Kids at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 2009 LBL Daughters & Sons to Work Day (flickr/berkeleylab)

Perhaps I’ll follow through in the future on collaborating with some science educators to design a hybrid course on the history of science for middle or high schoolers. But that’s a post for another time.

This creative project might seem a little self-serving, but it allows me to revisit some work that I’m proud of, and which made me a better writer and editor, which in turn made me a better and more committed English teacher. Moreover, it allows me to explore and reinforce connections between what I used to spend my time on, what I’ve been reading, and what I do now. And in the recent words of Steven Johnson, speaking about where good ideas come from, “Chance favors the connected mind” (emphasis added).

Without further ado, then, here’s a list of some Science Progress Greatest Hits authored, in whole, or in part, by your humble editor, arranged in chronological order (cross-posted under Portfolio):

04-15-10 | The Weathermen Know Which Way the Wind Blows
A recent survey demonstrates that many forecasters embrace their role as informal science educators. Ed Maibach says it’s an opportunity to boost public understanding of global warming.

03-30-10 | Court Rules that DNA Is Information, Not Intellectual Property
A lawsuit argued that patents owned by Myriad Genetics on two genes connected to breast and ovarian cancer stunt genetic research and limit access to health care for women. The ruling said that genes can’t be patented.

03-23-10 | Energy for Regional Innovation
We can ensure that scientists, engineers, and taxpayers alike get the most out of federal support for basic research and development by taking what researchers know about moving ideas from the lab to the market and linking universities, business, and the government in an effort to grow regional economies.

03-05-10 | How Science Sparked Democracy
There are intimate connections between the scientific advances that expanded the frontiers of human knowledge and the democratic experiments that expanded the frontiers of human liberty.

02-02-10 | A First-Place Budget for Science
The budget request for fiscal year 2011 that the Obama administration released on Monday includes foundational investments that will help the United States remain the leader among innovative nations.

12-04-09 | Reason is a Casualty in the Ongoing War on Climate Science
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial section, Daniel Henninger took exaggeration of the scandal over emails stolen from scientists at the University of East Anglia to new heights, arguing that the incident undermines the entire centuries-old scientific enterprise. But the column ignores both the current observable impact of climate change and scientific history, and is merely the latest volley in the ongoing conservative war on science.

11-10-09 | Time for Family, Time for Science
A significant proportion of American women leave scientific careers between earning their Ph.D. and winning tenure-track positions. Many of these “leaks” in the pipeline are the result of decisions to start families. Changes to federal and university policy can stem the losses, say the authors of a new report.

10-21-09 | Tools for Truth Telling
Given the Obama administration’s positive approach to science and to human rights, a new CAP report argues that now is the time to craft policies that support collaborations between researchers and advocates that stop atrocities.

09-24-09 | The Coolest Platform Raises the Hardest Questions
So who is speaking here, an ethicist, a scientist, or a policymaker? Real talk on the ethics of synthetic biology.

06-23-09 | NIH Funding is Good for Your Health, and It’s Good for the Economy
Federal funding for biomedical research saves lives. Not only that, but investment in research through the National Institutes of Health stimulates the economy by helping people stay healthy and productive. So says a new report published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access).

06-23-09 | Personal Profiling
Will access to our own genetic information make us healthier? That’s the idea, but there’s a lot to learn as we share and interpret it. Meanwhile, questions remain about proper oversight of an industry that blurs the line between consumer and research participant.

06-16-09 | The Worn Grooves of Disciplinary Research
Is pathbreaking science the product of interdisciplinary groups or the interdisciplinary thinking of foresighted individuals? In a commentary in PLoS Computational Biology, Sean Eddy, a Howard Hughes investigator, argues that “roadmap” thinking from the National Institutes of Health for building teams of specialists to tackle complex problems in modern research is flawed, because it encourages work in the worn grooves of existing, and perhaps outmoded, disciplines.

