No matter how
good an infrastructure the nation has, it still must have the people
to run it and the scientists and engineers to create and design the
next generations. It is hard to believe that the country would hire
foreign mercenaries for military and daily operations.

At present we enjoy a very good lifestyle. The primary question for
the nation and civilization as a whole is: What is it that allows
this? What has been the big change since the stone age? What steps can
we take to keep this and progress to the next level? Are humans
smarter, harder working, or any another way significantly better raw
material now than in the stone age? One surmises most of the
difference in physical attributes can be ascribed to better nutrition
and medical care.

The Human Future for Stone-Age Man?

It appears in fact that most humans use our technological
infrastructure to live a lifestyle with which a stone-age human could
readily identify. People live in shelters--houses or apartments rather
than caves. The go out daily to make their livelihood--now in SUVs,
cars, commuter trains rather than most by foot. People gather by
electronic fires (TV) or in bars most probably more isolated than the
stone-age clans. In general the bulk of people live in, exploit, and
make up a large cultural and technological infrastructure. They take
advantage of the base accumulated by humanity.

Nearly all the advances are made by a very small fraction of the
population--the innovators--mostly scientists, engineers,
entrepreneurs. The society and nation, which encourages, nurtures, and
makes this innovation possible and exploits it, will proper in many
ways.

Humans as a whole really have not have changed basically since the
stone age. Natural selection has not really changed humans since
humans became the dominant species. In some regions local culture has
instilled in its people respect for law and human life but even in
those places the people will go to war when threatened. Other regions
tribal and clan clashes are a way of life.

If the bulk of humans have not advanced physically, intellectually and
socially over the stone age milieu, then new technology can be as
easily used for terrorist and criminal activities as for neutral and
beneficial activities. Thus as technology improves, the potential for
devastating acts of terrorism continues to increase. The logical end
would be when it is possible for a small group or single individual to
destroy all life on Earth.

For economic, medical, and likely military motivations it is likely
that many areas of technology will continue to develop and its
potential for positive or negative consequences will increase. This
means that, if humans are not changed significantly physically
different, then we must understand how to develop a world culture that
rejects suicide attacks and then eventually violence to resolve
conflict. This would requires a whole program: (1) a better
understanding of why people form cults and groups that support such
activities, (2) understanding and removing the reservoir of young
people (e.g. HAMAS recruits, Jim Jones cult,) (3) demagogic and
totalitarian leaders and societies. This is a mixture of social and
political science studies and actual programs.

The first step is to assess the various issues and determine what
programs can be put in place in the short run and what research should
begin soon. Then developing a longer-term program to reduce the threat
of terrorism both by technical robustness and by social efforts. Note
that El Al is most successful through focusing on the people rather
than relying on sophisticated technology. Intelligence comes first and
then attention to people. We would prefer not to be in the position of
Israel as a country suffering terrorist activities on a very frequent
and regular basis. It costs much in terms of casualties, economic, and
military activities without any end in sight.

As long as terrorism can be kept at a low level in the country, then
the USA can continue most of its development including the scientific
research for the future. We also need to invest in the twin programs
of being robust against terrorist acts and an active program to
convert potential terrorists into positively contributing members of
society. Rather than nation building we must engage in civilization
building.

The path I did not mention was to stop or slow dramatically scientific
research and the development of new technologies and hope or search
for a new stability. We cannot stop things completely because other
countries already have significant scientific and technological
capability. Already third-rate countries, such as Iraq and North
Korea, are able to have advanced welcome programs. We could enter new
dark ages, the Nuclear Dark Ages or Weapons of Mass Destruction Dark
Ages. I don't mean nuclear winter from the exchange of thousands of
nuclear weapons; but a more gradual but catastrophe filled
deterioration. In the new Dark Ages there will be a repeat of regional
wars, blackmail and spoils of war, occasional small nuclear exchanges,
all of these leading to a spiraling down of civilization.

George F. Smoot
Professor of Physics
University of California at Berkeley
Leader. NASA's COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) Team
Author (with Keay Davidson) of Wrinkles In Time 
________________________________________________________________

The typical college student who has studied Arabic for a year has
essentially learned how to decode text and utter simple
sentences--which is useless in decoding a memo written in running
script by a terrorist, or even in understanding a speech by an Arab
official.

John H. McWhorter

Dear President Bush:

Recent geopolitical events bring into sharp relief the inadequacy of
foreign language training in the United States. I am dismayed by the
inability of our high schools and universities to impart a truly
useful competence in foreign languages to any but the most
self-directed and dedicated of students.

Obviously, our country is in dire need of people proficient in Arabic,
to assist us in defending ourselves against Islamicist terrorists. The
shortage of such people in the FBI, CIA, and Foreign Service is truly
chilling, as we see days go by before we even have worthy translations
of Arabic-language statements and documents.

Yet not only are few institutions of learning equipped to impart
Arabic to students, but even fewer are equipped to do so at anything
beyond an elementary level that will serve little use in the urgent
circumstances that confront us.

This is an especially serious problem with Arabic, a language that
seems to present a virtual hydra-head of challenges. The script is
elaborate, takes a great deal of practice to master, and only
approximately spells out the sounds of words. The vocabulary is too
different from English's to ease learning through ample cognates
(opportunity/opportunidad in Spanish, milk/Milch in German). And on
top of this, spoken Arabic varies from country to country to the point
that Egyptians, for example, speak essentially a different language
from Moroccans, and all of the spoken varieties are almost as
different from the written one as French and Spanish are from Latin.
The typical college student who has studied Arabic for a year has
essentially learned how to decode text and utter simple
sentences--which is useless in decoding a memo written in running
script by a terrorist, or even in understanding a speech by an Arab
official.

Military institutions, and other bodies with a concrete reason for
teaching their charges foreign languages well, such as religious
bodies, have long used truly effective, intense language-learning
programs that produce competent foreign language speakers. It is also
clear that European countries regularly give their students a solid
grounding in English that has always been the envy of Americans. For
years, I have been amazed at how an obscure series of books published
by the Assimil company in Europe can give the solitary learner a
decent conversational competence in any language in just six months of
home study, so cleverly are the lessons arranged to impart what is
really needed to speak the language in real life.

But meanwhile, school textbooks, for all their claims to teach "the
language as it is really spoken", continue in a tradition of foreign
language teaching descended from conceptions of grammar based on how
Latin happens to be constructed, imparting tiny vocabularies ("my
uncle is a lawyer but my aunt has a spoon") and rarely lending the
learner any genuine sense of the "feel" of how native speakers
actually put living sentences together. Language training rarely
affords the student any serious time speaking the language at length
on meaningful subjects. It is common to come away from several years
of classes in, say, French or Spanish unable to even carry on a simple
conversation with a native. Language training that leaves the student
unable to say "This smells like a rose", "Never mind", "The car is
stuck in the mud" or "Take your feet off the table"--sentences that
eight years of dedicated French "teaching" left me unable to
render--does not deserve the name.

The time has passed when our country could afford for excellent
language teaching to be limited to circumstances lending specialized
training to a few. Language teaching schools like Berlitz, the
military, and even findings from academic specialists in
second-language teaching have long bypassed our schools and
universities in foreign language teaching. In our moment, it is high
time that an effort on a nationwide scale be made to not only impart
foreign languages to students, but to do it in an effective way.

And in these times, our efforts must be focused as much on languages
like Chinese, Arabic, and Persian as the "old standby" languages like
French, Spanish and German. Our geopolitical situation requires this,
and the marvelous ethnic mixture of our country since the Immigration
Act of 1965 renders it even more urgent, in helping to foster
understanding and exchange in a new kind of America.

Sincerely,
John H. McWhorter
Associate Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
Author of Losing The Race: Self-Sabotage In Black America and The
Power Of Babel: A Natural History Of Language.
________________________________________________________________

Advocate technology as a learning partner across the curriculum.
This strategy is important for improving learning, developing
computer literacy, and for inviting a variety of users, including
girls, into technology.

Sherry Turkle

The Gender Gap In The Computer Culture 
There has been much interest in the digital divide as it pertains to
inequities between the poor and the rich. There is another digital
divide that threatens to limit scientific productivity and scope. This
is the inequity in the numbers of women who participate in the
computer culture. The computer culture is still, in the main, made by
engineers for engineers and by men for men. Girls are less likely to
take high-level computing classes in high school, and comprised just
17 percent of those taking Advanced Placement Computer Science exams.
Girls outnumbered boys only in their enrollment in "word processing"
classes, arguably the contemporary version of a typing class. In 1995,
at the post-secondary level, women received one in four of the
Computer/Information Sciences bachelor's degrees and only 11 percent
of the Ph.D.'s in Engineering-related technologies. These educational
gaps reverberate in the workplace, where by most estimates women today
occupy only 20 percent of the jobs in Information Technology.

A recent study of middle school and high school girls, commissioned by
the American Association of University Women made it clear that gender
inequity in digital culture is increasing. One goal is to get more
girls into the "pipeline" to computer-related careers. This could, of
course, be an end in itself, but diversity in participation would also
mean a richer digital culture. Digital culture (not so far away from a
world that asked users if they wanted to "abort, terminate, or fail"
processes running on their machines) could be positively transformed
through the integration of girls' and women's insights and life
experiences. So one of the values in getting more girls and women
interested in the computer pipeline is that their greater presence may
transform the computer culture overall; by the same token, changes in
the e-culture itself--the ways technology is discussed, valued, and
applied--would invite more girls and women to participate fully in
that culture, to become computer fluent.

This comment on values reflects the fact that today women seem to be
disenfranchised in the computer culture for cultural rather than
intellectual reasons. When young women are asked about their attitudes
towards computing they almost never report overt discrimination, but
at the same time, when asked to describe a person who is "really good
with computers" they describe a man. And most of them do not predict
that they will want to learn more about or become more involved with
computers in the future. These girls are not computer phobic, they are
"computer reticent." They say that they are not afraid but simply do
not want to get involved. They express a "we can, but I don't want to"
philosophy. Girls' views of computer careers, and of the computer
culture--including software, games, and Internet environments--tend to
reproduce stereotypes about a "computer person" as male and
antisocial, Women no longer (as they once did) see computing as "too
hard" for them. Earlier generations of women said, Women can't be
involved in technical professions, "We can't but I want to." Girls and
young women today seem to be saying, Women can do computing, "We can,
but I don't want to!" This position is usually accompanied by a
characterization of the computer as it has been presented to them at
school as infused with values that they cannot identify with. Simply
put: the computer culture is presented as a world which emphasizes
technical capacity, speed, and efficiency. It estranges a broad array
of learners, many girls included, who do not identify with the
wizardry of computer aficionados and have little interest in the
purely technical aspects of the machines. The computer culture has
become linked to a characteristically masculine worldview, such that
women too often feel they need to choose between the cultural
associations of "femininity" and those of "computers," a cliché that
has proven resistant to the growing diversity of information
technology and its users. Girls discuss information technology-related
careers not as too difficult, but as a "waste of intelligence."
Insists a young woman from Baltimore, "Guys just like to do that: sit
in a cubicle all day." In talking about their lack of desire to
continue learning about computers, girls also focus on the violence
and cruelty of current video games and see a culture that they do not
want to participate in. They are happy to play social simulation games
and chat with their friends, but see their identity on the computer as
that of "users," not the empowered.

Their teachers have given them little to inspire them. Teacher
education has stressed the "technical" side of things: Education
schools tend to give instruction in basic technical skills rather than
on how to integrate computers into the curriculum. A 1999 national
survey found that only 29 percent of teachers had six or more hours of
curriculum-integration instruction, whereas 42 percent had that amount
of basic-skills training. In the study by the American Association of
University Women of 2000, only 30% of teachers ranked as
"sophisticated" in their use of computers report that they received
any technology training in an undergraduate or master's teacher
education program, which probably reflects in part responses from
older teachers. Only 11 percent of the total teachers who were polled
report that they received training specifically in how to apply or
integrate computer technology into their lesson plans. Thus, current
teacher-training practices emphasize short technical courses on
connectivity and hardware. Preservice teachers make it clear that they
start their jobs uninformed about what the technology is supposed to
accomplish for their classrooms, either educationally or socially.

Our current approach to teacher training focuses on the technical
properties of hardware; it does not emphasize educational applications
or innovative uses of computing across the curriculum. Yet what
teachers need is sustained and ongoing education about how to
integrate technology with curricular materials and information about
how to make technology part of a humanistic classroom culture, so
essential for bringing girls into the picture. This latter approach
would create better informed teachers as well as multiple entry points
to computer competence for both students and teachers. The prevailing
emphasis on the "mechanics of computer operation" does not respond to
this need. As one teacher put it: "Without teacher education, it won't
matter if each student has his/her own computer. We teachers hate
having thousands of dollars of equipment thrown at us and being told
to use it when we have no clue how to go about it"

There are many points of entry to address this problem. All require
research and educational imagination in curriculum planning. All would
make the computer culture more vibrant and relevant for women as well
as men, and ultimately for us all.

o Advocate technology as a learning partner across the curriculum.
This strategy is important for improving learning, developing
computer literacy, and for inviting a variety of users, including
girls, into technology. The infusion of technology across the
curriculum also recognizes and supports multiple entry points into
technology. Some learners may develop a fluency with information
technology through music, some through mathematics, and others
through the arts.

o Enforce a distinction between using the computer as a tool
(teaching students how to use powerpoint) and using computation to
inspire new ways of thinking and learning. It is the second that
will inspire young minds to believe that there are rich rewards in
staying with the subject.

o Professional development for teachers, both preservice and
inservice, needs to emphasize not simply how computer technology
works but on how it can spark creativity across disciplines. There
appear to be a group of learners, predominantly young men, who are
willing to throw themselves into computing, presented as a
technical puzzle. But given the integration of computing into
culture, those in the field need to have broader interests and
motivation for being there. Improving the way computation is
introduced in education will thus not only draw in young women and
keep them from dropping out, it holds our only chance of having a
more broadly based computer culture for all of us.

Sherry Turkle
Director, Initiative on Technology and Self
MIT
Author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet and
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit.
________________________________________________________________

Rather than fixate on controlling greenhouse gases, which are
politically hard to suppress, I suggest a new, innovative research
program directed at the central global problem: warming. A partial
cure can come from simple methods, until now little studied.

Gregory Benford
Mr President:

Prudence alone should lead you to ask the scientific establishment to
study new, less costly methods of dealing with a global problem--the
possibility of climate change. It is time to require more inventive
thinking on this issue.
In his recent letter to you, William Calvin pointed out that shifting
ocean currents could trigger big shifts in weather. Rather than fixate
on controlling greenhouse gases, which are politically hard to
suppress, I suggest a new, innovative research program directed at the
central global problem: warming. A partial cure can come from simple
methods, until now little studied.

They are:

1) Increase the overall reflection of sunlight from the planet as a
whole. Here simple methods may work well. Trigger more cloud cover
over the tropical oceans. Color rooftops and blacktop roads lighter,
to lessen absorption. These ideas are fairly simple, and some field
work on them has been done. They do need study to make them efficient
and effective.

2) Hide carbon in the deep oceans. This keeps it from making carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere for about 1000 years. Most biospheric carbon
is already in the oceans anyway, and they can take a good deal more.

3) Push innovative energy research. Hand Ray Orbach at DOE the paper
by Hoffert et al, in Science 298, (p 981, 2002) and ask him to
implement its suggestions. You should also probably help develop
nuclear power in the most needy areas of the developing nations. With
safeguards against nuclear proliferation, this could cut down on the
default choice many are using--coal burning plants.
These approaches need further research, and should be fashioned into
off-the-shelf technologies. If in the next decade alarm bells go off,
warning of an approaching big wrench in our global climate, we can
then reach for these methods. Whatever one's position on global
warming, it is prudent to be prepared with a strategy that goes beyond
just nay-saying to the Kyoto Protocols.

Gregory Benford
Professor of Physics at University of California, Irvine
Author of Deep Time
________________________________________________________________

The problem of political and religious fanaticism is beyond the
scope separately of psychology, political science, or historical
study. An interdisciplinary program building upon current efforts
but addressing the issues with the use of multiple methods is
needed.

Vera John-Steiner
For a while after the defeat of Fascism and Nazism in the Second World
War, there was a hope for an era of enlightenment. It was thought that
a scientific understanding of its sources could help avoid a
repetition of the fascist nightmare. The Authoritarian Personality by
Theodor Adorno and co authors was a well known effort to achieve such
understanding.

Today political and religious fanaticisms are a source of world wide
anxiety. Al Qaeda is the most frightening at present. But it is not
only Islamic fanaticism that leads to atrocities. The Oklahoma City
bombing, mass murders of Moslems by Hindu mobs in India, the
assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in Israel and of Martin Luther
King in Nashville were the work of non-Islamic fanatics.

The torture-murder of a young gay man in Wyoming, the bombing of
abortion clinics, the torching of black churches and of Jewish
synagogues, all were associated with fanatical beliefs and movements.

Legislative, military, and educational solutions are proposed and
undertaken, but without any prior understanding of how fanaticism is
being fostered, both wittingly and unwittingly, or what causes certain
fanatical individuals to resort to individual or mass murder. Neither
is it well understood what factors or measures might counteract or
inhibit fanatical violence. At present, specialists concerned with
these issues focus either on social antecedents (including political,
economic and religious factors) or on personality variables .
.
The problem of political and religious fanaticism is beyond the scope
separately of psychology, political science, or historical study. An
interdisciplinary program building upon current efforts but addressing
the issues with the use of multiple methods is needed. Such a proposal
is made while recognizing that no single approach, however carefully
planned, can fully meet the challenge of fanaticism in contemporary
society. But a major and well-planned study, devoted to causes and
solutions, could make a contribution to the urgent task of decreasing
fanatical violence. President Bush should initiate such a program as a
scientific response to the sense of incomprehension and despair so
prevalent in the world at present.

Vera John-Steiner
Presidential Professor, University of New Mexico
Author of Notebooks of the Mind and Creative Collaboration
________________________________________________________________

Civilization's rocketing growth comes from exploiting
non-renewables: coal since 1800 and oil since 1900, for example. US
oil peaked about 15 years ago; global supplies should peak in about
10-15 years. There are semi-practical alternatives available or at
least conceivable to let us get by on renewables, but virtually no
one really sees the importance.

Paul B. MacCready
The world can support 1.5 to 2.0 billion people continuously, in
combination with a natural world. Right now we have 6.2 billion
people. The total mass of vertebrates on land and in the air is now
made up 98% by humans+livestock+pets, and 2% by all natural creatures.
Ten thousand years ago the 98% was only under 0.1%. Civilization's
rocketing growth comes from exploiting non-renewables: coal since 1800
and oil since 1900, for example. US oil peaked about 15 years ago;
global supplies should peak in about 10-15 years. There are
semi-practical alternatives available or at least conceivable to let
us get by on renewables, but virtually no one really sees the
importance.

Virtually all your correspondents focus on details of how to make
humans better and more numerous. Very few examine civilization's
growth and the world as would a creature from space visiting us every
few thousand years. Sincerely yours,

Paul B. MacCready
Chairman/Founder of AeroVironment Inc.
The "Father of Human-Powered Flight"
________________________________________________________________

In a climate of growing religious fundamentalism and rising
skepticism about science, the scientific community itself has began
to understand the importance of reaching out to the wider public.

Margaret Wertheim

Dear Mr. President

Of all the scientific issues currently confronting us it seems to me
that one is paramount--the woeful state of the public understanding of
science in our nation. Some of your other correspondents have already
raised this issue and I concur with much of what they have said. But I
would like to bring to your attention a further dimension of the
problem--the degree to which ignorance about science is correlated
with gender, age, race and socioeconomic position.

At present the serious science readership in the USA is estimated to
be around 1.5 million people, the combined subscriber base to our 2
major popular science publications, Discover and Scientific American.
Readers of these and other science-based magazines are well served and
scientifically fluent. But who precisely are these readers?
Overwhelmingly they are white, male, over 35, well educated (often
employed in science and technology fields) and in the upper
socioeconomic brackets. This 1.5 million people constitutes just a
little more than half a percent of our population, yet they are the
audience at whom almost all scientific publishing is aimed. This is
also the readers at whom science book publishers pitch their wares.
The question I would like to raise is what about the other 99% of our
population?

In a climate of growing religious fundamentalism and rising skepticism
about science, the scientific community itself has began to understand
the importance of reaching out to the wider public. Yet for all the
admirable rhetoric on this subject, most science communication
continues to be aimed at an already-well-informed audience. What I
would like to propose, Mr President, is the establishment of a
National Office for the Public Understanding of Science--an
organization that would be charged with responsibility for reaching
out to the "other 99", those who at present read almost no science and
who, as polls continue to show, are almost universally ignorant about
the subject. Such an office would have as its mission the task of
finding and supporting truly innovative ways to communicate about
science outside the box.

One major group of people who are disenfranchised from science are
women. One of the tasks for our proposed National Office could be to
explore ways in which science might be made more accessible and
exciting to women. It is a sad but true fact that few women read
science magazines, yet women buy and read an enormous number of
magazines per se. One thing our office might explore then is ways to
get science content into women's magazines such as Vogue, Elle and
Glamour. What about science programs on television that might appeal
to women? At present almost all the science on television is watched
by men--is it possible that there are other ways of presenting science
on TV that might also appeal to a female audience?

Another task our office might consider is ways in which scientific
organizations could be partnered with cultural organizations such as
art galleries and museums. So often science is presented as an
isolated activity, but like all human enterprises science takes place
within the context of the wider social and cultural spectrum. One way
to draw more people into science, I believe, is to bring them through
the portal of their other interests. There are, for example, many
artists today producing work based around scientific themes--genetic
engineering, nanotechnology, and computation in particular. This work,
and the immense interest in the arts world in scientific issues right
now, constitutes a formidable resource. Our office could work to
create links between artists and scientists in specific areas of
mutual interest.

We urgently need to improve our nation's pool of scientific literacy.
If we are serious about achieving this goal we must be serious about
reaching out to those who are disenfranchised. That means taking
seriously who those people are and how to speak to them effectively.
99% of our people is too large an audience to ignore--it is no good
sitting around demanding that they come to science--science must find
ways to go out to them!

Margaret Wertheim
Science writer and Commentator
Author of Pythagoras' Trousers and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A
History of Space from Dante to the Internet. 
________________________________________________________________

Biomedical research in the United States has a distinguished record
of contributing to knowledge and to new medical treatments. In the
same way, research with cells derived from cloned human embryos
will offer unique opportunities to study many extremely unpleasant
diseases, perhaps one day to have treatments for these diseases and
also to produce safer medicines. This research cannot be carried
out in any other way.

Ian Wilmut

Mr President,

Biomedical research in the United States has a distinguished record of
contributing to knowledge and to new medical treatments. In the same
way, research with cells derived from cloned human embryos will offer
unique opportunities to study many extremely unpleasant diseases,
perhaps one day to have treatments for these diseases and also to
produce safer medicines. This research cannot be carried out in any
other way.
The diseases include motor neurone disease, diabetes and genetic
causes of sudden heart failure. Researchers could learn a great deal
about these diseases if they could study in the laboratory the cells
that are affected by the disease. Later they would assess the effects
of drugs upon the malfunctioning cells. One day it may also be
possible use cells from cloned embryos to treat unpleasant
degenerative diseases by supplying replacement cells for those that
have been damaged in diseases such as diabetes or heart failure.

Each year thousands of people in the USA are killed by taking
medicines, even if the medicine was prescribed and used appropriately.
This is because people differ in the way that they react to drugs.
Pharmaceutical companies would be able to reduce this risk to us all
and design drugs to be safer and more effective if they could study
these differences in function of liver cells. At present the only
source of such cells for research is the liver of casualties, if the
organ is not suitable for transfer to a patient. Liver cells with
these important differences in responses to drugs could be derived
from cloned embryos and be used first to study these genetic
differences and then to design better drugs and to establish the basis
for personalised treatments.

There is no fully effective treatment for any of these conditions and
in some cases none at all. We all know people affected by them and may
fall victim ourselves, as we get older. In these circumstances, it
would be a tragedy if concern over the unsubstantiated claims of the
birth of a cloned child led to legislation that prohibited these
important research projects.

By contrast there is every reason to encourage legislation to prohibit
the production of children by cloning. Apart from the many ethical and
social concerns the evidence from experiments with animals all points
to the conclusion that the likely outcome of attempts to clone humans
would include late abortions, the birth of dead children and of
abnormal live children. As there is no way to avoid this tragic
outcome it is important that legislation is enacted as soon as
possible to prohibit such attempts.

I urge you to distinguish between these two uses of the cloning
procedure, to allow the research that has the potential to be so
beneficial, while prohibiting the misguided attempts to produce
children.

Ian Wilmut
Professor and Head of Department of Gene Expression and Development at
the Roslin Institute
Leader of the team that cloned Dolly the sheep in 1966 (The first
animal to be cloned from an adult cell).
Coauthor (with Colin Tudge & Keith Campbell) of The Second Creation;
author of After Dolly: The Uses and Misuses of Cloning (forthcoming).
________________________________________________________________

With the genetic material in hand of organisms such as human,
mouse, and fruit fly, researchers now have the opportunity to
understand these complex creatures so that we may one day better
treat disease, fully understand evolutionary biology, and thus
understand the most fundamental aspects of life and how we as
humans function.

J. Craig Venter

Dear President Bush:

At no time in our history is science more important in our society and
thus to your administration than now. We have made exciting and
promising advances in so many areas of scientific and medical research
yet we still have so much to learn. This is especially true in the
rapidly growing field of genomics.

In just the last 10 years we have gone from having the complete
genetic map of just a few microbes to today having completed the
sequencing of more than 100 organisms. With the genetic material in
hand of organisms such as human, mouse, and fruit fly, researchers now
have the opportunity to understand these complex creatures so that we
may one day better treat disease, fully understand evolutionary
biology, and thus understand the most fundamental aspects of life and
how we as humans function.

The future is indeed bright but only if we have a science-literate
administration to help translate this basic research into potential
treatments. With these great advances also come tough ethical issues.
But we must not become mired in these debates nor let fear and
ignorance win out over progress for us all. While I cannot accept the
offer to be science advisor I would like to outline a few ideas for
your administration to consider.

There are three key areas that need immediate attention:

o 1) Revamping the health care system using genomics and other
predictive tools to move toward a preventative medicine based
system.

o 2) Stepping up our efforts in developing deterrents and defensive
mechanisms to overcome the biological warfare threat to humans and
agriculture.

o 3) Moving as rapidly as possible toward a hydrogen-based economy.

Our health care system is suffering from double digit inflation while
the number of uninsured and underinsured continues to rise beyond any
acceptable level for a civilized nation. We have now the potential to
dramatically change the cost of health care by using the new
predictive tools that will come from the genomics revolution. It is
imperative that we make the commitment to go the less costly route of
preventing and limiting the extent of disease rather than treating
symptoms after they occur as we do now.

On this same preventative theme we can greatly diminish or effectively
eliminate the threat of bioterrorism by using the modern tools of
genomics to more quickly and accurately detect a suspect agent
including genetically modified organisms; develop new effective
vaccines without the risk profile associated with current small pox
and anthrax vaccines; and develop new effective antivirals and
antibiotics.

While your administration has made great progress in providing new
funding for these efforts, more direct funding for the National
Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) at the NIH will
move this field faster.

Despite much discussion on the topic of alternative energy solutions,
the United States continues to rely almost exclusively on fossil
fuels. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) approximately
80 percent of all human-caused carbon dioxide emissions currently come
from fossil fuel combustion. The DOE also estimates that world carbon
dioxide emissions are projected to rise from 6.1 billion metric tons
carbon equivalent in 1999 to 7.9 billion metric tons per year in 2010
and to 9.9 billion metric tons in 2020.

This continued consumption of fossil fuels is ample evidence that
there is a growing need to eliminate carbon dioxide output into the
environment and capture back some of the carbon dioxide associated
with global warming. Recent climate modeling from Scripps Institute of
Oceanography suggests that if climate change is allowed to continue
unabated a temperature increase of just two degrees will be enough to
dramatically reduce annual snowfall and ultimately food production due
to the drought that will develop in our most important agricultural
states.

As a nation we must invest in finding new solutions for our energy
needs. I believe that genomics could provide a viable avenue for
alleviating some of the problems associated with carbon-based fuels.

I believe it is imperative that we push forward on all the fronts
outlined above to insure energy independence, national security, and
an improved environment, health and well-being for future generations.

Sincerely

J. Craig Venter
Pioneer in sequencing the human genome
President of the Center for the Advancement of Genomics
President and Chairman, J. Craig Venter Science Foundation
________________________________________________________________

Your father called himself "the education president," and you have
promised new educational policies in which"no child is left
behind."

Steven Pinker

Dear President Bush,

Your father called himself "the education president," and you have
promised new educational policies in which "no child is left behind."
These affirmations of the centrality of education in a modern
democracy are admirable. As our economy comes to depend increasingly
on technology, and as modern media present us with unprecedented
choices - in our lifestyles, our workplaces, and our political
commitments - a child who cannot master an ever-increasing body of
skills and knowledge will be left farther and farther behind.

Unfortunately, the goals of the Presidents Bush are not being
realized. Most debates about education in this country focus on issues
of administration: vouchers, charter schools, class size, teachers'
unions, budgets, high-stakes testing. Fewer have focused on the actual
process of education: how events in the classroom affect the minds of
the pupils. This is an area in which science - in particular, the
sciences of mind - can make crucial contributions.

Your immediate predecessor was enthusiastic about applying research on
the brain to education and child development. But as exciting as the
field of basic neuroscience is, I suspect it will provide few insights
into the process of education. All learning must change the brain, but
the changes at the level of brain cells are pretty much the same in
all complex organisms -- including mice, which don't learn to read,
write, or add. It is the patterns of changes across billions of
neurons that determine the distinctively human forms of learning that
face us in the classroom, and to understand them we need to understand
how intact human beings perceive, think, and act. These topics are the
province of the sciences of mind, particularly cognitive science,
  psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and
evolutionary psychology, must be brought to bear on education in a
  more systematic way than has happened so far.

First and foremost, we must apply a scientific mindset to the
educational process. People outside of the educational establishment
are often shocked to learn how little in instructional practice has
   been evaluated using the standard paraphernalia of social
  science-control groups, random assignment, data collection,
statistics. Instead, classroom practice is set by fads, romantic
theories, slick packages, and political crusades. We already know that
some methods of teaching reading work better than others; we need more
of these assessments, and faster implementations of what works into
classroom settings.

Second, the sciences of mind can provide a sounder conception of human
nature, which ultimately underlies all educational policy. What is the
mind of a child inherently good at? What is it bad at? Without answers
to such fundamental questions we will be groping at random or plunging
headlong in wrong directions. An emerging view is that the human mind
is impressively competent at problems that were recurring challenges
to our evolutionary ancestors - seeing and moving, speaking and
listening, reading emotions and intentions, making friends and
influencing people. It is not so good at problems that are far simpler
(as gauged by what we can program a computer to do, for example) but
which are posed only by a modern way of life: reading and writing,
doing mathematical calculations, understanding the world of science or
  the mechanics of a complex society. If so, this has obvious
applications for education, both positive and negative. We should not
make false analogies that assume that children can learn to write as
easily as they learn to speak, that learning math can be as fun as
learning to run and throw, or that children in groups will learn to do
science as readily as they learn to exchange gossip. On the other hand
we can try to co-opt the mental faculties that work well (such as
understanding how objects fall and roll) and get children to apply
them to problems for which they lack natural competence.

Third, we can use an understanding of the mind to set priorities in
education at all levels. The goal of education should be to provide
students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping
the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are
born with. Observers from our best science writers to Jay Leno are
frequently appalled by the innumeracy, factual ignorance, and
scientific illiteracy of typical Americans. This has implications in
countless areas of the public and private spheres - for example, when
people fall victim to scam artists and irrational exuberance in their
investments, when they squander their money and health on medical and
nutritional flim-flam, and when they misunderstand the advantages and
disadvantages of a market economy in their political decisions. The
obvious cure for these fallacies is enhanced education in relatively
new fields such as economics, biology, and probability and statistics.
Unfortunately, most high-school and college curricula have barely
changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable, because no
one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is
unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or
trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject
may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to
teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The
question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is
more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should
know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated
person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a
world whose complexities are constantly challenging our intuitions,
  these tradeoffs cannot responsibly be avoided.

Sincerely,

Steven Pinker
Peter de Florez Professor of Psychology
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
  MIT
Author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules,
and The Blank Slate. 
________________________________________________________________

... my proposal is on a different front: to dramatically increase
funding for promising new methodologies in the field of "human
somatic cell engineering," which bypass entirely fetal stem cells.
These emerging technologies create new tissues with a patient's own
DNA by modifying one type of cell (such as a skin cell) directly
into another (such as a pancreatic Islet cell or a heart cell)
without the use of fetal stem cells.

Ray Kurzweil

FIRST, consider the following: would-be bioterrorists have no need to
put their "inventions" through the FDA for approval. But the
scientists we are depending on to develop the defensive technologies
(for example, new anti-viral medications) are required to go through
this extremely cumbersome process. Complying with these regulations
not only takes many years, but slows down the entire innovation
process.

If we look at an analogous offensive-defensive standoff, that of
software viruses, we find that the cyberterrorists are indeed creating
and unleashing ever more sophisticated software pathogens. But
development of the defensive technologies (for example, antiviral
software) has been able to keep pace, and software viruses are at
worst a nuisance. We have done so well precisely because the
development of software technologies is unhampered by sluggish
regulatory procedures. We will need the same speed of innovation and
implementation in the biological sciences.

In the current environment, when one person dies in gene therapy
trials, there are congressional investigations and all gene therapy
research comes to a grinding halt. There's a legitimate need to make
biomedical research as safe as possible, but our balancing of risks is
completely off. The millions of people who desperately need the
advances to be made available by gene therapy and other breakthrough
biotechnology advances appear to carry little political weight against
a handful of well publicized casualties from the inevitable risks of
progress.

This equation will become even more stark when we consider the
emerging dangers of bioengineered pathogens. What is needed is a
change in public attitude in terms of tolerance for needed risk. The
leadership for creating this change can only come from the top
official, the President of the United States.

SECOND, on another biotechnology front, pressure will heat up
considerably this year in the controversial area of stem cell
therapies. The number of available germ cell lines has turned out to
be a small fraction of the 60 lines that were to be made available for
research purposes. Although I would advocate that this policy be
reconsidered, my proposal is on a different front: to dramatically
increase funding for promising new methodologies in the field of
"human somatic cell engineering," which bypass entirely fetal stem
cells. These emerging technologies create new tissues with a patient's
own DNA by modifying one type of cell (such as a skin cell) directly
into another (such as a pancreatic Islet cell or a heart cell) without
the use of fetal stem cells. There have been breakthroughs in this
area in the past year. For example, scientists from the U.S. and
Norway successfully converted human skill cells directly into immune
system cells and nerve cells.

Consider the question: what is the difference between a skin cell and
any other type of cell in the body? After all, they all have the same
DNA. The differences are found in protein signaling factors that we
are now beginning to understand. By manipulating these proteins, we
can trick one type of cell into becoming another.

Perfecting this technology would not only diffuse a contentious
ethical and political issue, it is also the ideal solution from a
scientific perspective. If I need pancreatic Islet cells, or kidney
tissues, or a whole new heart, to avoid autoimmune reactions, I would
strongly prefer to obtain these with my own DNA, not the DNA from
someone else's germ line cells. The feasibility of doing this has been
demonstrated, and there should be a crash program to perfect a
technology that could dramatically improve the health of all
Americans.

THIRD, on a different front, that of energy, there has been dramatic
recent scientific progress in developing hydrogen fuel cells,
including microscopic-sized fuel cells using the same technology that
fabricates electronic circuits. These fuel cells, based on
micro-electronic mechanical systems (MEMS) can be scaled from tiny
devices that will power everything from portable electronics up to
cars, appliances, and homes. These systems use safe fuels such as
methanol and generate no emissions other than tiny amounts of water
and carbon dioxide. The fuels can be fabricated without environmental
impact from widely available coal and shale oil with new technologies
that capture emissions. All of the requisite technologies have been
demonstrated.

