2003 : WHAT ARE THE PRESSING SCIENTIFIC ISSUES FOR THE NATION AND THE WORLD, AND WHAT IS YOUR ADVICE ON HOW I CAN BEGIN TO DEAL WITH THEM? - GWB

Dear Mr. President,

With the threat of war in the Middle East, continuing concerns about terrorism, and a weak economy, science is probably not high on your agenda right now. But it should be.

Some the decisions you make now could dramatically affect the fate of our country, not just in the next decade, but in the next century. Perhaps most important among them will be the choices you make about stem cell research. If your administration continues to restrict stem cell research as it has, America will lose its place at the forefront of science and technology.

It will start slowly; few people will notice as some of our best scientists move elsewhere—to countries like Britain, Canada, Germany, and Japan. But within a decade or two, someone will notice that the most important patents and technology of the 21st century are all held elsewhere. In the 20th century, we led the way—our discovery of transistors led to everything from radios and televisions to cell phones and PocketPCs. But the leading technologies in the 21st century—cures for cancer, heart disease, and mental illness—will all be biological, and without research on stem cells, we will be left behind.

Stem cells are so important because they hold the key to life itself. Everything about the human condition—from the heartbeat or a smile of a newborn baby to the ability of our bodies to fight off disease—follows from the choices of individual cells in growing organisms. Embryonic stem cells burst with potential, therapeutically and scientifically; they truly can become anything. The researchers who master their secrets will be able to use them to repair damaged hearts, build vastly better drugs, and even regenerate damaged brain tissue and heal fractured minds. They will also be able to use those secrets to figure out what makes the human brain special, and in so doing open the door to new kinds of tools for education, probably not yet even dreamt of.

In the next century, the most educated, the most healthy, and the most wealthy citizens will be the ones living in the country that best understands the science of the human body. Let us not lose our place at the head of the class.

Gary F. Marcus
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology at New York University
Author of The Birth of the Mind: Creating the Complexity of the Human Brain (forthcoming).

The bulk of the problems we face are ultimately due to ignorance: lack of knowledge and understanding at one level or another. This has always been the case in the past, and will certainly continue to be so in the future.

Science is the nemesis of ignorance, and ignorance is our single biggest enemy. Ignorance has been attacking us for ages and it is so ever present that we often forget that it's there. Broad-based support for science, and the public awareness and appreciation of it, are essential if we are to have a future. There is no single overwhelmingly pressing sub field or sub-issue. We need it all, we need it now, and we need everyone to understand it as deeply as possible.

We still die from diseases we don't know how to cure, or even worse that we could easily prevent. We may even fail to follow up avenues of research that could show success due to ignorance of basic biology.

We pollute our planet or are dependent on other countries for energy because we don't know how to do any better, or we fail to understand the consequences of our actions. Perhaps worse, we fail to appreciate techniques that we already have which can produce power cleanly and eliminate nuclear waste.

We treat each other with hatred or disrespect because we fail to understand different cultures and customs. We harm ourselves with dangerous chemicals because we don't know enough to keep away from things that will ultimately hurt us.

With this in mind, and trying to capture some of the Zeitgeist, we propose that the US launch a vigorous "War on Ignorance". Funding comparable to that of the Wars on Drugs and Terror should be funneled into an aggressive counterstrike against the things that wound us or hold us back most.

We need better schools and a uniform and high standard of education for everyone, better science in the media, better public education (including about diet, health, drugs, sex, and everything else we so often remain silent about, making safe harbors for the Axis of Ignorance), and more money for both basic and applied research.

So let us arm the people—all of them—as well as we can. Arm them with knowledge, so that they become productive, law-abiding, tax-paying members of society. Arm them so that they may live with hope and dignity, and contribute to the good of all.

Leave them without it, and we'll have a society governed by irrationality and fear. It's an old saying that knowledge is power, and this is truer now than it's ever been. Ignorance, as always, remains our biggest foe. Focus on taking that one out, and the rest will follow.