03-27-09 | Bush’s Council on Bioethics Makes Toothless Attack on New Stem Cell Policy<
Yesterday, the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, released a statement authored by members of the President’s Council on Bioethics critiquing the Obama administration’s stem cell policy. What the authors failed to explain in either the statement or the accompanying press release is that the current members of the President’s Council on Bioethics were appointed by George W. Bush, and will serve until the charter for the council expires in September. The critique, in effect, is an echo from the past.

Coda

The eponymous title of this post is drawn from the title of one of my favorite SP articles (“The Areas of Our Expertise”)—favorite because it’s a great bioethics/policy/history of science think-piece, and because I took a speech written for a talk at the Library of Alexandria and edited it into a real article. The author, Eric Meslin, is also a great guy (and incidentally the former Executive Director of President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Council). Plus how often do you get to write about ideas with names like “Non-Overlapping Magisteria”?

In light of Obama declaring his campaign for re-election, I thought it would be a good occasion to share something intimately connected to his current presidency. Below is the farewell email I wrote to my co-workers at the Center for American Progress about 10 months ago, just before leaving for TFA summer institute. I decided to go from working at a think tank to teaching in large part because of how inspired I was by President Obama’s campaign. So here we are, entering the 4th quarter of my first year in front of a classroom. The email below has a few CAP in-jokes, but you can probably decipher the editorial conventions. Finally, this post should in no way be interpreted as an electoral endorsement connected to CAP, which is a 501(c)3. The views are solely those of the author.

My farewell email is attached and below. I appreciate any editorial suggestions.
—
[hede] A Progressive Education
[dek] Departing Staffer Indebted to Many, Attempts to Thank All
[blurb] Working with brilliant, committed CAP colleagues has inspired me for four years. Now I’m off to carry what I can of that vision and knowledge into the classroom.
[byline] Andrew Pratt

During a summer gig writing for a newspaper in college, the editor sat down with me to go over my inadequate first draft of a story. One major problem with the prose, he said, was that it was too wordy, and specifically, I didn’t need a bunch of multisyllabic verbs like “remarked,” “explained,” or “explicated” following quotes from sources. “Just use ‘said,’” he said. That simple advice has not only helped me write what I hope is somewhat better prose ever since, it’s tied the memory of that mentor to an exceptionally common word. I think about it every time I type the word “said.”

Similarly, I’ll be indebted to Ed Paisley for the lesson that even in policy writing, if you open with an anecdote, your thesis must follow fast and furious. So here it is: My time at the Center has been filled with a host of lessons that will not only help me do any future job better, but that have embedded critical knowledge into even small routines, like writing four-letter words. When I get to the bottom of a page and realize I haven’t gotten to the point, I hear Ed’s voice telling me to “flip it.” XX TOO EARNEST? PROBABLY FINE. GOODBYE EMAIL AND ALL. XX

Likewise, I owe a debt to Jonathan Moreno for taking a risk and letting me work on Science Progress in the first place. XX COULD QUIP THAT MORENO IGNORED OUR OWN RECOMMENDATIONS ABOUT EVIDENCE-BASED DECISION MAKING. MAYBE TOO FORCED? XX Part of the purpose of the project is to integrate knowledge across disciplines, something Jonathan does with uncanny effortlessness. Moving between offices in different states, he would introduce me via email from his iPhone (or Treo, remember those?) to brilliant researchers around the country and say “Write something for us.” And they would, because they trusted his vision for how to marry science, ethics, and progressivism.

Since October, 2007, when Science Progress debuted on the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, we’ve tried to tell a story about science and progressive public policy. XX SCIENCE AND HISTORY?…MIGHT START LOSING PEOPLE. XX There are a lot of ways to present that narrative, but one of my favorites emerged in a podcast Jonathan did with science writer Timothy Ferris. Ferris recently published a book called “The Science of Liberty” in which he argues that science and democratic revolutions from the Enlightenment onward are inextricably woven together, and “science continues to empower democratic freedom today.” This is one way I understand progressivism itself: it’s one ongoing experiment. Every election, every passage of a new law, and every policy is, after all, a way to test a hypothesis about how to make constant improvements to our government.