Perfecting these new hydrogen-based energy sources would have profound
and positive implications for the economy and the environment, not to
mention the geopolitical minefields of our current fossil fuel-based
economy.

Ray Kurzweil
Inventor and Technologist
Author of The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual
Machines 
________________________________________________________________

New insights in developmental biology--our similarities to not only
chimpanzees and baboons, but to fruit flies and worms, the genomic
revolution and the invigorated emergence of neuroscience are all
candidates for unforgettable discoveries. They must be pursued with
all the means at our disposal. I would like to address a totally
different one: the birth of our universe.

Gino Segre

Dear President Bush:

We are becoming increasingly aware of the connectedness and smallness
of our world. Our problems are global- we are all affected by what one
area or country does. Mid-western industrial pollution impacts on
Washington D.C. air quality; Antarctic ice melting causes flooding in
Bangladesh and Peruvian El Ninos can be traced to atmospheric pressure
seesaws between the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. The AIDs epidemic's
ravages know no boundaries. These realizations have changed the way we
think and must change the way we act. Finding ways to deal with these
issues and ones like them is a pressing scientific need as well as a
political, economic and moral one.

Parallel to these concerns, however, are topics that are pressing even
though they do not directly alter the quality of our everyday life.
Science deals with day-to-day matters, but it also challenges us to
leave the legacy of its discoveries to future generations. The Greeks
are remembered because of their findings in philosophy and geometry,
not because of territorial conquests. Copernicus' realization of the
Sun's centrality marks the Renaissance. We want to be remembered in
the centuries that come because of our own great achievements, ones
that our descendants will say changed the way they see the world.

New insights in developmental biology--our similarities to not only
chimpanzees and baboons, but to fruit flies and worms, the genomic
revolution and the invigorated emergence of neuroscience are all
candidates for unforgettable discoveries. They must be pursued with
all the means at our disposal. I would like to address a totally
different one: the birth of our universe.

A century ago there was no scientific theory of the universe's origin.
It has been less than 40 years since we obtained the first evidence of
radiation in the creation's aftermath and only a decade since we
established convincingly that the universe was once a super-dense,
ultra hot medium at essentially one common temperature. I said
"essentially" because there are small deviations in that record;
differences far less that a part per thousand from point to point in
the sky, but these provide the clue to all the formations of galaxies,
stars and planets that followed. This journey back in time is the
greatest archaeological expedition ever undertaken, the uncovering of
how our universe began and evolved. We almost have the tools in hand
for embarkation on this voyage and should not dawdle.

Through the past century's insights, we have come to realize that we
live on an ordinary planet circling a typical star of a mid-sized
galaxy. Perhaps there is one additional step--that our very universe
is not an anomaly in a continuum of space and time. We can leave a
trace greater than Copernicus did. Such discoveries, achieved by
scientists engaged in international collaborations and speaking the
common language of science may serve as a role model for a world in
which national, ethnic and religious barriers are broken down.

I believe it is a pressing issue for the nation and the world to have
dreams worthy of the best it can achieve.

Sincerely yours,

Gino Segre

Professor of Physics and Astronomy
University of Pennsylvania
Author of A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals About The Past
And Future Of Our Species, Planet And Universe 
________________________________________________________________

Science does not allocate equal time or space to all ideas once the
winnowing process of quality assessment has begun. To follow the
political doctrine of "balance" diminishes democracy since it
distorts the knowledge base upon which sound decisions should be
made.

Stephen H. Schneider

We all share a strong belief in democracy. But it can only function
well when the people understand the choices they need to make and are
in a position to make trade-offs rationally. As issues get
increasingly complex, ignorance decouples the people from the
knowledge they need to help guide policy choices that can shape our
future. Illiteracy in all forms--and especially in scientific
matters--is a threat to a functioning democracy.

Woodrow Wilson said about a century ago "what are we if we have to be
taken care of by a handful of experts who know the job, for if we
don't know the job we are not truly free". Therefore, as Science
Advisor I would work to greatly enhance the scientific literacy of the
public--but not just the public, also government employees, elected
officials and the media.

Science literacy is not just about the "facts"--knowledge of
chemistry, physics, biology or economics per se. More important for
non-specialists is to understand the process of science, and how
science interacts with public policy issues and gets communicated via
the media.

The media and political institutions are typically advocacy based--if
a reporter gets the views of a Democrat, she must also get the views
of a Republican. That is certainly appropriate in covering political
stories, but rarely are complex issues of science simply decomposable
into two polarized positions. Moreover, not only are there many
possibilities, but relative probabilities are attached by scientific
assessment to each of these possibilities.

Thus, an "equal time" doctrine is in fact a miscommunication of what
science knows or how it works. Science is about quality, not equality.
However, equality of opportunity to get your data and ideas heard is
essential too, but via forums in which people who are knowledgeable
about the complexities are present and in peer reviewed publications.
Such institutions of science are where probabilities get thrashed out.

Science does not allocate equal time or space to all ideas once the
winnowing process of quality assessment has begun. To follow the
political doctrine of "balance" diminishes democracy since it distorts
the knowledge base upon which sound decisions should be made. In
science all views are not given equal time or credence because the
scientific process of assessing likelihood takes precedence over mere
inclusion. This leads to many conflicts over controversial policy
issues, like climate change, strategic defense or health policy.

Climate change--in particular Global Warming--is a good case in point.
No honest scientist can assert with total confidence it will turn out
to be mild or catastrophic. But a dozen scientific assessments have
shown that the "good for you" and "end of the world" scenarios are the
two lowest probability outcomes. Some benefits are likely, but so too
are a range of risks--especially for natural systems and in poorer
countries.

The current political debates in which mild/catastrophic views are
polarized and get the bulk of the attention in the media and in front
of congress is an unfortunate distortion of what the scientific
community has reported in its assessments. Such false dichotomy
debates impede, rather than enhance democracy since they are not
accurately representing what is known and at what likelihood.

The role of science the is clear: assess what can happen and what are
the odds of it happening. The role of policy--driven by the beliefs of
the public--is to make value judgments on how to react to the odds of
various possibilities. It will take some major realignment of
institutions like the media and congressional hearings apparatus to
back away from the model of polarized advocates toward a doctrine of
"perspective": reporting and debating based on the assessment of the
likelihood of various events, not giving advocates of extreme opposite
views equal time or space.

Over time, better applications of science by a public and officials
who understand what can happen and at what odds will strengthen
democracy and distance it from both the special interests that spin
and distort to bolster ideological or client interests and the elitism
of the few people who are the only ones who currently "know the job".

Stephen H. Schneider
Professor, Dept. of Biological Sciences
Stanford University
________________________________________________________________

Your number one priority in science and technology should be a new
commitment to international public health. It is not a particularly
sexy topic; it needs no new nano-know-how, nor a radical change in
our way of seeing the physical world. It will create no great
technical advantage for America, nor add to its already impressive
defenses. Though it will employ the talents of hundreds of
thousands around the world, relatively few of them will be on the
cutting edge of research. But it is what you must do, nonetheless.

Oliver Morton

Dear Mr President,

Your number one priority in science and technology should be a new
commitment to international public health. It is not a particularly
sexy topic; it needs no new nano-know-how, nor a radical change in our
way of seeing the physical world. It will create no great technical
advantage for America, nor add to its already impressive defenses.
Though it will employ the talents of hundreds of thousands around the
world, relatively few of them will be on the cutting edge of research.
But it is what you must do, nonetheless.

I, like you, am a believer in progress. And it is for that reason that
I expect our descendants in a century or two to look back on our age
and hold us in contempt. Not for the fact that we fought wars; some
wars need to be fought, and some wars are hard to stop. Nor for the
fact that we polluted the environment; we are, after all, becoming
aware of the problems we have been storing up, and we are beginning to
address them on many levels. Our descendants will despise us for
having been content to live in a world where millions of poor people
died each year for want of basic medical interventions that the rich
half of the planet took for granted. And they will be right to do so.

Half a million women die each year because of complications
surrounding pregnancy and childbirth; 99% of those women are in low
and middle income countries. Saving the vast majority of them requires
nothing more than providing trained birth attendants. The 1.6 million
children in poor countries who die every year from measles, tetanus
and pertussis could almost all be saved by the provision of simple
vaccines, and if vaccines were developed against some of the other
diseases that kill poor children--diarrheal diseases and diseases of
the respiratory tract--that number could be doubled.That's without
starting on malaria, which kills over a million a year on its own.
Vaccines against malaria would be a great boon, and should be a high
priority--but even interventions available today, such as insecticide
impregnated sleeping nets and drug treatment, could save hundreds of
thousands. Aggressive extensions of existing tuberculosis treatment
programs could save millions more each year .

Some of your other advisers will tell you that there is no quick fix
for any of this--that the best medicine the poor of the world can get
is economic development, which slowly raises health standards in its
wake. They are wrong. It is possible to achieve impressive health
gains in very poor countries if the will and the resources are there.
There is good reason to believe that improving the health of the poor
makes subsequent economic development faster and more certain--and
helps plant the seeds of stable democracy.

This is not to say that the problems can be solved simply with money
and supplies. New interventions will be needed--most sorely vaccines
against AIDS and malaria. And much will need to be done to build the
capacity of health care systems to serve the poor. But that is not an
intractable problem--it has been solved in various ways in various
places. Evidence of a real commitment among rich countries to
providing the necessary resources would galvanise public health
workers around the world to take up those solutions and invent new
ones of their own. The idea that spending on aid is necessarily wasted
is a cynical and self-serving lie. If you don't believe me, ask Bill
Gates.

Other advisers will tell you that the American people will resent
money spent overseas when many are uninsured at home. Feel free to
tell them that you have some plans for dealing with that problem too.
Feel free to tell them that there will also be many benefits to
spending money on the health of the poor; that it will grow new
markets and win new friends, improving America's image both among
those who benefit from this new generosity and those in Europe and
Japan suddenly obliged to match it. But tell them too that you are
doing this not for those reasons, but because it is the right thing to
do.

And tell them that the American people are not as small of heart or
mean of spirit as they imagine. Tell them that the American people
will understand that the annual $8 billion budget you intend to have
set for this program by the end of your second term is less than one
percent of what America spends on health care. Tell them that every
American couple that leaves a maternity ward with a healthy baby will
be happy to think some of their money is making sure a mother in
Africa doesn't bleed out unattended. Tell them the opportunity to
change the world does not come often--and that as such opportunities
go, this one is cheap.

I wouldn't want you to cut other science and technology spending to
this end. But if you were to decide that was the only way to balance
the books, then I would say go right ahead. The end purpose of
research is knowledge with which to improve the human lot. At the
moment we already have the knowledge we need to save hundreds of
millions of lives over the coming decades, and if push were to come to
shove for a few years, using that knowledge should be a higher
priority than storing up more knowledge for the future .

You and I, as believers in progress, have faith that the future will
be able to take care of itself. We must turn our attention to the
present.

--
[This advice draws on work for the WHO's Commission on Macroeconomics
and Health summarised in "Improving the Health of the Global Poor",
Prabhat Jha et al, Science 295 2036-2039, March 15 2002]
--

Oliver Morton
Author of Mapping Mars 
________________________________________________________________

I would urge you to set aside perhaps a billion dollars to fund new
fellowships for graduate students from predominantly Islamic
countries to come and study science (broadly construed) in the
United States.

Rodney Brooks

Dear President Bush,

Science and the technology that flows from it have been great
strengths of the United States; without them the US would not be the
single superpower that it is today in the world.

For the last fifty years that science has been carried out largely in
the open and has been shared with the rest of the world. That sharing
has been a source of great strength. The US graduate education system
is the strongest in the world and many international leaders have had
some of their training in our Universities. The openness and the way
in which our universities have been run as meritocracies, not places
where national origin or religion is considered in evaluating one's
work, has attracted waves of immigration of great scientists and
engineers to this country.

There is a place for classified and restricted research but it is
mostly in areas that are close to application, not in fundamental
scientific and engineering questions. The place for that research is
not at our universities. The great universities of the US should
remain as open arenas for all areas of research where they act as an
engine of creativity that feeds the scientific needs of the US and the
world.

As science advisor I would urge you to continue, and strengthen, this
policy of openness. I would urge you to set aside perhaps a billion
dollars to fund new fellowships for graduate students from
predominantly Islamic countries to come and study science (broadly
construed) in the United States. I would urge you to direct the INS to
treat foreign students as welcome guests rather than suspected
criminals who must be monitored constantly by their host universities,
and who are to be arrested, as has recently happened, when the courses
they end up taking at a respected first rate university do not match
some preconceived plan.

To reach out this generous hand to aspiring young students would be
courageous in the current domestic climate of fear. But the long term
payoff for the United States will be immense. It will create long term
personal links between people in the countries we currently most fear
and our own country. Based on past experience we can predict that many
of those people will rise to positions of leadership and authority
within their countries. In the shorter term it will be an act of
generosity rather than aggression, and one can hope that it will have
positive effects in the way the US is viewed. Besides that we will
gain access to a large number of very smart, very driven, young minds
who will help us and the world in making scientific progress.

Once I have convinced you to follow this advice I will get to work on
some more radical ideas which involve funding science that is deep and
curiosity driven, rather than dressed up as responding to politically
justifiable immediate needs. Such science has been the well spring of
the great advances throughout history.

Rodney Brooks
Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
Author of Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us 
________________________________________________________________

Science is public knowledge. But science is not the only field
where openness is important. The security failures of 9/11 were
caused not by too little, but by too much secrecy. And the
discussions that form public policy should be public...Science
isn't poker: it only works when the cards are dealt face up. Don't
go down in history as the Texan who closed the scientific frontier.

Seth Lloyd

Dear Mr. President,

Thank you for your invitation to advise you on matters of science.
Science is after all the most public form of knowledge.

Scientific knowledge consists exactly of those pieces of information
that can in principle be verified by anyone with the tools and desire
to do so.

My advice to our highest elected official is to keep science public.
Secret knowledge, no matter how laboriously acquired, is less than
science.

Some knowledge, of course, must remain secret for the security of the
nation. Do not have the National Security Administration publish its
cryptographic keys.

But unless there is a clear security risk, publish all else. Why?
Science belongs to the public: they pay for it; they benefit from it.
The benefits of scientific knowledge accrue far more rapidly when that
knowledge lies open for all to see, to test, and to try.

Your administration has presided over some good examples of the
benefits of open dissemination of scientific knowledge. I will
restrict my attention to my own field of quantum computation.

Quantum computers are devices that store information at the level of
atoms, and that process that information in a way that respects the
wave like nature of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is famously
weird, and one of the consequences of quantum weirdness is that even a
small quantum computer, consisting of a few thousand atoms, would be
able to break all existing public-key cryptosystems.

By their potential power, quantum computers pose a significant threat
to the security not only of classified encoded material, but to the
security of most commercial transactions, in particular those that
take place electronically. Despite the clear application of quantum
computation to problems of national security, your security agencies
have elected to pursue the majority of their research on quantum
computers by open competition for public funds, under the stipulation
that the results of the research be published and made available to
all.

This is a wise course. Although potentially highly disruptive, quantum
computers are hard to build. Large-scale quantum computation is a
decade away, at least. To construct such large-scale quantum computers
will require the scientific and engineering community to solve
wide-ranging problems of nanofabrication and control. The solutions to
such problems will have wide application in the design and manufacture
of high precision, high-power technologies across the board. The
potential benefits of such research are a thousand times greater than
any drawback from potential disruption to security.

By keeping the science public, your agencies are dramatically speeding
the development not only of quantum computers, but of a wide variety
of other quantum technologies, ranging from enhanced lithography to
more accurate atomic clocks, to precise global positioning. The
frontier of the very small offers huge space for development: keep
this frontier open to all.

Science is public knowledge. But science is not the only field where
openness is important. The security failures of 9/11 were caused not
by too little, but by too much secrecy. And the discussions that form
public policy should be public.

I know that other advisors are offering you conflicting advice: keep
your cards close to your chest--don't let our enemies (or our allies)
benefit from our hard-earned knowledge. Don't listen to them. Science
isn't poker: it only works when the cards are dealt face up. Don't go
down in history as the Texan who closed the scientific frontier.

Yours,

Seth Lloyd
Professor of Quantum-Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
________________________________________________________________

I hope your new Science Advisor comes to the job armed with
knowledge of the rich history of junk science and false predictions
served up to government in the last forty years.

Denis Dutton

Dear Mr. President,

Many thanks for your invitation to apply for the position of Science
Advisor to the President. Alas, there is some mistake, for I am a
philosophy professor. At their best, scientists respond to problems
with answers, and this can be useful to presidents. Philosophers have
a cranky habit of responding to answers with more problems. You don't
need that.

Taking into account all of the poor scientific policy advice that has
been promulgated in Washington for the last forty years, you'll need
luck in your search for the right person. The record shows that
scientists are as much victims of fashion as other ordinary mortals.
Recall a few examples of science in predictive mode:

o In the mid-1970, many climatologists warned of a coming Ice Age
that would severely diminish agricultural productivity by year
2000.

o Frightened by dramatic allegations in the 1960s about the
environmental effects of DDT, the U.S. banned the pesticide in
1972. In retrospect, the allegations of harm were so much
hyperbole. In the meantime, millions of people, especially in
Africa, have died of malaria, with Europe and the U.S. reluctant to
support them in DDT mosquito eradication.

o Let's not forget the scientific predictions about oil and mineral
resources. In the 1970s your predecessors in office were being told
that there would be essentially no oil left by the 1990s. Gold
would be $10,000 an ounce, of course.

o Overpopulation? When I was in the Peace Corps in India in the
1960s we all "knew," in line with expert scientific advice from the
U.S. government, that the population explosion would cause massive,
worldwide famine by the late 1980s.

This list could be expanded into periodic cancer scares, worries about
the ozone hole, silicon breast implants, acid rain (another wildly
exaggerated threat), air pollution, and so forth. It's odd when you
think about it: though you and I might have enjoyed scary Frankenstein
movies, when we were children, science and technology were seen as
great forces for the benefit of mankind. Things shifted in the 1960s,
and a spirit of pessimism began to invade science.

Today, it is much easier for scientists to receive grants if they
indicate their research might uncover a serious threat or
problem--economic, medical, ecological. Media fascination with bad
news is partly to blame, along with the principled gloominess and
nagging of organizations such as Greenpeace. But government itself has
played its natural part. After all, as H.L. Mencken once remarked,
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed,
and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an
endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Since I'm sure you're keen to avoid such alarmism, you'll need an
advisor who can see through the fashions of science, and understand
something of their psychology. The epidemiologist who slightly
overstates the conclusiveness of his study suggesting that french
fries might cause cancer (in mice) or the young climatologist on the
global-warming gravy train are not basically dishonest people. You too
might more easily buy into some doomsday scenario, if it meant regular
business-class flights to major resorts to compare computer climate
models with other experts (models that you know in your heart could
not possibly predict average atmospheric temperatures fifty years
hence, but what hell, the food's great).

I hope your new Science Advisor comes to the job armed with knowledge
of the rich history of junk science and false predictions served up to
government in the last forty years. The point is not to be cynical
about fads and careerism, but wisely to choose where best to support
both pure science and science that can give us beneficial
technologies.

Denis Dutton
Founder and Editor, Arts & Letters Daily 
Department of Philosophy
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand
________________________________________________________________

The resulting memo is practical and unimaginative. It may not be of
much interest to the Edge community, but I think it would be more
useful to the president than a wider-ranging document. The second
memo is the unpractical and imaginative version. It is not very
imaginative, because I still want it to be taken seriously as an
agenda for the twenty-first century.

Freeman Dyson

Here two answers to the Edge Annual Question. In the first version I
have followed your instruction to stick to science and to those
scientific areas where I have expertise. The resulting memo is
practical and unimaginative. It may not be of much interest to the
Edge community, but I think it would be more useful to the president
than a wider-ranging document. The second memo is the unpractical and
imaginative version. It is not very imaginative, because I still want
it to be taken seriously as an agenda for the twenty-first century.

Memo to the President (I)

The scientific enterprise in this country is generally in good shape
and needs only modest increases in support to keep up with inflation.
One weakness of the enterprise that needs to be addressed is the
system of peer review that governs the support of
investigator-initiated proposals. The peer-review system works well
for proposals that lie within established disciplines of science. It
works badly for proposals that lie outside or between established
disciplines.

A glaring example of the failure of the system is the lack of support
for large underground detectors of elementary particles. During the
past year, the two most important discoveries in particle physics were
made using such detectors, one in Canada and one in Japan. The United
States has fallen behind in this highly promising area of research,
because underground detectors lie between the disciplines of physics
and astronomy. Physicist peer-reviewers failed to support underground
detectors because they are not accelerators, and astronomer
peer-reviewers failed to support them because they are not telescopes.

Similar failures of the peer-review system occur in areas of space
technology that lie outside mainstream disciplines. They probably also
occur in areas of biology and medicine with which I am not familiar. A
possible remedy for this state of affairs would be to assign a small
fraction of the national research budget, perhaps five or ten percent,
to proposals that are exempt from the normal process of peer-review.
The choice of exempt proposals to be supported could be made by
directors of federal agencies, with the help of panels representing
science as a whole rather than specialized disciplines.

Memo to the President (II)

During the last ten years, the human genome project has laid the
foundation for a comprehensive understanding of human biology. The
translation of the new understanding into cures for human diseases
will be a slow and difficult process.

Meanwhile, a new century has begun. It is time for you to launch a
bold new initiative in biology, a planetary genome project to sequence
the genomes of all the millions of species that live together on this
planet. This will require first of all an aggressive development of
new sequencing technology, comparable to the development of computer
technology during the last half century, so that the cost of
sequencing will continue to fall as rapidly as the cost of computing.

The goal will be to complete the sequencing of the biosphere within
less than half a century, at a cost comparable with the cost of the
human genome. The successful completion of the project will bring an
enormous increase in understanding of the ecology of the planet.
Increased understanding could then be translated into practical
measures to sustain and improve the ecology while allowing continued
rapid economic development.

Detailed understanding of the ecology could lead to large-scale and
cost effective use of solar energy and to stabilization of the
atmosphere and the climate. Let this century be the century of cures
for planetary as well as human diseases.

Freeman Dyson
retired professor of physics
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey
Author of Disturbing the Universe; Infinite in All Directions; and The
Sun, the Genome, and the Internet. 
________________________________________________________________

There are many excellent researchers who would make rapid progress
in malarial "post-genomics" if substantial new money became
available. It would therefore be widely recognised as a wonderfully
enlightened action if you were to ensure that the National
Institutes of Health introduced a malaria post-genomics programme,
with a new budget of at least $300m, as a first step towards the
prevention and cure of this devastating disease.

Philip Campbell

Dear Mr President

Your administration has commendably focused not only on the urgent
ways in which science can help the nation, especially through the
National Institutes of Health and the Department of Homeland Security,
but also in boosting the broader and longer-term interests of the
country by increasing the budgets of, for example, the National
Science Foundation, whose science constituencies underpin critical
sources of knowledge and skills. I am troubled by the half-hearted
approach adopted by your administration towards alternative energy
sources and climate research, but will leave those issues for another
day.

However, every President should leave a personal legacy that goes
beyond the national political and social goals of the moment. If that
legacy addresses one of the major issues facing the wider world, so
much the better.

Malaria provides you with precisely that opportunity. It affects
hundreds of millions of people and kills well over one million every
year. It affects countries across South America, Africa and South East
Asia. The challenges are made all the more urgent by the development
of multidrug resistance by the parasite.

There have been some positive moves from philanthropists and charities
for the control of malaria and for the development of vaccines and
drugs, and some limited progress with private-public partnerships. But
these funds--two or three hundred million all told - are a drop in the
ocean. Furthermore, they do not seriously address the longer term need
to investigate the malaria parasite at a basic scientific level.

Some people will argue that we already have enough science, we simply
need to develop better drugs, or a vaccine, or have better controls of
the disease through prevention. History shows, however, that every one
of these alternative routes has its own chronic difficulties.
Addressing new opportunities in the basic science of the disease
could, in the long term, deliver more far-reaching solutions.

The journal Nature recently published the sequence of the malaria
parasite Plasmodium falciparum's genome, and other related fundamental
information critical in understanding the parasite. That's a key step
along the way, and provides a new platform on which to develop
essential insights into the many biomolecular and cellular pathways by
which the parasite survives and interacts with us, its indispensible
hosts. New techniques are beginning to be applied, such as
high-throughput analyses of the pattern of gene expression and of the
interactions of proteins at key phases of the parasite's lifecycle.
The new availability of the genome combined with these techniques will
undoubtedly spur progress significantly--if there are funds to permit
it.

For the United States to provide significant help in this battle would
not simply represent an act of great good will. It would also be in
the nation's long-term strategic interests. The less that so many
developing countries have to battle with the illness and mortality of
malaria and the social burdens that they bring, the more they can
focus on economic and social development and provide new opportunities
for US businesses and other organisations.

There are many excellent researchers who would make rapid progress in
malarial "post-genomics" if substantial new money became available. It
would therefore be widely recognised as a wonderfully enlightened
action if you were to ensure that the National Institutes of Health
introduced a malaria post-genomics programme, with a new budget of at
least $300m, as a first step towards the prevention and cure of this
devastating disease.

Philip Campbell, PhD
Editor-in-Chief
Nature 
________________________________________________________________

Science, like business, has been totally captured by the next
quarter mentality, and it will require a deliberate effort to
stress the long view so that our knowledge matches our predicament.

Kevin Kelly

Dear Mr. Bush,

Thank you for your confidence in me. Here are the three things you
should encourage; these are neglected by our current science policy:

1) Develop Long Term Science.

Most science experiments, clinical studies, and data collection lasts
about 4 years--the duration of a graduate student. Most problems we
have before us last for generations. Science, like business, has been
totally captured by the next quarter mentality, and it will require a
deliberate effort to stress the long view so that our knowledge
matches our predicament. Long-term studies can begin to alleviate much
of our ignorance of climatic, environmental, health, social, and
biological issues.

2) Foster a Global View.

While the United States is among the nations leading the world in
monitoring and mapping its own territory, most of the world has not
been mapped. We, as humans, lack a sufficient survey of the geology,
habitat, weather, and biological diversity of our home planet. For
instance we have identified as few as 5% of all the species living on
earth. A detailed map of the planet, which would include geological
assets, urban impacts, ecological assessments, and detailed
cartographic information would be invaluable to business, military
intelligence, social work, and peace and prosperity, at the very
least, to the US. As it is we are trying to run a planet with only a
dim sense of what it is.

3) Fund Blue Sky Work.

US universities were once renowned for funding work that could not
possibly pay off for ten years or more. Much of university research
was pure research that had no obvious application at all at the time
of its funding. In an effort to weed out seemingly frivolous work that
might wind up as a headline in a supermarket tabloid, a lot of bold
research has simply been dropped. Research is now expected to show
results quickly, and to fit into return on investment curves developed
by business. This may be good for business, and maybe even for
government in the short term, but it is disastrous for science,
especially in the long term. Some federally funded research should aim
for a ten- or even 25-year result horizon. This would create the
strongest possible science culture.

These three things could be implemented without substantially
increasing the science budget, although that is always a good idea.

Kevin Kelly
Editor-At-Large, Wired
Author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems,
and the Economic World; New Rules for the New Economy;and Asia Grace
(all images, not words).
________________________________________________________________

The fear of smallpox as a weapon of mass destruction in the hands
of terrorists is based either on the public information, which is
speculative and anecdotal, or on military or secret intelligence
sources which are unavailable.

Lawrence B. Brilliant, M.D.

Mr. President,

During the past several months, I've been frustrated by the smallpox
puzzle and the accompanying national agony about vaccination. Dozens
of people have cornered me asking "what should I do about vaccinating
my family" or, more pointedly: "are you or your family getting
vaccinated?"

I was vaccinated against smallpox hundreds of times in the smallpox
program in India, and again by CDC last year during the "smallpox bio
terrorism" sessions for first responders. In this regard, it is
appropriate that as President, you were recently vaccinated. My
children, wife, mother, brother and neighbors have not been recently
vaccinated and I do not recommend it, at least not yet. Based on the
risks and benefits of what we know today, I do not recommend anyone
rush out to get vaccinated unless they will be a "first responder" or
work in a hospital emergency room.

Why? My decision is based on trying to solve many simultaneous
equations. The smallpox dilemma has no simple answers, and making the
correct decision may, literally, be a matter of life and death.

The facts today: Smallpox as a disease does not exist. It has been
eradicated. A very small amount of the virus which causes smallpox,
Variola, has been held frozen in liquid nitrogen in two "legal and
secure" facilities in Atlanta and Moscow, as agreed to by the 150+
member states of the World Health Organization. It is easy to "awaken"
the demon of smallpox if it is removed from these freezers. Except for
a very controversial and potentially destabilizing removal last year
of some viral material by U.S. Army scientist Peter Jahrling who used
those viruses to infect monkeys with smallpox with the thought of
testing smallpox anti viral agents and improved vaccines all the other
legal viral samples remain in place. The fear of smallpox as a weapon
of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists is based either on the
public information, which is speculative and anecdotal, or on military
or secret intelligence sources which are unavailable. Vaccination of
280 million Americans could cause potentially fatal vaccine
side-effects in tens of thousands and death in 500 to 1000. In order
to justify so many vaccine side-effects, there must be real evidence
of incremental risk of an epidemic caused by vaccine preventable
smallpox. There are at least three gating items, all of which must be
true before it is logical to begin vaccinations against a disease
which does not exist:

o Gating item #1: Smallpox virus must exist outside of the two
"legal and secure" repositories where, with the only known
exception being the Jahrling experiments, it has resided securely
for nearly three decades

o Gating item #2: That smallpox virus which is outside of the two
"legal and secure" repositories must have reached the hands of
terrorists or nation-states that would use smallpox in war

o Gating Item #3: That smallpox virus which is outside of the
"legal and secure" repositories, in the hands of terrorists with an
intent to use it, must not have been genetically altered so as to
be impervious to the vaccine we currently have.

As is quite clear from credible journalistic sources, Gating Item #1
appears to have occurred-Russian scientists operating under a
Gorbachev approved billion dollar 5-year plan manufactured as much as
100 tons of Variola virus annually at a then secret facility called,
ironically, Vector, near Novosibirsk, Siberia in the Soviet Union
during the 1980's. There may have been other programs that have
remained secret, just as the CIA program "Bacchus" to build a
miniature anthrax production lab stayed secret virtually until the
anthrax attacks of 2001.

There is no public knowledge, and I stress "public" for obvious
reasons, that Gating Item #2 is true. The major known sources of
concern are:

o a) Saddam Hussein used saran gas and anthrax in missiles and
shells and attempted to use Camelpox in horrid experiments against
the Kurds. Logic dictates that if he does have smallpox, he is a
serious threat to use it as a "doomsday" weapon.

o b) Weapons inspectors found a refrigerator in Iraq, "ominously"
labeled "smallpox" during the last round of inspections-we do not
know if the "smallpox" referred to the disease of smallpox or the
vaccine against it, but there were active cases of smallpox in Iraq
as late as 1972 and there is no reason to believe harvesting viral
specimens from those cases was not done. Iran, Iraq's neighbor and
sometime enemy, certainly hid cases of smallpox from WHO inspectors
(I was one of these) as late as the Shah's ceremonial coronation in
1972-73. When Iran and Iraq went to war a few years later, Saddam
Hussein had reciprocal regional reasons for hoarding the Variola
virus.

o c) Al Qaeda documents, including some found on a personal
computer purchased by a Wall Street Journal reporter, contained
references to smallpox as a weapon to be used by terrorists.
Taliban fighters and Al Qaeda terrorists frequented a Soviet era
"weapons dump" just North of the Afghanistan border; it is not
known if any biological weapons were included amongst the other
weapons acquired there.

o d) Soviet smallpox epidemiologists, who had betrayed many of us
in the World Health Organization by lifting smallpox scabs from
patients in India and elsewhere, and then smuggling these
infectious specimens back to Russia to become part of Vector's
"collection" used to create the infamous India-1 "weaponized
smallpox", fell on hard times after the breakup of the Soviet
Union. So did some of the virologists at Vector who worked on
weaponizing smallpox and other biologicals; there is evidence some
of these scientists visited Iraq, and were paid to consult with
colleagues in Saddam Hussein's government on biologicals. There has
recently been an active US program to find other work for these
scientists to rid them of the financial necessity of such
activities. There is even the suggestion, strongly denied by her
Russian colleagues, that the eminent smallpox virologist Dr. Nelja
N. Maltseva, might have visited or even collaborated with the
Iraqis.

As for Gating Item #3, no one knows. The well known Australian
experiments altering a gene in mousepox suggests it would be easy for
terrorists-or even college microbiology students who had access to pox
to create a "superpox" impervious to today's vaccines. I won't go into
the details but the bottom line is that if anyone had enough hatred
and enough money, the creation of a vaccine-proof smallpox variant is
well within the realm of the possible. Obviously, if the terrorists
have vaccine-proof smallpox, it is silly to vaccinate anyone with a
high risk vaccine that is impotent against genetically altered
smallpox.

How great is the risk of adverse reactions? Again, no one can really
quantify it because much has changed, for better and for worse, since
the 1970's from which the last large datasets are available. At that
time the death rate from vaccine was about 2 or 3 per million
vaccinated, and the risk of serious side effects about ten times
higher. There are factors today which might raise or lower the rate of
complications. Thirty years ago far fewer Americans had immune systems
compromised by chemo therapy or AIDs, and the prevalence rates of
eczema, a serious contra indication to smallpox vaccine, were lower as
well. On the other hand, recent data from Israel and from vaccination
in the US military suggests that vaccinating young healthy
pre-screened men and women carries very few risks of side effects and
today's ICU medical care for vaccine complications is likely to
markedly reduce fatalities. All in all, it is likely that ten to one
hundred people per million vaccinated from the general public would
have a very serious reaction or even death from the vaccine-somewhere
between 3000 and 30,000.

And so, here we are, faced with the need to decide whether to
vaccinate our families. We will each need to make personal decisions
under conditions of uncertainty.

Here is why I chose not to vaccinate my family:

o 1) To the best of my knowledge, there is no proof of any link
between the experiments at Vector and either Al Qaeda or Saddam
Hussein, but concern is understandable. If any proof of linkage
arises, I might change my mind.

o 2) If Saddam Hussein has smallpox, I believe he might well be
crazy or desperate enough to use it as a "doomsday weapon" if he
were about to be destroyed; but it is also likely that Iraqi
scientists have the ability to genetically alter the virus to make
it vaccine-proof. If it is an end game, why would he use a virus
that we have a vaccine against? It makes no sense.

o 3) If Al-Qaeda has the smallpox virus, I do not believe they
would be willing to use it. Unlike Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda seeks
the victory of an entire people, a culture, a religion-not the
hegemony of any individual. Smallpox is the ultimate boomerang
weapon. If it is released from its captivity at Chicago O'Hare
airport, it is only a matter of days before it infects Mecca and
Medina. It is not a likely weapon for a war that is a "Clash of
Civilizations" unless a combatant sought the destruction of both
civilizations.

o 4) Smallpox can be prevented if an exposed person is vaccinated
as late as four or five days after exposure. While there is some
risk that smallpox could be spread unseen for the first attack,
within two weeks cases would start to appear and for nearly all
Americans, there would be ample time and ample vaccine to be
vaccinated after the first attack and still be safe.

o 5) I do not want to go into the fear that a small minority of
Americans have that the your administration is prone to exaggerate
the risks of terrorism in general and smallpox in particular as
part of an attempt to frighten the public into accepting the
erosion of civil liberties. As horrible as that allegation is, I
simply have no information on which to make any comment other than
to note the fear exists. And for my purposes here, it really does
not matter. Based on the evidence I have seen to date, the risk of
getting a case of vaccine-preventable smallpox today is just not as
high as the risk of an adverse reaction to the smallpox vaccine.

