science, policy, and design

An email arrived in my Gmail inbox today from the annual giving officer for the University of Virginia class of 2005. It explained in simple terms what has been true for years: despite the fact that UVa is a state school, the vast majority if its operating budget comes from private dollars. When I finished undergrad, state funds made up about eight percent of annual expenditures. So to maintain the high level of excellence at the university, they need my dollars. Normally, I delete such emails without a second thought. But today, a commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education captured perfectly the reason why my alma mater will likely never see a single development dime from me.

In the piece, fourth-year student Honor Jones highlights the inequality that UVa insists upon codifying in brick and mortar. Her point is this: the University of Virginia, which is still a public school, should spend its money on programs that increase economic and educational equality. It should not erect gawdy Jeffersonian buildings as it continues to refuse to pay its direct and contract employees a living wage. It is just as the email from my class annual giving officer said: “While some things from your student days remain the same, others have changed.”

Clicking back through the Cavalier Daily archives for articles covering the living wage sit-in of spring 2006 fills me with anger and despair. In the past, the pages of the CD were full of commentary from well-bred students professing to know the motivations behind low-wage workers who took jobs at UVa and spouting the supply-demand basics they picked up in Econ 101. But Jones’s commentary pushes beyond the willful ignorance of students who refuse to acknowledge that in Charlottesville, where the largest engine of economic activity is the university, a person can work full time and still live in poverty. The Census Bureau’s most recent data for the city is from 2000, but at that time, 12 percent of families were below the federal poverty line.

Jones points out that the school makes other attempts to support low-income families and students as it pursues a $3 billion capital campaign. The AccessUVA program provides need-based grants to students from families with incomes below $40,000 a year, but the program appears stagnant. Efforts to grow the diversity of incoming classes have paid off, only to be met with more enlightened commentary in the CD: “financial aid encourages people who have no business being in college to attend.”

But perhaps the most frustrating fact from Jones’s piece, the strongest indication that some things from my student days remain the same, were the quotes from the UVa administration’s cheerleader for supply-side economics, Leonard Sandridge. At a public meeting of the Commission on the Future of the University, he trotted out this boiler-plate: “we have a responsibility to serve the public,” which is “expecting more from us than we’ve ever seen before.” The quote resonated with something an administrator told living wage organizers in the spring of 2006: social justice is not a mission of the university.

Part of what baffled me about all the arguments between students and with the administration over the living wage was that for opponents, this shocking statement from the administrator was implicit. The school, a bastion of learning and a crucible of opportunity, had no obligation to largely invisible workers.

Intricacies of the living wage debate aside, what I always wanted most from the university administrators was a simple recognition that institutions of higher education should make the world a better place—not just in theory, but in practice. And that is just what Jones asks for: “Public colleges and universities need to work harder at recruiting, enrolling, and retaining low-income students; paying better wages to employees; and supporting employee education. We should foster an inclusive academic debate that goes beyond theory to explore the inequalities right in front of us.”

At a rally during the 2006 sit-in, activist and attorney Mark Lane brilliantly inverted the reactionary stance of the administration: “If social justice is not on the agenda of this university, then this university has no agenda.” I would happily support an institution that declared its intentions to serve and empower the public, and then took concrete action to do so. An email with that declaration from my annual giving officer would really make my day.

Tomorrow is National DNA Day, in commemoration of the 1953 discovery of the molecule’s double helix structure and the 2003 completion of the Human Genome Project. But while the focus of the government-conceived holiday is on the DNA of one familiar species, homo sapiens, there are some other genomes worth considering on a day devoted to nucleic acid.

The Human Genome Project, as I learned researching for an interview on genetic testing with Nancy Spinner, began in 1990 and was originally planned to take 15 years. Advances in sequencing technology moved so quickly that the project finished two years early. In 2005, the NSF, USDA, and DOE funded a project at Washington University and Iowa State University to sequence the maize genome. The two institutions published a draft of the genome in February of this year.

News of the corn genetic sequencing arrived the same week the Svalbard Seed Vault opened in Norway—a coincidence I noted on Science Progress. Each project represents different but complementary approaches to plant genetic resources: the sequencing an understanding and control over biological materials, the seed bank a commitment to the preservation of biodiversity.

But in light of some of the most complicated global resource problems of late—soaring energy and food prices, and competition between crops grown for food, fuel, and feed—DNA day could be a moment to reflect on the sustainability of genetic resources beyond our own.

The Senate today passed the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act, designed to protect patients from abuses of their genetic information by insurance companies or employers. Cutting people from insurance rolls is one possible scary use of genetic information that is getting easier to obtain. Another is the reckless creation of synthetic organisms (like nasty pathogens) from readily available cassettes of DNA—which enabled the construction of the first artificial bacteria genome at the Craig Venter Institute just a few months ago.

But what does Venter plan to do with those engineered microbes? Make biofuels.

The point being that understanding and celebrating achievements in genetics isn’t just going to make us healthier. Genetics already plays a significant role in determining what we eat—and that role will only increase—but DNA will also shape the fuel we use to move that food around.

In the third paragraph of his lengthy and provocative article on “Science and the Left” in the Winter issue of The New Atlantis, senior editor Yuval Levin swiftly dismisses five headline-grabbing objections raised in recent years to conservative blindness on science policy. With a sweeping rhetorical gesture, he minimizes the debates over human embryonic stem cell research, sex education, energy and climate policy, the rejection and suppression of scientific evidence in government decision-making, and the appointment of ideological pedagogues to public positions demanding scientific integrity.