Stephen Reucroft
Physicist, Matthews Distinguished University Professor
Northeastern University
Coauthor (with John Swain) of syndicated column "Science Briefs"

John Swain
Physicist, Northeaster University
Coauthor (with Stephen Reucroft) of syndicated column "Science Briefs"

Dear Mr. President

I had to smile when I read the assignment, to give advice about pressing scientific issues, while sticking to those scientific areas where I have expertise. As an astrophysicist, few issues in my trade could be considered pressing. When I meet people who ask me what I do for a living, I often describe my area of work as being in some ways more akin to art than to science: we astrophysicists produce pretty pictures and interesting stories about places and times far away, events that are unlikely to affect you and me in our daily lives.

However, there is one aspect of my work that does have deadly consequences, more precisely, will have deadly consequences if it is ignored. Here is where heaven and earth meet: in the possibility, and in the long run the certainty, that people will die through the effects of an impact of an asteroid, large or small.

Although there are several more pressing things to worry about right now, including many already pointed out by the band of science advisors reporting here, this does not mean that it would be wise to neglect the threat of an asteroid impact. Would you be willing to face the public if an asteroid would be discovered heading our way? You would have to tell them that NASA has been discovering and tracking asteroids, but that funding had not been sufficient to catalogue most of them, and that there had not been any funding so far to study the question of how to deflect an asteroid, once found, even though the technology has in principle been available. Not a nice speech to give, I bet.

Fortunately, it is rather straightforward to develop the technology to send a spacecraft to a 100-meter diameter asteroid, in order to give it a nudge so that it will miss the Earth. The ingredients are at hand, and all we have to do is to carry out a test mission, in which we demonstrate the capability to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid. That way, when we discover an asteroid with our name on it, so to speak, we will be prepared. We could be in a position to save millions of lives, and at the very least we could not be accused of knowing about a danger and ignoring it.

Even if we are lucky, and no life-threatening asteroid crosses our path in the foreseeable future, developing the technology to gently nudge asteroids is likely to help us to explore the solar system. Plasma engines, for example, can be used as tug boats for asteroids but also to speed up human expansion into space. This could be a major legacy of your administration: to open the door to populating other worlds while at the same time making our own world a safer place.

Piet Hut
Astrophysicist, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton
A founding member of the Kira Institute and of the B612 Foundation.

Mr. President,

The appointment of an anthropologist such as myself to the post of science advisor would be unusual, but perhaps opportune, as some of the lessons anthropologists have drawn from their investigations over the past century have some bearing on the times. Anthropology has always been identified with the concept of culture, and recent events suggest that the need to understand how different belief systems arise and perpetuate themselves has become urgent. But let me first explain how anthropologists use the culture concept as a way of identifying how humankind is different from the rest of Creation, because this not only contains its own lesson, it sets the stage for the argument about how one cultural group comes to differ from another.

Culture is what we have that other creatures don't. However, as we have learned more about other animals, the number of features unique to our way of life has diminished considerably. For example, we used to think that no other animal learned an idiosyncratic way of performing some behavior that makes their group characteristically different from other groups—what anthropologists call "cultural traditions." Now we know that chimps—and probably a number of dolphin and whale species—do have socially acquired traditions. So we can no longer say that such traditions are unique to us.

Grammatical language is still on the list of quintessentially human characteristics, but its status on the list is highly contested because some say that chimps can be taught by human care takers to speak (or use sign language) in grammatical fashion. Thus, some species have near-human abilities to make complex judgments. Our first lesson: We should therefore consider these animals as being worthy of moral rights equal to their cognitive and emotional capacities.

The best we can say nowadays is that people have complex culture. This means primarily that we have organizations (or designed, special-purpose social groups), and technology (especially machines), which have no parallel in the rest of the animal kingdom. What is important about this, in light of recent events, is that organizations and technology have allowed human cultures to diversify in ways seen in no other animals.

Human groups exhibit specific ways of life that have emerged during the individual history of that group. As a result, the human population, unlike any other, can be divided into groups that live according to quite different sets of rules. This sometimes makes it hard for members of one group to sympathize with the members of other groups, or even to comprehend what the rationale for some "exotic" behavior like a witchcraft trial or an elaborate "rite of passage" into adulthood might be.