That is the conclusion that I have reached as of today. And unless or
until that changes, I will not vaccinate my family and the ones that I
love.

Lawrence B. Brilliant, M.D.
Interim CEO of Cometa Networks, Inc.
Medical officer for the United Nations World Health
Organization(1970s) helping lead the successful effort to eradicate
smallpox.
Author of nearly 100 scientific articles and two books and is an
expert on smallpox.
________________________________________________________________

The point is, Mr. President, that a National Bureau for the Support
of Science, with Cabinet status, is getting to be a necessity.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

Mr. President, allow me to start with a personal reminiscence. When I
was being interviewed for my first teaching job, almost four decades
ago, the head of the search committee  a nuclear physicist  told me in
dismissive tones: "Well, now that we scientists have been able to
harness the power of nuclear forces, let's see if you so-called social
scientists can teach us how to use it." His tone of voice and smirk
clearly meant that he didn't believe for a moment that we "soft"
scientists were up to even such an easy task as that of preventing
humanity from the misuse of nuclear energy.

Things haven't much improved since. To-day's issue of the Los Angeles
Times (12/2/02), for instance, carries three stories on the front page
that relate to the issue I am raising: One of them laments the fact
that patients are increasingly refusing to participate in drug trials
and medical experiments because they mistrust scientists; another
warns about the leakage in the former Soviet arsenal of deadly
weapons; and the third consists of a huge color photo of the black
waves carrying spilled oil advancing on Spanish beaches.

Now you and I know that it is childish to blame such problems on
science or on scientists. It is not their fault that their brilliant
advances are so tragically misused, corrupted, trivialized. Yet I am
afraid that the majority of our countrymen are going to draw that
conclusion, with consequences that are too dire to contemplate. A re
run of the Dark Ages would be much worse than the original.

Unfortunately our colleagues in the "hard" sciences have not been
entirely helpful either. Their mantra has been: "Our task is to push
further the boundaries of knowledge; what happens afterwards is not
our responsibility; that's for society to decide." Fair enough: But
let anyone else suggest how science should be used and he'll be
crucified as a philistine. We all wish to have the proverbial cake and
to eat it, too. Sooner or later, however, reality does intervene. It
is perhaps time for this to happen to science.

The point is, Mr. President, that a National Bureau for the Support of
Science, with Cabinet status, is getting to be a necessity. It should
not be a body controlled by scientists. Just as war is too important
to be left up to generals, and religion too important to be left in
the hands of clergy, so is science too important to be given over to
scientists. Nor should it be under the control  God forbid  of
business interests or politicians. It is much easier to specify who
should not control such a board than who should, but the task is too
urgent for us to be deterred by such an obstacle. It should be a
parliament composed by people who have demonstrated concern for the
future of humanity: Scientists as well as laypeople  yes, even
businesspersons, clergy, and generals.

The task of such a bureau would be to allocate a goodly proportion of
the national revenue to projects that are important to our survival
and wellbeing. Not to the discovery of more foul chemicals, deadly
viruses, or laser guns circling around the planet. Instead, ways to
produce clean energy, clean water, to keep biodiversity from
disappearing should be supported. We should be preparing for the
future, Mr. President, not continuing to invest in a mythical past.
Currently science is at the service of speculators and mindless
traffickers in destruction. It is time the rest of society reclaimed
its right to have a voice in determining what their lives shall be
like.

When people raise concerns about the headlong advance of science and
technology they are inevitably ridiculed as Luddites who are trying to
interfere with progress. You should not let this fact deter you, Mr.
President. Instead, you should remind those who protest that if there
is one issue on which scientists agree is that evolution is in itself
blind and unconcerned with our  or of any other species'  wellbeing.
It would be strange to exempt scientific progress from this
conclusion. Left to itself, the great power of science can be easily
misused and misdirected. If we do our best to direct it we may still
fail, but at least we tried.

Sincerely,

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Davidson Professor of Management
Claremont Graduate University
Author of Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience; The Evolving
Self; Creativity; and Finding Flow. 
________________________________________________________________

Many commentators are urging George Bush Jr. to finish in Iraq what
President George Bush Sr. began in the Gulf War. Mr. President, I
urge you to apply this advise in space. Take up the challenge. Go
to Mars!

Paul Davies

Mr. President,

As the year 2002 draws to an end, your Administration is preoccupied
with the prospect of war with Iraq, and with a more shadowy adversary
in the form of global terrorism. Much has been said in that context
about 'weapons of mass destruction.' It goes without saying that such
weapons are the products of science and technology; one might say they
are perversions of science and technology. What could be more pressing
than finding a way to promote the beneficial aspects of science while
curbing the misuse?

I do not wish to repeat here the well worn arguments about defensive
versus offensive military research, the development of better sensor
and detection technology and more efficient intelligence gathering
systems. Arms races have dogged mankind from the dawn of history, and
history seems bound to repeat itself.

What America, indeed the world, needs most urgently is a positive and
uplifting project, a project born of a vision that transcends the
factional squabbles that divide us, something to celebrate the
creative side of science by the world's greatest scientific power.
Forty years ago, when the world was in the grip of the Cold War, the
United States committed itself to putting a man on the moon. Although
the Apollo program was undeniably a by-product of the Cold War arms
race, viewed with hindsight it was the crowning achievement of
twentieth century science and engineering. Apollo continues to stand
as an emblem for the triumph of the human spirit in a world dominated
by dark fears and ideological divisions.

What, then, should be the Apollo program of the Bush Presidency? The
answer has been clear since your own father articulated the concept in
1989. The United States, together with its partners in space, should
commit to sending an expedition to the planet Mars. The Red Planet is
probably the only body in the solar system on which a permanent
self-sufficient colony might eventually be established. Although
relatively hostile to humans, the surface of Mars is far more
congenial than the moon. By establishing a human presence on Mars, our
species will be afforded an insurance policy against a global
cataclysm at home.

But that is not the prime reason to go to Mars. Rather, the
exploration of the Red Planet will represent a scientific bonanza of
unprecedented value. By general consent, Mars offers the best--quite
possibly the only--hope of finding life beyond Earth. It harbors vital
clues to the origin of life on our own planet; indeed, it is possible
that life came to Earth from Mars. So the search for life on Mars is a
search for ourselves: who we are and what our place is in the great
cosmic scheme.

Many commentators are urging George Bush Jr. to finish in Iraq what
President George Bush Sr. began in the Gulf War. Mr. President, I urge
you to apply this advise in space. Take up the challenge. Go to Mars!

Sincerely,

Paul Davies
Physicist, writer and broadcaster, now based in South Australia
Author of The Mind of God; Are We Alone?; The Fifth Miracle; and The
Last Three Minutes. 
________________________________________________________________

Our scientific and cultural heritage is abundant, and the threats
to it are numerous--it is time to back up civilization. To do this
we will need to establish secure sanctuaries (think of the
monasteries of the Middle Ages) that preserve and update copies of
the vital records and articles needed for the conduct of our
society.

Robert Shapiro

Dear Mr. President,

The finest days of your administration thus far were the ones
immediately after September 11, when you rallied the spirits of this
nation by your stand against the terrorists, and the values that they
stood for. You pointed out, quite correctly, that their actions
represented an attack against civilization itself. But by raising the
vision that our civilization was an entity that both needed protection
and was worthy of it, you entered an arena of concern that extends far
the particular threats of Al Queda and Saddam Hussein. Within your
lifetime, the fabric of scientific information that underlies our
technological society has become much more richly embroidered, and at
the same time much more vulnerable. And its preservation is essential
to the survival of our advanced civilization and even of our species.

At the time of your birth, in 1946, the scientific community was not
yet generally aware that our heredity is stored in sequences of
"letters" within the chemical called DNA. We now possess the complete
DNA sequence for a prototype human being, as well as a mouse, a simple
plant, and a number of other species. Each such sequence, or genome,
contains millions to billions of characters, far too many to be stored
conveniently in books; the data is kept within computers. The Chemical
Abstracts Service had been tabulating the literature of chemistry
since 1907, but when you were 11 years old, it established a Registry
that systematically records, classifies and renders available
information about the hosts of organic substances that exist naturally
or have been created within laboratories. The number of such
registered substances has passed 20 million and is growing by about
4,000 per day. Let us also note the endless reams of computer
instructions, and the hardware that executes them, that makes possible
the word processing instrument by which I am composing this letter,
and the Internet that allows me to send it off immediately. No trace
of these conveniences existed in 1946.

In the mid-twentieth century, technical information was stored in
books. The most important works were duplicated in hundreds of
libraries. A person who wished access to the information need only
walk in, locate the appropriate volumes by use of a mechanical
indexing system and thumb the pages to the relevant material. In the
future, the sheer volume and complexity of the information will
require digital storage on discs and tapes.

Apart from questions concerning authorization and passwords, up to
date hardware and considerable familiarity with the software will be
needed for access to these materials. Computer storage of each
document will be limited to a few locations.

Such arrangements may work well when our society is in a healthy
state, but very little provision is made for catastrophe. A number of
different scenarios can be envisaged which would eliminate electrical
power, disrupt or destroy networks, eliminate key personnel or
otherwise prevent access to our technological and cultural heritage by
survivors. The immense legacy of our civilization would be partly or
wholly lost. Such catastrophes have been listed by many writers--they
include bio terrorism and natural plagues, nuclear war, asteroid and
comet collision, massive and unexpected climate change, famine
associated with civil disorders and social collapse and others.

None of these events is probable on its own, nor even taken together
do they represent the most likely course for the future. But we make
no provision for these possibilities, then we as a civilization are
taking the position of an author who does not choose to back up the
novel he is typing on his word processor, or the home owner who
carries no insurance and does not store his valuables in a secure
cache far from his residence. Our scientific and cultural heritage is
abundant, and the threats to it are numerous--it is time to back up
civilization. To do this we will need to establish secure sanctuaries
(think of the monasteries of the Middle Ages) that preserve and update
copies of the vital records and articles needed for the conduct of our
society. As their interpretation and reinstallation after a
catastrophe would require hands-on human expertise, we would need
staffed settlements, rather that buried time capsules. Such
settlements would need to be remote enough to be immune from the
varied array of disasters that might afflict humanity, but close
enough top remain in direct contact, and to bring aid when
appropriate.

Although a network of Biosphere-like settlements in scattered
locations on Earth might be robust enough to weather most
difficulties, there is a safer bastion which would provide inspiration
and a variety of types of technological spin-off, in addition to its
prime function of backing up civilization on Earth. The construction
of a lunar base dedicated to that purpose would provide a superb goal
for our newly-born century and millennium. It would also provide
needed purpose and continuation to one of the great human achievements
of your lifetime; the Apollo Program.

I have sketched out a goal that extends in time far beyond few years
possible for one administration. The costs will require many years of
investment, with private contributions and international cooperation
highly desirable. The goals however could be embraced by you, and
planning commenced, at only moderate cost at the present time. What
greater enhancements of the concepts of Homeland Security and the war
against terrorism could there be, than to extend their protection to
the preservation of civilization itself, for the indefinite future.

Robert Shapiro
Professor of Chemistry, New York University
Author of Origins; The Human Blueprint; and Planetary Dreams. 
________________________________________________________________

You are in an amazing position. You are the most powerful president
in a generation. Be bold! Science and technology are the most
potent tools mankind has for improving our circumstances. Let's use
this amazing moment in history to create a new period of happiness
and prosperity. Please don't let your marvelous position in history
go to waste.

Jaron Lanier

Dear Mr. President,

Whether or not you choose to follow up with me specifically, I want to
thank you for reaching out to a scientist who doesn't benefit from
prior personal connections to someone associated with your
administration. Your sphere of advisors has seemed unusually distant
from the scientific and technical communities.

I can understand, in a way, why you have been reticent in the past.
Many scientists work in the academic environment, which tends to be
liberal minded, and perhaps you've worried that there would be an
ideological coloration in the advice you would receive. It would seem
that the scientific mainstream is often at odds with your
administration on issues such as stem cell research, global warming,
and so on.

But the best way around this is not to retreat from the scientific
community as a whole, but to embrace it, and demand that it find a way
to transcend ideological colorations in its interactions with you.
After all, much of the discipline of science is devoted to reducing
personal bias. We spend a lot of our time repeating work that's
already been done before because we're so cautious about our
all-too-human vulnerabilities that could lead to self-deception. In a
way we are the most skeptically conservative community around, and you
would probably find more common ground with us than you expect if you
gave us more of a try.

I suppose a science advisor has to be part speech writer and part
budget warrior.

With that in mind, I would like to give you a sense of what my advice
would be like on a variety of difficult issues.

You are in an amazing position. You are the most powerful president in
a generation. Be bold! Science and technology are the most potent
tools mankind has for improving our circumstances. Let's use this
amazing moment in history to create a new period of happiness and
prosperity. Please don't let your marvelous position in history go to
waste.

In this note I will address the four toughest issues, which present
the greatest opportunities and the most difficult political dilemmas.
These are:

1) New medicine

2) New energy and transportation solutions.

3) Global warming response.

4) War on terror.

America's success on every level has depended in the past on
government lead research initiatives.

There are three models from the twentieth century for giant government
research and development projects: The Manhattan Project, the Apollo
Program, and the era of massive public works, including the TVA, much
of the WPA, and the Interstates.

We have to be bold and imagine a new type of national initiative that
combines the best of all three models. The Manhattan project showed
what can be done by gathering the very best minds in one place. The
Apollo Program showed that it's possible to do big science in a way
that engages all the world in a positive way. The massive public works
projects I listed, while they might be abhorrent to your economic
advisors, should be appreciated because they showed that government
can create a giant infrastructure without damage to democracy or
capitalism.

I do not propose that big centralized science initiatives are the best
method of tackling all our hardest problems, only the ones I listed
above.

Private industry can sometimes address a big problem, even one that is
serious enough to threaten our survival. In such cases, government
should still play role of oversight and be ready to step in should
industry fail for some reason. Some examples in this category:

1) Impending loss of efficacy of antibiotics

2) Need for new desalinization technologies and other fixes for
looming shortages of fresh water

3) AIDS crisis. In this case, private industry has the research and
manufacturing infrastructure in place already, but is not
structured to do as much as it should to help patients in most of
the world. An enhanced government role is crucial, because this
problem as well as other related ones in the Third World will have
a huge impact on our security in the long term.

About stem cells, cloning, and such things:

Here we have the potential to extend and improve human life, and it's
just the sort of research that is better undertaken under governmental
lead. It's expensive, high risk, and fraught with ethical concerns.
Furthermore, if the vast new intellectual property riches are either
Balkanized or monopolized, humanity will suffer, and America's role in
the world order will be seriously challenged.

You face a tough situation here, though, in that one of your core
constituencies, the faith-based voters, is understandably queasy about
the whole direction. So you've sought compromises on such things as
embryonic stem cell research, but the available compromises don't
quite give the scientific community enough room to make progress. I
understand how difficult these decisions are.

There are two likely negative outcomes from your policies as they
stand. In the short term, legitimate research on new fundamental
medicine will often be overshadowed by weird proprietary outfits, such
as the supposed cloning achieved by a UFO cult or stray doctors here
and there. These events poison public discourse.

In the long term, foreign countries will enjoy an economic advantage
because the US will not be a center of expertise in medicine. In
twenty years we could see a phenomenon in which masses of Americans
who can afford the trip head to Europe or Asia for medical care,
leaving their dollars abroad, so that there's increasingly less wealth
to go around for those Americans who had to stay home.

I don't need to tell you how significant this would be to the long
term economic health of our nation.

I would advise you to use your bully pulpit to be tough with both your
religious constituents AND the scientific research establishments.

To the scientists, I would say something like this: "You have
yourselves to blame in part for the public's reticence to fund the new
age of medicine. You seem to love making claims about life's
fundamental questions. I'm sick of reading that some robot at MIT has
gained emotions, that some new gene explains as much as you seem to
claim about a person's character, or any opinion of yours at all about
consciousness or God. I don't believe you have expertise on these
matters and you embarrass yourselves."

Yes, I want you to be that tough on us, because we deserve it, and
because it is what your religious constituents need to hear in the
public sphere.

Of course you can have a speech writer smooth these thoughts out so
they sound nicer. I'm used to combative debates so you have to tone
down any advice I give you in matters of rhetoric. I'm sure you have
people who can handle that job.

To your religious constituents, I would say this: "Your concerns are
legitimate and sane, but it's possible you've been mislead a bit by
those who enjoy exaggerating the true nature of the new frontiers in
medicine. You must remember that scientists have to sell themselves in
order to be funded, just like everyone else, so you need to learn to
discount a little bit of the science fiction-like atmosphere that
surrounds reporting on recent research.

For instance, they talk about 'clones', but that's a science fiction
word. Dolly the sheep was really no more than a delayed twin, and in
fact less similar to Dolly than a regular twin would have been. That's
not to say that I support the creation of human delayed twins--I
don't. But it's important not to allow the scientific community to
mystify what it can do.

It is essential that we hold life precious. Unfortunately, Americans
don't always agree on specific questions like abortion, but I know
that almost all Americans do hold life sacred and precious. I want to
suggest to you that defining the chemical moment of conception as the
start of life is not going to work, because it is a definition based
on scientific concepts which are themselves in the process of being
transformed. We can't reduce human life to a mechanical interaction of
molecules, or whatever objects scientists are talking about in a given
era. I believe that there is a difference between a collection of
cells and a person--call it a soul if you like. If you believe there's
a soul in a Petrie dish, you reduce what you mean by a soul.

I want my family and friends to be relieved from disease when it is
possible and I want the same for your family and friends. Please join
me in a loving quest to achieve this possibility."

I think this approach can work.

Once you win the hearts of both sides, and I think you can, an ethics
policy should be based on open information and consent. A person
should know and approve of what happens to their tissue. No viable
embryo should be created outside of the rule of law. And so on.

But please, let us proceed to improve our lives using the means
available to us.

I'll next address Energy, Transportation, and Climate:

We have to address the possibility of climate cataclysm. If we take
the position that Kyoto is flawed, and I think there's a strong case
that it is, we must articulate an alternative soon, so that the world
doesn't think we're crazy.

The revolution in transportation and energy must come about anyway,
whether the climate scare is legitimate or not.

I have a bit of a confession to make here. My colleagues and I might
have contributed to your falsely optimistic sense about the near term
potential of the oil economy. In the last twenty years, ever more
powerful computers have created the illusion the oil supply is
increasing. I worked on some of the first virtual oil field
exploration tools, and such tools have made oil fields far more
productive than we ever imagined. Furthermore, computer-aided design
has helped produce a new generation of oil extraction machinery that
can get at the oil we discover through our simulations. That's all
fine, and I'm proud of how much computer science has been able to
contribute to the oil exploration business, but there's also a hidden
danger. Without computers, not only would oil have been running out by
now, but it would have run out gradually, with prices going up as a
warning sign. I'm afraid that computers are creating the illusion of
an ever increasing supply, and will therefore reduce the period of
warning before the supply runs out, which it will.

So, I suppose I hope to make you aware of how my colleagues and I have
inadvertently fooled you on this matter. But this issue can be framed
positively even better than it can be framed negatively. Why don't we
invent new, better fuels and engines and then sell them to the world?
What's wrong with that picture? It seems like such a win-win solution.

We should create a new energy/transportation infrastructure,
presumably based on a cleaner and more efficient chemistry than the
current one. I agree with the emerging consensus that it would
probably consist of decentralized hydrogen production, possibly using
biotechnology to make the hydrogen. I also see cars that can drive
themselves, almost never getting into accidents, and merging
flawlessly and automatically into trains to create ad-hoc mass-transit
solutions. Car accidents cause more deaths than wars, so the
introduction of this technology would create a new boom in wealth and
happiness even aside from the curing of problems related to dependence
on oil.

If the world saw us building the next energy cycle, our policies
related to the current energy cycle would be less contentious.

We might have already contorted the climate enough that switching
fuels will not be enough. We might need to resort to a massive
technological fix. I dearly hope this will not come to pass, but I
believe we should set up an institute that explores such high risk
measures as re-carving the ocean floors or intercepting the sun's
energy in space on its way to the Earth. Once again, I would grieve if
it came to pass that we had to attempt measures such as these in the
future, but I must regretfully recommend that we begin to prepare
ourselves just in case.

The recent surprise announcement by the Japanese that they had created
the world's fastest computer, in order to model the weather, should be
treated as a friendly Sputnik-like event. I'm on the science board for
what had been the world's fastest civilian computer, at the Pittsburgh
Supercomputer Center, and I have to tell you my heart sank when I read
the announcement, even though I'm also happy that the new Japanese
machine is being put to a good use. I hope you felt as embarrassed as
I did, and I wish you would share that emotion with the public.

About the war on terror.

War is Hell. I lived right by the World Trade Center, and I dearly
wish I had not been home that day. It is clear that in our connected
world, in which many technologies become cheaper and more widely
available because of Moore's Law-like processes, and in which
communication is easy and essentially free, the old equations about
privacy and liberty have to be re thought. I hate this fact with the
whole of my being, but I acknowledge it's a fact.

I don't think your administration has been handling this matter very
well. For instance, your attorney general comes off badly in public.
He seems to be enjoying this turn of events, as if it vindicates his
beliefs. If you want Americans or other people in the world to make
the mental transition and emotional commitment into a new order, your
administration ought to be able to show that it shares in the pain.

You might be thinking to yourself, "This matter is none of my science
advisor's business." But privacy these days is about digital policy,
and that overlaps both socially and institutionally with the
scientific and engineering communities.

I believe you have to have these communities on board in order for
your policies to be successful and for the country to be more secure.

I have two specific suggestions.

First, if you want the public to accept less privacy, make it
symmetric. Instead of merely building a new domestic spying capability
that itself would be vulnerable to corruption, as secret centers of
power always are, make key institutions more open and transparent.

This serves multiple purposes. Let's not forget that since the war on
terror began, corrupt accounting cost the country more, in monetary
terms, than the terrorist attacks. The direct costs were tremendous,
but the indirect costs due to the gutting of investor confidence were
immeasurable.

We have the greatest information infrastructure in all history, and
yet investors weren't tipped off about a wave of massive fraudulent
schemes until it was too late. This cannot stand. The remedy is to
make big companies and yes, big government agencies, as transparent to
the public as the public must become to the new security apparatus.

This might sound counterintuitive at first. Would this not give
terrorists more information and therefore advantage as they planned
attacks?

I think there are strong arguments that symmetry increases security.
No matter how big the spy agencies might be, they can't employ enough
trusted eyeballs to look at all the data. And no, as your advisor I
can assure you that you cannot count on artificial intelligence
programs to make up the gap. The only solution is to have the whole
public looking. It was widely distributed public information that lead
to the capture of the Unabomber, the DC snipers, and so on.

The strength of Islamist terrorist cells is not so much that they are
well trained as that they benefit from a surrounding society that
doesn't call in tips. This leads to the second reason to support
symmetry. Transparency can be used to make the world friendlier to the
US.

Here I would like to add a specific recommendation. The
Arabic-speaking world is encountering the power of modern propaganda
for the first time via satellite TV. Our response has been to craft
infomercials, but why not try to find the next generation of leaders
when they are young. They are undoubtedly oriented to new media just
like their Western counterparts. Why not make language translators
available on the web so that kids in Arabic speaking countries can
browse English language websites and learn for themselves about us?
Why not encourage personal links using the web? Why not make science
and technology education materials available in this way?

None of these proposals would be easy to implement. Computer access is
restricted in repressive countries, for instance. Nonetheless, there
is considerable room to maneuver and it doesn't cost much.

In a related vein, we could do more to help empower and win the hearts
of young people in the exploding populations of the third world by
cleverly using inexpensive technology. We could use the latest
advances in speech recognition and synthesis to empower illiterate
people with access to basic information, for instance. Even
undernourished populations often gain access to consumer electronics
these days. This strange situation could be turned to advantage. Why
not design a hard-to-detect, human powered, wireless communicator
designed for illiterate people and give away millions of them in the
poorest parts of the world? Why not bring these people into the web of
modernity, in which they might find their way to a better life and
coincidentally might just send in tips?

All of these ideas relate to security, because as soon as terrorists
realize there's even a slight increase in the chance that someone in
their home environment might rat on them, they rapidly lose
maneuvering room. A little openness could go a long way.

I believe that if such devices were in place, we'd have given out the
unclaimed cash award for information leading to the capture of Bin
Laden by now.

Respectfully,

Jaron Lanier
Computer Scientist And Musician
Pioneer of Virtual Reality
Founder and former CEO of VPL
Currently the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion
Initiative.
________________________________________________________________

...science is patriotic. Good old American know-how is the
foundation that has made this a great country. It is no coincidence
that so many of the founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson and
Benjamin Franklin, had a lifelong passion for science. Science is
the engine that has fueled our prosperity.

J. Doyne Famer 
Dear Mr. President,

The most pressing issue facing the United States today is not doing
better science, but rather using the science that we already have to
make better public policy. Science, which originally came from the
Latin word for "knowledge", is not just something that weird guys in
lab coats do - it is a practical mode of thought, a nuts and bolts
approach, a way of telling fact from fiction. According to my
dictionary, "scientific" means "having an exact, objective, factual,
systematic, or methodological basis". It means that when you don't
understand something, you make careful observations or experiments,
understand what works and what doesn't work, and choose the things
that work. Unfortunately, all too often we are now making public
policy based on belief and uninformed public opinion rather than
science, even when science gives clear answers that directly
contradict belief. This approach may make you popular in the short
run, but in the long run it is doomed to failure.

I would also like to point out that science is patriotic. Good old
American know-how is the foundation that has made this a great
country. It is no coincidence that so many of the founding fathers,
such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, had a lifelong passion
for science. Science is the engine that has fueled our prosperity. The
United States has by far the greatest scientific establishment in the
world, the best that has ever existed. So why, at the peak of our
scientific power, are we completely ignoring science when it comes to
formulating public policy?

I began my career as a scientist studying what has now come to be
called "chaos". What this means is that lots of things, like the
weather, are inherently unpredictable. This has come up recently for
global warming, which I'm sure you've heard a lot about. It's true
that at this point we can't predict exactly what global warming is
going to do to the earth. But there is something we can predict with
complete certainty: Global warming is going to make some big changes,
and those changes are highly unpredictable. The unpredictability of
global warming is precisely why we need to do something to stop it
now. One definition of conservative is "preferring gradual development
to abrupt change". Conservatives feel particularly strongly about this
when we don't have any idea what that abrupt change is going to be.
Global warming is a situation where anyone who is paying any attention
to what science is telling us ought to be a conservative.

Science isn't just about things, its also about people. During the
last fifty years we've learned a lot about people and what makes them
happy and productive. For example, we know that once they have their
basic needs taken care of, making more money is not a big factor that
contributes to making people happy. Scientists have measured that, and
understand it a lot better than global warming. Dollar for dollar,
investing money in nice parks, safe neighborhoods, getting rid of
pollution, and instituting good social services has a much bigger
effect on people's happiness than lowering their taxes.

There are many other areas where science tells us things about the
world and we aren't paying attention. These include building an
effective national defense, preventing huge forest fires, managing
water in the west, education, prison reform, drug policy, or social
security. In all these areas science tells us a lot about how to make
things work better, but we just aren't making good use of what it's
telling us.

Sincerely,

Doyne Farmer
Pioneer of Chaos Theory
McKinsey Professor
Santa Fe Institute
________________________________________________________________

...science has become bound with wealth and power into a positive
feedback loop from which it cannot escape: its perceived role in
the present age is to provide high technologies of the kind that
generate capital which in turn supports more science, of the kind
that will provide high technologies to generate more capital and so
on and so on.

Colin Tudge

The prime task of 2003 and beyond is to re-define and re-discover the
intellectual and moral roots of science. For science has become bound
with wealth and power into a positive feedback loop from which it
cannot escape: its perceived role in the present age is to provide
high technologies of the kind that generate capital which in turn
supports more science, of the kind that will provide high technologies
to generate more capital and so on and so on. It becomes more and more
difficult to finance science that offers no obvious short-term
commercial or military reward. Worse: an entire generation of
scientists and politicians has grown up that takes it to be
self-evident that science should accept its role as the handmaiden of
commerce and power. Hence the present uncritical enthusiasm for GMOs,
with no clear vision of how they might benefit humankind, and for the
industrialisation of agriculture in general, with no knowledge of, or
respect for, all that is destroyed along the way.

So we need above all and as a matter of urgency to re-state what
science is, and what it is for, and to re-discover the political means
by which it might again promote the perennial human causes of justice,
human rights, and cultural and biological diversity. We need of course
to revise the teaching of it: to present science not simply as a
vocational pursuit, a means to promote wealth and power, but truly as
one of the world's most valuable cultural pursuits: not as the royal
road to omniscience, which it decidedly is not, but certainly as an
indispensable source of insight and enlightenment.

All the rest is detail.

Colin Tudge
Oxfordshire
Three-time winner of the Glaxo/ABSW Science Writer of the Year Award.
Author of The Time Before History; The Variety of Life; and coauthor
of The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control. 
________________________________________________________________

My idea is that the whole "Homeland Defense" thing is too
cost-ineffective to be plausible.

Marvin Minsky

Mr. President:

My idea is that the whole "Homeland Defense" thing is too
cost-ineffective to be plausible. The lifetime cost of, for example,
preventing each airplane-crash fatality will be the order of
$100,000,000--and we could save a thousand times as many lives at the
same cost by various simple public-health measures.

Conclusion: what we really need is a "Homeland Arithmetic"
reorganization.

Yours truly,

Marvin Minsky
Mathematician and computer scientist
Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; Cofounder of Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory.
MIT
Author of eight books, including The Society of Mind.
________________________________________________________________

What's missing is that science (and engineering) is no longer a
fundamental priority of the national agenda--the way it was when
Sputnik galvanized us into action in the aftermath of World War II.

George Dyson 
Mr. President:

I appreciate the opportunity to offer some advice. We currently have
no shortage of scientific expertise to deal with the manifold issues
facing this nation and the world. What's missing is that science (and
engineering) is no longer a fundamental priority of the national
agenda--the way it was when Sputnik galvanized us into action in the
aftermath of World War II.

You have dozens of capable and distinguished advisors to call upon who
owe their training and their love of science to the excitement of the
Sputnik years. What worries me is that we are not instilling the same
spirit among the generations now in school.

Should I be accepted for the position, I will move immediately to
initiate a national program (with public/private partnership) of
sabbaticals for all science educators, from kindergarten through grade
12. This will attract better teachers to the field, encourage existing
science educators to widen their horizons, and allow them to remain
current with what's going on in the real world. The entire nation will
reap long-term benefits through better-educated and more-inspired
students, and short-term benefits from the kinds of projects that
individual teachers will undertake in their sabbatical years.

Thank you for inviting my comments, and I wish your new emphasis on
science all possible success.

Sincerely,

George B. Dyson
Science historian
Author of Darwin Among the Machines and Project Orion: The True Story
of the Atomic Spaceship. 
________________________________________________________________

But only a dozen years ago, no one knew much about abrupt climate
change, those past occasions when the whole world flipped out of a
warm-and-wet mode like today into the alternate mode, which is
cool, dry, windy, dusty.

William H. Calvin

A Machiavellian advisor to a president might note that scientists are
always handy when you need an excuse to postpone action. We're
professional skeptics, and can always find holes in any proposal. (You
say that you figured that one out already?) But the physician who
waits until dead certain of a diagnosis before acting is likely to
wind up with a dead patient. Sometimes things develop so rapidly that
only early action--back when you're still somewhat uncertain--stands a
chance of being effective, as in catching cancer before it
metastasizes.

When the patient is civilization itself, science can provide a
heads-up--but only the best politicians have the talent to implement
the foresight. And coming on stage now is a stunning example of how
civilization must rescue itself. Looked at one way, the story is about
abrupt climate change--but similar lessons about shocks and
instability likely apply to our current problems with suicidal
terrorists.

Another major climate story is now emerging, and it dwarfs the three
big scientific alerts from the 1970s about global warming, ozone loss,
and acid rain. (Yes, it really has been thirty years.) But only a
dozen years ago, no one knew much about abrupt climate change, those
past occasions when the whole world flipped out of a warm-and-wet mode
like today into the alternate mode, which is cool, dry, windy, dusty.

In abrupt climate change you see big alterations in only 3-5 years, as
sudden as a drought--which it is. We once thought of climate change as
gradual, like ramping up a dimmer switch (the usual greenhouse warming
notion). But now we know that some climate change is more like the
ordinary light switch that flips abruptly. Dozens of these flips have
recently been discovered in ice cores and layered sediments around the
world.

In scope, a flip looks like a worldwide version of the Oklahoma Dust
Bowl of the 1930s. A few centuries later, the drought climate flips
back into worldwide warm-and-wet, even more quickly. The big flips
have happened every few thousand years on average, though the most
recent one was back before agriculture in 10,000 B.C.

Were another climate lurch to happen in today's world, with a
population six thousand times greater than on the last occasion,
agriculture could no longer feed the city populations. People would
flee into the countryside, eating everything in sight, and losing much
of the societal organization needed for prompt recovery.

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall" will likely apply, with a
vicious downward spiral into the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
famine, pestilence, war, death. It probably won't be the end of human
beings but genocide will be widespread in this vast downsizing--and
not just on the scale of the genocide recorded in the Old Testament or
the Greek versions deplored by Thucydides. Just recall Bosnia or
Rwanda, multiply by ten, and imagine the whole ruined world affected
by such hatred. Recovery from that hellish state of affairs would take
many generations.

Can we head off the next flip, or perhaps slow it down? After all,
were the same climate changes spread out over 500 years, and not such
a shock, there might be a technofix, one that would counter the
tendency to collapse like a house of cards. Flips have a chain of
causation and, in medicine, this is good news, as it provides a number
of intermediate stages at which you can intervene. How much time do we
have, to develop this preventative medicine of climate that guards
against sudden shocks?

Alas, the next flip may arrive sooner than otherwise, thanks to our
current warming trend. The northern extension of the Gulf Stream
appears quite vulnerable to global warming in four different ways.
That's important because it fails in a flip. An early warning might be
a decline in this current. And according to two oceanographic studies
published this last year, this vulnerable ocean current has been
dramatically declining for the last 40-50 years, paralleling our
global warming and rising CO2.

Some optimists say, from what little is known about the climate
feedback mechanisms, that we might be immune to the usual flips for
awhile. I hope they are right, but a possible "out" is not something
to bet our civilization on. As the new National Research Council
report Abrupt Climate Change says dryly, "denying the likelihood, or
downplaying the relevance of past abrupt events, could be costly." It
is now clear that climate is like a drunk. If left alone, it sits.
Forced to move, it staggers.

While climate flips are a particularly dramatic setup for the failure
of civilization, other sudden shocks might set off much the same
scenario, where people flee the cities and destroy the remaining
efficient agriculture before starving. Epidemic disease in big cities
could trigger much the same thing. So could a widespread economic
collapse. Asymmetrical warfare may not yet be capable of starting a
climate flip, but we certainly have acquired suicidal enemies whose
shock tactics aspire to trigger epidemic and economic catastrophes.
But their victims might become the whole world, as many interdependent
countries, unable to feed their large populations, slide down the
slippery slope into genocidal downsizings.

We must shore up the foundations of civilization well in advance, much
as the medieval cathedrals had flying buttresses retrofitted. What to
do is a much longer story, but getting started now is important
because political consensus takes so long to achieve. The development
of atomic bombs required only a few years, yet Europe's impressive
achievement of a common currency took fifty years. Action and
effective societal reaction have very different time scales.

While scientists can provide better headlights to spot the turnings
and the washouts in advance, speeding up consensus-building requires a
different set of skills. Only an effective combination of foresight
and leadership stands a chance of building those flying buttresses
that are needed to protect the cathedral of civilization from abrupt
shocks.

