Post mortem with President Bush's point man on science, John Marburger

After the Storm, by Adam Bly & TJ Kelleher
An exclusive and revealing post mortem with President Bush's point man on science, John Marburger.
Seed Magazine, January 13, 2009 08:33 AM

Excerpts:

Seed: So let's start big. What is the state of science in America?

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JM: All right. America continues to lead the world in its investments in science, in virtually every field. Although we have about 5 percent of the world's population, we employ about 20 percent of the world's scientists and engineers. No large country other than Japan devotes as much of its GDP to research and development as the US. On the federal level, about half is in the Department of Defense. The other half is the nondefense research. Nondefense research is always a constant fraction of the nondefense discretionary budget, so as the discretionary budget grows or shrinks, the budget for nondefense science grows or shrinks along with it. That pattern has held for four decades, and I expect that to continue.

There are some imbalances in funding. When the Cold War ended, support for physical science, engineering, math, and computer science really flattened out. But with that leveling off, the support for biomedical research was growing steadily, as it had been during the Cold War. In recent years the NIH budget doubled; 60 percent of that money was provided by this administration. The president embraced it as he had a number of things, including nanotechnology and information technology initiatives, that actually had their seeds in the previous administration.

Seed: Could we take the budgetary dimension out of the equation for a moment?

JM: That's very hard to do. The health of science depends on having money for people and facilities and infrastructure that science needs to fly. It's a major aspect, probably the primary aspect of science health.

Seed: But would you acknowledge that another aspect of the state of science is a culture of science? Could you compare the culture of science in America eight years ago to today?

JM: Virtually unchanged, as far as I'm concerned. Science has its own culture. And it's a relatively nonpolitical, almost apolitical, culture. We've seen some increased visibility of the science community during the Bush administration. I think that was part of a political strategy of the Democratic Party, which was somewhat successful, to undermine the credibility of the Bush administration by fixing on these issues. His position on stem cells was attacked as a scientific position, when in fact it's an ethical position. He was attacked for his position on the Kyoto protocol, despite its serious flaws, and the fact that the Senate had already refused to ratify it. But the way it was handled gave an opportunity to the detractors of the president to use those issues to portray the administration as negative toward science.

Seed: So there's no merit to those criticisms?

JM: That image is an urban legend. He made federal money available for embryonic stem cell research for the first time. Furthermore, his State of the Union addresses as well as other speeches often emphasized technology and how important it was. When he unveiled his American Competitiveness Initiative, he stated clearly that it was important to double the budgets for the agencies that did the most critical basic research in physical science.

Seed: Is America still competitive with the rest of the world in science and technology?

JM: The concerns are not about the present. The concern is all about the future. And certainly, the longest term issue in competitiveness is the preparation of a technical workforce. The weakness is manifest in the first place by the rate at which young people choose to go into technical careers of any sort. The No Child Left Behind Act, like other initiatives in science and education that the president has launched, sought to address that lack of preparation. The main criticisms tend to be that it has not been enough.

The quality of science education is very poor because we don't have qualified teachers in the classrooms. Important components of No Child Left Behind and also the American Competitiveness Initiative were designed to address that. The quality of teaching in science and mathematics needs to be enhanced in the US, absolutely.

Seed: Okay. Let's compare that with the state of science in the world.

JM: About a third of the world's R&D is performed in North America, nearly all of it in the US. About a third in Europe and about a third in Asia. Asia is dominated by Japan and now China. North America is dominated by the US. In Europe it is more balanced. Europe is trying to forge coherence in its very fragmented system of education and research, and doing a pretty good job of it. Then there is this huge north/south split. There is emerging research in South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, but it is tiny, and the infrastructure is growing slowly. The percentage of GDP devoted to research in those countries is very small.

Those are areas that we should be concerned about, because investments in science and technology are important stabilizing features for the economies, and they are important nucleations for development programs. You don't have to have people working on particle physics or cosmology in Africa, but you need people who understand them to act as role models and attract young people into technical studies.

Seed: Did America's strategy on science as a soft power change at all over the past eight years?

JM: Many countries pursue science as soft power, but America is unique among nations in this respect. After World War II, the US alone had the remaining economic capacity to develop the opportunities presented by science. Consequently, the world sent its aspiring scientists to us. Because of that, we haven't had to have a focused office of international science diplomacy. It is happening, and it is happening probably more powerfully than for any other country. Whenever I travel to other countries, I see colleagues and students of mine and other faculty. Now some of those students are getting a little old, and I'd like to see more and younger ones.

Seed: How does the US get more?

JM: It should be easier to get into the US as a student. And it should be easier to stay here and become a citizen if you want to, after you get an advanced degree. The president has some very interesting ideas about immigration, which are way out in front of his own party. I wish Democrats had supported them more strongly.

In any case, we've got soft diplomacy. We only have to avoid stepping on our own toes to let it work. By that I mean to be cautious about the post 9/11 provisions that we've made for homeland security. We really need to be careful about our openness to the world.

Seed: Has the US missed an opportunity to enhance American soft power by building something like the Large Hadron Collider?