The anthropological enterprise would be unnecessary if people everywhere lived according to the same set of rules. At the same time, anthropology would be impossible if it weren't the case that individuals can learn to live successfully amongst those whose culture is different from their own. Aspects of culture may reflect the idiosyncratic history of each group, but they make sense within the confines of that history. Our second lesson can be drawn from this fact: Just as we should understand and respect other animals, so too should we honor other cultures, because just as species diversity is important to the survival of the biosphere, so too is cultural diversity necessary for the health and longevity of the human species. The world will only become a safer place when we realize that each and every culture is an invaluable inheritance of knowledge tested against local conditions over a long period of time.

While the findings of anthropologists indicate that we should be tolerant of cultural variation, taking anthropology seriously as a science also indicates that we should not mistake exotic beliefs for science. The fact that people have diverse systems of belief does not give them all equal claims on truth. Intelligent Design theorists, for example, argue that because the natural world is complex, a supernatural agent must have designed it. There are two problems with this argument. First, scientific theories for the emergence of complexity exist, such as Darwinian evolution and complexity theory. Second, even if such theories did not exist, the conclusion that only supernatural causes can explain such complexity does not follow, since a scientific explanation for complexity could arise tomorrow. Our final lesson: The teachings of Intelligent Design theorists therefore belong in programs of religious, not scientific, instruction.

I believe these lessons from anthropology should play an important role in deciding our future scientific policies. I respectfully hope you will agree.

Sincerely,

Robert Aunger
Department of Anthropology
University College, London
Author of The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think.

Mr.President,

Have you ever held in your hand a prehistoric stone tool and considered the processes involved in making it? The hand that struck the flakes and who it belonged to, and the world in which they encountered this technology? And pondered the time scale of the evolutionary technology involved in the transformation of stone into an artifact, and one which holds the potential to make other tools? And hold that thought (as well as the object) as you consider the technological change in your own lifetime (computers you have used?), and the acceleration of the rate of change that is now made even more complex by overlays of hype, something which is itself generated and spread by means of escalating technologies.

For the past eight years I have taught a course on Archaeology and Anthropology to American High School students. These young people are juggling their own rites of passage into adulthood with the external demands of an increasingly challenging world. They don't talk readily about what happened in their grandmother's day, or what their parents grew up with. They can see more relevance in discussing what their older siblings used at school. Last year's model is the new archaeology. I encourage them to think about the evolution of the computer over a few decades as if considering stone tool technology over millenia. It's not change that is significant, it's the rate of change, and that's a tricky concept to convey to students who have never used a pen to write an essay.

But what is unique about the 21st century perspective of these Americans is they have, potentially, more than objects to teach them about change—they can hear the folk-memory of these archaic forms in the stories of the Apple on which a mother wrote her thesis; the DEC PD11 on which a father worked. They can learn to evaluate change from observing the material culture of still-functioning computers, all the more so because of the work of individuals and institutions such as the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, who seek to preserve them. And they can also consider the inequalities of technology by finding out what becomes of old computers which are not yet interesting, but simply out-moded.

Without a sense of the past, there is a danger of raising a generation of change-junkies, weaned on the rush of accelerating technologies, for whom history has no relevance. They would recognise technological change only through its material culture—the stuff—brought to them on the street and in a welter of media hits. In their world where nothing stands still, they are left with no space to evaluate why technological change happens and, crucially, its implications.

Change happens. The challenge is to work with the materiality and mass consumerism of our everyday world, and to use it to communicate a scientific context in which technological leaps and bounds make sense. Not just to American High School students. But to all of us.

Christine Finn
Archaeologist and Journalist
Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and Research Associate, The Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford.
Author of Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year In Silicon Valley.

Dear President Bush,

One scientific issue that requires immediate attention is this: Understanding the psychological circuits that motivate people to murder. The impact of killing cascades beyond the obvious tragedy of each prematurely terminated life. Each dead victim is also a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, a father or a mother, so the lives of the victim's family shatter. Uncertain and unpredictable dangers promote contagious anxiety. The limited days of our lives become wasted when we seek to act, but lack the knowledge to detect and deter killers.