I think that political leadership has the harder task, given how
difficult it is to make people aware of what must be done and get them
moving in time. It's going to be like herding kittens, and the
political leaders who can do it will be seen as the same kind of
geniuses that pulled off the American Revolution.

William H. Calvin
Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
University of Washington, Seattle
Author of A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate
Change and the Atlantic Monthly's cover story, "The great climate
flip-flop."
________________________________________________________________

What the president ought to do is obvious: focus the nation's mind
on a big, real and exciting problem. Ideally we ought to have a
competitor to keep us playing our best game--but if the problem is
interesting enough, maybe the competitor doesn't matter.

David Gelernter

The best thing that happened to U.S. science in the last half-century
was the Cold War and its consequences--one of them being the Space
Race. Americans cared about space in the 1960s as they'd never cared
about any science or engineering project before, and never have since.
The social catastrophe of the late '60s tends to obscure the
spectacular achievements of those years.

What the president ought to do is obvious: focus the nation's mind on
a big, real and exciting problem. Ideally we ought to have a
competitor to keep us playing our best game--but if the problem is
interesting enough, maybe the competitor doesn't matter.

We know several things for sure about what this Big Project ought to
be. "Men on Mars" is not it. (It's a fascinating prospect, but too
close intellectually and emotionally to the Moon program.)

The right answer will have nothing to do with environmental doomsday
stories; it will deal with people's everyday lives, making them
better.

Nowadays nearly everyone travels by air; it might be time to
reconsider supersonic passenger travel--but the solution has to be
cheap and clean and quiet enough to be acceptable, nothing like the
Concorde; a hard problem; that's what makes it interesting.

Or: a nationwide magnetic (or some other post-iron-on-iron technology)
rail system. Or: practical rocket planes for New York-Tokyo in two
hours or less. Or: anything whatsoever to get people between New York
and New Haven in under an hour.

That's the sort of science and engineering that changes lives, by
manufacturing time, the world's most precious commodity. (Maybe its
only precious commodity.)

These are the sorts of practical problems that scientists and
engineers (for the most part) no longer give a damn about. But
transportation has a lot to do with the nation's quality of life, and
transportation is headed downhill fast. For most people, travel is
substantially more of a pain today than it was in 1950. Why is that
acceptable? I don't give a damn how fast my computer runs if moving my
carcass costs more time, effort and pain every year.

David Gelernter
Professor of computer science, Yale University
Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies
Board Member, National Endowment for the Arts
Author of Mirror Worlds and Drawing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber 
________________________________________________________________

It is a compelling human story. From genetics, to cognitive
science, to physics we can patch together a view of the world, our
place in it, our power and powerlessness. We can describe the mad
animals we are in the middle of a range of phenomenon from the
microscopic to the mind tauntingly vast.

Janna Levin

Dear Mr. President

There is a weighty apprehension that scientific issues in general have
been marginalized in your administration. We could detail our specific
causes but the impact is lost if the very nature of scientific pursuit
is not appreciated. Should we first advise you of the significance to
our country and the world of our broader scientific aspirations?

It is a compelling human story. From genetics, to cognitive science,
to physics we can patch together a view of the world, our place in it,
our power and powerlessness. We can describe the mad animals we are in
the middle of a range of phenomenon from the microscopic to the mind
tauntingly vast. The fruits of this vast scientific enterprise are of
pressing importance to our survival--a survival that is not currently
assured.

I have heard, to my persistent surprise, that people kill each other
for land, money, oil. Our petty gripes and vicious aggression as
insignificant as a dog fight kicking up dust and dirt in our squabbles
as the earth rolls us around the sun. And although so many of us
despair over the newspaper accounts of our more barbarous traits,
Tuesdays are always a good day as we get the special Science Section
in The New York Times and the pessimism lifts.

The articles are not about territory or struggle or financial gain
they're about strange crystal growths, rocks from Mars, the human
genome, an accelerating universe. These things we do out of purely
human curiosity. We are driven by inquisitiveness and a belief that
the world is beautiful and true and reaffirms our brand of faith which
transcends race and gender and national boundaries. Nature speaks to
all of us and any of us.

No one can guess the shape or size or language of the next genius but
we can all participate in the knowledge that is woven of all of our
contributions. Through a well-supported scientific initiative we could
develop energy sources to better protect our planet, cure AIDS, and
understand the origin and fate of our entire universe. No small aims.

Reaching these aims demands vision beyond our short-term ambitions.
When a Congressional Committee asked how scientific research would
advance defense of our country, Robert Wilson, the founding director
of Fermilab said, "it has nothing to do directly with defending our
country, except to make it worth defending". Our scientific culture
helps to make ours a world worth defending.

Janna Levin
Theoretical Physicist
Cambridge University
Author of How the Universe got Its Spots. 
________________________________________________________________

You went to Andover, Yale and Harvard, respected educational
institutions where educational values are debated up front, where
you were not a guinea pig in randomized trials, and where you had
some of the most gifted teachers in the world. Your children, our
children, deserve the same respect.

Howard Gardner

To President George Bush

Re: the new Institute for Educational Sciences

We are faced with a paradox. On the one hand, the United States leads
the world on nearly every dimension of scientific and technological
achievement, in both the biomedical and the physical sciences. At the
same time, we have a precollegiate educational system that is mediocre
at best. It is natural to ask whether we can use our scientific
strength to improve American education. And, indeed, that is the
purpose of the recently created Institute for Educational Sciences.
This Institute promises to improve the quality of educational research
by embracing models from biomedicine. Indeed it singles out
"randomized trials" as the "gold standard" for educational research.

By all means, we should ask science to do what it capable to do, but
not what it cannot do. (I am sure that, wearing your religious hat,
you would agree with that statement. No one is calling for randomized
trials in the church, synagogue, or mosque). Education differs from
medicine in three crucial respects and these need to be understood and
respected.

First of all, education is an endeavor that is laden with human
values. While almost no one disputes the medical goals of longer and
healthier lives, we in a democracy differ deeply about the kind of
education that we value. How could we ever design a single educational
system that would please Jesse Helms, Jesse Jackson, and Jesse
Ventura? We cannot conduct meaningful scientific research on
educational practices unless we articulate a value system with some
specificity. And so, to be concrete, we can't just compare three
scientific methods in terms of efficacy. We need to decide whether we
want a science education that focuses on factual knowledge, laboratory
skills, deep understanding of a few essential concepts, asking good
questions, or some amalgam thereof. Only thereafter can proper studies
be launched.

Second, young persons are not seeds of corn, nor are they informed
adults who can give consent to their involvement in an experiment. It
may be appropriate to have randomized trials for certain questions
(e.g. what are the benefits and losses of beginning secondary school
one hour later each day) but it is not appropriate to institute them
for other issues (e.g. teaching a class without any opportunity for
student questions, only to determine what the costs and benefits are
of such an approach). Certainly, as a parent, I would not give consent
for my child to be a guinea pig in order to demonstrate the merits or
liabilities of some educationalist's pet theory.

Third, teaching is and will always be in part an art or craft, and
properly so. Teaching depends upon human interactions over long
periods of time and on the transmission of wisdom as well as the
gradual elimination of pernicious practices. The educational systems
that we admire all over the world are not ones that are based on
scientific research; they are the ones where skilled practitioners
have cultivated wise procedures over the generations and passed them
on to their successors carefully though not uncritically. Attempts to
create teacher-proof environments are destined to fail. We need to
honor the craft of teaching, and not try to eliminate it by scientific
(which are often pseudo-scientific) manipulations.

So two cheers for the New Institute, Mr. President, but remember above
all: You went to Andover, Yale and Harvard, respected educational
institutions where educational values are debated up front, where you
were not a guinea pig in randomized trials, and where you had some of
the most gifted teachers in the world. Your children, our children,
deserve the same respect.

Howard Gardner
Professor of Education at Harvard University
Author of Frames of Mind, The Mind's New Science, and Extraordinary
Minds. 
________________________________________________________________

It takes a bomb in the office of some academics to make them
realize that their most basic values are now threatened, and some
of my good friends and colleagues on the Edge seem to have
forgotten 9/11.

Martin Seligman

The civilized world is at war with Jihad Islamic terrorism. It takes a
bomb in the office of some academics to make them realize that their
most basic values are now threatened, and some of my good friends and
colleagues on the Edge seem to have forgotten 9/11. If we lose the
war, the laudable, but pet projects they endorse, will not be issues.
Fighting fatwahs and no education for women will displace grousing
about random assignment of schoolchildren to study education. If we
win this war, we can go on to pursue the normal goals of science.

So a science advisor to the President today needs to help direct
natural science and social science toward winning our war against
terrorism. First and foremost.

Martin Seligman
Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania
Author of Learned Optimism; The Optimistic Child; and Authentic
Happiness. 
________________________________________________________________

Beneficial results for innovations in minority education have been
obtained at every level from early elementary school through
college. Unfortunately, it is frequently assumed, even by
educators, that such results are possible only for charismatic
individuals and that they cannot be duplicated by normal people in
normal school systems.

Richard E. Nisbett

Dear Mr. President,

American scientific success, as measured for example by the number of
Nobel Prize winners who live in the United States, helps to sustain an
illusion that the American educational system is fundamentally
healthy. This illusion is further aided by the fact that American
higher education is rightly the envy of the world. And it is helped
along by the fact that most Americans believe that, though there may
be serious problems with most U.S. schools, the ones their children go
to are an exception. (This is a variant of the same phenomenon that
gets people re-elected to Congress: the public has a low opinion of
the Congress in general, but people tend to regard their own
Representative as an exception.)

You are well aware that math and science education at the secondary
and elementary level is substandard in comparison to most of the rest
of the developed world. And education at those levels too often fails
across the boards to serve minority populations. You have commented on
these facts in public. But you sometimes speak as though we knew how
to improve education in all respects. The fact is that most of what we
know about education--when we know anything at all--is mostly at the
level of widely accepted anecdote rather than solid scientific
findings. Enough progress has been made in the last 30 years by
cognitive psychologists, as well as by developmental and social
psychologists, to allow for an avalanche of research on what is
effective in education if a serious national effort were to be made.

Generating support for a serious research program would likely be
impeded by pessimism on the part of the public. It is distressing how
many people assume that little can be done to improve
education--especially for minorities. But in fact we have a large
number of demonstrations that it is possible for minority students to
perform at levels well above the national average--the "Jaime
Escalante Effect." Beneficial results for innovations in minority
education have been obtained at every level from early elementary
school through college. Unfortunately, it is frequently assumed, even
by educators, that such results are possible only for charismatic
individuals and that they cannot be duplicated by normal people in
normal school systems.

Jaime Escalantes may in fact be rare, but there may be ways to help
minority children achieve high levels of educational success short of
providing each of them with an inspirational teacher. There are
already many hints about how to improve teaching of students in
general and there are some suggestions that not all students learn in
the same way. An example is tentative evidence that minority children
are particularly likely to benefit from interacting with computers as
opposed to traditional methods of reading books and listening to
lectures.

An all-out effort to find both the generalizations about what kinds of
education are good in general, and what kinds are most helpful for
minority children, would pay back many-fold. The obvious agency to
handle this is the Department of Education. You have directed the
Department to spend more money on basic research in education. Perhaps
that will be effective, despite the very poor record of the department
in spending money wisely for research. My recommendation, however, is
to establish a special bureau within the National Science Foundation
and avoid any situation where traditional educational researchers have
a veto over what kind of research gets funded.

Sincerely yours,

Richard E. Nisbett
Psychologist
University of Michigan
Author of The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think
Differently--And Why 
________________________________________________________________

One promising example of such legislation would be a program of
parental licensure requiring persons, wishing to birth and rear a
baby, to demonstrate at least what we should minimally require of
persons wishing to adopt someone else's baby.

David Lykken

Dear President Bush,

The rate of violent crime in the U.S. in 1993 was five times the rate
in 1960. In response to this epidemic, the number of inmates in U.S.
prisons began to rise rapidly in 1975 from some 200,000 to at least
1,400,000 today. Locking up seven times as many criminals produced a
recent (and temporary) dip in the crime rate but the latest statistics
show crime to be starting upwards yet again. Who are these violent
criminals? Where do they come from? Neither our state nor federal
prison systems normally collect the data required to answer these
questions.

Dr. Louis Sullivan, then Secretary of Health and Human Services,
reported in 1992 that 70% of juveniles in long-term correctional
facilities did not live with their biological father while growing up.
About 70% of teenage mothers, 72% of teenage runaways, 70% of
elementary school pupils with at least 22 unexcused absences per year,
were reared without fathers. In Minneapolis, 70% of 135 children
guilty of felonies ranging from arson to burglary and assault,
children 9 years old or younger, were found to be domiciled with
single mothers. There is strong reason to suspect that our crime
problem, involving perpetrators both black and white, is an inevitable
consequence of a growing and self-reproducing underclass consisting of
the unsocialized offspring of single-mothers who were immature,
over-burdened, and/or unsocialized themselves.

A research project to collect accurate, detailed information about the
psychological and demographic characteristics of all American
adjudicated felons, adult and juvenile, contrasted with a non-criminal
control group matched for age, race, and gender, would reveal whether
I am right in predicting that the great majority of current prison
inmates would have become law-abiding neighbors and citizens had they
gone home from the obstetrical hospital with a mature,
self-supporting, socialized mother and father. The definite
confirmation of that hypothesis would encourage state and federal
legislators to give serious consideration to, and at least local
experimentation with, legislation designed to inhibit further growth
of the underclass and to preserve the right of all American children
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

One promising example of such legislation would be a program of
parental licensure requiring persons, wishing to birth and rear a
baby, to demonstrate at least what we should minimally require of
persons wishing to adopt someone else's baby. These minimum
requirements, for undertaking one of the most important and most
demanding of human responsibilities, would include a mature married
couple, who are self-supporting, not incapacitated by mental or
physical disease, and without a prior conviction for a violent crime.
Family-court judges would be empowered to grant exceptions to these
simple requirements in special cases (e.g., to socially responsible
gay or lesbian couples). Babies born to unlicensed parents would be
placed for permanent adoption.

I believe that a well-designed, large-scale research program would
produce results that would motivate public demand for legislative
action. I think that this demand would come both from citizens who
fear crime and its heavy price tag and also from citizens who feel a
responsibility for those millions of once-innocent children whose
fatherless rearing has deprived them of a reasonable chance to grow up
as socialized citizens and neighbors.

David T. Lykken, PhD.
Emeritus Professor of Psychology
University of Minnesota
Author of Happiness: What Studies on Twins Show Us about Nature,
Nurture, and the Happiness Set Point. 
________________________________________________________________

Human beings have thrived because, more than any other creature, we
are naturally driven to learn about the world around us. Our
greatest scientists and most creative companies regularly borrow
the best practices of mothers and preschool teachers. Give all our
scientists, old and young, lunch, the right toys, a safe place to
play, interesting problems to solve, and someone to talk to, and
watch them fly.

Alison Gopnik

Dear President Bush,

Like many of your other prospective science advisors I would like to
urge you to provide more support for basic scientific research. But I
would especially urge more support for the most productive, and most
underfunded, scientific community in the country. This group of
scientists and science educators do more to provide the basic
intellectual infrastructure of the nation than any other. Every year
they make fundamental discoveries in physics, biology, mathematics,
and psychology, as well as ensuring that the discoveries of previous
generations of scientists are transmitted to the scientists of the
future. Yet they typically receive salaries somewhere between zero and
$15,000.00 a year, and 20% are below the poverty line. Most of the
science educators in this group actually make major financial
sacrifices to do their fundamentally important work. They receive less
federal and state support than any other part of the scientific
community, no grants, no scholarships, no R and D write-offs, less
even than public elementary schools or community colleges. In fact,
both your administration and the preceding one have actually cut the
small amount of funding that was once earmarked for this group. These
unsung geniuses, are, of course, children under five and the many
women (and a few men) who take care of them.

This may seem like a motherhood issue--well, actually, it is a
motherhood issue. But really valuing families and genuinely leaving no
child behind isn't just motherhood--its the soundest science policy
too. And don't please, waste all this scientific talent on meaningless
busy work by putting young children in junior versions of our
notoriously awful schools. America's science has always been most
successful where it is least constrained--we need blue sky research up
and down the line. In fact, blue sky research is our most fundamental
competitive advantage, not just as Americans but as Homo Sapiens, too.
Human beings have thrived because, more than any other creature, we
are naturally driven to learn about the world around us. Our greatest
scientists and most creative companies regularly borrow the best
practices of mothers and preschool teachers. Give all our scientists,
old and young, lunch, the right toys, a safe place to play,
interesting problems to solve, and someone to talk to, and watch them
fly.

Sincerely yours,
Alison Gopnik
Professor of Psychology
Coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us
About the Mind 
________________________________________________________________

To understand the nature of foreign markets, we must understand the
psychology of foreign cultures. This entails a search for human
universals and how these constrain cultural variation. To
illustrate, consider the problem of cooperation, and in particular,
how people judge fairness and respond to unfair play.

Marc D. Hauser

Dear President Bush,

I am delighted to hear that you are willing to consider my application
as a science advisor to your administration. In the current climate, I
can't think of a more important mission than to clarify how the
different branches of science can contribute to the overall health of
our nation. I would put it stronger: the health of our nation depends
on science. In this spirit, I would like to sketch a proposal for how
recent developments in the sciences of the mind directly impact on
government policies concerning economics, law, and health care.

1. Human nature, universality, and the economics of fairness

Our economy is currently in a vulnerable state of affairs. The stock
market oscillates unpredictably. Some portion of this oscillation is
driven by foreign markets. To understand the nature of foreign
markets, we must understand the psychology of foreign cultures. This
entails a search for human universals and how these constrain cultural
variation. To illustrate, consider the problem of cooperation, and in
particular, how people judge fairness and respond to unfair play.

A standard test of resource distribution and maximization in
experimental economics is the Ultimatum Game. The standard game
entails one player making an offer to share some proportion of a pot
of money to another player. The game is played only once and the
identity of the other player is never revealed. Once the player making
an offer does so, the other player has a choice: accept the offer or
reject it. If the receiver accepts, then he or she keeps the
proportion offered and the player making the offer keeps the
remainder. If the offer is rejected, both players end the game with no
money at all. The intuition from economics, an intuition driven by the
view that people are generally selfish and wish to maximize personal
resources, is that the player offering should propose the smallest
amount acceptable to another player.

This makes good sense because from the receiver's perspective, some
money is better than no money, so all offers should be accepted. When
this game is played in developed nations such as the united States and
the UK, results indicate that the economist's intuition is wrong.
People typically make offers of about 50% of the pot and receivers
reject offers of 20% or less. Both moves are highly irrational if
resource maximization is the norm. It is clearly not the norm. In the
developed world, fairness drives both the offer and the acceptance,
and what appears to be fair is about a 50:50 split.

This was the standard textbook account until about 5 years ago. The
tide changed when a small group of economists decided to look into
cross cultural variation of resource maximization and distribution.
When people in small scale, non-industrial societies, play the
ultimatum game, there are two clear results. First, every human,
independent of cultural heritage, has a powerful sense of fairness.
Second, the local culture shifts what people consider fair and how
they respond to an unfair trade. For example, when the ultimatum game
is played in some cultures, there are modal offers of only 15% while
in other cultures the offers are as high as 50% but the rejection
rates are almost equally high. These results show that the human mind
has evolved a powerful sense of fairness, a capacity that is part of
the brain's unique endowment. What culture does, constrained by
biology, is change what constitutes a fair exchange. Other studies in
experimental economics have begun to reveal how public goods can be
protected against cheaters. Once again, pure economics fails where an
integration of economics, biology, and psychology pays off handsomely.
Public goods are vulnerable to cheaters because the payoffs are higher
if others contribute in your stead. To guard against defection,
economists working in an evolutionary psychology framework have shown
that two factors maintain public goods: information on reputation
(what participants contribute) and the capacity to punish those who
cheat. Again, these factors are cross-culturally important and stable,
revealing universal properties of the mind that persist in the face of
changes in the environment, including the emergence of civilization,
formal governments, universities and so forth.

This view of cooperation and fairness shows striking parallels with
other systems of knowing, including language and mathematics. Although
each of these systems show cross-cultural variation, each is
constrained by machinery in the brain that is present in all humans,
independent of culture. The implications of this perspective, and
these particular findings in anthropological economics, are profound.
Given our nation's interest in and commitment to international trade,
we would be well advised to take seriously both the facts concerning
human universals in decision making as well as the power of
cross-cultural differences to tweak the perception of fairness. We are
more likely to develop productive programs for economic development by
understanding those parts that unify all humans and those parts that
make us different. Our government must not only incorporate such
findings, but seriously consider the integration of scientists working
in these areas with government officials attempting to launch
international aid programs.

2. The brains underlying control and its loss

Each year, our government spends millions, if not billions of dollars
on problems concerning violence, drug abuse, gambling, smoking, and
eating disorders. Although these problems appear different on the
surface, they reflect a common underlying theme: overcoming temptation
in the face of weak systems of control. Over the last decade, studies
in cognitive neuroscience and genetics have begun to pinpoint areas in
the brain that are involved in reward, conflict monitoring, and
control, as well as gene sequences that may put some people at greater
risk than others with respect to overcoming problems of control. To
illustrate the importance of these findings for the health of our
nation, consider the following frightening fact: the best predictor,
internationally, of the level of violence within a nation is the
proportion of young men in the population. Men are more violent than
women in all cultures. Although cultures can shift the level of
violence, the sex difference remains. Men are more heavily involved in
risk taking. We now know that a significant correlate of violence in
humans, both men and women, is the level of circulating serotonin--a
key neurochemical in the brain. When serotonin levels are low, the
level of control is lower; low serotonin levels are associated with
greater impulsivity, more risk taking. We are only beginning to
understand what determines and changes levels of serotonin in the
brain. One thing is certain: the key lies in understanding what
happens in development. A recent study illustrates this point, and
shows why science must interface with policy. Genetic analyses have
revealed that a particular form of one gene causes differential
expression of an enzyme. This enzyme plays a critical role in the
production of serotonin. In a study of several hundred young boys,
results revealed that when this gene produces a low level of the
target enzyme, such children are far more vulnerable to physical abuse
by parents than in children with a high level of the enzyme. In
particular, boys who were targets of severe parental aggression were
much more likely to shows signs of antisocial personality disorder if
the level of the enzyme was low than if it was high. Parental
aggression should not be tolerated under any circumstance. But what
this study reveals is that we are not equally vulnerable to
aggression. As our understanding of genetics and neuroscience
increase, we will be able to use this information to better plan
programs for intervention. Ultimately, this interplay between
molecular genetics and neurobiology on the one hand, and social work
on the other hand, should lead to a reduction in overall levels of
violence as we can perhaps begin to target the source in development
as opposed to the consequences in adulthood.

In closing, I believe that our government is ideally poised to bring
science more fully into issues of policy. The rapid explosion of
knowledge in the sciences must not sit idly in the libraries of
universities, but should make its way into building a healthier
nation. As President, you have the opportunity to lead this
initiative.

Sincerely yours,

Marc D. Hauser
Professor of Psychology
Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
Harvard University
________________________________________________________________

The first and most important issue at the edge is the biology
underlying conscious experience, particularly the biology of
self-awareness: How do you study it? Where is it located in the
brain? How does it develop over time?

Eric R. Kandel

The issues at the edge of neuroscience are clear.

The first and most important issue at the edge is the biology
underlying conscious experience, particularly the biology of
self-awareness: How do you study it? Where is it located in the brain?
How does it develop over time?

A second problem is how is memory perpetuated to last the lifetime of
an individual.

A third problem is the future of stem cell biology in the brain. To
what degree will we be able to replace cells in the nervous system
that die with stem cells that take on similar properties?

Sincerely yours,

Eric R. Kandel, MD
Nobel Laureate
University Professor, Columbia University, Center for Neurobiology &
Behavior
Senior Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
________________________________________________________________

Advanced nanotechnologies, based on molecular manufacturing, will
enable the production of computer systems a billion times more
powerful than today's, aerospace vehicles with 98% less structural
mass, and medical tools enabling molecular repair of cells,
tissues, and organs. These and related technologies will be
economically and strategically decisive.

K. Eric Drexler

Dear Mr. President:

I must respectfully decline your invitation, as I am unsuited to such
a role, but I wish to take this opportunity to offer a potentially
crucial piece of advice regarding strategic research directions.

The United States, like all the leading technological powers, has
recently turned its research efforts toward a broad field called
"nanotechnology". I introduced this term in the mid-1980s and
described long-term prospects that helped motivate the recent
explosion of interest and investment. Advanced nanotechnologies, based
on molecular manufacturing, will enable the production of computer
systems a billion times more powerful than today's, aerospace vehicles
with 98% less structural mass, and medical tools enabling molecular
repair of cells, tissues, and organs. These and related technologies
will be economically and strategically decisive.

Molecular manufacturing will be based on molecular machine systems
able to manipulate and assemble molecular components to make larger
products. If you look in a conventional factory today, you will see
electronic devices sensing and controlling processes, but the actual
work--shaping, moving, and assembling parts--is done by machines that,
quite naturally, use moving parts to move parts.

Research programs today are poorly focused on developing the molecular
machine technologies essential to the strategic objective of molecular
manufacturing. Researchers, steeped in late-20th-century culture,
often see machinery as somehow archaic, left over from the 19th
century, rather than recognizing it as the necessary foundation of
technologies past, present, and future. The broad field of
nanotechnology embraces a host of topics related to more fashionable
academic topics, such as biotechnology, materials, and
microelectronics. Interest in these topics has diverted resources into
short-term efforts that are well worth doing--but not at the expense
of neglecting core technologies essential to the long-term promise of
nanotechnology.

The issues here are broad and basic enough that policy makers need not
defer to the judgment of narrow technical experts: Advanced
nanotechnologies will be based on molecular manufacturing, which, like
all manufacturing, will require systems of machines with moving parts.
Accordingly, the development of molecular machine systems must be a
central priority of the ongoing National Nanotechnology Initiative.

K. Eric Drexler
Chairman, Foresight Institute
Author of Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and
Computation; Unbounding the Future; and Engines of Creation. 
________________________________________________________________

The most critical science policy decisions that face you can all be
reduced to a three words: education, education, education.

James J. O'Donnell 
Mr. President,

The most critical science policy decisions that face you can all be
reduced to a three words: education, education, education.

In 1957, I was a little kid growing up at White Sands Proving Ground
in New Mexico, Werner Von Braun's first American test site. I well
remember the news stories in the paper on Saturday, October 5, when
Sputnik went up, and well remember the flood of money that came to our
missile base and to educational institutions everywhere in the months
that followed. Three of my classmates and I got our pictures in
newspapers all over the country posing thoughtfully with models of
missiles because we--growing up at White Sands--were supposed to be
the hope of the next generation. (Me, I decided a few years later that
rocket science was what middle aged guys in suits did, so to be truly
rebellious I went off to study Greek and Latin, but another few years
later I wound up as CIO of a great university, so the education money
wasn't all mis-spent.)

American science in the near half-century since has done wonderful
things--but we train fewer scientists every year, we can't fill
secondary school classrooms with trained science teachers, we cannot
support the building of research facilities in our universities, and
the mass media and the houses of congress are full of scientific
illiterates. Scientific research will not fix all humankind's
problems--but so far it has made us healthier, better fed, more
prosperous, and better able to achieve the potential of human
intelligence and human society than my grandfather's generation could
have imagined.

But we will go nowhere near where we need to go without the smart,
trained people to take us there. We must be as relentless in hunting
down that talent as we are in pursuing terrorists, and as committed to
winning the hearts and minds on the American street to an
understanding of the power of science as we are to winning hearts and
minds on middle eastern streets. We can probably win wars, but to make
them worth winning, we must build a world that makes all humankind
thrive in ways that are only possible with that most rigorous
application of our most precious resource--human intelligence.

James J. O'Donnell
Professor of Classics
Provost
Georgetown University
Author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. 
________________________________________________________________

Science is a way of thinking that recognizes the need to test
hypotheses so that the process is not reduced to mere opinion
mongering, that the findings of such tests are provisional and
probabilistic, and that natural explanations are always sought for
natural phenomena.

Michael Shermer

Dear Mr. President:

We live in the age of science. The geometric growth in computing power
and internet communications is emblematic of the impact science has
had in all human endeavors. Science has made the world of today as
different from 1950, as 1950 was from 1500. Given that fact it is
jarring to encounter the results of the National Science Foundation's
biennial report on the state of science understanding, published last
April:

o 30% of Americans believe that UFOs are space vehicles from other
civilizations
o 60% believe in ESP
o 40% think that astrology is scientific
o 32% believe in lucky numbers
o 70% accept magnetic therapy as scientific
o 88% agree that alternative medicine is a viable means of treating
illness

Education by itself is not a panacea. Although belief in ESP decreased
from 65% among high school graduates to 60% among college graduates,
and belief in magnetic therapy dropped from 71% among high school
graduates to 55% among college graduates, that still leaves over half
fully endorsing such claims! And for embracing alternative medicine,
the percentages actually increase, from 89% for high school grads to
92% for college grads.

Why do so many people, even smart people, believe so many weird
things? The problem is usually blamed on education, especially science
education. That is only part of the problem. People believe weird
things because they are taught what to think, not how to think.
Consider these additional statistics from the NSF report: 70% of
Americans still do not understand the scientific process, defined in
the study as grasping probability, the experimental method, and
hypothesis testing. One solution is more and better science education,
as indicated by the fact that 53% of Americans with a high level of
science education (nine or more high school and college science/math
courses) understand the scientific process, compared to 38% with a
middle level (six to eight such courses) science education, and 17%
with a low level (less than five such courses).

To address this serious problem we need to teach people that science
is not simply a database of unconnected factoids, but a set of methods
aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or
confirmation. Science is a way of thinking that recognizes the need to
test hypotheses so that the process is not reduced to mere opinion
mongering, that the findings of such tests are provisional and
probabilistic, and that natural explanations are always sought for
natural phenomena.

Lacking a fundamental comprehension of how science works, the siren
song of pseudoscience becomes too alluring to resist, no matter how
smart you are. So my recommendation, Mr. Bush, is that since your
father was the "education President" you become the "science education
President." Not just any science education, but science education that
teaches students how to think; and not just how to think about weird
things, but how to think about, challenge, and be skeptical of all
things, including and especially political, economic, and social
issues.

Science is the greatest tool ever devised to understand the cause of
things. It is, therefore, our greatest hope for a viable future. Ad
astra!

Michael Shermer
Editor-in-Chief, Skeptic magazine
Monthly Columnist, Scientific American 
Author of In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel
Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History. 
________________________________________________________________

My proposal: surface the hidden links between what we buy and the
consequential impacts of those products. Then let consumers make
choices based on this new information--in a sense,"voting" every
time we purchase goods--and let the power of the free market,
rather than government policy alone, become a force for
improvement.

Daniel Goleman

Mr. President:

One large set of pressing problems our nation and the world
face--ranging from growing rates of childhood asthma to global
warming--stem in large part from a shared root cause: the cumulative
impacts of our habits of consumption. The asthma and global warming,
for example, both stem largely from the build-up in the air of
particulates from the production (through, say, coal-burning power
plants) of the energy we use in our homes and the exhaust of autos.
Yet most of us make little or no connection between our own buying
habits and concerns like our children's asthma or the warming of the
planet.

The reason: Virtually none of us can give a precise answer to the
question,"What are the impacts for health, the environment, our
planet's resources, the gap between rich and poor, of the products we
buy? The answers are potentially available, but now are hidden by a
fog about the consequences for ourselves and the world of our own
actions as consumers.

Yet the multiplier effect--the vast number of people who buy those
same products--creates a vast network of inadvertent, adverse
consequences. This goes on because we have little or no information
about the hidden links between what we buy, and how it impacts our
world, our health, our climate, our children. So those of us who
complain about or suffer from these problems still continue to be part
of their very cause.

My proposal: surface the hidden links between what we buy and the
consequential impacts of those products. Then let consumers make
choices based on this new information--in a sense,"voting" every time
we purchase goods--and let the power of the free market, rather than
government policy alone, become a force for improvement.

So, Mr. President, I urge you to deploy the forces necessary to fill
in the hidden links between the goods we consume and their impact in
the world. Then create a website that consumers could access at the
point of purchase--perhaps by passing a palm pilot-like device over
the barcode to get to the product-relevant area of the website.

That website should provide immediate data comparing a product to
others in its category on any of several dimensions, such as working
conditions in factories where components or the product was
manufactured; wages (weighted for national norms, etc.); how much
energy was used in producing and transporting the product to market;
impact on the environment of its production (this alone involves
multiple factors, from industrial byproducts like heavy metals and
other toxins, to polluting micro-particles); and so on.

Ideally, consumers could determine which of such dimensions were most
important in their personal decision to purchase, and so have a
built-in logarithm that would pop out the best choices as they wander
down the aisles of a store.

As we've seen in the diamond industry--with the industry wide effort
to certify the source of diamonds to keep from market "blood" diamonds
that finance corrupt regimes and civil wars in Africa--consumer
preferences can become forces for social, political, environmental and
economic good. But this can only be only true if consumers become
aware of links that are now hidden.

Such transparency could alter the buying habits of substantial numbers
of consumers, and so create a new marketing advantage for some
companies. Ethically driven (or simply nimble) companies could find
market advantage in becoming the"good guys" in their category, and so
gain market share. This could then open up an entirely new arena for
competition between companies, creating a financial incentive to find
ways to improve the environmental; health, and other consequences of
everything from their manufacturing processes to their wage
structures.

Of course, gathering the required data poses a formidable task. It can
begin modestly, focusing on the easier dimensions of information. But
ultimately filling in the missing links could require a Manhattan
Project-like intensity of research, that would draw on findings from
fields as diverse as industrial engineering and sociology,
environmental sciences and economics, biochemistry and systems theory.
It might also require the creation of an impartial body to gather and
vet the data--something like a mega-Consumer Reports. Perhaps a new
cabinet post for transparency, Mr. President?

Daniel Goleman
Psychologist
Author of the international bestsellers, Emotional Intelligence;
Working with Emotional Intelligence; (with Boyatzis & McKee) Primal
Leadership. 
________________________________________________________________

The making of scientific information understandable means
presenting, designing & structuring this information so that it is
accessible, available and actionable. Constructive science is based
upon accessibility, understandability, an informed constituency and
finally action.

Richard Saul Wurman

The role of the secretary of science.
At the beginning, there is always understanding.

In order to act on all issues scientific and otherwise with
constructive progress and the discovery of solutions, data,
information and ideas need to be put in an understandable form.

Public information about science should be made public.

Public information refers to everything that creates an informed
citizen. Public means everything that we as a society agree should be
available to the body politic.

The making of scientific information understandable means presenting,
designing & structuring this information so that it is accessible,
available and actionable. Constructive science is based upon
accessibility, understandability, an informed constituency and finally
action.

Richard Saul Wurman
TEDMed Conferences
Architect, cartographer, creator of the Access Travel Guide Series
Author and designer of Information Architects;Follow the Yellow Brick
Road; and Information Anxiety.
________________________________________________________________

As your new scientific advisor, I would like to draw your attention
to an important and perhaps surprising fact. The citizens of your
country are not just flesh and blood. They are, increasingly,
flesh, blood, and machine. Let me explain why, and then why it
matters.

Andy Clark

Mr President,

As your new scientific advisor, I would like to draw your attention to
an important and perhaps surprising fact. The citizens of your country
are not just flesh and blood. They are, increasingly, flesh, blood,
and machine. Let me explain why, and then why it matters.

While the biological bodies of our fellow citizens remain (temporarily
at least) much as they ever were, their minds are more and more the
minds of hybrid beings. As thinking beings, as persons, they are
constituted not just by the blood and guts contents of their ancient
biological skinbags, but also by vastly transformative webs of social
and technological structure.

