Both John McCain and Barack Obama answered the fourteen questions posed to them by Innovation 2008. In today's issue of Nature, Obama answers eighteen similar questions posed by the editors. McCain was also invited to reply. He declined. The editors interleave information on McCain's positions gleaned from other sources. Alexandra Witze also contributes an analytical overview that attempts to project where each of the candidates would lead the U.S. if elected.In related news, Matt Nisbet argues that having candidates participate in a science debate is a bad idea. His arguments mirror those David Goldston and the editors of Nature made last winter. I'm coming around to their point of view. As Matt points out,
[I]t's unlikely that the candidates would actually discuss science, instead their remarks would be carefully framed to evoke ideology or emotion, and to make small differences on policy into openings for attack politics.Rather than a debate on science, per se, we need to find a way to ensure that public policy is informed by the best science available. For that it doesn't matter whether or not the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy holds the title of Assistant to the President for Science and Technology policy. What matters is whether we have a president (and a Congress) who will listen to advice from OSTP and other scientists inside and outside government.
And that's not a scientific challenge. It's a challenge to all evidence-based approaches to making public policy. Advice from OSTP on science and technology will be based on empirical evidence.1 If president and Congress won't pay attention to that advice, they aren't likely to pay attention to evidence relevant to any policy choice. Under those circumstances, any resemblance between good policies and those that are adopted will be purely coincidental.
1Let me be clear here, lest I be misunderstood. I'm not claiming that scientific investigations will uniquely determine the public policy choices to be made. To take the example of global climate change, the IPCC can tell us that "Anthropogenic warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change." And it can tell us how those irreversible impacts might affect human health and livelihood. It can even tell us something about the potential costs of adapting to climate change versus reducing the amount of change that happens. It can't tell us how much to spend now on carbon mitigation. That's a policy choice that requires balancing costs and benefits. It ultimately depends on the kind of world in which we want to live, and that's a moral, aesthetic, or philosophical question, not a scientific one.
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