The current lifetime odds of being murdered at the hands of a fellow human being are far from trivial. In America, they are one in 200 for the general population, and one in 26 for certain sub-groups of males. If you add attempted homicides that are "unsuccessful" due to valiant or desperate measures, the victim list more than triples. In the hot spots around the world, the toll of dead bodies runs from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands.

In the past century, war across the world has claimed victims by the millions. We are endangered from the outside by our avowed enemies. We are threatened from within by killers among us. An urgent need for the nation to establish a deep scientific understanding of psychological circuits dedicated to murder and the causal processes that create, activate, and deactivate those circuits. Without such knowledge, we cannot effectively prevent the premature and irreversible ending of lives.

Sincerely,

David M. Buss
Professor of Psychology
University of Texas at Austin
Author of The Evolution of Desire, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, and The Dangerous Passion.

Dear Mr. President:

Among the pressing issues that we face:

1. Natural pathogens (bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites):

As recognized pathogens develop multi-drug resistance, and as new pathogens are recognized, our tools for recognizing and treating these agents must keep up. At one time it was thought that infectious diseases had been practically vanquished. We must work hard to keep up.

Conversely: Some microorganisms contribute to host health and defense. There is need to focus on studying and mining the benefits of beneficial organisms, as well as attending to those that produce harm. (Thus, there is evidence of altered gut "flora", i.e. altered balance of bacteria and fungi, in persons with irritable bowel syndrome; there is evidence that some "intestinal flora" are vital to gut function and nutrient absorption, and protect against invasion of pathogenic organisms; there is evidence that H. pylori, a bacterium that may contribute to gastroesophageal reflux, may also protect against esophageal cancer;

2. Biowarfare agents:

Additional work must go toward defense against pathogens and toxins developed as weapons of terrorism and biowarfare..

3. Chemical interactions and individual susceptibilities:

In our ever more chemically rich environment, certain health problems are escalating that are likely to be linked to exposures to certain chemicals and their combinations. Increasing evidence implicates certain chemical agents, and combinations of these agents, in chronic multisystem health problems to which a subset of the population appears susceptible; persons with fibromalgia/chemical sensitivity/chronic fatigue syndrome spectrum often report onset following chemical exposure and there is increasing evidence to support effects on membrane functioning, neurotransmitter systems, and mitochondria (the energy producing elements of cells) from these chemicals in susceptible persons. (Some genetic susceptibility factors have already been identified.)

Persons with such chronic multisystem problems are disproportionate users of healthcare resources. Fathoming the mechanisms of these problems and developing strategies to mitigate their onset and treat them when present will reduce healthcare costs and downstream litigation costs, and will enhance the health of many. Understanding these mechanisms may also lead to prevention, by permitting proper warnings to be placed regarding use of potentially hazardous agents, especially use in combination with agents that may have harmful interactions.

4. Chemical warfare and terrorism defense:

Because some of the classes of chemical implicated above, particularly carbamates and organophosphates (both of which act by inhibiting regulation of a key nerve and muscle signaling chemical that has widespread roles throughout the body), are used both to protect military persons in the event of nerve agent attack, and are used as nerve agents themselves, this work will have vital importance for military preparedness and health protection; for treatment of veterans in the event of renewed military conflict with nations that have or are suspected to have chemical warfare agents; and for civilian health protection.

5. Genomics and proteomics:

The time is ripe for increasing work to mine the genome, and more pertinently, to study how the balance of proteins and non-protein chemicals, using modern informatic and advanced statistical techniques, can:

• Predict illness susceptibility from various causes
• Show who will respond to particular treatments
• Track the benefits of particular treatments
• Design drugs that may mitigate and even cure chronic and uncurable diseases

6. Capitalize on existing databases to reap their full benefit:

There is much material that has never been culled from existing federally funded databases. A major reason is that the incentive system in academics rewards those who bring in large new grants, with the attendant overhead dollars. Thus, rather than spend time to study prior databases in detail, the incentive system encourages the time to be spent on procuring new grants. Additionally, there is a peculiar attitude, that must be changed, that major findings based on data initially procured by someone else are of lesser importance, even if they lead to paradigm shifts, than the expected next step that one performs oneself. There is need to change this attitude.