To see what I mean, reflect that recent advances in genetics,
cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and
cross-cultural studies are helping to paint a much fuller picture of
the complex interplay between native skills and rich developmental
plasticity that makes us who and what we are. Part of this picture
involves native dispositions of various kinds. But another big part
involves a vast and distinctive shot of cortical plasticity. This
plasticity allows young (and older) human brains to factor surrounding
culture, tools and technologies deep into their problem-solving
practice. Brains like ours alter profoundly to fit the technologies
and practices that surround them.

And there is more. In the past, this process of fit was mainly
one-way. Human brains adapted to the devices that they had to work
with. But new technologies are changing this one-sided profile. Our
best devices now adapt to individual users according to patterns of
use. They provide for fast, fluent, painless information retrieval
that alters the tasks left to biological memory. They are mobile,
portable, robust. Lose one and you feel impaired, as if afflicted by
some transient neural trauma. The simple cell phone, with its
ever-expanding range of functions, will probably one day be seen as
the key transition technology that led humankind into a new hybrid
age.

The level of productive debate and co-operation between the humanities
and the sciences of the mind is also rising daily. At this critical
historical moment, America can lead the world by taking the quality of
human life seriously, and by devoting its impressive resources not to
hopeless and misguided causes but to helping all its citizens lead
full and rewarding lives. That means spending money on the kinds of
education, training and research that will help us to understand
ourselves as we are today, and to build better hybrid minds tomorrow.
Such a project requires understanding both our biological roots and
the socio-technological matrixes that take those roots and turn them
into the hybrid intelligent systems we recognize as persons.

This project, the project of tracking the interactions between biology
and the social and technological matrix itself, could be for the new
century what sequencing the human genome was to the last. Done
properly, it could mark a transformative moment in human history: the
moment we put war and aggression aside, and tried to build better
people by better understanding who and what we are.

Andy Clark
Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Cognitive Science Program
Indiana University, Bloomington
Author of five books including Microcognition and Being There: Putting
Brain, Body and World Together Again. 
________________________________________________________________

I recommend that you create a new governmental body, The National
Institute for the Scientific Study of Peace, to address by far the
most pressing issue of our time: the persistence of war as a means
of resolving disputes between nations.

John Horgan

The National Institute for the Scientific Study of Peace (NISSP)

Dear Mr. President:

The technologist Kevin Kelly has urged you to give more support to
long-term, blue-sky, globally relevant research. I could not agree
more. In that spirit, I recommend that you create a new governmental
body, The National Institute for the Scientific Study of Peace, to
address by far the most pressing issue of our time: the persistence of
war as a means of resolving disputes between nations.

Fields such as evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive
science are now providing new insights into the brain, emotions,
reasoning and the evolution of human nature. Findings from these
fields as well as from economics, game theory, anthropology, and
political science can help us to understand the causes of war and find
ways to reduce its occurrence. Thus far, however, the scientific
community has not given war-related questions the serious, sustained
attention that they deserve.

The National Institute for the Scientific Study of Peace (NISSP) would
redress that insufficiency. Its short-term goal would be to find more
effective means of resolving conflict in the world today, wherever it
might occur. The long-term goal would be to explore ideas on how
nations can make the transition toward permanent disarmament: the
elimination of armies, arms, and arms industries. Through its grants
and publications, NISSP would encourage ambitious young scientists to
see peace as a challenge at least as worthy of pursuit as a unified
theory of physics, a cure for cancer, or a cheap, clean, renewable
source of energy.

Just as a percentage of the budget for the Human Genome Project is
allocated to ethical issues, so part of the Defense Department's
budget could be allocated to NISSP. One tenth of one percent should be
sufficient. Some might argue that war is not a scientific issue.
Certainly it is a dauntingly complex one, with political, economic,
and social ramifications. But the same could be said of global warming
and population growth.

Scholars such as the Yale political scientist Bruce Russett have noted
that democracies rarely wage war against each other. We need more
rigorous investigations of correlations such as these, which can
identify ways to promote stability within and between nations. What is
the link between the risk of war and nations' political ideologies?
Trade and economic policies? Religious and ethnic diversity?
Population growth and poverty? Education and womens' rights? Freedom
of the press? Availability of energy, food, and other vital resources?

Darwinian theory is sometimes said to imply that conflict is inherent
in nature and hence inevitable in human affairs. This view assumes
that evolution is primarily what game theorists call a zero-sum game,
in which one organism's gain is off-set by another's loss. War is the
ultimate zero sum--or, more often, negative--sum game.

But as the journalist Robert Wright points out in his book Nonzero,
non-zero-sum processes such as symbiosis and cooperation also play
vital roles in evolution. The key to global peace and prosperity,
Wright argues, lies in fostering trade, communications, and other
mutually beneficial interactions between nations. (Nonzero has been
touted by your predecessor in the White House, but don't hold that
against it.)

Many scientists will dismiss total, global disarmament, which I
believe should be the ultimate goal of our strivings toward peace, as
hopelessly unrealistic. These skeptics will argue that at the very
least some trans-national organization should always retain a military
force, perhaps equipped with nuclear weapons, to deter or suppress
attacks from outlaw states or quasi-states, such as Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Certainly global disarmament seems a remote possibility now, but that
does not mean we should fatalistically accept armies and armaments,
including weapons of mass destruction, as permanent features of
civilization. Given the extraordinary advances our species has already
achieved in science, technology, medicine, and human rights, surely we
are intelligent enough to make not only war but even the threat of war
obsolete. The only question is how, and how soon

Yours truly,

John Horgan
Freelance science journalist (Scientific American, the New York Times,
the Washington Post, among others)
Author of The End of Science; The Undiscovered Mind; and Rational
Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality
(forthcoming).
________________________________________________________________

I'll bet you didn't take a single science course at Yale. Who
could blame you? I was a member of the Yale faculty for many years.
The science professors are preparing future scientists not future
Presidents. The nation suffers as a result.

Roger Schank

Dear President Bush:

One thing a science advisor should do is attempt to define science.
The last definition we had was in 1892 when Charles Eliot, the
President of Harvard, led a committee that decided upon the high
school curriculum that is still in place today. They defined science
as biology, chemistry, and physics (in that order.) These just
happened to be the science departments at Harvard in 1892. They
defined mathematics as algebra, geometry and trigonometry (-- same
reason.) But a few things have happened since 1892.

One thing that has happened is that there are new and different
science departments at Harvard (and elsewhere.) Another thing that has
happened is that nearly everyone goes to high school and half of those
kids go on to college. In 1892 those who went to high school (and on
to Harvard which probably what President Eliot was worried about) were
preparing to become teachers, professors, ministers and statesmen.
They were not preparing the bulk of the population to live.

One of your illustrious predecessors, John Adams--he was the father of
another President of the same name, a confusion that I am sure you
identify with--said that education was about only two things: how to
make a living and how to live. Unfortunately our current school system
does neither.

Science is a good example. Should people learn science?

I have recently become the academic dean at Grandview Prep in Florida.
I am trying to build a realistic high school curriculum there. I will
tell you a story that will help you understand my problem:

I helped build an on line physics course for Columbia, so I installed
it in the curriculum at Grandview. There were immediate objections
that it would be too hard. (It is a college level course, but actually
it is intended to replace "Physics for Poets" at Columbia so it isn't
that hard.) Nevertheless it was decided that the good students at
Grandview could take this course but the bad students would have to
take regular physics. (I thought this bizarre but went along.)

So, I asked the physics teacher what he taught in regular physics. The
first thing he mentioned was Ohm's Law. Apparently, the bad kids could
understand Ohm's Law but not space travel (which is the basis of the
Columbia course.)

Now, I don't know about you President Bush, but Ohm's Law simply fails
to come up in my life. And, while we are discussing things that come
up in one's life, when was the last time you used the quadratic
formula? Your father said every graduating senior would know the
Pythagorean Theorem by the time his Presidency was finished (I suppose
he was counting on another term eh?) I have it on good authority (from
your brother Neil) that no adult member of the Bush family knows the
Pythagorean theorem, you or dad included. I suppose you never needed
it. (Neither did hardly anyone else.)

Our problems in science and in education come from our view that
education is about preparing for Harvard in 1892 and not for life in
2003. So, as your science advisor I would propose three things:

o 1) Begin to help change our education policy to create students
who prepare for the real world they will inhabit by learning how to
wire their houses instead of quoting Ohm's law or how and when to
refinance their house rather than learning Euclidean Geometry. I
would create more curricula in science and other subjects that
emphasized everyday reasoning issues like the use of stem cells or
waste cleanup or snow removal or alternative energy sources. Why
can't science be about real issues in real people's lives? I'll bet
you didn't take a single science course at Yale. Who could blame
you? I was a member of the Yale faculty for many years. The science
professors are preparing future scientists not future Presidents.
The nation suffers as a result.

o 2) We must call for a new curriculum meeting to replace the 1892
curriculum and to reinvent the schools. Stop going on about test
scores and making sure every kid studies the same stuff and build
hundreds of new curricula and let students choose. We need to teach
people how to think not how to memorize information.

o 3) We must consider education (and science) as our most likely
product for export. The world needs education more than it needs
food. This is the best way to counter terrorism in the long run. We
have the best and brightest in this country because a lot of our
education system isn't broken. (We have great universities and
superb Ph.D. programs for example.) Let's start considering how we
export these great educational products with the intent not of
taking others country's best minds and making them US citizens, but
with the idea that if they cant read in Pakistan this can cause us
a great many problems down the road. On line learning is the answer
because it is easy to export. Why haven't we spent money on
creating high quality on line literacy programs and science
reasoning programs that would make the export of education a real
possibility? Instead of spending money on making better tests why
not spend money on better curricula?

The time has come to make science more accessible and education in it
and other subjects more relevant.

Sincerely,

Roger C. Schank
Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science
Chief Education Officer
Carnegie Mellon West
Founder of the Institute for the Learning Sciences, Northwestern
University
Author of Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane; Coloring Outside the Lines
(Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking all the Rules), Engines for
Education 
________________________________________________________________

The new National Institute for Humanism would be a mechanism to
formally foster and encourage collaborations across the arts,
humanities, and sciences, create synergy and cross-fertilization of
ideas, uniting thinkers from different viewpoints and disciplines
in tackling important questions about who and what we are.

Nancy Etcoff

Mr. President,

I would recommend the creation of a new institute--The National
Institute for Humanism--that would fund research and programs that
address pressing national problems in a radically new way, by ignoring
traditional dividing lines and disciplines. The Institute would create
a mechanism to bridge the worlds of the arts and sciences, worlds that
have often acted unheeding of the other, or worse, mistrustful or
hostile to one another and in competition for the intellectual center.

As John Brockman has written "Around the fifteenth century, the word
'humanism' was tied in with the idea of one intellectual whole. A
Florentine nobleman knew that to read Dante but ignore science was
ridiculous. Leonardo was a great artist, a great scientist, a great
technologist."

Art and science both address the most profound issues of the day yet
often face each other across a great divide. The new National
Institute for Humanism would be a mechanism to formally foster and
encourage collaborations across the arts, humanities, and sciences,
create synergy and cross-fertilization of ideas, uniting thinkers from
different viewpoints and disciplines in tackling important questions
about who and what we are. Call it the intellectual equivalent of
globalization.

Milan Kundera once wrote that every novel offers some answer to the
question. "What is human existence and wherein does it poetry lie?" I
would submit, so does every work of important science.

Nancy Etcoff PhD
Faculty, Harvard Medical School/Harvard Mind Brain Behavior Initiative
Clinical Associate in Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital
Author of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, and the
forthcoming, Hooked on a Feeling: The Limits and Worth of Happiness 
________________________________________________________________

...it is essential to realize that behind the many pressing
scientific issues facing our Nation today, one stands out far among
the rest: The persistent decline for several years in the past, and
into the foreseeable future, of the very health of the
scientific/technological workforce of America.

Gerald Holton

No one can dispute any longer that when a Nation's science and
technology weaken, the Nation itself is in danger--economically,
militarily, intellectually, and in terms of its image and power as a
world leader. Therefore it is essential to realize that behind the
many pressing scientific issues facing our Nation today, one stands
out far among the rest: The persistent decline for several years in
the past, and into the foreseeable future, of the very health of the
scientific/technological workforce of America. This decline--which, if
not reversed, may well turn out to be the Achilles Heel in the battle
for maintaining the historic high standing of American science and
technology-- has several indicators. I will here confine myself to
two:

1) As the non-partisan Government-University-Industry Research
Roundtable determined by consensus a few days ago, the number and
quality of American S&E workers is dropping precipitously--with over
50 percent of federal S&E workers expected to retire within the next
ten years, with U.S. production of scientists decreasing since the
1990s (in part because of the long-term decline, in real $ and as a
fraction of GDP, in federal funding for true research, except for
biology). As the American Physical Society Science News of December
2002 stresses, "Overall, the number of PhD students in science and
engineering is at a 50-year low, and there is little sign of a
turn-about." To make up for the low enrollment of U.S. citizens, that
of "foreign students, in particular, ballooned in the '80s and '90s,"
and continues to do so--with many major university science departments
now having half or more of their graduate students recruited from
foreign countries--students which in large numbers return to their
home countries after graduation.

2) Not unrelated to the first point is--with few great exceptions--the
deplorable state of science/technology/mathematics knowledge and
teaching in K-12 classes, and even in U.S. colleges, where now only
about 30% of them require even one hour of science instruction for
graduation. In April 1983, just twenty years ago, the National
Commission on Excellence in Education published its unanimous report
on American schools, titled "A Nation at Risk." Its five main
recommendations were endorsed, in several public addresses, by
President Reagan. To a small degree, these recommendations, and others
like them, were adopted by some Governors and schools. But in fact the
performance, on average, of America's students is still painfully
poor, not only in science and not only with respect to international
comparisons with students in other main industrial nations. The Nation
is still at risk.

In the days after Sputnik, the nation's leadership aroused our
population to make major investments, in both scientific research and
science education. The time has come for analogous acts of national
leadership, on both points, and along the whole "pipeline," from early
schooling to the most advanced research labs. For example: With nearly
2 million new school teachers expected to be needed in the next 10
years, and many existing ones in positions still far below what a true
professional would deserve, a large-scale (perhaps State-centered) set
of Academic Year (or Summer) Institutes is needed to bring science
teachers up to speed, and to be ready to help the more educated pupils
reach the next levels. And, at the other end, talented Americans need
to be brought back in sufficient numbers into the U.S. research labs,
many of which are now demoralized by having to fight again and again
in the face of refusals of funding for their admittedly meritorious
projects.

I conclude by expressing my willingness to collaborate with others
interested in these (here much abbreviated) observations and
recommendations. Just as President Eisenhower invented, and
brilliantly used, a wide, non-partisan circle of science advisers to
deal with key aspects of the international challenges confronting
America at that time, so has history brought our current leadership to
an analogous moment. And history will judge the success or failure to
seize that moment.

Gerald Holton
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of
Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University
Author of Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought; Science and
Anti-Science; and Einstein, History, and Other Passions. 
________________________________________________________________

Maybe you should look for a science advisor in some other field ...
um, botany? No, too controversial. Dermatology?

Judith Rich Harris

Dear President Bush:

I respectfully decline your invitation to compete for the job of
science adviser. I just don't think we could work together
successfully. For one thing, you're a morning type and a jogger, and
I'm not. For another, I somehow don't think we have compatible views
of what science is and how it works.

You're an upbeat sort of guy, and would no doubt expect your science
advisor to bring you lots of good news about how science is going to
solve all the world's problems. But to tell the truth, I'm a little
discouraged right now about science's ability to solve all the world's
problems.

You see, in my view the source of the world's problems is people. It's
people who make wars, commit crimes, mess up the environment, spend
too much, spend too little, whatever. So in order to solve the world's
problems, we need to understand people. The science of understanding
people is called "psychology." But psychology isn't taken seriously,
because most folks think they already understand people--who needs
science?

What's worse, this attitude is common not just among non-experts like
(begging your pardon) yourself: it's common even among psychologists.
They all have their own pet theories of what makes people tick, and if
the evidence doesn't happen to agree with their theories--well, to
hell with the evidence.

Do you see the dilemma? We need a science of human behavior--a science
of the human mind--that would tell us (among other things) why people
won't believe the evidence that science produces. But if such a
science produced interesting and novel results, nobody would believe
them! So what's the point?

Maybe you should look for a science advisor in some other field ...
um, botany? No, too controversial. Dermatology?

Thanks anyway, and good luck!

Judith Rich Harris
Psychologist
Author, The Nurture Assumption, and the forthcoming Why Are Siblings
So Different? 
________________________________________________________________

Accelerating the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere by
profligate use of Iraq's vast oil supplies, together with the
continuing deforestation of the Amazon, will not only turn the
Amazon basin into a parched desert but plunge the entire mid-West
into prolonged drought, resulting in famine in your own land.
History would then judge you as an apocalyptic Burning Bush,
bringing the scourge of parching fire to your country and its
people.

Brian Goodwin

Dear Mr Bush,

I am pleased to have this opportunity of sharing with you some of the
insights from science that are relevant to the situation you face at
home and abroad. Let me start by reminding you of something you
learned at school that holds the key to your own and everyone else's
future. It's a chemical process that looks like this : 2H2 + O2 ->
2H2O + energy.

Remember? Hydrogen burns with oxygen to produce water and energy.
Water and energy are the key to the future, as I'm sure you realise.

You learned from the oil business that whoever controls energy
controls the world. You are about to seize the billions of barrels of
liquid energy that lie beneath the sands and the coastal waters of
Iraq in order to secure the future for your country and gain control
of the uncertain politics of this fractious global village in which we
now live. However, this isn't a good policy and I want to persuade you
of a much better alternative.

Apart from the international political turmoil and increased terrorist
activity that this action will provoke, there are direct consequences
that will follow for the future of the US . Unrestricted access to all
that oil for US industry, with no effective Kyoto-type constraints
which you have refused to accept, will accelerate CO2 build-up in the
earth's atmosphere to a rate that guarantees a sudden failure of
rainfall over the bread basket of the American mid-West. We now know
from studies by your own scientists that it is the remarkable volume
of water transpired by trees in the Amazon basin that produces the
climatic conditions for rain to fall in Kansas and the mid-Western
states.

Accelerating the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere by profligate
use of Iraq's vast oil supplies, together with the continuing
deforestation of the Amazon, will not only turn the Amazon basin into
a parched desert but plunge the entire mid-West into prolonged
drought, resulting in famine in your own land. History would then
judge you as an apocalyptic Burning Bush, bringing the scourge of
parching fire to your country and its people.

The alternative that science provides for you comes through the
blessing of water. The little formula that I reminded you of contains
all the answers. You start with water and end with water, pure and
unpolluting. Use the sun's energy via solar panels, wind, wave and
hydroelectric power to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then
use the hydrogen to drive industry, cars and other means of transport.
The science and technology is all there, and the countries that
develop this industrial potential will lead the recovery from the
recession that is now deepening.

As we undertake this technological and economic transformation, we
will need to make other major adjustments to our world-view. However,
just as science has shown how to become sustainable in energy use, it
is providing the vision needed to follow ecological principles,
resulting in no waste or pollution in industrial production,
consistent with the principles of the hydrogen economy. And, most
important of all, there is a shift occurring both in sc silence and in
society that is taking us from preoccupation with quantities of goods
to concern about quality of life.

We have learned through science and technology how to turn the
bountiful resources of the earth into vast quantities of goods, enough
to provide for all if we share. However, in the process we have lost
sight of the qualities on which our lives depend, which make them
worthwhile and meaningful : health and well-being, relationships,
community living, sharing, caring for the planet and all of its
inhabitants, human and non human alike.

We have tried to substitute quantities for qualities and found that
this produces poverty in the quality of our relationships, in the
meaning and value of our lives. Science is now expanding so that
qualities of persons, communities, cultures, ecosystems, landscapes,
farms and animals, the Amazon, the planet , are primary, with a focus
on health, creativity and meaning. A science of qualities is now
developing in response to the recognised limitations of our science of
quantities, to refocus our attention on the qualities and values of
life. It's the path into the future. Why not take it? Then you'll go
down in history not as Burning Bush but as Bush the Bringer of
Universal Sustainability through Hydrogen.

Prof Brian Goodwin
Schumacher College
Dartington, Totnes, Devon, UK
Author of How The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of
Complexity; (with Richard Sole) Signs if Life: How Complexity Pervades
Biology 
________________________________________________________________

The best way to deal with this particular problem [deep level of
ignorance of science], which impedes the solution of most other
scientific problems, is to provide an annual bonus on top of their
salary to new science teachers of $100,000 a year, and put
applicants through a rigorous selection process based on a
combination of knowledge, skill and passion for the subject,
combined with superb pupil handling ability.

Karl Sabbagh

Dear Mr President,

The most pressing scientific issue facing the nation and the world is
the deep level of ignorance of science that exists among the vast
majority of the world's population, civilized as well as uncivilized.
This is manifest in two ways: 1. Lack of knowledge of even basic
scientific discoveries about the world; and 2. Lack of appreciation of
the effectiveness of scientific reasoning at arriving at the truth:
what Eugene Wigner, one of the last century's leading scientists,
called "the unreasonable effectiveness of science".

This appreciation is necessary not only to remove current obstacles to
the advances of science; it also needs to infiltrate people's everyday
lives so that their daily decisions about how to live are based less
on fantasy and irrationality and more on facts and logic.

Until this ignorance is corrected, the whole of the scientific
enterprise will be continually hampered by its failure to convince an
uncomprehending legislature and electorate to provide suitable funding
for science, and to exploit to the maximum its discoveries. The best
way to deal with this particular problem, which impedes the solution
of most other scientific problems, is to provide an annual bonus on
top of their salary to new science teachers of $100,000 a year, and
put applicants through a rigorous selection process based on a
combination of knowledge, skill and passion for the subject, combined
with superb pupil handling ability.

There are about 3 million teaching posts in the USA. If, say, a
quarter are to teach math and science, that means finding $75 billion
a year. It sounds a lot, but it's actually $5 per person per week.
It's estimated that global warming could cost the world $300 billion a
year, and America a sizeable proportion of that amount. Good science
could deal with that problem and pay for itself. Or take something
more banal. In the US people spend almost $75 billion dollars a year
on nutritional supplements. If people understood science better, most
if not all of that money would be saved, either by eating a better
diet or by not buying junk medicines. In one generation the problem
will be solved, and during that generation, as a new breed of
scientists enters the universities and research institutes, the whole
of science will begin to benefit.

A less obvious issue is the deteriorating nature of man-machine
interfaces as technology becomes more complex. This is not just a
matter of better design of control panels and remote controls-it needs
a more fundamental innovation where the intention of the any user is
immediately translated into the actions of the device.

Karl Sabbagh
Public communicator in science
Author of A Rum Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud; The Riemann
Hypothesis: The Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics 
________________________________________________________________

We are entering an era of scientific change that is rocking no less
than human nature itself. This directed evolution is unprecedented.
It is convulsing everything from the affairs of state, to defense,
to commerce, to labor, to education, to health, to welfare, to the
economy. It is not science fiction. It has begun to occur and is
accelerating this decade. You need an advisor who can help you try
to ride this curve of change.

Joel Garreau

Mr. President:

We are entering an era of scientific change that is rocking no less
than human nature itself. This directed evolution is unprecedented. It
is convulsing everything from the affairs of state, to defense, to
commerce, to labor, to education, to health, to welfare, to the
economy. It is not science fiction. It has begun to occur and is
accelerating this decade. You need an advisor who can help you try to
ride this curve of change.

Human organization is always structured by the technology of the
time--"We shape our houses, then they shape us," as Churchill put it.
But culture moves more slowly than invention.

So in the '50s, for example, we may very well have been rocked by the
atomic bomb, television, mass-produced suburban housing, and all the
rest. Yet the '50s was the notoriously quiet Eisenhower decade. The
cultural upheaval of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll--enabled by The
Pill, synthetic psychedelics and the transistor--did not occur until
the '60s.

Similarly, the '90s saw the rise of a suite of technologies that are
fundamentally altering the underpinnings of our world. These are
genomics, robotics, information networking, and nanotechnology. Yet
the '90s was an astonishingly quiescent decade. The big news was
peace, prosperity, and Monica.

Only now are we beginning to sense a hinge in history, a time when the
earth is beginning to move beneath our feet. For only now is
technology augmenting and enhancing our very bodies and minds and
personalities.

This transformation of humanity demands leadership. It needs a guide
to what is being born. It will require someone with a road map and a
tout sheet and a cultural compass to the driving forces behind this
transformation, identifying opportunities. It needs a chief of state
who will provide a sense of intention. We can't live without this
transformation and we can't kill it. Trying to let it pass will only
turn our lives into a political and philosophical curiosity.

For all recorded history, humans have been trying to transcend human
nature: Think of Socratic reasoning, Buddhist enlightenment, Christian
sainthood, Cartesian logic or the Marxists' "New Man." Now such
transformation may actually be in reach because of technology. Is it a
good idea after all?

Little stands in the way of the transcendence of human nature
occurring in your lifetime 20 to 50 years from now. That's the one
thing on which everyone who looks at this compounding curve of change
agrees. You can get an argument about whether this is inevitable.
Biotech critic Francis Fukuyama proposes a broad program of government
intervention to preserve the human nature we've always known. Others
scoff, saying such efforts are like placing a rock in a stream. There
are more than enough labs run by brave souls in adventurous parts of
the world for events to just flow around any barriers.

You can also find disagreement about whether the biological revolution
or the computer revolution first will lead us to becoming trans-human.
Gregory Stock, director of the UCLA Program on Medicine, Technology
and Society, foresees widespread reworking of human biology via
genetic engineering that cannot be stopped by either governments or
religious groups. Others, like the much-honored computer pioneer Ray
Kurzweil, agree with Stock that the biogenetic changes will take
place, but believes that we also see profound integration of our
biological systems with non biological intelligence, enabling routine
integration of machines and the brain by 2030. As you know, Mr.
President, your Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has
already demonstrated remarkable progress on this front this year.

What none of these scientists dispute is the notion that as
exponential technological change continues to accelerate into the
first half of the 21st century, "it will appear to explode into
infinity, at least from the limited and linear perspective of
contemporary humans," as Kurzweil puts it. This will result in
"technological change so rapid and profound that it represents a
rupture in the fabric of human history."

The towering question is whether this is good or bad. In the near
term, the world could divide up into three kinds of humans. One would
be the Enhanced, who embrace these opportunities. A second would be
the Naturals, who have the technology available but who, like today's
vegetarians, choose not to indulge for moral or aesthetic reasons.
Finally, there would be The Rest those without access to these
technologies for financial or geographic reasons, lagging behind,
envying or despising those with ever-increasing choices. Especially if
the Enhanced can easily be recognized because of the way they look, or
what they can do, this is a recipe for conflict that would make racial
or religious differences quaintly obsolete.

There are a variety of scenarios for such a future. One critical
uncertainty is whether the technology is seen as benign or malignant.
Another is whether society coheres during this transformation or
bursts into shards. Some of the possible outcomes: The secrets of
human consciousness and the human brain elude us, and the change is
stately. Or incremental change continues to accelerate, aging is
reversed, the revolution has occurred, and we are just trying to deal
with the consequences. Another possibility: new intelligent species
roam the Earth in 20 or 30 years, some of them mainly flesh and blood,
and some of them mainly not.

In whatever case, what we're talking about here is transcendence
becoming separate from or going beyond the gritty world we've always
known. The realm of religion and mythology is being challenged by that
of science and technology as the key to overcoming the confines of
human nature. This is the stuff of Nietzsche, in his declaration that
"Man is a rope, fastened between animal and overman a rope over an
abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal."

"To me, that is what human civilization is all about," says Kurzweil.
"It is part of our destiny and part of the destiny of evolution to
continue to progress ever faster, and to grow the power of
intelligence exponentially. To contemplate stopping that to think
human beings are fine the way they are is a misplaced remembrance of
what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a species that
has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it's the
nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow
exponentially, and that's what we're talking about."

The question then becomes whether we want to be evolving human nature
beyond what we've known for millennia. They involve difficult choices.
These go to those eternal questions of who we are, how we got that
way, where we're headed, and what makes us tick.

Joel Garreau
Cultural revolution correspondent, The Washington Post
Principal, The Garreau Group
Author of Edge City: Life on the New Frontier and The Nine Nations of
North America 
________________________________________________________________

Mr President, it is the United States of America who long ago
brought the evil of prohibition upon the world, and still holds the
power to prevent the rest of us from seeking freedom from
prohibition. Mr President, you could win the war on terrorism, not
by fighting, but by refusing to fight the war on drugs.

Susan Blackmore

Mr President

I have a dream.

I have a dream that one day we shall look back on today's society with
the same abhorrence with which we now view Victorian child labour, the
oppression of women, and the evils of slavery.

We shall look back with horror on terrorist attacks, street crime out
of control, and violence marring everyone's lives--to a time when
neither police nor the law were respected, and half our children were
criminals before they even left school. And we shall wonder why so few
people were prepared to stand up and shout "Enough."

In my dream I can walk down any street in Bristol, Boston, Bogotá or
Bombay and no one will steal my phone to get their next fix. No
heroin-dazed beggar will plead for my change. No crack-crazed youth
will kill me for my credit card. And why? Because in my dream they,
like me, can walk down that street and buy any drug they like.

Cannabis and ecstasy, heroin and cocaine, LSD and aspirin, will all be
sold - clean, legal, properly packaged in precise doses, with
appropriate warnings and proper regulation. Tax revenue will be more
than enough to treat addicts and to guide problem users. Scientists
will be free to research the effects of any drug without fear.
Children will be given true advice, and real drugs education that
teaches wise drug use, not ignorant abuse. And global terrorism will
have disappeared for lack of funds.

Our prisons will have room to spare. No one will be there for wanting
the freedom to control their own mind. And no one will be there
because gangs have lured or threatened them into a life of dealing and
violence. Police will once more earn the respect of the majority whose
lives they work to protect.

In my dream, the peasants of Afghanistan will work their poppy fields
for legal wages, the farmers of South America will labour free of the
fear of the drug barons, and the profits of world trade will not be
siphoned off by the criminals but returned to the people who earned
them.

Mr President, it is the United States of America who long ago brought
the evil of prohibition upon the world, and still holds the power to
prevent the rest of us from seeking freedom from prohibition. Mr
President, you could win the war on terrorism, not by fighting, but by
refusing to fight the war on drugs.

As your prospective scientific advisor on issues of mind and
consciousness, I know that there is no more pressing issue than the
problem of drugs. I urge you to act now to free us all.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Susan Blackmore
Psychologist
Bristol, England
Author of Dying to Live, The Meme Machine, and Consciousness: An
Introduction. 
________________________________________________________________

A key aspect of this program is the prize: $100,000 to each high
school senior and $1,000,000 to the college counterparts. The total
annual cost of the program (including administration) would be less
than $250 million, while its impact would be dramatic and long
lasting. With serious prize money on the line science would no
longer be just for the "weird" kids. Indeed, doing science would be
seen as cool.

Leo M. Chalupa

Dear Mr. President:

As you no doubt recognize, your scientific advisor is essentially a
soothsayer. This individual is called upon to make key predictions
about different aspects of the scientific enterprise, enabling the
President to make appropriate decisions for the benefit and welfare of
the American people. To assure you of my qualifications for this
position, I will go out on the proverbial limb and make three specific
predictions that you will find to be borne out by future events.

First, I predict that all the other applicants for this position will
urge you to increase federal funding for science. Second, every
applicant will make a special case for increased funding for the
scientific field in which he or she specializes. The biologists will
plead for more money for biomedical research, the physicists for
particle research, and the psychologists for behavioral studies. This
is not to belittle the worthiness of such advice. All branches of
science can make good use of more funding, and who better to make a
case for a particular field than an expert in that field.

Before providing you with my third prediction, allow me to identify
what I consider to be the most significant problem in science today.
In my opinion, our nation needs to get more of our young people
interested in pursuing a career in science.

We are just beginning to unravel the secrets of the universe, from
subatomic particles to the molecular cues that guide the building of
the brain. As Cole Porter wrote: "the best is yet to come,"and I
believe you will agree with me Mr. President that it is vitally
important for America to lead the world in this effort. Regretfully,
there has been a pronounced downturn in the number of young Americans
choosing to dedicate their lives to science. As I travel around the
country giving talks at our leading universities, it is readily
apparent to me that more and more graduate students and postdoctoral
fellows are from abroad. This is to be expected since at present we
are the world's leader in scientific research. But, I believe that it
would be a grave mistake for us to rely on foreign talent for our
future scientific breakthroughs. For one thing, there is no guarantee
that these individuals, whose costly training was paid for by the
American taxpayer, will remain in this country. It is also
shortsighted to assume that foreign scientific talent will be drawn to
our shores for evermore. Without in any way discouraging the world's
best young minds from coming to the United States to do science, we
must come up with a strategy to encourage the best and the brightest
in our nation to do the same.

My first recommendation to you, Mr. President would be to budget a
relatively small amount of money for a program that might be termed
"GWB Science Allstars of the Future." The program would annually
select 1000 high school seniors and 100 college seniors with
outstanding potential for future scientific achievements. (It might be
prudent to distribute the number of nominees and subsequent winners in
proportion to the congressional seats held by each of the 50 states,
but others are better suited than I to deal with such matters.) The
selection committee could be comprised of science teachers as well as
preeminent scientists from industry, government and universities. A
key aspect of this program is the prize: $100,000 to each high school
senior and $1,000,000 to the college counterparts. The total annual
cost of the program (including administration) would be less than $250
million, while its impact would be dramatic and long lasting. With
serious prize money on the line science would no longer be just for
the "weird" kids. Indeed, doing science would be seen as cool. With
the right kid of publicity the GWB Science Allstars would become
national celebrities, on par with sports heroes. One can even imagine
rap songs describing the travails and triumphs of particularly
charismatic young scientists.

This brings me to my third prediction, Mr. President. When the young
people in our nation get as much money for scientific achievement as
NBA draftees, the entire educational enterprise in this country will
be raised to a level unprecedented in the history of the world. This
could become the greatest the legacy of your presidency, perhaps even
rivaling our eventual victory in the war on terrorism, and at a cost
of much less than that a single stealth bomber.

Sincerely yours,

Leo M. Chalupa
Professor of Ophthalmology and Neurobiology
University of Irvine
________________________________________________________________

Taking all three points together, my advice is to stimulate
optimism by making a bold move turning America's focus from its
negative role in war brinkmanship to a positive role as a leader
who stands for peace, freedom and economic growth.

Jordan Pollack

Dear Mr. President,

In the mad hysteria of the moment, when all your intellectual
resources are focused on finding someone in the Middle East to play
Tit for Tat, whether Osama, Saddam, or Abu Nidal, I would remind you
of some common sense truths about the complex dynamics of living
systems.

First: Punishment doesn't work.

We know that beating a child doesn't make them peaceful, it makes them
more violent.

We know that exercise doesn't make you tired, it gives you more
energy.

If you have dandelions growing in your lawn, would you selectively
blow their heads off or fertilize the lawn to choke out the weeds?
Each dandelion you crush results in many more next year, while a
stronger lawn resists their invasion.

The moral of this story is that striking back at terrorists may merely
create more terrorists, while engaging the people in peaceful commerce
inhibits terror.

Second: You can bet your last nickel that masses are fickle.

The mass coherence which supports your initiatives can turn on a dime.
Spending $200B on war will cause severe "buyers remorse" when the
people realize they bought nothing but national debt, a mess in Iraq,
and higher prices for oil.

Third: Optimism is necessary.

Optimists behave different than pessimists. They buy more, invest
more, take risk for future gains, and work harder. One doesn't have to
be a genius to realize that the threat of continual war, while
enhancing power, leads to economic woes because investors and
consumers are uncertain. While oil profits may rise, all the rest of
our modern industries, from Airlines, to Investment Banking,
Telecommunications, Software and Chips will continue to collapse. To
end the depression, the country needs optimism about economic growth
driven by expectations of peace and stability.

Taking all three points together, my advice is to stimulate optimism
by making a bold move turning America's focus from its negative role
in war brinkmanship to a positive role as a leader who stands for
peace, freedom and economic growth.