JM: I don't think so. The US is actually — in a way, unfortunately — dominating the science community at CERN. And the CERN people are a little bit uncomfortable about that. And anyway, that's only one instrument. There are these lovely pictures of protein structures and glowing fish, for which two Americans just got the Nobel Prize. And you've got Hubble and the Mars rovers.

We have ongoing imaginative technological sagas that are capturing the world's attention. The world doesn't always connect them with the US, but the US is the primary player, even on questions like climate science. This is American science.

The biggest threat to that science is the inexorable growth of the mandatory budget for Social Security, Medicare, and other programs. The growth of the mandatory budget is squeezing everything. It is squeezing science, infrastructure, renewal. If not for that, we wouldn't have all these priority decisions to make. We could double NIH and NSF and NASA and everything else in reasonable amount of time. But the fact is that our discretionary budget is not increasing at the same rate as our economy or the needs and aspirations of our society. We have got to do something about it.

Seed: Our magazine has advanced the idea that we must consider science not simply as a thing that we fund, but as a lens through which we should look at the world. Does the structure of science advice to government correlate with the place of science in the world?

JM: Yes, it does. This is an area of vast ignorance because the majority of people motivated to understand science policy and the structure of science advice are government employees. Those are the people who are motivated to understand this stuff. What they know — what the science community at large does not — is that the structure of science advice reflects the full panoply of government activities in a very sophisticated way. Most of what we do here is to coordinate this vast machinery of science in government so that it produces a coherent science program.

When I want to know what to tell the president, I go to NOAA, I go to NASA, I go to NSF, I go to the Department of Energy and bring the right guys in. If I want to learn about climate change, I go to Jim Hansen. Jim Hansen has his own personal point of view. He will tell you that it's his own personal point of view that there's a tipping point, that we can't go over a certain atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. That's fine. As long as he makes it clear that that's his opinion, it's fine with me. He's a controversial person because he's one of the few scientists who's willing to state his opinion. It makes me a little nervous because of his authority as a scientist. Whenever science is recruited in the service of opinion, it makes me very nervous. Everybody wants to use the credibility of science to bolster their opinions. And I don't like that. I try to avoid getting into that trap in this office.

Seed: Did you see President Bush ever change his mind based on the scientific evidence that you presented him?

JM: As far as I can tell, the president, as a matter of principle, doesn't think it's wise to defy nature. By the time I've arranged a presentation about something for the president, all science questions have been resolved. And he expects it. He would probably fire me if I permitted a science question to leak into his briefings. I'm there to make sure that his advisors and his agencies have consulted with the science community, and that all the science issues have been taken care of before anything gets to him.

Seed: Was there a dimension, an approach, or a philosophy held by the president's other advisors that most commonly confronted your advice?

JM: I only give advice about science. I don't give advice about politics or foreign affairs or economics or legal affairs. I stay out of those things. All of the issues that the president needs to decide are in those domains. They are not in my domain. The president doesn't need to make decisions about science. Science does not tell you how to implement policies, except in rare cases. And the real tough part of governing is implementing.

I mean, the tough issues, about climate, for example, are not about whether the Earth is warming or whether it is caused by humans; the real question is how do you go about addressing the problem at a scale that is significant enough to make a difference.

Seed: Except if it takes an extra day or year or term to accept those scientific conclusions as foundational to economic or political strategy, doesn't that seem to be in violation of the principles of science?

JM: The president has had a very practical approach to a response to climate change. In 2001, before I came to Washington, the president established the Federal Climate Science Program to punch up our knowledge and focus on the remaining uncertainties in the science, and he started an initiative in climate technology, which was the seed for lots of subsequent energy initiatives, including the most recent advanced energy initiative. The president reentered ITER, the international nuclear fusion program. He has encouraged the use of nuclear power. Those were decisions that were made by the president.

The president has not said that we have to wait until the certainties are resolved before we do something about climate change. He has actually said just the opposite. It is not easy for me to understand how the public discourse can get so off track as to hold that the president says, "Oh, let's do more research, so we don't have to take any action."

Seed: Why do you think the public holds the belief that it does?

JM: That's actually a science question. I've read a wonderful book called Predictably Irrational, by Daniel Ariely, that addresses this. This is something marketing people, political consultants, and politicians know about, almost instinctively: informational cascades. Scientists, I think, are particularly vulnerable to the informational cascade phenomenon. They know who the good scientists are, and when a good scientist says something, the others tend to say, "Gee, I know he is smart or she is smart, so what he's saying must be right." So it doesn't take too much to tilt a community like this toward a mythology or a mistaken impression. In the absence of some strong rebuttal, I think it is likely to take root in the media environment that we have today.

Seed: Have you ever been troubled by the degree to which science informed the decision about a nonscientific subject?

JM: My job is to make sure that the president understands the issues. I think he has understood every science issue that I have ever talked with him about. Actually, I think he's understood well, much better than people would imagine.

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Seed: What challenges will President-elect Obama face? What advice would you give him and his science advisor?

JM: President-elect Obama, godspeed to him, will face similar difficulties. He ran such a perfect campaign, I hesitate to give him any advice. But, I would say, have respect for the science and for the structures that generations of his predecessors have labored to put in place to make science work for America.