I’ll be moving on to an organization that applies this philosophy on a granular level. That is, Teach for America measures the effectiveness of everything it does, and teaches new educators how to leverage the power of data (among many other things) to close the achievement gap. I’m going to TFA in part because of the example of public service set by so many CAP colleagues—in government, non-profits, the military, the foreign service, and in the classroom. Moreover, like so many millennials, I came to DC with episodes of “The West Wing” rolling through my head, and then caught a serious case of Obama fever in the summer of 2008 while staying up late, sweltering nights helping to copyedit “Change for America.”

I owe thanks to many people. To Andrew Sherry for hiring me right out of school to work in Online Communications. To our former SP colleague Rick Weiss, now at OSTP. To our long-time partner at SP, Chris Mooney. To the Editorial and Art teams, with whom I collaborated constantly in both my jobs. To all the CAP colleagues who supported Science Progress. To all the CAP colleagues who wrote for Science Progress. To all the CAP colleagues who convinced outside contributors to write for Science Progress. To all the colleagues from whom I solicited advice on teaching. XX THIS IS REALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO THANK EVERYONE ADEQUATELY. HOW DO PEOPLE WRITE THESE EMAILS? XX Thanks to everyone who started CAP and grew it into what it is today. Thanks to everyone. Period.

I’ll be teaching English to secondary students (somewhere between grade 7-12) in the DC Region, in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland, so I’m sure I’ll be seeing folks around. There are the usual ways of staying in touch, appratt [at] gmail.com and @appratt on Twitter. I’ll contact you from one of these sources when I’ve realized I forgot to thank you properly. I’ve also made a go of writing about some of the first steps of the TFA process at my personal site, appratt.com, in case you’re interested.

XX OKAY TIME TO WRAP IT UP. XX

CAP will continue to do wonderful things, and I’ll be watching. President Obama highlighted one of them on a cold day last January. “We’ll restore science to its rightful place,” he said.

Sincerely,
Andrew

Cattle grazing. flickr.com/yourdon

Generally speaking, meat production in the United States is produced in an environmentally unsustainable manner. An important personal rationale for sticking to a mostly vegetarian diet is that it reduces by some small amount demand for meat production processes that generate a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions and fertilizer runoff, and that demand pumping antibiotics into cows and pigs housed in feedlots. I do eat some meat occasionally; I don’t mind that other people eat lots of it; and I’m fully aware that my income and living situation allow me to make this choice. But a recent policy forum in Science presents some compelling research-based arguments for why there’s a lot of variation in the environmental impact of raising animals for slaughter:

However, the argument that all meat consumption is bad is overly simplistic. First, there is substantial variation in the production efficiency and environmental impact of the major classes of meat consumed by people (Table 2). Second, whilst a substantial fraction of livestock is fed on grain and other plant protein which could feed humans, there remains a very significant proportion which is grass-fed. Much of the grassland used to feed these animals could not be converted to arable, or could only be converted with significant adverse environmental outcomes. In addition, pigs and poultry are often fed on human food “waste.” Third, through better rearing or improved breeds it may be possible to increase the efficiency with which meat is produced. Finally, in developing countries meat represents the most concentrated source of some vitamins and minerals, which is important for individuals such as young children. Livestock also are used for ploughing and transport, provide a local supply of manure, can be a vital source of income and are of huge cultural significance for many poorer communities.

The whole piece is dense, but worth a read for foodies and anyone involved in a whole swath of disciplines from energy and environmental policy to human rights and foreign relations, as it takes a close look at the challenge of feeding everyone on the planet as the population increases, but more importantly, as populations grow wealthier and has more resources to buy pricier foods, including meat. So kudos to Science for archiving this outside the pay wall.

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.

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.

Source: SSTI

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.