7. Scientific Reasoning:

Surprisingly, neither medical schools nor graduate schools have formal training in reasoning from evidence, the process of inference, fallacies in reasoning, and factors that influence the credibility of evidence. Even persons with a good grounding in statistics per se are not trained in these areas. In consequence, even many persons that are highly respected in the scientific community are ill-positioned to generate the recommendations from evidence that they are tasked to do. I can cite many instances in which failure of training and aptitude in this area has unnecessarily held back progress. I believe that such training should begin to be part of the core training process for graduate and medical schools. Arguably, reasoning skills ("how to think") should be an element of the core curriculum, at a more basic level, even among undergraduates. While this need not be legislated, it could certainly be strongly endorsed.

8. Informatics:

Additional focus should go to development and refinement of tools to handle large and incomplete databases.

9. Energy:

Efforts are needed to develop technologies to reduce dependency on foreign oil sources. This is an area in need of real leadership. We all recognize the importance of the oil industry in the US, and there is no reason that industry cannot participate in, or take a lead in, developing alternative technologies, or technologies to enhance efficiency of fuel use.

10. New means to disseminate scientific information:

The current structure of science leads to costly and needless delays in release of scientific information resulting from the structure of the publication process. Moreover, costly page charges lead to tightly written documents, but at the expense of key information being included. An antischolarly approach ensues: limitations in number of citations prevents all but limited literature from being cited, effectively leading to "loss" to the scientific community of valuable older information, the costs of which have already been expended. (Rather than it being required that each declarative statement should have a source cited, it is now possible for authors to make assertions that may have no basis in evidence—and if they do, the reader is not in a position to ascertain what that basis is.)

In the modern internet era, new approaches to speeding information dissemination, by capitalizing on internet technology should be seriously considered. (As one primordial suggestion, a system could be generated by which new research results could be posted on the internet. The system would have in place an opportunity for peer-review comments to be appended. This permits new readers to post their comments and expertise. A continually modifiable process of credentialing reviewers, with rankings by other readers, could allowing ranking of review comments. Among the advantages of this process, full database information could be provided, circumventing space limitations in journals, permitting others to perform their own analyses. Space limitations in journals often prevent pivotal information from being expressed.

Beatrice Golomb
Assistant Professor (of Medicine; Family and Preventive Medicine; and Psychology) at UCSD
Principal Investigator, UCSD Statin Study
University of California San Diego School of Medicine

Dear Mr. President:

Among the pressing issues that we face:

1. Natural pathogens (bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites):

As recognized pathogens develop multi-drug resistance, and as new pathogens are recognized, our tools for recognizing and treating these agents must keep up. At one time it was thought that infectious diseases had been practically vanquished. We must work hard to keep up.

Conversely: Some microorganisms contribute to host health and defense. There is need to focus on studying and mining the benefits of beneficial organisms, as well as attending to those that produce harm. (Thus, there is evidence of altered gut "flora", i.e. altered balance of bacteria and fungi, in persons with irritable bowel syndrome; there is evidence that some "intestinal flora" are vital to gut function and nutrient absorption, and protect against invasion of pathogenic organisms; there is evidence that H. pylori, a bacterium that may contribute to gastroesophageal reflux, may also protect against esophageal cancer;

2. Biowarfare agents:

Additional work must go toward defense against pathogens and toxins developed as weapons of terrorism and biowarfare..

3. Chemical interactions and individual susceptibilities:

In our ever more chemically rich environment, certain health problems are escalating that are likely to be linked to exposures to certain chemicals and their combinations. Increasing evidence implicates certain chemical agents, and combinations of these agents, in chronic multisystem health problems to which a subset of the population appears susceptible; persons with fibromalgia/chemical sensitivity/chronic fatigue syndrome spectrum often report onset following chemical exposure and there is increasing evidence to support effects on membrane functioning, neurotransmitter systems, and mitochondria (the energy producing elements of cells) from these chemicals in susceptible persons. (Some genetic susceptibility factors have already been identified.)

Persons with such chronic multisystem problems are disproportionate users of healthcare resources. Fathoming the mechanisms of these problems and developing strategies to mitigate their onset and treat them when present will reduce healthcare costs and downstream litigation costs, and will enhance the health of many. Understanding these mechanisms may also lead to prevention, by permitting proper warnings to be placed regarding use of potentially hazardous agents, especially use in combination with agents that may have harmful interactions.