Jordan Pollack
Professor of Computer Science
Brandeis University
________________________________________________________________

The moral: It is perfectly normal to fear purposeful violence from
those who hate us. When Saddam commits more evil, or when
terrorists strike again (likely where unexpected), we will all
recoil in horror. But smart thinkers will also want to check their
intuitive fears against the facts.

David G. Myers

Dear Mr. President,

"We refuse to live in fear," you declared in your October 7th address
from the Oval Office. If only it were so.

An hour before your address, I was screened into my local airport's
sleepy concourse (with but four small flights yet to depart) by
nineteen bored security personnel. Cars entering the parking lot,
though buffered from the single story airport by two streets,
underwent inspection (though not at more vulnerable venues across
America, such as ferries and underground parking lots). With 9/11's
four crashed airliners still vividly in mind, and with threats of more
terror to come, our airlines have been flying into the red.
Understandably, Mr. President, we are living in fear.

Terrorists may indeed strike again, though our preoccupation with
airline terror likely underestimates their creativity. Already in the
aftermath of 9/11 the terrorists have continued killing us, in ways
unnoticed. In the ensuing months, Americans flew 20 percent less. "No
way are we flying to Disneyland for vacation!" Instead, we drove many
of those miles, which surely caused more additional highway deaths
than occurred on those four ill-fated flights.

Consider: The National Safety Council reports that in the last half of
the 1990s Americans were, mile for mile, 37 times more likely to die
in a vehicle crash than on a commercial flight. When I fly to
Washington for our meetings, the most dangerous part of my journey is
my drive to the Grand Rapids airport.

Terrorists, perish the thought, could have taken down 50 more planes
with 60 passengers each in 2001 and--had we kept flying (speaking
hypothetically)--we would still have finished 2001 safer in planes
than on the road. Flying may be scary (531 people died on U.S.
scheduled airlines in 2001). But driving the same distance should be
many times scarier.

Why do we intuitively fear the wrong things? Why do so many smokers
(whose habit shortens their lives, on average, by about five years)
fret before flying (which, averaged across people, shortens life by
one day)? Why do we fear violent crime more than clogged arteries? Why
do we fear terrorism more than accidents--which kill nearly as many
per week in just the United States as did worldwide terrorism in all
of the 1990s. Even with the horrific scale of 9/11, more Americans in
2001 died of food poisoning (which scares few) than terrorism (which
scares many).

To understand why we live in fear, Mr. President, and how you might
lead us to think more rationally, consider four influences on our
intuitions about risk (as identified by psychological science).

o First, we fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to
fear--which includes confinement and heights, and therefore flying.

o Second, we fear what we cannot control. Driving we control,
flying we do not. "We are loathe to let others do unto us what we
happily do to ourselves," noted risk analyst Chauncey Starr.

o Third, we fear what is immediate. Teens are indifferent to
smoking's toxicity because they live more for the present than the
distant future. Likewise, the dangers of driving are diffused
across many moments to come, each trivially dangerous.

o Fourth, we fear what is most readily available in memory.
Horrific images of United Flight 175 slicing into the World Trade
Center, form indelible memories. And availability in memory
provides our intuitive rule for judging risks. Thousands of safe
car trips (for those who have survived to read this) have largely
extinguished our anxieties about driving. A thousand massively
publicized anthrax victims would similarly rivet our attention more
than yet another 20,000+ annual U.S. influenza fatalities, or
another 30,000+ annual gun deaths.

Some things we should fear more, Mr. President, and you can use your
bully pulpit to help us fear the right things. We fear too little
those threats that will claim lives undramatically, one by one (rather
than in bunches). Smoking kills 400,000 Americans a year, yet we
subsidize tobacco growers. Although killing many fewer, terrorists
cause more terror. Never again, we vow. And so will spend tens of
billions to save future thousands, yet are reluctant to spend a few
billion to save millions.

A 2002 report by Deloitte Consulting and Aviation Week projected that
the United States would spend between $93 and $138 billion during 2003
to deter potential terrorism. Alternatively, $1.5 billion a year would
be the U.S. share of a global effort to cut world hunger in half by
2015, according to a 2001 study done for the U.S. Agency for
International Development. Ten billion dollars a year would spare 29
million world citizens from developing AIDS by 2010, according to a
joint report by representatives of the United Nations, the World
Health Organization, and others. And a few tens of billions spent
converting cars to hybrid engines and constructing renewable energy
sources could help avert the anticipated future catastrophe of global
warming and associated surging seas and extreme weather.

While agonizing over missed signals of the 9/11 horror, are we missing
the clearer indications of greater horrors to come? "Osama bin Laden
can't destroy Western civilization," observed Paul Krugman (dare I
quote him). "Carbon dioxide can."

The moral: It is perfectly normal to fear purposeful violence from
those who hate us. When Saddam commits more evil, or when terrorists
strike again (likely where unexpected), we will all recoil in horror.
But smart thinkers will also want to check their intuitive fears
against the facts. To be prudent is to be mindful of the realities of
how humans die. By so doing, we can take away the terrorists' most
omnipresent weapon: exaggerated fear. If our fears cause us to live
and spend in ways that fail to avert tomorrow's biggest dangers, then
we surely do have something to fear from fear itself.

David G. Myers
John Dirk Werkman Professor of Psychology
Hope College
Author of Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, and The American Paradox:
Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty 
________________________________________________________________

Scientists are natural ambassadors...It is only scientists who
bring people and nations together. Independent of history,
religious faith, economic status, gender or color of skin,
scientists work together and have worked together to pursue a
common goal, i.e. a deeper understanding of nature and culture.

Ernst Pöppel

Dear Mr. President,

Scientists are natural ambassadors.

I consider it a great opportunity to get your attention for what I
believe is an important scientific and societal issue.

Who am I? A neuroscientist born in 1940 in an area of Germany which is
now Poland. I belong to the group of people who lost everything after
expatriation, and who had to start again at a new place owning only
what they had and have in their head, i.e. their brain.

With my experiences I have come to the conclusion stated in the
beginning: Scientists are natural ambassadors.

It is only scientists who bring people and nations together.
Independent of history, religious faith, economic status, gender or
color of skin, scientists work together and have worked together to
pursue a common goal, i.e. a deeper understanding of nature and
culture. As this is the case, I believe it is necessary to use the
sciences building bridges between cultures.

Although your administration is presently deeply involved, and
necessarily so, in fighting terrorism, I believe, Mr. President, that
a long-term issue should also be tackled by your administration.

Let me use a picture from physics. Stability is only given if an
object rests on three legs. This is also true in global politics. A
longterm balance is given if three large blocks develop and maintain
their identity. This is of course the US, but which is also East Asia
(in particular China), and Europe (in spite of some present
hesitations to see its identity and its global mission). In a world of
three large areas of cultural identity, i.e. US, East Asia and Europe,
each one of equal importance and expressing respect to the others, we
can hope for longterm stability.

It is the scientists in all these countries to create the necessary
atmosphere and provide the societal glue to reach that goal.

With all respect

Ernst Pöppel
Neuroscientist
Chair of the Board of Directors at the Center for Human Sciences
Director of the Institute for Medical Psychology, University of
Munich.
________________________________________________________________

The views of the scientific community could be especially relevant
today. Many pressing issues that will shape the lives of Americans
and the world in the coming years will be best addressed by leaders
who recognize that science, science education, scientific
expertise, and international science cooperation are crucial to
formulating the best policy.

Lisa Randall

I am pleased you are considering me for this advisory position.
However, before proceeding further, I would appreciate some
clarification about your vision for my role in your administration.
Particularly in these tumultuous times, I would like to know that you
will not neglect the advice of the scientific community. Since you
have moved my predecessor's office away from the White House and
downgraded his role, refusing to give him the customary title
"Assistant to the President," I cannot help but question your
commitment to furthering and best utilizing scientific advances.

This apprehension is compounded by your having eliminated my
predecessor's deputy from the National Security Council, explicitly
indicating that science is no longer an integral part of national
decision making.

The views of the scientific community could be especially relevant
today. Many pressing issues that will shape the lives of Americans and
the world in the coming years will be best addressed by leaders who
recognize that science, science education, scientific expertise, and
international scientific cooperation are crucial to formulating the
best policy.

Take the issue of national security. How can we assess other
countries' potential for creating weapons of mass destruction without
detailed understanding of potentially dangerous materials and what is
required to transform them into truly dangerous ones? How can any
agency hope to protect "the homeland" without evaluating our reliance
on technology and how best to safeguard it from interference? And how
can we hope to have a stable world unless the benefits and advances of
technology are more widely distributed?

I fear I will disqualify myself from this job by pointing out that the
threat of global warming is an issue the scientific community has
finally reached consensus on. Yet the detrimental effects, both
economically and environmentally, of excessive carbon dioxide
emissions have been completely neglected in formulating current
policy.

I do not wish to give the impression that I think the role of
scientific advisor is only to attend to the most pressing issues of
our day. It is critical that the importance of a long-term view of the
role and significance of science does not get subsumed by the more
immediate issues. Like a college education, which is absurdly
expensive yet repays itself in spades, science is difficult to assess
with a cost-benefit analysis. Current scientific policy focuses on
short-term achievement and success, to the exclusion of investigating
long-term potential and possibilities.

The long-term future of science might well involve big expensive tools
that take time to develop and employ. It is essential to develop some
riskier ideas if in the end we are to remain competitive. This is
particularly true for Particle Physics, where progress will only be
made with adequately funded big projects that will most likely happen
only with meaningful international cooperation. It is important that
you, the President, recognize that with action or inaction, we are
making a choice about our long-term competitiveness in this field and
physics as a whole. Europe devotes twice the percentage of its GDP
than America to physics. The European collider facility in Geneva,
CERN, has twice the budget of the main American facility, Fermilab, in
Batavia, Illinois. CERN has been able to develop new projects using
only its operating budget; American facilities lack that luxury.

My focus on Particle Physics is because it is my field of expertise.
But I want to emphasize that the benefits of Particle Physics, like
most scientific endeavors, spread beyond their immediate goals.
Accelerator technology was developed for purely scientific reasons yet
is now routinely utilized in hospitals. Advances in processing and
coordinating large databases has and will filter out of the physics
environment to the world at large. And exciting ideas and better
understanding are essential to stimulating and promoting the advanced
education which sustains our economy.

In summary, a coherent scientific policy is particularly imperative in
the world of today. There is a real danger of losing the priceless
environment, both physical and intellectual, that enhances our way of
life. With so many technological and scientific issues at stake, it is
critical that corporate interests and political calculations are not
the sole determinants of scientific policy. Let's not sacrifice
support for major scientific advances to short-term political agendas
whose legacy will forever be regretted.

Lisa Randall
Professor of Physics
Harvard University
________________________________________________________________

I have yet to see an area where science has informed any of this
present administration's policies. Despite much hand waving about
"sound science" I have no confidence that a science advisor would
have any useful impact whatsoever.

Stuart L. Pimm

I've given much thought to present adminstration's policy on science
particularly on evironmental issues (very broadly defined), but also
on related areas (such as energy policy), and have even been involved
in some of the issues involving terrorist threats (diseases of people
and agricultural resources). I have yet to see an area where science
has informed any of this present administration's policies. Despite
much hand waving about "sound science" I have no confidence that a
science advisor would have any useful impact whatsoever.

I think I'll give this position a pass, not so much out of spite, but
because I think there are many better platforms from which to ensure
that science effects good policy at the international, national, and
state levels.

Stuart L. Pimm
Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology
Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Science
Duke University
Author of The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth 
________________________________________________________________

Science is pointing towards an LSD-like world without LSD intake.
And we are wholly unprepared for both. Math, Physics, Chemistry,
Biology and Psychology--the things we are made of--are inextricably
intertwined. People though, remain interactiveless and
disentangled.

Eduardo Punset

Neuroscientists have recently discovered that a given visual
perception of the Universe activates the same group of neurons than
just to imagine that perception. Surprisingly, the discovery did not
make headlines in the press.

Apparently, it does not matter that much to perceive a fraction of the
tiniest part of the Universe--that is to say, the visible part--or
imagine instead the dominant invisible reality of atoms and void, in
order to feel something, the glory of colours in Newton's words, or to
be self-conscious.

The immediate corollary for corporate life of the absence of barriers
between visible and invisible at the level of consciousness is that
the same degree, at least, of attention should be paid to evaluating
customers degree of satisfaction, than to what is going on in their
imagination. Both might be very different and equally relevant. It is
obvious that some corporate projects might be geared to fulfill
consumers visible needs, and others to short-cut this lengthy process
by direct access to the imagination.

By and large people have not realized yet the impact of the sudden
crumbling down of all sorts of barriers. From the neuron's point of
view there is no difference between a visually perceived or imagined
bit of the Universe. From a professional chemist's point of view, it
has become irrelevant too to distinguish between a synthetic or a
natural compound. Both are likely to be impure, more so natural
extracts usually made of complex mixtures, unless processed to
separate the components.

Biologist John Bonner at Princeton has, following more than forty
years research, proved that it is impossible to distinguish between
human intelligence and that of a social amoeba like slime molds. You
just cannot demonstrate that slim molds--or bacteria for that
matter--are unconscious. Since Darwin and modern genetics, the old
debate around what distinguishes humans from other animals has become
redundant. If anything, we are looking now into the differences
betweens humans and minerals.

Astrophysicist John Gribbin--to the dismay of many--has been
meticulously unscafolding away the existence of that last barrier.
Life and the Universe are inextricably intertwined. There would be no
planets like the Earth, and no life forms like us, if there were no
clouds of gas laced with tiny traces of dusty debris produced by the
previous explosions of supernova. There is no doubt now. We are made
of interstellar galactic mineral dust.

Last but not least, the mother of all barriers, the last frontier
between life and death is becoming ever more suspicious and difficult
to ascertain. Hardly three years ago it was discovered that we humans
too--like mouse and rats--have stem cells. Or, stem cells happen to be
immortal. Stem cells command the process of morphogenesis from the
incipient and magic zygot to the finished embryo. They are not the
least important cells in the body. On the contrary. No wonder if the
mother of all barriers has been deadly shaken. If atoms are eternal,
and stem cells are immortal, what on earth dies out when somebody
dies.

The unprecedented disappearance of barriers clashes with every social
convention. Most people only feel comfortable within the narrow limits
of his or her own identity, if duly ranged with equals from the same
species, tribe, generation, church, country and culture. And identical
cultures provide similar sight, taste, tact and hearing. That is the
way the neocortex works. But the sudden lack of barriers tunes very
well with the unconscious brain and its capacity to allucinate under
the effects of LSD. The most powerful drug on earth happens to destroy
barriers between people, between mind and body, between oneself and
other living organisms and, finally, between the spirit and the
Universe.

Science is pointing towards an LSD-like world without LSD intake. And
we are wholly unprepared for both. Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology
and Psychology--the things we are made of--are inextricably
intertwined. People though, remain interactiveless and disentangled.

Governments have no more urgent task than to help to conciliate
individuals, corporations, institutions, and society at large with the
new frontierless Universe. Otherwise, managers will continue to hold
that science has nothing to do with their entrepreneurial projects,
citizens and their legal systems will be crushed by unexplained
violence, Universities will go on focusing on specific subjects amidst
growing demands for global interconnectivity between humans, robots
and computers, the practice of medicine will continue to exorcise
symptoms instead of regenerating tissues, and in a frontierless
Universe nations will continue to fight and hide behind frontiers.

Eduardo Punset
Professor of Economic Policy at the Chemical Institute of Ramon Llull
University in Barcelona
Director and Producer of Networks (a weekly programme of Spanish
public television on Science).
Author of A Field Guide to Survive in the XXI st Century. 
________________________________________________________________

In the modern world, science, democracy and prosperity go hand in
hand, and it is no coincidence that throughout history those
nations that led the development of democracy also led their times
in scientific advancement.

Lee Smolin

Dear Mr. President,

The United States has led the world in science and technology since
World War II. In recent years our lead has reduced as Europe, Japan
and Canada have matched and in some cases exceeded our investments in
education and science. This is to be expected, and we can be happy
that all of our rivals for scientific and technological leadership are
also our allies. Indeed, in the modern world, science, democracy and
prosperity go hand in hand, and it is no coincidence that throughout
history those nations that led the development of democracy also led
their times in scientific advancement. Our main goal, as the leader of
the democratic world, must be to see that the benefits of democracy
and science, and the prosperity they jointly give rise to, are
extended to all the peoples of the Earth.

To achieve this we shall have to make use of the unique strengths of
our society, which have been responsible for our dominance in science
and technology. These strengths are connected to the openness of our
society to new ideas and new immigrants, to our spirit of initiative
and innovation, to our generosity, our preference for peace over war,
and the respect for peoples of all cultures, races and nations that
comes from our being a nation of immigrants. We would best build on
these by the following steps:

1) Create crash programs, analogous to the Manhattan project and the
Apollo program, to solve the major scientific and technological
problems facing human kind. These include global warming, energy
efficiency and renewable energy resources. It also includes
developments in medicine and biology related to public health, such as
the AIDS epidemic as well as finding ways to protect against terrorism
without compromising our freedoms.

Only the United States has the scientific capability, economic
resources and technological base to mount programs to solve these
problems. Only the United States has the experience of successfully
carrying off such ambitious programs. Only the United States has the
spirit of innovation and risk taking that makes such projects succeed.
By taking on and solving these problems we would create enormous
benefits to all the peoples of the world. There is indeed no better
way to maintain our position of leadership in the eyes of the world.

Thus, in each of the areas I mentioned, I propose that the United
States announce a crash program with clearly defined goals. Put the
prestige of your office and the scientific and technological
capabilities of the United States on the line in each of these. Create
a flexible, flat organization, led by scientific and engineering
visionaries, not managers and bureaucrats, fund them generously and
give them all the scope and resources they need to succeed quickly.
Remember that it took less than five years to make the atomic bomb,
and less than ten to put a person on the moon. Avoid the temptation,
in areas such as global warming and energy independence, to reward
special interests by delaying action and funding further studies.
Instead, put the energy of our scientists and engineers into finding
and implementing workable solutions to the problems.

This is an expensive proposal, but it will be worth every dollar. For
example, in the long run it will be cheaper to invest our resources to
develop renewable sources of energy, and new energy efficient
technologies, than in increasingly risky and destabilizing attempts to
control oil and gas by military force.

2) Our leadership is due in no small measure to the fact that a large
fraction of scientists and engineers working in the United States
immigrated here in order to study and work. To maintain leadership, we
must keep open the possibility that a bright young engineer or
scientist can come to our shores from anywhere in the world and
realize the American dream while working in our universities,
laboratories and companies. We benefit enormously from the talents and
contributions of those who stay and become American citizens, but we
also benefit from those who return to their countries after studying
and working here. There is no better way to win friends and to promote
the spread of our values than by continuing to have open doors for
scientists and engineers. Generally speaking, there is no person of
any background or culture more likely to appreciate our democratic
values, and less likely to engage in terrorism or religious
fundamentalism, than a person trained in the sciences.

3) Let us do everything we can to maintain leadership in pure
sciences. This means funding the NSF and NIH generously, but it means
more than that. Over the last several decades these organizations have
become increasingly bureaucratic, inflexible and unresponsive to the
needs of those scientists who do the most to advance science. There
are fewer and fewer grants to individual scientists as an increasing
proportion of the funds are diverted to big projects and research
centers. But it can be documented that most major advances come from
the laboratories and offices of individual scientists, and not from
big research centers and projects. Then why the trend? Unfortunately
all too often, the big research centers and projects serve to further
the careers of bureaucrats and administrators in government and the
universities.

In the universities as well there has been also a rapid growth of
bureaucracy and middle management. Where there used to be one chair or
dean, there is now a suite of offices with several associate and
assistant bureaucrats. While many businesses have eliminated middle
managers and flattened hierarchies, to gain the flexibility needed to
innovate and compete in a rapidly changing world, universities have
been going in the other direction. Many business leaders are quite
simply shocked when they try to partner with universities, as they
discover how administrative heavy and bureaucratic the large
universities have become.

But progress in science depends on risk taking and an openness to
novelty and surprise. This is why most scientific advances are made by
young scientists, or by those who take the risk of switching fields
during their careers. I once asked a General of the Marine Corp how
they educate people to take on large amounts of risk. He said the most
important thing they teach a Marine officer is that there is a big
difference between leadership and management. This is a lesson too
many of the administrators who lead the big universities and research
projects never learned.

So I would ask: why should the universities, which are the sector of
our society most responsible for innovation and discovery, be the
place where seniority and bureaucracy most hinder the rise of talented
young people to positions of leadership?

I once asked a venture capitalist how he judged when he was taking on
the right amount of risk. He responded that when more than 10% of the
companies he funded succeeded, he knew that he was not taking on
enough risk, and that his profits would consequently suffer. This
amazed me, as we university professors write our grant proposals to
NSF and NIH as if there is no risk whatsoever. To be funded, we have
learned, we must present every scientific project as if it is bound to
succeed. Many scientists simply propose doing things they already know
will work. This reduces risk taking, leads to much duplication of
effort and slows down the progress of science. I would then propose
that you require that the federal funding agencies reorganize
themselves so that they behave more like venture capitalists than like
mortgage bankers, so that young scientists, and scientists of all ages
with bold and ambitious ideas, have the support they need to take on
the degree of risk that is required to keep science advancing rapidly
in the United States.

Lee Smolin
Theoretical Physicist
Founding member, Perimeter Institute in Waterloo Canada
Author of The Life of The Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.
________________________________________________________________

Without the Infinite, mathematics as we know it, would simply not
exist. But where does the Infinite come from? How do we grasp the
Infinite if, after all, our biology is finite, and so are our
experiences and everything we encounter with our bodies?

Rafael Nunez

How do our brains create Infinity?

The Infinite is one of the most intriguing ideas in which the human
mind has ever engaged. Full of paradoxes and controversies, it has
raised fundamental issues in domains as diverse as theology, physics,
philosophy, literature, and art. Moreover (and strangely enough), the
Infinite, elusive and counterintuitive, has played a central role in
defining a fundamental field of human intellectual activity
characterized by precision, certainty, objectivity, and effectiveness
in modeling our real finite world: mathematics!

Without the Infinite, mathematics as we know it, would simply not
exist. But where does the Infinite come from? How do we grasp the
Infinite if, after all, our biology is finite, and so are our
experiences and everything we encounter with our bodies?

From the point of view of the scientific study of the mind (i.e.,
cognitive science and related disciplines) several other questions
need to be addressed: What cognitive mechanisms make the Infinite
possible? How such an elusive and paradoxical idea structures an
objective and precise field such as mathematics? Why the various forms
of infinities in mathematics, such as infinite sums, limits, points at
infinity, infinite sets, and infinitesimal numbers, have the exact
conceptual structure they have?

Recent studies of human conceptual systems in cognitive linguistics,
cognitive semantics, and psycholinguistics show that like many
abstract ideas, the Infinite is created via very specific everyday
cognitive mechanisms that make human imagination possible such as
conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies, conceptual blends, and so
on (which are very precise inference-preserving inter-domains
mappings).

Now the big question for cognitive neuroscience is: How does the human
brain orchestrate and enact these cognitive mechanisms that bring
Infinity into being.

Rafael Nunez
Cognitive Scientist
Member, international board of the International Group for Psychology
of Mathematics Education
Author (with George Lakoff) of Where Mathematics Comes From;
Philosophy of the Flesh; and En deçà du transfini: Aspects
psychocognitifs sous-jacents au concept d'infini en mathémathiques. 
________________________________________________________________

I have recently suggested that what early humans were up to was
very different to what we hitherto thought, and that the birth of
religion and the emergence of social cohesion was rooted in
atavistic practices of human sacrifice and ceremonial cannibalism.

Timothy Taylor

Mr President,

I spent my Christmas on sick leave from my university, suffering from
a stress-related illness. OK, so I'm a periodic depressive of a
particular sort. A lot of scientists and thinkers are, alternating
between great activity and deep lassitude. Why am I telling you? Well,
because in Britain at least, the creeping managerial culture of
universities makes it very difficult for people like this to flourish.
In a misguided attempt to put accountancy procedures in place to
obtain value for money out of science, civil servants are in danger of
driving out the creativity and innovation that lie at the heart of the
story of western science.

It is natural for governments to expect results from science, but they
cannot be guaranteed. However, there are two positive things you can
do, each of which makes more sense in relation to the other than
either does alone. The first is to acknowledge the precedence of
observation over experiment. The second is to take the 'interpretive
dilemma' to heart.

When bureaucrats try to manage science they want experiments done.
That is what they think good science does. It is a convenient belief
because research-grant monies can be easily justified when measurable
results are produced to a pre-agreed schedule. But much (perhaps most)
great science has been based predominantly on observation and has no
timetable. Newton and Darwin did very few significant experiments, but
both exercised immense observational acumen on a daily basis. Both
also took so long to publish their insights that they would
undoubtedly both have been fired from modern universities for failing
to produce. But the mentality that finds it so hard to thrive in a
regularized accountancy culture is the one most suited to long and
profound contemplation of the meaning of phenomena. It is the one most
likely to crack through the interpretive dilemma.

The interpretive dilemma simply states that in order to interpret
something, one must have decided that there is something to interpret
and, in focussing on that something, one has already formed a strong
idea of what it is.

For example, as an archaeologist, I am used to interpreting burials.
But when I am trying to uncover the meaning of a particular burial, I
hardly stop to think that I have already decided the most important
thing about it when I called it a 'burial'. In casually naming it,
prior to conducting certain measurable experiments (dating and
technological analyses) I have already dramatically lessened the
possibility of understanding anything new and surprising.

By rethinking the nature of apparent 'burials'--a process that
involved absolutely no experimentation or new excavation at all, but
which nevertheless took up several years thinking time--I have
recently suggested that what early humans were up to was very
different to what we hitherto thought, and that the birth of religion
and the emergence of social cohesion was rooted in atavistic practices
of human sacrifice and ceremonial cannibalism. The ostensible
'burials' that archaeologists have dated to the period of the last Ice
Age are in fact the remains of elaborate, communally-approved ritual
murders.

Mr President, space to rethink the apparently familiar is essential to
all good science. It means that you need to trust scientists to follow
their instincts, and not make them accountable every year for a string
of tangible results. Look after your science contemplatives and they
will look after you.

Timothy Taylor
Archeologist, FSA Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and a member
of CIFA (Centre for International Forensic Assistance)
University of Bradford, UK
Author of The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual
Culture, and The Buried Soul. 
________________________________________________________________

We are benefitted by the significant investments into nano/bio
technologies being funded through NIH, NSF, DARPA/DOD. An increase,
modest on the scale of the overall budget, with a research mandate
encouraging exploring these new areas of potential discovery, can
yield enormous benefits in developing diagnostics, and as a result
of that, therapeutics, to tackle the many diseases afflicting
humanity, and the current enormous cost of treating these diseases.

Mike Weiner

Mr. President,

There is an opportunity to improve the quest for cures for many
diseases, including cancers, by increasing the instrumentation budget
for advanced detection of physical properties of the genome, such as
being able to view the conformal shape of DNA in live cells as it
twists and turns, winds and unwinds, achieving 5500:1 rates of
compression in size, knowing when to unwind and transcribe, photon and
EMF emission by DNA in cells in vivo and in vitro, which we have no
way to measure today; etc. Included in this
proposed initiative should be the involvement of more physicists to
aid molecular biologists in their interpretation of the state of
activity, including quantum mechanics, at work in the nanoworld of
live cells.

We cannot see into the nucleus of live cells very effectively, and
most of our understanding of DNA, its role in cells, and cellular
signalling, is deduced from chemical analysis and imputation. Not from
direct observation and measurement. Advances in many technologies,
including nanotechnology, neutron imaging, microscopy, SEM and AFM,
X-Ray crystallography, and more, are widening our ability to see.

Only two years ago the NIH began funding instrumentation to facilitate
sensing at the nano levels needed to really understand the processes
of cellular biology.

Complicating this quest is the lack of much coalescence among fields
of science. Few molecular biologists understand advanced physics,
photonics, Van der Waals forces, et al. And the reverse is also true,
few physicists are knowledgeable, in depth, about what goes on in
cells, at the level of understanding the potential role of histones,
microtubules, cellular signalling, and the complex, interrelated
activities of the cells which make up our bodies and determine our
health, longevity, aging and survival.

We are benefitted by the significant investments into nano/bio
technologies being funded through NIH, NSF, DARPA/DOD. An increase,
modest on the scale of the overall budget, with a research mandate
encouraging exploring these new areas of potential discovery, can
yield enormous benefits in developing diagnostics, and as a result of
that, therapeutics, to tackle the many diseases afflicting humanity,
and the current enormous cost of treating these diseases.

Mike Weiner
CEO, Biophan Technologies, Inc.
________________________________________________________________

When you remarked that the nation owes me (i.e. its scientists) a
great debt, I could not refrain from asking, "Sir, could you
possibly estimate approximately how much that would be?" the crowd
broke up and I missed my chance.

Leon Lederman

Dear Mr. President,

You may recall that we met at the White House during your reception
for U.S Nobel Laureates. My award was in Physics (1988) and we had a
brief discussion of neutrinos and our ever more incisive story of the
creation and evolution of the Universe and how the deep connections of
the outer space of cosmology and the inner space of particle physics
are joined to illuminate the history and structure of the physical
universe.

I was impressed by the questions you asked, with a line of Laureates
waiting to meet you. When you remarked that the nation owes me (i.e.
its scientists) a great debt, I could not refrain from asking, "Sir,
could you possibly estimate approximately how much that would be?" the
crowd broke up and I missed my chance. Now I would like to bring up a
new topic which I believe is as crucial to the future of the nation as
any that my illustrious colleagues have raised. This is the education
of our children and especially the prep to 12 schooling they are
receiving. I have spent the best part of the past decade in a growing
fascination with the problem and with growing despair.

I know you are aware of the problem and your "Leave no child behind"
rhetoric and legislation are bold steps to face the issue. But I am
afraid the problem is much more desperate than one imagines. My
vantage point as a scientist enables me to realize that out scientific
and technological successes are now at risk. Alan Greenspan has
testified before the Goodling Congressional Committee hearings that we
have maintained a robust science by means of fortuitous immigration
which is slowing down as nations begin to realize how crucial their
scientific and technological manpower are to their own development.
And our industries plead for more visas to supply the human resources
that our own schools are failing to do. Our founding fathers, in their
almost infinite wisdom, left education to states and localities,
failing perhaps to anticipate the national peril that would arise if
our (now) 16,000 separate school systems failed to educate the
populations we need, not only the future scientists and engineers but
also the voting citizens with a sense of science that a democratic
society must have in order to support difficult decisions that 21st
century society must make.

I suggest that the President convene a very powerful National
Commission on Education. It would consist of University Presidents,
CEO's of major technology industries, High ranking officers in the
military, scientists and educators. The Chair must be a person of
immense public recognition and respect, e.g. Colin Powell, should he
retire from your Government The charge would be to create an action
plan for a far reaching national consensus program to bring the U.S.
into the 21st century educationally. Whereas this would clearly not be
a Federally mandated program, the influential composition of the
Commission must have a profound effect on the States and localities.

We have a large number of successful schools and skilled teachers. We
have very strong elements of new curricula. The revolution we need is
to add the new elements of cognition science, to collect the new
information from the neurosciences that are useful in the classroom,
to create a new ethic of teacher education and continuous professional
development. Salaries for teachers and a creative effort at raising
the social status of teachers must be blended to make teaching a
primary objective of the best students.

It is not difficult to imagine that the Commission will suggest a
program of matching Federal and State resources to pay for the
increments that this program will require. There is probably a ten
year program of implementation before the payoffs begin to appear.
Special programs will be needed for the inner cities but solid
experience in Chicago and other cities indicate that, given the
resources, these can achieve spectacular success.

There are many holes in this proposal but that is why we need this
high level Commission. The Bush Education Commission will create a
heritage that few Presidents can claim, rivalling the creation of free
public education, the G.I. Bill , Social Security etc.

Generations of Americans will remember and honor you for finally
addressing the issue of our failed school system and of matching
resources with rhetoric to create a new age of education, a new
meaning of superpower.

With best wishes for the remainder of your term,

Leon M. Lederman
Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Nobel Laureate in Physics (1988)
Coauthor (with David Schramm) of From Quarks to the Cosmos : Tools of
Discovery, and (with Dick Teresi) of The God Particle: If the Universe
Is the Answer, What Is the Question? 
________________________________________________________________

But there is a more focused and more urgent crisis of scientific
literacy: There is widespread statistical illiteracy among
scientists themselves. The signature of this illiteracy is not
being able to tell a number from a curve.

Bart Kosko

Dear President Bush:

The country suffers from a crisis in scientific literacy. Indeed you
yourself have often used the phrase "fuzzy math" as an insult even
though your own home state of Texas funds fuzzy mathematics at
research centers at Texas A&M and at the University of Texas at El
Paso.

But there is a more focused and more urgent crisis of scientific
literacy: There is widespread statistical illiteracy among scientists
themselves. The signature of this illiteracy is not being able to tell
a number from a curve.

Please allow me to explain. Almost all scientists and engineers work
with and interpret statistical data. The very phrase "scientific
study" tends to mean a study conducted in accord with standard
principles of modern statistics. But few scientists or engineers can
distinguish the key condition that gives rise to the beloved bell
curve (remember those IQ and SAT tests?) from the condition that lets
a pollster accept the averaged answers of a thousand or so subjects as
a reliable estimate of the population at large (remember exit polls?).
The first case gives a curve and the other case gives a number and it
is crucial that at least the scientists who advise policy makers be
able to distinguish the two. This goes to the heart of whether in a
given case scientists should even apply the statistical framework and
whether they should accept the results if they do apply it.

I know you are not a detail person. But this is one detail worth
knowing: The whole distinction here turns on something as simple as
the square root of the number of samples. That's right: everything
turns on whether you use a number or its square root.

Here is how it turns out. The square-root case gives you something
called the Central Limit Theorem or CLT for short. The CLT gives you
the (thin tailed) bell curve that remains the most popular probability
model in science and engineering--even though more accurate bell
curves need thicker tails to account for the observed frequency of
"rare" events such as stockmarket crashes or big flashes of lightning.
Mathematicians even named this bell curve the Gaussian after the
German mathematician Gauss although more and more scientists simply
call it the "normal" bell curve because they find it so normal to
apply to random phenomena. (Behind this is a deeper illiteracy that
confuses data dispersion with an artificial and nonrobust contrivance
called the "variance" but that is too much detail for this memo.) The
other case works with the number of samples rather than the square
root of that number. It gives you one of many so-called Laws of Large
Numbers or LLNs for short. Those LLN theorems give you a single number
or "poll result" that lesser politicians might use to measure public
sentiment on a given yes-or-no question. This common confusion (that
CLT = LLN) over a mere square root ranges from science and engineering
to medicine and the war room.

See the problem? Social policy rests on empirical science or at least
it should. And empirical science rests in turn on statistics and this
is a subject far trickier than all too many scientists seem to think.
So a little statistical incompetence can have dramatic social
effects--think junk science in the courtroom.

What to do?

There isn't time to train or retrain our scientists and engineers and
physicians (and lawyers) in probability and statistics. Nor would it
be either cost effective or polite to require that at least once each
grant applicant submit her answers from a proctored multiple-choice
exam on basic statistics when she submits her grant proposal to a
federal funding agency--even though state governments periodically do
require just such test results to renew a driver's license.

Instead there is a simple rule of thumb you and your staff can use to
quickly weed out the least competent: Fire or at least ignore any
advisor or applicant who in good faith uses the phrase "law of
averages." There is no such law.

Bart Kosko
Professor of Electrical Engineering
University of Southern California
Author of Fuzzy Thinking; Heaven in a Chip; and the novel Nanotime. 
________________________________________________________________

In times where the most important issues facing your
administration, and indeed the nation, are science-centric--from
the search for biological weapons in Iraq to human cloning, from
global warming to smallpox vaccinations--the voice of the
President's chief science advisor must be more pronounced; the
public needs to see and hear a stronger scientific presence in the
West Wing.