Dismissing these most recent arguments allows him to clear the way for a more fundamental critique of liberal political thought and its relation to science. While setting aside contemporary battles to analyze intellectual history makes sense, the disputes he brushes off the table can hardly be taken lightly. One of the scientists behind last year’s breakthrough in induced pluripotent cells penned an editorial in The Washington Post explaining that the Bush administration’s policy on stem cells set research on life-saving cures back by several years. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only sex education. Almost every other country represented at the Bali climate talks last year understood that arguments over climate change and energy policy are in fact what Levin presents as caricature: “a clash of simple scientific facts against willful ignorance and greed”–and what he misses is that some of the richest companies in the world will eventually be those on the same side as the thousands of scientists and policy makers armed with those simple scientific facts. If a decidedly conservative Supreme Court reminding the Environmental Protection Agency of its responsibility to regulate greenhouse gas emissions of mercury pollution isn’t evidence of retrograde anti-rationalism in the executive branch, then I’m not sure what is. And appointing an anti-contraception activist without a medical degree or experience in family planning to the Office of Population Affairs was just one demonstration that in this conservative administration, scientific knowledge is no prerequisite for managing taxpayer dollars on issues that demand scientific integrity, like public health.

But Levin’s point in bracketing these recent issues is to clear the ground for his more complex thesis: That thinkers on the left have not grappled with the dialectical nature of the enlightenment and scientific rationality. That is, scientific rationality can contain its own opposite; strict adherence to purely rational thought can lead to a dogmatic mythology reminiscent of the theocratic teachings that enlightenment thinking pushed aside in the West in the 18th century.

Denying the legitimacy of current claims about scientific policy, he instead ploughs through the intellectual history of the 18th and 19th centuries and completely disregards the substantial body of 20th century scholarship that deals precisely with the tension between scientific rationalism and modern life. In fact, the work of Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who penned Dialectic of Enlightenment, dealt in part with the need for theory to operate in a self-aware manner that never denied the ideological conditions of its own formation. Many significant critiques of the original iterations of this “critical theory” subsequently demonstrated its shortcomings, but ignoring the influence of these and other thinkers, like Herbert Marcuse, on liberal thought in the 20th century is an oversight that dramatically destabilizes Levin’s claim that the left’s “blindness to the power of science is a…perplexing quandary.”

Others versed in the history of the subject will deal far better than I could with his subsequent attempt to claim that unfortunate support for eugenic programs from some prominent progressive leaders in the first half of the 20th century now has any bearing whatsoever on the mainstream left.

But Levin is right to point out the tensions between left thinking on dynamic responses to climate change and the some of the deeply conservative impulses of the environmental movement. Yet I can’t help thinking that this critique would have been more pertinent before the significant alliances between mainstream progressives and environmental activists that began in the late 1990s. I can’t help thinking that this critique would have had more bite in the 1970s, or even the late 1980s.

Some of the most powerful and important progressive thinking of the current moment is already well beyond the either-or tension Levin describes between “science beholding nature” and scientific mastery over the natural world. This new framework goes by the name “sustainability,” and while it has not yet filtered into the upper echelons of U.S. political discourse, it is the synthesis of this dialectic. It is about focusing the power of scientific rationality for the simultaneous preservation of the natural world and the project of promoting human equality.

Sustainability is grounded in the idea that equality means that everyone who lives on the planet–and everyone who will live on it in the future–deserves access to healthy and productive resources. And we should think twice before dismissing earnest critiques of governments that fail simultaneously to promote equality by impoverishing the resources of its current and future citizens and to support the science that can fuel that justice.

Here we’re going to experiment with a Google gadget displaying Federal expenditures on state R & D over a period of 14 years:

Source: SSTI

The more I learn about specific issues within energy and environmental policy–biofuels, for instances–the more clearly the complexity of those issues demand reshifting the terms of the debate. Biofuels, for example, aren’t just about “energy independence.” But they’re also not just about renewable sources of energy. There are so many issues interwoven in this one “wickedly complex” topic–life-cycle carbon emissions, land use concerns, food prices, agricultural subsidies, fertilizer run off, water management, biodiversity–that the top-level framework for thinking about biofuels has to be sustainability.

If one other thing is clear about the complexity of the biofuels debate, it’s that in order to make informed policy decisions, we need more research to understand the problems and their interdisciplinary solutions. Might this work benefit from a prestigious, well-organized and well-supported open-access journal that drove discussion? At least one such journal has been around since 2005: Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Science.

But the publication I’m envisioning would have a little more polish, a little more bravado, and a lot more marketing and community development. Basically, it would have the digital panache, selectivity, and impact scores of a journal in the Public Library of Science family.

Naive, perhaps, to think that a single journal could help drive solutions for debates like those over biofuels? Absolutely. But if you’ve seen ecologists debate miscanthus crop yields and the attendant impact on Iowa watersheds within the economic framework of the current Farm Bill, then you know that running a provocative publication is the easy part.

I figured that the best way to encourage myself to revamp appratt.com would be to just delete everything on the site and install WordPress. Here we are. Now on to step two, putting my own stuff back on.