The return of scientific enlightenment

Nuala Moran, Senior Editor

As we prepare to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, there is hope for a return to the spirit of scientific enlightenment that fostered – and was informed by – his work on the theory of evolution.

Such enlightenment is needed now more than ever. It is needed to inform and drive policy in areas ranging from the search for new energy sources to population growth.

In the past decade issues such as genetically modified crops, embryonic stem cell research, animal cloning, the clash between biofuels and food resources – and the inconvenient truth of climate change – have lowered science’s image in the eyes of a general public that expects it to be a source of definitive answers.

And at the same time politicians have freely cherry picked its findings – or in the case of George W Bush and climate change, dismissed them altogether.

This is bad on two levels. Policy may come from the (ideological) heart, but it needs input from what scientific research tells us. For policy to be accepted, the public has to trust the veracity and objectivity of the research that affects policy.

Incoming US President Barack Obama has already given us reasons to feel more cheerful about the standing of science, fulfilling his commitment to bring scientists into his administration and promising to launch a new era of science-driven innovation.

As Obama himself put it, “Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prospects as a nation.”

Steven Chu, physicist, head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Nobel Prize winner, and promoter of solar and other alternative forms of energy, will be the new Energy Secretary.

Jane Lubchenco, a biologist and a critic of the Bush administration’s view of climate change, will head the government’s climate agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and geneticist Eric Lander of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will co-chair Obama’s committee of scientific advisers, while Harvard physicist John Holdren has been made Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

These are not a new breed of technocrats, but scientists at the top of their fields. They bring the respect of fellow scientists, and respect for the integrity of their research, to these important posts.

“It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader on science and technology,” Obama said of these appointments.

But this is about more than restoring science’s position after the recent funding drought. In a heartening and thoughtful remark, Obama said his approach is not just about investment and resources. “It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted, nor obscured, by politics and ideology.”

Given some of the unfortunate social and policy ends to which his theory of evolution was put, that is no doubt a sentiment with which Charles Darwin would have concurred.