Adam Bly

Dear Mr. President,

Unlike some of my colleagues, I am uncomfortable acting both as a
media executive and as an advisor to the President, and so I must
regrettably turn down your invitation to serve. But I will say this:

In times where the most important issues facing your administration,
and indeed the nation, are science-centric--from the search for
biological weapons in Iraq to human cloning, from global warming to
smallpox vaccinations--the voice of the President's chief science
advisor must be more pronounced; the public needs to see and hear a
stronger scientific presence in the West Wing.

Mr. Blair has taken noteworthy steps to increase science advice within
his government. It is critical that you have the necessary, direct
science advice to guide your decision-making. Budget increases for
research are commendable; informed policy can be revolutionary.

Sincerely,

Adam Bly
Founder and editor-in-Chief of SEED (Science has never looked so good)
________________________________________________________________

A World Science Collaboration committed to providing
no-strings-attached scientific resources to other countries would
change how the United States is viewed by the world community.

Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.

Dear President Bush,

It was somewhat surprising, but still most welcome, to receive your
request for advice on the pressing scientific issues of our time.
Brief general advice won't be very useful, with two possible
exceptions. First, support for superb science education will pay off
so handsomely that I have no idea why you have not done it already.
Probably you are distracted, but this is one of those "not urgent but
important" things that should not be put off further. Second, because
the big advances usually come from basic science, you would do well to
invest more there, instead of assigning resources mainly to solve
problems.

I suspect, however, that what you really want is advice on how to use
our scientific advantage to gain economic and military advantages. We
dominate the world in science, and this science helps us to dominate
the world. But, the price is high. Many in other countries see the
United States not as the leading light, but as a bully that uses its
scientific powers only to advance its own interests. Yes, I know we do
much that benefits other countries, and it must be frustrating to you
that these efforts get so little notice. Nonetheless, many people hate
us and see our science as an instrument of imperialism.

You can change this, and science can help. We are coming to new
explanations of how relationships work. Trading favors is only the
beginning; a reputation for fulfilling commitments is equally
important. Your current policies demonstrate that you understand the
importance of convincing others that we will fulfill military
commitments even when they are not in our direct interests. There is
also power in fulfilling commitments to help others even when no
benefit is expected.

Just a few generous actions based on values, not interests, would
change how the world sees us. Here is one way to proceed. You could
create a new organization, call it The World Science Collaboration, to
tackle problems that other countries find urgent. Provide them with
resources to deal with these problems, and with whatever help they
request from US scientists, many of whom will be eager to contribute
to such an effort. To work, this must not be aid with strings
attached, but a gift without any expectation of paybacks, financial or
political. Once it is clear that we are serious, the world will
quickly realize that we do not always use our science for ourselves.

Furthermore, the initiative will spread scientific expertise that will
foster development and fight superstition. If we invested 4.5 billion
dollars, the cost of one aircraft carrier, into finding cures for
malaria and sleeping sickness, the whole world would see us
differently, and the health of the world would soon be improved. If we
set up a dozen such projects, the changed outcomes in arguments about
the USA late at night in dirt-floored huts across the world might well
enhance our security more than all the technology we can muster.

This opportunity is rare in its appeal to people across the political
spectrum from the helping left, to the pragmatic center and, one would
hope, the truly religious on the right. People here will see this as a
small but feasible and tangible antidote to perceptions that the
United States is the enemy of the rest of the world. People elsewhere
will see that the United States can act on principle instead of
cynical self-interest. This could be the most important accomplishment
of your presidency.

I would be curious to hear your perspectives on this, and glad, if you
would like, to discussion specific plans for implementation.

Sincerely Yours,

Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry, Professor of Psychology
Senior Research Scientist, RCGD, Institute for Social Research
The University of Michigan
Author of Why We Get Sick, The New Science of Darwinian Medicine;
Editor of Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment 
________________________________________________________________

A bold new initiative is needed to train a new generation of
computational biologists who are equally at home in wet bench
science and the world of computational science.

Terrence Sejnowski

Dear President Bush:

A new branch of science is emerging that will have a far-reaching
impact on the economy of the United States, with applications to
medicine, agriculture and defense that will be revolutionary.

The discovery that DNA carries the genetic code for cells opened a new
era in biology that focused on the organization of information in
cells. Soon we will know all the genes in cells from humans and many
other species and high throughput methods are available to identify
proteins and to analyze their three dimensional structures. However,
the sequence of a genome only provides the equivalent of nature's
white pages, a useful index of genes but far less than we need in
order to know how cells work.

At present researchers are creating a list functions for those genes
in different cell, which is equivalent to nature's yellow pages. But
even this is not enough to know how organisms are built since the
genes encode a program that is used during development to create a
wide range of different cells and organs.

We need a new approach to these problems that uses all of the tools in
molecular genetics and in addition brings to bear powerful
computational tools from computer science. Although we have the tools
and techniques to make major discoveries, we do not have enough
scientists, trained at the interface between biology and computer
science, to make them.

A bold new initiative is needed to train a new generation of
computational biologists who are equally at home in wet bench science
and the world of computational science. A new national institute
should be initiated at the National Institutes of Health devoted to
the goal of discovering broad general theoretical principles for how
biological systems become self organized into functional systems.

For example, we can anticipate that general principles will emerge
from the study of how various proteins and macromolecular complexes in
cells interact with each other and control gene expression. The
potential payoff for establishing these general principles is
enormous. The Institute for Computational Biology and Medicine will be
a resource for the entire nation, focusing existing talent and
creating the computational infrastructure needed to make major
advances.

Sincerely,

Terrence Sejnowski
Computational Neuroscientist
Professor, Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical
Institute;
Professor of Biology and Neurosciences, University of California, San
Diego;
Coauthor of The Computational Brain and most recently (with Steven
Quartz) Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals
About How We Become Who We Are. 
________________________________________________________________

...we regard more and more problems of individual behavior as
biologically determined, but we are increasingly ready to treat
them biochemically, and looking forward to treating them
genetically. Our fatalism about the individual capacity to learn
and heal is matched only by our technological hubris.

Mary Catherine Bateson

Dear Mr. President,

I hope that some of my colleagues will offer you a shopping list of
specific goals. I want however to address a broader question that
requires fitting together the findings of many researchers and that
resonates with popular culture and the political process. For
simplicity let me put it in terms of a single question: Can Human
Beings Learn?

Most people would answer, of course. I am sure that you yourself
remember learning things from time to time, at Yale for instance, and
perhaps since. But I write to point out that we are steadily reducing
our estimate of what and how much humans can learn, except at a
relatively trivial level. And we are making policy on that basis.

We live at a time of impressive progress in biology (especially
genetics and neuroscience), which has replaced physics as the most
glamorous of the sciences. Certainly you have had to take positions on
applications of this new science to human beings, but you may be
unaware of the indirect influence of popularized scientific ideas on
our systems of child care, education, health, and criminal justice. In
all of these areas we are drifting toward biological determinism, but
the situation is complicated by the popular belief that whereas what
human individuals can learn is limited, scientists can learn to
tinker. Thus we regard more and more problems of individual behavior
as biologically determined, but we are increasingly ready to treat
them biochemically, and looking forward to treating them genetically.
Our fatalism about the individual capacity to learn and heal is
matched only by our technological hubris.

Let me give you a glimpse of each area:

o Learning begins at birth. But in child care there is now a
substantial community that says early childhood does not have the
importance it was believed to have. Even though there is some
continuing support for child health insurance, for daycare that
allows mothers to work, and for Headstart, the programs that are
actually funded are increasingly custodial and mechanistic.

o The K-12 years are critical in learning to think, feel, and
interact with others. But in education we are reducing our goals to
testable skills and information, diverting attention from more
subtle intellectual and social potentials. In poorer areas, we are
miseducating large numbers of children, and we are allowing them to
grow up in impoverished and violent environments--as if we believed
that an improvement in conditions would have no positive effect.

o Psychotherapy developed to promote reflection on experience and
to facilitate learning new ways to cope, physically and mentally.
But in mental health we are letting medication replace, rather than
support, psychotherapy. We are drugging or segregating problem
children and ignoring the experiential basis of many conditions.

o Learning does take place in prisons. But increasingly they are
training centers for crime and alienation, because we use them as
if those we incarcerate were already irreversible career criminals.
Thus, we increasingly assume that rehabilitation is impossible.

o Let me add foreign policy. If we believed that terrorism, for
instance, was learned rather than innate, would we not question the
policies that have kept three generations of Palestinian children
growing up in refugee camps? Would we not focus AID money on
education and social conditions rather than armaments? How many
future terrorists will emerge from today's traumas?

I can see a lightbulb flashing over your head. "She's not talking
science," you say, "she's talking the liberal agenda." That's true,
Mr. President: liberals are not people who spend money on government
programs per se, liberals are people who put money into improving
social conditions because they affirm that humans can learn--from
parents, peers, teachers, and what they see and hear around them. How
come? Because human biology evolved for adaptation by learning. Can
all humans learn equally well? Of course not, but they can learn
better. We have seen that in the case of the learning disabled over
the last generation. Are humans perfectible? Of course not. But
liberals tend to use government to improve social conditions (which is
to say, to support the learning environment in the widest sense)
rather than on coercion, incarceration, warfare--and rewarding those
who have already had the benefits of privileged environments. Have you
ever noticed, Mr. President, how so much of the twins research that is
used to argue the determining importance of genetics depends on
controlling for socioeconomic status? That little phrase is the basis
of the liberal agenda: give everyone an equal chance and, yes, the
genes will play a large role. Inequality blocks genetic potential.

But is this science, you ask? Indeed. Anthropologists have spent the
last century assembling evidence of how differently humans behave when
reared in different cultural settings--and how those differences
disappear when the settings change, sometimes overnight, sometimes
over a couple of generations.

Mr. President, do continue to support research in neuroscience. We
need to know more about the effects of love or trauma, of intellectual
stimulation or monotony on the brain itself. Brain structure may
increasingly be seen as a result rather than a cause. Keep the work
going in human genetics and biochemistry. Doing science is after all
derived from the evolved human capacity to adapt by learning and we
can hope that some of the hubris will settle down with time. But put
your money into research and policy for the great long term experiment
of building a world in which everyone can learn to be the best they
can be.

Respectfully submitted.

Mary Catherine Bateson
Anthropologist
Visiting Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Author of With a Daughter's Eye (on her parents Margaret Mead and
Gregory Bateson); Composing a Life; Peripheral Visions, and Full
Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in Transition. 
________________________________________________________________

Too many people think cloning cells for the fight against disease is the
same thing as creating Frankenstein's monster. Too many people think
evolution is the idea that people are descended from apes. And too many
people think that genetic modification of plants is a dangerous new idea,
instead of something that's been going on for ten thousand years...The
problem is that, although we're all entitled to our beliefs, our culture
increasingly holds that science is just another belief. Maybe this is
because it's easier to believe something--anything--than not to know.

Alan Alda

Dear Mr. President,

I think there may have been a terrible mistake. I'm not a scientist.

Worse than that, I'm an actor. So, I don't know how I got recommended
to you as a candidate for science advisor. Possibly, someone felt that
if we could let an actor be president without major damage beyond a
trillion or two, why not science advisor? But, I'm also a writer who
has a lifelong interest in science, and I host the PBS program
Scientific American Frontiers, and I have played Richard Feynman on
the stage, so I can see where the confusion might have arisen.

If you choose to name me as your advisor on scientific matters, I
would consider it my duty not to turn you down, but I think it only
fair to let you know the kind of advice I'm liable to give you.

First, I really do value science. I get the impression from some
previous appointments in your administration that the mission of the
appointees is to dismantle the agencies they were put in charge of. I
might do some damage through ignorance, which may be why I'm on your
short list, but I could not bring myself to put an end to science in
the United States; so if that's what you had in mind, please count me
out.

As for my actual advice, it breaks down into two major categories:
Deep and Deeper.

Deep:

The world is going to come to an end in about 5 billion years no
matter what we do. So, in the long run, you're off the hook. It's true
that things like Global Warming, plus the increasing loss of clean
water and bio diversity, can hasten The End Of Everything As We Know
It, but even so, it will all end eventually. Nobody gets blamed for
continuing a disastrous policy, so there will be no harm to your
reputation if you do nothing. People simply do not say, "Caesar did
nothing to halt the Roman practice of putting lead in the air and
water, probably resulting in the eventual weakening and fall of the
empire." But they're absolutely fascinated with the way he could
divide Gaul into thirds.

Recognizing this, I will not advise you to do anything related to the
environment. I will simply ask permission to put a glass of water on
your desk every day with little things swimming in it. Sooner or
later, you'll slip and drink from it, and while you're in the
hospital, we can talk about the billion or so people who have nothing
else to drink.

I will also arrange for the local gas station to charge your mom and
dad what a gallon of gas costs after the actual costs of the gas have
been added. This would include the cost of subsidies to oil producers,
health care for skin cancers and lung conditions, and a couple of
wars, but we'll skip the wars. I don't think this comes to more than a
thousand dollars a gallon, but if your folks write you about the awful
price of gas these days, then maybe we could have another talk.

And while we're on the subject of gas, I believe it is our duty as
patriotic citizens to end our reliance on foreign oil. It is also our
duty as rational people to end our reliance on any oil. Both of these
duties are satisfied by pouring a huge amount of money into the
development of hydrogen cells, as well as thermal, wind, solar and
several other forms of energy. But it will take a huge amount of
money--possibly what it will cost to pay for 3 or 4 days of the next
war.

As you can see, the Deep stuff isn't all that deep, and it's pretty
much what you would expect from your average limousine liberal. The
Deeper stuff gets, as you might suspect, deeper. It will also, I'm
afraid, get more earnest.

Deeper:

What your science advisor really needs to do is help you re-fashion
the thinking of the country. Too many people think cloning cells for
the fight against disease is the same thing as creating Frankenstein's
monster. Too many people think evolution is the idea that people are
descended from apes. And too many people think that genetic
modification of plants is a dangerous new idea, instead of something
that's been going on for ten thousand years.

If our people don't learn to make distinctions and challenge their own
thinking, as well as that of others, then they will be at a
disadvantage when facing the technologies, insights and strategies of
those who do. Rationality has a special importance for us now.

The commencement speaker at Caltech this past year said,

"We live in a time when massive means of destruction are right here in
our hands. We're probably the first species capable of doing this much
damage to our planet. We can make the birds stop singing; we can still
the fish and make the insects fall from the trees like black rain. And
ironically we've been brought here by reason, by rationality. We
cannot afford to live in a culture that doesn't use the power in its
hands with the kind of rationality that produced it in the first
place."

Actually, I was the commencement speaker who said that, but I thought
you'd pay more attention if I put the Caltech part first.

The problem is that, although we're all entitled to our beliefs, our
culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief. Maybe
this is because it's easier to believe something--anything--than not
to know.

We don't like uncertainty--so we gravitate back to the last
comfortable solution we had, and in this way we elevate belief to the
status of fact.

But scientists are comfortable with not knowing. They thrive on it.
They don't assume that just because they had an idea it must be right.
They attack it as vigorously as they can because they don't want to
lie to themselves. As Richard Feynman said, "Not knowing is much more
interesting than believing an answer which might be wrong."

Above, all, Mr. President, I think your science advisor needs to help
you help our country learn to be comfortable with uncertainty, and--as
hard as this might be to believe--to put reason ahead of belief.

Alan Alda
Actor, Director, Writer
Host of PBS program "Scientific American Frontiers"
________________________________________________________________

Your science advisor is really a social advisor, providing an
expert's view on how the state can best assist in and benefit from
the advancement of science.

Cliff Barney

Dear Mr. President,

The most pressing science-related issue for the nation and the world
concerns how best to make the existential choices that bring science,
a value-free process, into a social arena where values are central.

This is not, strictly speaking, a scientific issue. Your science
advisor is really a social advisor, providing an expert's view on how
the state can best assist in and benefit from the advancement of
science.

Therefore I urge you to appoint a social scientist, preferably a
sociologist who has studied the impact of science on society, as your
science advisor. More specifically, since a global networked economy
and global political issues (such as terrorism) are affecting the
entire planet, I suggest that you choose someone who has investigated
the new social forms that are developing to cope with the global
communications network.

This will not guarantee wise choices but it will at least meet
scientists half way in dealing with scientific issues.

Cliff Barney
Technology journalist, designer of online news systems
Publisher of Tales of the Network Frontier (www.netfront.to)
________________________________________________________________

To push a science agenda, we would have to promote the underlying
premise of science: that none of the systems we use to understand
this reality are pre-existing or true. They were simply the most
useful at a particular moment--very often to a particular group.
When they stop being useful, we must be prepared to discard them.

Douglas Rushkoff

A modest super-fund to explore alternative, non-resource-based energy
sources could solve a great majority of the world's problems. But it
would need to be accompanied by an equally serious look at our
commodities-based economic model. Our chief obstacle to sustainable
energy technology might not be scientific at all, but economic. What
would happen to the oil industry if we no longer needed oil?

The same could be asked about our chemically and genetically addicted
agriculture. It's not that high-yield, top-soil enriching farming
practices are out of reach; it's simply that our agribusiness industry
doesn't know how to profit off a paradigm that doesn't rely on
synthetic fertilizers and gene modification.

America's great problems lie in our inability to change the models we
are using to understand the challenges before us. And this is where a
genuine science education--both in schools and through good use of
media--would prove extraordinarily useful.

The scientific model acknowledges that it is just a model of our
reality. It is not the way things are, but rather a way of explaining
the way the way things are. Those of us who use the scientific model
have great practice in reminding ourselves that our understandings
must constantly be revised, evolved, even improvised.

To push a science agenda, we would have to promote the underlying
premise of science: that none of the systems we use to understand this
reality are pre-existing or true. They were simply the most useful at
a particular moment--very often to a particular group. When they stop
being useful, we must be prepared to discard them.

Douglas Rushkoff
Author, Lecturer, and Social Theorist
Professor of Media Culture at New York University's Interactive
Telecommunications Program
Author of Media Virus!; Coercion; and Nothing Sacred: The Truth About
Judaism.
________________________________________________________________

But the single greatest mystery facing science today arises,
remarkably, each time we see the red of an apple, hear the blast of
a trumpet, smell the fragrance of a rose, or reel with anger from
an insult. The mystery is this: What is the relationship between
our everyday conscious experiences and our brains?

Donald D. Hoffman

Mr. President,

Scientists are now studying many fascinating and fundamental problems:
What is the nature of "dark matter," the unseen and as yet unknown
matter which apparently comprises most of our universe? What is the
ultimate "theory of everything" that will unify our understanding of
the forces of nature? Will such a theory let us predict the masses of
fundamental particles?

But the single greatest mystery facing science today arises,
remarkably, each time we see the red of an apple, hear the blast of a
trumpet, smell the fragrance of a rose, or reel with anger from an
insult. The mystery is this: What is the relationship between our
everyday conscious experiences and our brains?

The issue is that brains seem to be physical objects with physical
properties like spin and momentum, but conscious experiences seem to
lack such properties. What, for instance, is the spin of anger or the
momentum of my experience of red? The very question sounds like
nonsense, and that raises the mystery.

The mystery is us. What kind of creatures are we? Are we composites of
physical bodies and nonphysical experiences? Or are we entirely
physical, or entirely nonphysical? Do brains create conscious
experiences, or vice versa? Could some complex pattern of neural
activity in my brain actually cause, or be identical with, my
experience of red? How, precisely? Is the distinction between physical
and nonphysical even useful here?

The mystery could hardly be more personal: What are we? And the fields
of science potentially relevant to its resolution could hardly be more
diverse: Quantum physics and chemistry, molecular biology,
evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, sociology and
anthropology.

The mystery is as old as philosophy and religion, but today it engages
many of the brightest minds in diverse scientific fields. An
initiative to study this mystery could galvanize these fields and
promote multidisciplinary collaborations.

What are the potential payoffs of such an initiative? At a minimum
there is the intangible benefit of furthering our scientific
understanding of what we are. The tangible benefits of such an
understanding are anyone's guess. They might include payoffs of
interest to any administration, such as a better understanding of the
sources of interpersonal and international conflict and how these can
be resolved. For if we better understand what we are, we might better
understand why we behave as we do.

Donald D. Hoffman
Professor of Cognitive Science
University of California, Irvine
Author of Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See and coauthor
of Observer Mechanic 
________________________________________________________________

Science is the only way we have of truly understanding how our
increasingly complex world works. The scientific view is the long
view--it is not short term thinking; it seeks the big picture. The
choice is clear: a future of ignorance, or a far better future of
enlightenment.

Steve Giddings

Dear Mr. President:

A great president is measured in several ways. One is his response to
crisis. Another is his vision of the future.

Many of issues most critical to our future as a society, and indeed as
the human species, have a large scientific component. These include:

o Uncontrolled population growth, that is beginning to surpass the
level at which our world resources can sustain it. Another example
of an exponential growth curve in a finite system is cancer: by the
time you realize you have it, it's just a few more tumor-doubling
times to death.

o The related problem of global environmental crises: global
warming, species extinctions unparalleled since the end of the age
of the dinosaurs, large-scale loss of habitat of all kinds, from
forest to sea, global-scale pollution, and others.

o Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction: as North Korea is
demonstrating, this is not just a problem with Iraq, and soon this
problem will spread. Ultimately, our survival as a species is
probably at stake.

o Bioterrorism: I needn't explain its relevance to you.

There are many others, and that means there are some very tough
decisions that we, as a nation, have to make in confronting these
problems. We are in it for the long haul: they won't go away soon. It
is essential that we, as a people, be fully informed to make these
choices. Yet many among our population have a woefully inadequate
background in scientific matters, which lie at the very foundation of
these and other problems.

For this reason, the most important scientific matter facing the
nation is that of scientific education, literacy, and appreciation. It
is imperative that our populace, as well as our decision makers, have
a solid grounding in basic scientific principles, appreciation for
what science can (and cannot) do, and understanding of how science is
carried out.

I've referred to crisis, let's turn to vision. Not only would a
scientifically literate populace be better equipped to handle our
problems, but it would be better able to work towards a greatly
improved future. The fruits of past scientific innovation are all
around us: computers, TVs, the World Wide Web (invented by high energy
physicists!), medical diagnostics, advancing cures for many diseases,
new sources of power, and many more. Our modern society as we know it
would not exist without the discoveries of science--we'd still be
huddled around our wood stoves and lanterns and riding horses. And
there is so much more we can do, as we advance our fundamental
understanding of our Universe, our world, and our biology. Science is
a path of bold exploration, and it may someday even be a path to the
stars.

For this reason I would urge you to follow the vision of a
scientifically literate populace, able to intelligently confront our
crises and lead humanity to a better future.

There are many things that could be done, and we can discuss details
later. But here are some ideas:

o Advocate revamping of school curricula, at both the K-12 and
University levels, to place adequate focus on mathematics and
physical and biological sciences as an integral part of core
curricula. The US was reminded of the importance of science in the
Sputnik era, and responded well. Let's not wait for another
dramatic signal that we are falling behind. If you prefer to think
of it this way, this is, in the end, a matter of our national
security.

o Improve science funding through the NSF, DOE, NIH, and other
national funding organizations. Much of this funding ultimately
goes into the training of new leaders in science.

o Initiate programs to foster better communication between
scientists and the press. It is essential that the American people,
through their press, gain an understanding of what science is, what
is good (and bad) science, and appreciate the importance and great
promise that science holds for their future.

o Initiate programs to bring more scientific knowledge to our
decision makers: Congress and other administration officials. We
should have annual meetings in which leading scientists are invited
to brief our leaders on the implications, perils, and promises of
scientific discoveries. Congress, and all of your administration,
should, on an ongoing basis, actively seek the advice of
scientists, both in confronting crises, and in planning for a
better future for the American people.

Science is the only way we have of truly understanding how our
increasingly complex world works. The scientific view is the long
view--it is not short term thinking; it seeks the big picture. The
choice is clear: a future of ignorance, or a far better future of
enlightenment.

Steve Giddings
Professor of Physics
University of California, Santa Barbara
________________________________________________________________

Your friend Tony Blair recently gave a speech where he declared,
"We're at a crossroads. We could choose a path of timidity in the
face of the unknown. Or we could choose to be a nation at ease with
radical knowledge, not fearful of the future, a culture that values
a pragmatic, evidence-based approach to new opportunities." Prime
Minister Blair believes the second path is the clear choice. It's
time you demonstrated the same conviction.

Lance Knobel

Dear Mr President,

You are fortunate in leading a nation pre-eminent in science. By any
measure, scientists in the US are having a profound impact on our
understanding of virtually every field of research.

But this sustained excellence is matched by the steady of growth of a
culture of unreason, deeply opposed to the methods and conclusions of
science. You are in a uniquely powerful position to confront this
dangerous trend, but I'm afraid you are also in a deeply compromised
position. For tackling the culture of unreason means confronting the
core of your political support, the religious right.

Why is this important? The scientific issues we need to confront as a
society are increasingly posing hard questions of moral judgement and
of practical concern. This is particularly true in the revolution in
biosciences which intimately affects who and what we are. Your
administration has already compromised US scientific advance--and
potentially the health of many of your citizens--by a politically
motivated policy fudge over embryonic stem cells.

The questions in coming years will get harder, not easier. It will be
the task of elected politicians to make societal choices on the basis
of scientific evidence, not prejudice.

Your friend Tony Blair recently gave a speech where he declared,
"We're at a crossroads. We could choose a path of timidity in the face
of the unknown. Or we could choose to be a nation at ease with radical
knowledge, not fearful of the future, a culture that values a
pragmatic, evidence-based approach to new opportunities." Prime
Minister Blair believes the second path is the clear choice. It's time
you demonstrated the same conviction.

Sincerely,

Lance Knobel
Independent Writer and Strategist
Former Advisor, Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, London
________________________________________________________________

However, there is one aspect of my work that does have deadly
consequences, more precisely, will have deadly consequences if it
is ignored. Here is where heaven and earth meet: in the
possibility, and in the long run the certainty, that people will
die through the effects of an impact of an asteroid, large or
small.

Piet Hut

Dear Mr. President

I had to smile when I read the assignment, to give advice about
pressing scientific issues, while sticking to those scientific areas
where I have expertise. As an astrophysicist, few issues in my trade
could be considered pressing. When I meet people who ask me what I do
for a living, I often describe my area of work as being in some ways
more akin to art than to science: we astrophysicists produce pretty
pictures and interesting stories about places and times far away,
events that are unlikely to affect you and me in our daily lives.

However, there is one aspect of my work that does have deadly
consequences, more precisely, will have deadly consequences if it is
ignored. Here is where heaven and earth meet: in the possibility, and
in the long run the certainty, that people will die through the
effects of an impact of an asteroid, large or small.

Although there are several more pressing things to worry about right
now, including many already pointed out by the band of science
advisors reporting here, this does not mean that it would be wise to
neglect the threat of an asteroid impact. Would you be willing to face
the public if an asteroid would be discovered heading our way? You
would have to tell them that NASA has been discovering and tracking
asteroids, but that funding had not been sufficient to catalogue most
of them, and that there had not been any funding so far to study the
question of how to deflect an asteroid, once found, even though the
technology has in principle been available. Not a nice speech to give,
I bet.

Fortunately, it is rather straightforward to develop the technology to
send a spacecraft to a 100-meter diameter asteroid, in order to give
it a nudge so that it will miss the Earth. The ingredients are at
hand, and all we have to do is to carry out a test mission, in which
we demonstrate the capability to significantly alter the orbit of an
asteroid. That way, when we discover an asteroid with our name on it,
so to speak, we will be prepared. We could be in a position to save
millions of lives, and at the very least we could not be accused of
knowing about a danger and ignoring it.

Even if we are lucky, and no life-threatening asteroid crosses our
path in the foreseeable future, developing the technology to gently
nudge asteroids is likely to help us to explore the solar system.
Plasma engines, for example, can be used as tug boats for asteroids
but also to speed up human expansion into space. This could be a major
legacy of your administration: to open the door to populating other
worlds while at the same time making our own world a safer place.

Piet Hut
Astrophysicist, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton
A founding member of the Kira Institute and of the B612 Foundation.
________________________________________________________________

While the findings of anthropologists indicate that we should be
tolerant of cultural variation, taking anthropology seriously as a
science also indicates that we should not mistake exotic beliefs
for science. The fact that people have diverse systems of belief
does not give them all equal claims on truth.

Robert Aunger
Mr. President,

The appointment of an anthropologist such as myself to the post of
science advisor would be unusual, but perhaps opportune, as some of
the lessons anthropologists have drawn from their investigations over
the past century have some bearing on the times. Anthropology has
always been identified with the concept of culture, and recent events
suggest that the need to understand how different belief systems arise
and perpetuate themselves has become urgent. But let me first explain
how anthropologists use the culture concept as a way of identifying
how humankind is different from the rest of Creation, because this not
only contains its own lesson, it sets the stage for the argument about
how one cultural group comes to differ from another.

Culture is what we have that other creatures don't. However, as we
have learned more about other animals, the number of features unique
to our way of life has diminished considerably. For example, we used
to think that no other animal learned an idiosyncratic way of
performing some behavior that makes their group characteristically
different from other groups--what anthropologists call "cultural
traditions." Now we know that chimps--and probably a number of dolphin
and whale species--do have socially acquired traditions. So we can no
longer say that such traditions are unique to us.

Grammatical language is still on the list of quintessentially human
characteristics, but its status on the list is highly contested
because some say that chimps can be taught by human care takers to
speak (or use sign language) in grammatical fashion. Thus, some
species have near-human abilities to make complex judgments. Our first
lesson: We should therefore consider these animals as being worthy of
moral rights equal to their cognitive and emotional capacities.

The best we can say nowadays is that people have complex culture. This
means primarily that we have organizations (or designed,
special-purpose social groups), and technology (especially machines),
which have no parallel in the rest of the animal kingdom. What is
important about this, in light of recent events, is that organizations
and technology have allowed human cultures to diversify in ways seen
in no other animals.

Human groups exhibit specific ways of life that have emerged during
the individual history of that group. As a result, the human
population, unlike any other, can be divided into groups that live
according to quite different sets of rules. This sometimes makes it
hard for members of one group to sympathize with the members of other
groups, or even to comprehend what the rationale for some "exotic"
behavior like a witchcraft trial or an elaborate "rite of passage"
into adulthood might be.

The anthropological enterprise would be unnecessary if people
everywhere lived according to the same set of rules. At the same time,
anthropology would be impossible if it weren't the case that
individuals can learn to live successfully amongst those whose culture
is different from their own. Aspects of culture may reflect the
idiosyncratic history of each group, but they make sense within the
confines of that history. Our second lesson can be drawn from this
fact: Just as we should understand and respect other animals, so too
should we honor other cultures, because just as species diversity is
important to the survival of the biosphere, so too is cultural
diversity necessary for the health and longevity of the human species.
The world will only become a safer place when we realize that each and
every culture is an invaluable inheritance of knowledge tested against
local conditions over a long period of time.

While the findings of anthropologists indicate that we should be
tolerant of cultural variation, taking anthropology seriously as a
science also indicates that we should not mistake exotic beliefs for
science. The fact that people have diverse systems of belief does not
give them all equal claims on truth. Intelligent Design theorists, for
example, argue that because the natural world is complex, a
supernatural agent must have designed it. There are two problems with
this argument. First, scientific theories for the emergence of
complexity exist, such as Darwinian evolution and complexity theory.
Second, even if such theories did not exist, the conclusion that only
supernatural causes can explain such complexity does not follow, since
a scientific explanation for complexity could arise tomorrow. Our
final lesson: The teachings of Intelligent Design theorists therefore
belong in programs of religious, not scientific, instruction.

I believe these lessons from anthropology should play an important
role in deciding our future scientific policies. I respectfully hope
you will agree.

Sincerely,

Robert Aunger
Department of Anthropology
University College, London
Author of The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. 
________________________________________________________________

Without a sense of the past, there is a danger of raising a
generation of change-junkies, weaned on the rush of accelerating
technologies, for whom history has no relevance. They would
recognise technological change only through its material
culture--the stuff--brought to them on the street and in a welter
of media hits. In their world where nothing stands still, they are
left with no space to evaluate why technological change happens
and, crucially, its implications.

Christine Finn

Mr.President,

Have you ever held in your hand a prehistoric stone tool and
considered the processes involved in making it? The hand that struck
the flakes and who it belonged to, and the world in which they
encountered this technology? And pondered the time scale of the
evolutionary technology involved in the transformation of stone into
an artifact, and one which holds the potential to make other tools?
And hold that thought (as well as the object) as you consider the
technological change in your own lifetime (computers you have used?),
and the acceleration of the rate of change that is now made even more
complex by overlays of hype, something which is itself generated and
spread by means of escalating technologies.

For the past eight years I have taught a course on Archaeology and
Anthropology to American High School students. These young people are
juggling their own rites of passage into adulthood with the external
demands of an increasingly challenging world. They don't talk readily
about what happened in their grandmother's day, or what their parents
grew up with. They can see more relevance in discussing what their
older siblings used at school. Last year's model is the new
archaeology. I encourage them to think about the evolution of the
computer over a few decades as if considering stone tool technology
over millenia. It's not change that is significant, it's the rate of
change, and that's a tricky concept to convey to students who have
never used a pen to write an essay.

But what is unique about the 21st century perspective of these
Americans is they have, potentially, more than objects to teach them
about change--they can hear the folk-memory of these archaic forms in
the stories of the Apple on which a mother wrote her thesis; the DEC
PD11 on which a father worked. They can learn to evaluate change from
observing the material culture of still-functioning computers, all the
more so because of the work of individuals and institutions such as
the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, who seek to preserve
them. And they can also consider the inequalities of technology by
finding out what becomes of old computers which are not yet
interesting, but simply out-moded.

Without a sense of the past, there is a danger of raising a generation
of change-junkies, weaned on the rush of accelerating technologies,
for whom history has no relevance. They would recognise technological
change only through its material culture--the stuff--brought to them
on the street and in a welter of media hits. In their world where
nothing stands still, they are left with no space to evaluate why
technological change happens and, crucially, its implications.

Change happens. The challenge is to work with the materiality and mass
consumerism of our everyday world, and to use it to communicate a
scientific context in which technological leaps and bounds make sense.
Not just to American High School students. But to all of us.

Christine Finn
Archaeologist and Journalist
Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and Research Associate, The
Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford.
Author of Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year In Silicon Valley.
________________________________________________________________

We are endangered from the outside by our avowed enemies. We are
threatened from within by killers among us. An urgent need for the
nation to establish a deep scientific understanding of
psychological circuits dedicated to murder and the causal processes
that create, activate, and deactivate those circuits.

David M. Buss

Dear President Bush,

One scientific issue that requires immediate attention is this:
Understanding the psychological circuits that motivate people to
murder. The impact of killing cascades beyond the obvious tragedy of
each prematurely terminated life. Each dead victim is also a son or a
daughter, a brother or a sister, a father or a mother, so the lives of
the victim's family shatter. Uncertain and unpredictable dangers
promote contagious anxiety. The limited days of our lives become
wasted when we seek to act, but lack the knowledge to detect and deter
killers.

The current lifetime odds of being murdered at the hands of a fellow
human being are far from trivial. In America, they are one in 200 for
the general population, and one in 26 for certain sub-groups of males.
If you add attempted homicides that are "unsuccessful" due to valiant
or desperate measures, the victim list more than triples. In the hot
spots around the world, the toll of dead bodies runs from the hundreds
to the hundreds of thousands.

In the past century, war across the world has claimed victims by the
millions. We are endangered from the outside by our avowed enemies. We
are threatened from within by killers among us. An urgent need for the
nation to establish a deep scientific understanding of psychological
circuits dedicated to murder and the causal processes that create,
activate, and deactivate those circuits. Without such knowledge, we
cannot effectively prevent the premature and irreversible ending of
lives.

Sincerely,

David M. Buss
Professor of Psychology
University of Texas at Austin
Author of The Evolution of Desire, Evolutionary Psychology: The New
Science of the Mind, and The Dangerous Passion.
________________________________________________________________

As recognized pathogens develop multi-drug resistance, and as new
pathogens are recognized, our tools for recognizing and treating
these agents must keep up. At one time it was thought that
infectious diseases had been practically vanquished. We must work
hard to keep up.

Beatrice Golomb

Dear Mr. President:

Among the pressing issues that we face:

1. Natural pathogens (bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites):

As recognized pathogens develop multi-drug resistance, and as new
pathogens are recognized, our tools for recognizing and treating these
agents must keep up. At one time it was thought that infectious
diseases had been practically vanquished. We must work hard to keep
up.

Conversely: Some microorganisms contribute to host health and defense.
There is need to focus on studying and mining the benefits of
beneficial organisms, as well as attending to those that produce harm.
(Thus, there is evidence of altered gut "flora", i.e. altered balance
of bacteria and fungi, in persons with irritable bowel syndrome; there
is evidence that some "intestinal flora" are vital to gut function and
nutrient absorption, and protect against invasion of pathogenic
organisms; there is evidence that H. pylori, a bacterium that may
contribute to gastroesophageal reflux, may also protect against
esophageal cancer;

2. Biowarfare agents:

Additional work must go toward defense against pathogens and toxins
developed as weapons of terrorism and biowarfare..

3. Chemical interactions and individual susceptibilities:

In our ever more chemically rich environment, certain health problems
are escalating that are likely to be linked to exposures to certain
chemicals and their combinations. Increasing evidence implicates
certain chemical agents, and combinations of these agents, in chronic
multisystem health problems to which a subset of the population
appears susceptible; persons with fibromalgia/chemical
sensitivity/chronic fatigue syndrome spectrum often report onset
following chemical exposure and there is increasing evidence to
support effects on membrane functioning, neurotransmitter systems, and
mitochondria (the energy producing elements of cells) from these
chemicals in susceptible persons. (Some genetic susceptibility factors
have already been identified.)

Persons with such chronic multisystem problems are disproportionate
users of healthcare resources. Fathoming the mechanisms of these
problems and developing strategies to mitigate their onset and treat
them when present will reduce healthcare costs and downstream
litigation costs, and will enhance the health of many. Understanding
these mechanisms may also lead to prevention, by permitting proper
warnings to be placed regarding use of potentially hazardous agents,
especially use in combination with agents that may have harmful
interactions.

4. Chemical warfare and terrorism defense:

Because some of the classes of chemical implicated above, particularly
carbamates and organophosphates (both of which act by inhibiting
regulation of a key nerve and muscle signaling chemical that has
widespread roles throughout the body), are used both to protect
military persons in the event of nerve agent attack, and are used as
nerve agents themselves, this work will have vital importance for
military preparedness and health protection; for treatment of veterans
in the event of renewed military conflict with nations that have or
are suspected to have chemical warfare agents; and for civilian health
protection.

5. Genomics and proteomics:

The time is ripe for increasing work to mine the genome, and more
pertinently, to study how the balance of proteins and non-protein
chemicals, using modern informatic and advanced statistical
techniques, can:

o Predict illness susceptibility from various causes
o Show who will respond to particular treatments
o Track the benefits of particular treatments
o Design drugs that may mitigate and even cure chronic and
uncurable diseases

6. Capitalize on existing databases to reap their full benefit:

There is much material that has never been culled from existing
federally funded databases. A major reason is that the incentive
system in academics rewards those who bring in large new grants, with
the attendant overhead dollars. Thus, rather than spend time to study
prior databases in detail, the incentive system encourages the time to
be spent on procuring new grants. Additionally, there is a peculiar
attitude, that must be changed, that major findings based on data
initially procured by someone else are of lesser importance, even if
they lead to paradigm shifts, than the expected next step that one
performs oneself. There is need to change this attitude.

7. Scientific Reasoning:

Surprisingly, neither medical schools nor graduate schools have formal
training in reasoning from evidence, the process of inference,
fallacies in reasoning, and factors that influence the credibility of
evidence. Even persons with a good grounding in statistics per se are
not trained in these areas. In consequence, even many persons that are
highly respected in the scientific community are ill-positioned to
generate the recommendations from evidence that they are tasked to do.
I can cite many instances in which failure of training and aptitude in
this area has unnecessarily held back progress. I believe that such
training should begin to be part of the core training process for
graduate and medical schools. Arguably, reasoning skills ("how to
think") should be an element of the core curriculum, at a more basic
level, even among undergraduates. While this need not be legislated,
it could certainly be strongly endorsed.

8. Informatics:

Additional focus should go to development and refinement of tools to
handle large and incomplete databases.

9. Energy:

Efforts are needed to develop technologies to reduce dependency on
foreign oil sources. This is an area in need of real leadership. We
all recognize the importance of the oil industry in the US, and there
is no reason that industry cannot participate in, or take a lead in,
developing alternative technologies, or technologies to enhance
efficiency of fuel use.

10. New means to disseminate scientific information:

The current structure of science leads to costly and needless delays
in release of scientific information resulting from the structure of
the publication process. Moreover, costly page charges lead to tightly
written documents, but at the expense of key information being
included. An antischolarly approach ensues: limitations in number of
citations prevents all but limited literature from being cited,
effectively leading to "loss" to the scientific community of valuable
older information, the costs of which have already been expended.
(Rather than it being required that each declarative statement should
have a source cited, it is now possible for authors to make assertions
that may have no basis in evidence--and if they do, the reader is not
in a position to ascertain what that basis is.)

In the modern internet era, new approaches to speeding information
dissemination, by capitalizing on internet technology should be
seriously considered. (As one primordial suggestion, a system could be
generated by which new research results could be posted on the
internet. The system would have in place an opportunity for
peer-review comments to be appended. This permits new readers to post
their comments and expertise. A continually modifiable process of
credentialing reviewers, with rankings by other readers, could
allowing ranking of review comments. Among the advantages of this
process, full database information could be provided, circumventing
space limitations in journals, permitting others to perform their own
analyses. Space limitations in journals often prevent pivotal
information from being expressed.

Beatrice Golomb
Assistant Professor (of Medicine; Family and Preventive Medicine; and
Psychology) at UCSD
Principal Investigator, UCSD Statin Study
University of California San Diego School of Medicine
________________________________________________________________

My proposal is that 99 per cent of the research funds continue to
be allocated in the usual way. But I suggest that 1 per cent is
spent in a way that reflects the curiosity of lay people, who pay
for all publicly funded research through taxes. It would be
necessary to create a separate funding body. One possible name
would be the National Discovery Center.

Rupert Sheldrake 
Dear President Bush,

I believe that if 1 percent of science funding went to research that
was of real interest to taxpayers, science would literally become more
popular.

At present the distribution of funds for research depends on the
priorities within the scientific establishment, and on the agendas of
corporations and government bureaucracies. The administration of
science is neither democratically accountable, nor carried out in a
democratic spirit.

My proposal is that 99 per cent of the research funds continue to be
allocated in the usual way. But I suggest that 1 per cent is spent in
a way that reflects the curiosity of lay people, who pay for all
publicly funded research through taxes. It would be necessary to
create a separate funding body. One possible name would be the
National Discovery Center.

What questions capable of being answered by scientific research are in
fact of interest to the electorate? The simplest way to find out would
be to ask for suggestions. Some would come from individuals, through
the Center's Web site. Some would come from local groups, like sports
clubs and horticultural associations; from national societies like the
National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club; from voluntary
organizations like Narcotics Anonymous; from consumer protection
organizations; and from local governments, schools, churches and
trades unions. Potential subjects for research could be discussed in
newspapers and magazines, and on radio and television. To find out in
more detail what subject areas are of significant public concern,
market research and opinion polls would probably be helpful.

The Center would be governed by a Board representing a wide range of
interests, including non-governmental organizations, schools and
voluntary associations. The Center would publish a list of the
research areas in which grants were available, and would invite
applications that would be evaluated on the basis of expert advice.
This Center would only fund research that is not already covered by
the regular science budget, and would therefore open up new areas of
scientific enquiry.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
(NCCAM), established by the US Congress in 1998, sets a precedent.
Complementary and alternative medicine are of great interest to
millions of American tax-payers, and the basis of a multi-billion
dollar industry. But before NCCAM's predecessor, the Office of
Alternative Medicine, was set up by Congress in 1992, research in
these fields was receiving practically no support through established
grant-giving agencies. NCCAM's current annual budget is about $100
million (less than 0.5 percent of the total budget of the NIH).

Diverting 1 percent of the present science budget to the National
Discovery Center, open to democratic input and public participation,
would involve no additional expenditure, but would have a big effect
on people's involvement in science and on innovation. It would appeal
to many voters, make science more attractive to young people,
stimulate interest in scientific thinking and hypothesis-testing, and
help break down the increasing alienation many people feel from
science. It would also enable many working scientists to think more
freely, and unleash some of the creative potential that is currently
being stifled.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D.
Biologist
Author of Seven Experiments That Could Change The World and Dogs that
Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, And Other Unexplained Powers
of Animals.
________________________________________________________________

Your science advisor would also need to be a political analyst,
whose first hurdle would be overcoming West Wing Withdrawal. For
all Martin Sheen's ability to multi-task, in reality, key problems
are often pushed to the back burner, and domestic policy is
naturally suffering by the current need to put out so many fires in
foreign policy.

Delta Willis

Dear Mr. President,

A top priority for today's science advisor should be Alternative
Energy, with a fleet of Think Again Tanks to reconsider the potential
of cold fusion, hydrogen cells, more efficient solar power, better
methods of drilling for methane, and employing wind and tidal energy.

Your science advisor would also need to be a political analyst, whose
first hurdle would be overcoming West Wing Withdrawal. For all Martin
Sheen's ability to multi-task, in reality, key problems are often
pushed to the back burner, and domestic policy is naturally suffering
by the current need to put out so many fires in foreign policy.

Reducing our dependence on foreign oil was a need that should have
been addressed a few decades ago, a "Vision Thing". The long view so
necessary in science is limited by the preference for short-term
gains, i.e. how to be re-elected in 2004. Your father's success in
foreign policy was quickly undone by discontent on domestic policies
and a bad economy. So how to please the voters, create new jobs, and
maintain sustainable development?

Develop a project of broad appeal, say, something that will make Baby
Boomers look younger. (It was, after all, a marketing campaign
targeting Baby Boomers that promoted SUVs as must haves for the
adventurous.)

For the moment let's call this phase one Reinventing the Wheel. In
reality, we're reintroducing the bicycle, along with Green Lanes, to
combat urban sprawl. Lance Armstrong might be involved to give the
project broad appeal, although there's hardly a town or city
unaffected by this in the U.S.
Problems include loss of farmland, global warming from increased
traffic, loss of wilderness and wetland habitat, death of downtowns,
and voters stressed out by longer commutes. Americans are becoming
increasingly obese, partly from lack of exercise, yet it's
inconvenient and dangerous to walk in many US cities.

Green Lanes should accommodate bicycles, along with 3-wheel rickshaws,
Segways or other non-fossil-fuel burning transport, including horse
drawn carriages. These protected lanes could also allow golf carts,
electric powered, quiet and producing no fumes. All should be
registered and licensed to help fund the Green Lanes, designed with
some clever coverage for in-climate weather.

This would be the first small step towards reducing traffic, and
perhaps the beginning of an educational program that draws upon
talents of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley to transform
scientific research into ideas that engage, and offer doable
solutions.

Finally, how can we return scientists and other thinking people to a
mentoring (celebrity) role? When Albert Einstein arrived in New York,
hundreds of fans turned out to greet him. I suggest the White House
consider a New Year's List similar to England's peerage designations,
to honor visionary leaders in science. The honorees could range
widely, including conservationists, AIDs researchers, even novelists
who write well about science and conservation. Instead of knighthood,
recipients might be denoted by a tier of titles (the Order of the
Helix) or put EMC after their name (Einstein's famous formula adapted
to denote "Einstein Mentoring Colleague.") Recipients would be
required to speak on issues that most concern them at Year's End,
answer questions from students, and participate in a roundtable
similar to "A Glorious Accident".

Delta Willis
Author of The Sand Dollar & the Slide Rule, The Leakey Family, and The
Hominid Gang. 
________________________________________________________________

Quantum dots consist of trapped electrons with no nucleus. Once
confined, the electrons repel one another and form orbitals
reminiscent of orbitals we find in actual atoms. Novel substances
made from quantum dots will be able to change their properties as
easy as a traffic light changes from red to green, and their
properties can be adjusted in real-time through the application of
light, electricity, and so forth.

Clifford Pickover

Dear President Bush,

We are entering an era of revolutionary scientific change, and you are
fortunate to be President of a nation that leads the world in
scientific and technological discovery. A top priority for today's
science advisor should be on-demand matter, a new area of science now
emerging that will have a far-reaching impact on the world's economy
and the well-being of humankind.

Perhaps you have heard of printing "on demand," a technology that
allows books to be quickly printed to meet the immediate needs of a
customer. Similarly, on-demand matter (OM) is just on the horizon and
will allow humanity to create new substances quickly and efficiently.

In particular, on-demand matter made from "quantum dots" will someday
allow us to produce virtual substances with undreamed of properties.
Let me give you some background.

Quantum dots consist of trapped electrons with no nucleus. Once
confined, the electrons repel one another and form orbitals
reminiscent of orbitals we find in actual atoms. Novel substances made
from quantum dots will be able to change their properties as easy as a
traffic light changes from red to green, and their properties can be
adjusted in real-time through the application of light, electricity,
and so forth. Visionary writer Wil McCarthy has coined the word
"wellstone" to refer to hypothetical woven solids, made from entities
such as quantum dots, whose bulk properties are broadly programmable.

With on-demand matter, humanity will be able to create ecologically
friendly industries that produce low-cost and exceptional products. OM
can be used to create novel sensors, computing devices, space
vehicles, windows, protective clothing, medical prostheses, rooftops,
auto parts, and a host of on-demand materials with limitless
potential. With just a voice command, your toothbrush becomes a
supercomputer, or your umbrella changes to a material that could never
be available by other means.

One of the first steps I would make as your science advisor would be
to recommend the formation of a number of think tanks to consider the
potential of on-demand matter. A modest funding agency to explore OM
may one day lead to a technology with the potential to solve a number
of the world's problems and empower humanity to sail on a shoreless
sea.

Clifford Pickover
Research Staff member, IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center
Author of The Paradox of God and The Science of Omniscience, Keys to
Infinity, and the Neoreality science-fiction series.
________________________________________________________________

What is needed now to get scientific research back on a fast and
efficient track again can be termed "lean science". Lean science is
slender, quick, efficient and inexpensive. It has the potential of
leading to numerous unexpected insights and discoveries.

Eberhard Zangger

Dear Mr. President,

In my opinion, in the future, what will be of major importance is how,
in principle, we carry out scientific inquiries--not in which fields
we conduct that research.

Let me use a simile to illustrate my point of view. The question as to
which fields to concentrate future research on reminds me a bit of the
question "What shall we have for lunch?" Everybody must eat--just as
every industrial nation needs a research plan. So, why not pick
something from the menu: Missions to Mars, the human genome, larger
accelerators--there are countless options.

However, when considering what to eat, the customer employs a certain
perspective, looking down the aisles past the waiter to the delights
behind the kitchen door--the latter being the equivalent of the chest
holding the nation's research funds. Let us now reverse the
perspective. Looking from the kitchen door down the aisles past the
waiter, we see the guest--and it turns out something has become
fundamentally wrong with him. The customer is an immensely huge freak,
almost immovable due to the large amounts of fat he has already
accumulated. The last thing this person needs is yet another meal.
Instead, a complete change in attitude towards eating seems
imperative, including a new perspective of life and its numerous
opportunities, more physical exercise and much less but smarter food
intake.

How did the customer grow so fat and cumbersome?

Over the past few decades, research focus was determined by big
science projects, beginning with the "Manhattan Project" and
continuing with the mission to the moon and the peaceful exploitation
of nuclear energy. As a consequence of the apparent success of these
big science projects, politicians consider focused research to be the
best way to achieve clearly defined scientific goals. To continue the
restaurant metaphor, uniting a few thousand scientists to strive for a
common goal to be reached at a certain time is like asking several
outstanding chefs to produce one certain dish--it is almost guaranteed
that they will be able to deliver a decent meal. But this is precisely
the reason why our patient has become so fat.

For politicians, big science projects can lead to immortality. John F.
Kennedy promised a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s and
consequently, on July 10, 1969, the nation got what the president had
asked for. Administrators also prefer big science projects, because
instead of having to split budgets amongst thousands of candidates,
they only have to pass the money on to a few large governmental
institutions.

Even scientists themselves prefer big science projects. Such projects
may bring tremendous power and fame to their leaders; at the same
time, they yield a structure that reduces insecurity among followers.
For taxpayers, however, big science is often useless at best, and
potentially harmful at worst. The "Manhattan Project" led to the
biggest single incident of manslaughter in human history, the
production of nuclear energy including the disposal of waste and
obsolete plants is economically futile, and the moon landing is
regarded by many as a cold war propaganda mission with questionable
scientific merit. Considering recent big science projects such as
super colliders, space stations and Mars missions, the effort and
costs to launch them appear to be inversely related to the
significance of potential results for the general public. Once again,
big science projects made our customer fat and immovable.

What is needed now to get scientific research back on a fast and
efficient track again can be termed "lean science". Lean science is
slender, quick, efficient and inexpensive. It has the potential of
leading to numerous unexpected insights and discoveries. Yet, lean
science also holds a number of potential weaknesses. It is more
difficult to administrate, the outcome cannot be determined
beforehand, and it requires education, patience and tolerance.

Lean science is built upon the concept that all scientific
achievements sprang up in the minds of individual people. Thus,
providing individual scientists with a hospitable environment in which
they can flourish and excel is bound to lead to new discoveries. Some
private universities in the United States have already realized this
and improved the environment in terms of academic freedom,
qualification of staff and quality of physical surroundings.

In the past, great thinkers and artists appear to have come in groups.
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were not only contemporaries, they also
lived in the same city--Athens in Greece. The coincidence of great
thinkers continued in history--artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and
Michelangelo were contemporaries just like painters such as Edgar
Degas, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet and Paul Cezanne or
poets like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich
von Kleist.

How come there was such an abundance of great thinkers in certain
places at certain times, while there seems to be little if any of such
excellence around today? I, for one, am utterly convinced that such
great minds are indeed around today--they always have been--but those
periods in Greece, France and Germany were rare times when the
environmental conditions were right for great thinkers to emerge and
become visible, speak up and meet each other, exchange ideas and then
take them further.

Thus, in my opinion, the first thing to consider when thinking about
pressing scientific issues would be to provide the right environmental
conditions for scientists to flourish in. That does not mean loads of
money. On the contrary, it means respect, freedom of thought, a
platform for the exchange of ideas, and a path forward even for the
non conformist--since by definition, all great thinkers were
non-conformists.

How can we obtain such an environment? We would probably have to
overhaul the medieval university system, in particular the obsolete
idea of uniting research and teaching, and the mad concept of peer
review, in which established authorities judge the merit of competing
ideas.

Getting rid of the old-fashioned universities would make room for a
new system that could operate similar to Montesquieu's scheme of
divided powers in politics (Executive, Legislative, Judicial) to
prevent misuse of power. A tri-partite control of powers in academia
could consist of research in think tank-equivalent institutions,
education in colleges, and administration of quality, funds, jobs,
permits, awards and the like in separate institutions. Scientists
would only work in one of these units at a time. Early on in their
careers, they would be researchers, then teachers and finally
administrators--instead of being all at the same time, as it is often
the case today. Funding would be provided individually, mainly on the
basis of track record and persuasiveness of ideas.

Hence, a long-term strategy is required--much like what is needed to
get a fat person thin and healthy. Your country was among the first to
fully adopt Montesquieu's scheme of a separation of powers, and today
it is the closest working model to the academic system I have
introduced here. Thus, you are in an ideal position to make a fat
system slender, beautiful, athletic and primed for success!

Eberhard Zangger
Geoarchaeologist
Discoverer of the lost continent of Atlantis
Author of The Future of the Past 
________________________________________________________________

Studies of our biological constitution make it increasingly clear
that we are social creatures of meaning, who crave a sense of
coherence and purpose. Yet, our modern way of life seems to provide
fewer and fewer opportunities to engage in the group life that
satisfies these human needs--indeed, many of its structures and
institutions stunts these very needs.

Steven R. Quartz

Dear Mr. President:

First, I should start off by endorsing virtually all the
recommendations you have received so far. I would add another
recommendation, which I believe addresses a fundamental, but
ironically largely ignored, problem facing us today. Let me put the
problem this way: why is it that in an age of unprecedented material
wealth, a billion dollar self-help industry, and an economy designed
to feed not stomachs but lifestyles, more and more people are
depressed and go through life listlessly, with little sense of purpose
or meaning? Why in the absence of such meaning do some people turn to
destructive ideologies, whose manifestations in terrorism are all to
real (I think a cult model is the way you should be thinking about
terrorist organizations, by the way)?

Studies of our biological constitution make it increasingly clear that
we are social creatures of meaning, who crave a sense of coherence and
purpose. Yet, our modern way of life seems to provide fewer and fewer
opportunities to engage in the group life that satisfies these human
needs--indeed, many of its structures and institutions stunts these
very needs. In addition to these obstacles within the design of modern
life, it's my hunch that modernist culture is based on a profoundly
mistaken view of human needs. The upshot is a deeply flawed view of
human happiness as the private pursuit of self actualization. The
implications are profound, and range from an enormous cost in public
health terms to more and more social conflicts, terrorism being just
one manifestation of these.

As science advisor, I would initiate a program at the intersection of
science and culture to investigate what modern brain science reveals
about human needs and how such an understanding can be applied to
create both ways of living and a culture that better satisfies
them--for lack of a better word, I'd call this "neurosociology."

I think we will find that the staggering advances in brain science
reveal human needs to be vastly different from the modern view--for
example, that we aren't the asocial, consumptive selves Freud thought
we were, but instead are deeply social and need not only to belong but
to identify with groups and purposes larger than ourselves.

This initiative would attempt to use this new knowledge to design ways
of living that provide more opportunity for real meaning and social
engagement that the human brain requires--from how we ought to think
about the design of communities, the workplace, learning institutions,
and entertainment and leisure. This initiative would also have to
focus on a deeply troubling problem: although science is the engine of
our society, its core values and insights have had only a weak
influence on our culture. This is a troubling gap: for science, and
therefore, our civilization, to sustain itself, we require a culture
that is built on the core values and insights of science itself, one
that endows human life with the meaning we all crave. Aligning the
design of life and a sustaining culture with the human needs that
brain science is beginning to reveal would, I think, have a profound
impact on many of the most troubling social dilemmas we face.

To sum it up, I would recommend the creation of a new science of human
flourishing and significance, a nascent neurosociology, whose goal
would be a happiness worth having.

Steven Quartz
Neuroscientist
Division of Humanities & Social Sciences, and Computation and Neural
Systems Program
California Institute of Technology
Coauthor (with Terrence Sejnowski) of Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What
the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are. 
________________________________________________________________

In short, most of the current effort being put into increasing
airline safety is a waste of valuable resources. In a world where
fanatical individuals are willing to give their own lives to
achieve their goals, we can never be 100% safe. What we should do,
is direct our resources in the most efficient manner possible.

Keith Devlin
Mr President,

I am pleased to learn that I am being considered as your next Science
Advisor. Unfortunately, as a mathematician, I do not feel sufficiently
well qualified for that position. I do, however, feel there is a clear
and demonstrated need for someone on your team to offer advice on
interpreting quantitative data, particularly when it comes to risk
assessment. I would like to suggest that you create such a position,
and I would be pleased to be considered for it.

For well understood evolutionary reasons, we humans are notoriously
poor at assessing risks in a modern society. A single dramatic
incident or one frightening picture in a newspaper can create a
totally unrealistic impression. Let me give you one example I know to
be dear to your heart. The tragic criminal acts of September 11, 2001,
have left none of us unchanged. We are, I am sure, all agreed that we
should do all we can to prevent a repetition.

Strengthening cockpit doors so that no one can force an entrance, as
you have done, will surely prevent any more planes being flown into
buildings. (El Al has had such doors for many years, and no
unauthorized person has ever gained access to the cockpit.)

Thus, the remaining risk is of a plane being blown up either by
suicide terrorists on board, by a bomb smuggled into luggage, or by
sabotage prior to take-off. In any such case, the likelihood of
significant loss of life to people on the ground is extremely low. So
low that we can ignore it. The pilot of a plane that has been damaged
while in the air will almost certainly be able to direct the plane
away from any urban areas, and the odds that any wreckage from a plane
that explodes catastrophically in mid-air are overwhelmingly that it
will not land on a populated region.

I know that what I say might sound cavalier or foolhardy or uncaring.
The hard facts the numbers present often fly in the face of our
emotional responses and our fears. But the fact is, we have limited
resources, and we need to decide where best to deploy them. This is
why you need someone to help you assess risk.

That leaves the threat to the plane and the people on board. Let me
try to put that risk into some perspective. For a single individual
faced with a choice of driving a car or flying, how do the dangers of
the two kinds of transport compare in the post September 11 world? We
know the answer, thanks to a calculation carried out recently at the
University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. In order for
commercial air travel to be as risky (in terms of loss of life) as
driving a car on a major road, there would have to be a September 11
style incident roughly once every month, throughout the year.

Let me stress that this figure is not based on comparing apples and
oranges, as some previous airline safety studies have done. By being
based on the lengths of journeys, those previous studies made airline
travel appear safer than it really is. The figure I have given you is
based on the computed risk to a single individual. It compares the
risks we face, for the journey we are about to take, when any one of
us decides whether to board a plane or step into our car. In other
words, "How likely am I to die on this trip?"

The answer, as the figures show, is that it would take a September 11
attack once every month before air travel offers the same kind of risk
as car travel.

In short, most of the current effort being put into increasing airline
safety is a waste of valuable resources. In a world where fanatical
individuals are willing to give their own lives to achieve their
goals, we can never be 100% safe. What we should do, is direct our
resources in the most efficient manner possible.

In that connection, if you have not already done so, I recommend you
see the movie The Sum of All Fears, where terrorists smuggle an atomic
bomb into the United States in a shipping crate and detonate it in
downtown Baltimore. Leaving aside the details of the plot, the risk
portrayed in that film is real, and one where we would be advised (and
I would so advise you) to put the resources we are currently
squandering on airline security.

That is why you need expert assistance when it comes to interpreting
the masses of numerical data that surround us, and putting those
numbers into simple forms that ordinary human beings, including
Presidents, can appreciate.

Numerically yours,

Keith Devlin
Mathematician
Executive Director of Stanford University's Center for the Study of
Language and Information
Author of The Math Gene and The Millennium Problems. 
________________________________________________________________

Now here's my warning; it may be unnecessary. The scientific
community, worldwide as well as in America, is like other
communities and given to fads and taboos. These taboos have
prevented some subjects from being researched or even discussed.
These subjects include the genetics of behavior and intelligence.

John McCarthy

Dear Mr. President:

A President can only do a very few of the many things proposed for the
improvement of American society. I want to make one positive proposal
for which Presidential action is appropriate and to issue one warning.

The weakest area of science is social science, specifically as it
evaluates the effects of changes in social institutions. These
institutions include education, taxation, criminal justice, structure
of government, the institutions that support scientific research.
Proposed changes in these and other institutions need to be evaluated
by systematic experiment with clear criteria of success and proper
statistical evaluation. The experiments need enough publicity all the
way through so that the results are heeded.

There are experimental programs today, but they are mostly too dilute.
Thus every state or city or school district wants its share of
experimental money, and there isn't enough money to experiment
everywhere. Social experiments need to concentrate the money in a few
places and provide enough scientific observers and statistical
resources.

Because Congress and administrations often respond to pressures to
divide the money "fairly", Presidential leadership can play a big role
in concentrating experimental programs.

Now here's my warning; it may be unnecessary. The scientific
community, worldwide as well as in America, is like other communities
and given to fads and taboos. These taboos have prevented some
subjects from being researched or even discussed. These subjects
include the genetics of behavior and intelligence. When a program
fails, the possibility that genetic differences are involved is not
allowed to be mentioned. Another taboo in the scientific community
that studies energy is nuclear energy. Nuclear energy provides the one
guarantee that those aspects of American society that depend on high
use of energy including personal mobility can be sustained
indefinitely, i.e. beyond the supply of oil

John McCarthy
Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence
________________________________________________________________

In the 20th century, we led the way--our discovery of transistors
led to everything from radios and televisions to cell phones and
PocketPCs. But the leading technologies in the 21st century--cures
for cancer, heart disease, and mental illness--will all be
biological, and without research on stem cells, we will be left
behind.

Gary Marcus

Dear Mr. President,

With the threat of war in the Middle East, continuing concerns about
terrorism, and a weak economy, science is probably not high on your
agenda right now. But it should be.

Some the decisions you make now could dramatically affect the fate of
our country, not just in the next decade, but in the next century.
Perhaps most important among them will be the choices you make about
stem cell research. If your administration continues to restrict stem
cell research as it has, America will lose its place at the forefront
of science and technology.

It will start slowly; few people will notice as some of our best
scientists move elsewhere--to countries like Britain, Canada, Germany,
and Japan. But within a decade or two, someone will notice that the
most important patents and technology of the 21st century are all held
elsewhere. In the 20th century, we led the way--our discovery of
transistors led to everything from radios and televisions to cell
phones and PocketPCs. But the leading technologies in the 21st
century--cures for cancer, heart disease, and mental illness--will all
be biological, and without research on stem cells, we will be left
behind.

Stem cells are so important because they hold the key to life itself.
Everything about the human condition--from the heartbeat or a smile of
a newborn baby to the ability of our bodies to fight off
disease--follows from the choices of individual cells in growing
organisms. Embryonic stem cells burst with potential, therapeutically
and scientifically; they truly can become anything. The researchers
who master their secrets will be able to use them to repair damaged
hearts, build vastly better drugs, and even regenerate damaged brain
tissue and heal fractured minds. They will also be able to use those
secrets to figure out what makes the human brain special, and in so
doing open the door to new kinds of tools for education, probably not
yet even dreamt of.

In the next century, the most educated, the most healthy, and the most
wealthy citizens will be the ones living in the country that best
understands the science of the human body. Let us not lose our place
at the head of the class.

Gary F. Marcus
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology at New York University
Author of The Birth of the Mind: Creating the Complexity of the Human
Brain (forthcoming).
________________________________________________________________

Video games compel kids to spend dozens of hours a week exploring
virtual worlds and learning their rules. Barring a massive overhaul
of our school system, Nintendo and PlayStation will continue to be
the most successful at captivating young minds.

Justin Hall

Mr. President:

Education is a proven means for investing in our future. But while
American schools are notoriously under-serving their students, kids
are rushing home to learn how to succeed in alternative universes.
Video games compel kids to spend dozens of hours a week exploring
virtual worlds and learning their rules. Barring a massive overhaul of
our school system, Nintendo and PlayStation will continue to be the
most successful at captivating young minds.

Over 60% of Korean homes have broadband Internet access. Massively
multiplayer online role-playing games are immensely popular there;
increasing numbers of people spend hours each night fighting monsters
together online. The largest Korean textbook distributor Daekyo and an
independent software design firm JMCJ (Interesting & Creative Co.,
Ltd.) have joined forces to make a massively multiplayer online
role-playing game in which children can study math, science and
history: Demiurges. These people intend to make it possible for people
to play in a virtual world saturated with real-world knowledge.

That game may not be successful--educational software has a famously
difficult time competing with splashier commercial titles. In their
paper "Serious Play," academics Jennifer Jensen and Suzanne de Castell
mourn that "Non-commercial development of 'educational games'has been
primarily in the hands of enthusiastic academics from a variety of
disciplines who frequently lack funding, skills, and/or access to
cutting edge technological resources." But while commercial games
seize the most attention in the industry, efforts are still underway
in the States to use games to teach specific skills.

With a budget of $7 million the U.S. Army built the first in a series
of games to be made available as free download over the web, and to be
distributed free on CDs with gaming magazines. Their first title,
"America's Army" helps teenagers learn about tactics and waging war,
as they rush through first-person shooter missions armed with guns and
grenades. Except for the U.S. military trim, and some mission
constraints, "America's Army" is indistinguishable from popular video
games for sale in stores.

Unfortunately, there are few games intent on teaching more civilian
skills. While televisions and slide shows play a large role in
classrooms, video games are still appallingly underutilized as means
for teaching. Throwing money at the problem is not the only answer;
however the kind of advanced technology and game design talent that
money could buy could well serve the project of developing engaging
educational electronic entertainment.

Jensen and de Castell continue: "what researchers and educational game
developers have so far been unable to do is to create an 'educational
game' which offers its players an engaging, immersive play space, in
which users want to stay, explore, and 'learn' as they consistently do
in commercial games." Let's match the money and effort spent on
"America's Army" to develop a freely-available game teaching kids
about math and science, history and citizenship.

Justin Hall
Web Pioneer
Video gaming consultant
Founder and author of Justin's Links
________________________________________________________________

Science is the nemesis of ignorance, and ignorance is our single
biggest enemy. Ignorance has been attacking us for ages and it is
so ever present that we often forget that it's there. Broad-based
support for science, and the public awareness and appreciation of
it, are essential if we are to have a future. There is no single
overwhelmingly pressing sub field or sub-issue. We need it all, we
need it now, and we need everyone to understand it as deeply as
possible.

Stephen Reucroft and John Swain

The bulk of the problems we face are ultimately due to ignorance: lack
of knowledge and understanding at one level or another. This has
always been the case in the past, and will certainly continue to be so
in the future.

Science is the nemesis of ignorance, and ignorance is our single
biggest enemy. Ignorance has been attacking us for ages and it is so
ever present that we often forget that it's there. Broad-based support
for science, and the public awareness and appreciation of it, are
essential if we are to have a future. There is no single
overwhelmingly pressing sub field or sub-issue. We need it all, we
need it now, and we need everyone to understand it as deeply as
possible.

We still die from diseases we don't know how to cure, or even worse
that we could easily prevent. We may even fail to follow up avenues of
research that could show success due to ignorance of basic biology.

We pollute our planet or are dependent on other countries for energy
because we don't know how to do any better, or we fail to understand
the consequences of our actions. Perhaps worse, we fail to appreciate
techniques that we already have which can produce power cleanly and
eliminate nuclear waste.

We treat each other with hatred or disrespect because we fail to
understand different cultures and customs. We harm ourselves with
dangerous chemicals because we don't know enough to keep away from
things that will ultimately hurt us.

With this in mind, and trying to capture some of the Zeitgeist, we
propose that the US launch a vigorous "War on Ignorance". Funding
comparable to that of the Wars on Drugs and Terror should be funneled
into an aggressive counterstrike against the things that wound us or
hold us back most.

We need better schools and a uniform and high standard of education
for everyone, better science in the media, better public education
(including about diet, health, drugs, sex, and everything else we so
often remain silent about, making safe harbors for the Axis of
Ignorance), and more money for both basic and applied research.

So let us arm the people--all of them--as well as we can. Arm them
with knowledge, so that they become productive, law-abiding,
tax-paying members of society. Arm them so that they may live with
hope and dignity, and contribute to the good of all.

Leave them without it, and we'll have a society governed by
irrationality and fear. It's an old saying that knowledge is power,
and this is truer now than it's ever been. Ignorance, as always,
remains our biggest foe. Focus on taking that one out, and the rest
will follow.

Stephen Reucroft
Physicist, Matthews Distinguished University Professor
Northeastern University
Coauthor (with John Swain) of syndicated column "Science Briefs"

John Swain
Physicist, Northeaster University
Coauthor (with Stephen Reucroft) of syndicated column "Science Briefs"