4. Chemical warfare and terrorism defense:

Because some of the classes of chemical implicated above, particularly carbamates and organophosphates (both of which act by inhibiting regulation of a key nerve and muscle signaling chemical that has widespread roles throughout the body), are used both to protect military persons in the event of nerve agent attack, and are used as nerve agents themselves, this work will have vital importance for military preparedness and health protection; for treatment of veterans in the event of renewed military conflict with nations that have or are suspected to have chemical warfare agents; and for civilian health protection.

5. Genomics and proteomics:

The time is ripe for increasing work to mine the genome, and more pertinently, to study how the balance of proteins and non-protein chemicals, using modern informatic and advanced statistical techniques, can:

• Predict illness susceptibility from various causes
• Show who will respond to particular treatments
• Track the benefits of particular treatments
• Design drugs that may mitigate and even cure chronic and uncurable diseases

6. Capitalize on existing databases to reap their full benefit:

There is much material that has never been culled from existing federally funded databases. A major reason is that the incentive system in academics rewards those who bring in large new grants, with the attendant overhead dollars. Thus, rather than spend time to study prior databases in detail, the incentive system encourages the time to be spent on procuring new grants. Additionally, there is a peculiar attitude, that must be changed, that major findings based on data initially procured by someone else are of lesser importance, even if they lead to paradigm shifts, than the expected next step that one performs oneself. There is need to change this attitude.

7. Scientific Reasoning:

Surprisingly, neither medical schools nor graduate schools have formal training in reasoning from evidence, the process of inference, fallacies in reasoning, and factors that influence the credibility of evidence. Even persons with a good grounding in statistics per se are not trained in these areas. In consequence, even many persons that are highly respected in the scientific community are ill-positioned to generate the recommendations from evidence that they are tasked to do. I can cite many instances in which failure of training and aptitude in this area has unnecessarily held back progress. I believe that such training should begin to be part of the core training process for graduate and medical schools. Arguably, reasoning skills ("how to think") should be an element of the core curriculum, at a more basic level, even among undergraduates. While this need not be legislated, it could certainly be strongly endorsed.

8. Informatics:

Additional focus should go to development and refinement of tools to handle large and incomplete databases.

9. Energy:

Efforts are needed to develop technologies to reduce dependency on foreign oil sources. This is an area in need of real leadership. We all recognize the importance of the oil industry in the US, and there is no reason that industry cannot participate in, or take a lead in, developing alternative technologies, or technologies to enhance efficiency of fuel use.

10. New means to disseminate scientific information:

The current structure of science leads to costly and needless delays in release of scientific information resulting from the structure of the publication process. Moreover, costly page charges lead to tightly written documents, but at the expense of key information being included. An antischolarly approach ensues: limitations in number of citations prevents all but limited literature from being cited, effectively leading to "loss" to the scientific community of valuable older information, the costs of which have already been expended. (Rather than it being required that each declarative statement should have a source cited, it is now possible for authors to make assertions that may have no basis in evidence—and if they do, the reader is not in a position to ascertain what that basis is.)

In the modern internet era, new approaches to speeding information dissemination, by capitalizing on internet technology should be seriously considered. (As one primordial suggestion, a system could be generated by which new research results could be posted on the internet. The system would have in place an opportunity for peer-review comments to be appended. This permits new readers to post their comments and expertise. A continually modifiable process of credentialing reviewers, with rankings by other readers, could allowing ranking of review comments. Among the advantages of this process, full database information could be provided, circumventing space limitations in journals, permitting others to perform their own analyses. Space limitations in journals often prevent pivotal information from being expressed.

Beatrice Golomb
Assistant Professor (of Medicine; Family and Preventive Medicine; and Psychology) at UCSD
Principal Investigator, UCSD Statin Study
University of California San Diego School of Medicine

Dear President Bush,

I believe that if 1 percent of science funding went to research that was of real interest to taxpayers, science would literally become more popular.

At present the distribution of funds for research depends on the priorities within the scientific establishment, and on the agendas of corporations and government bureaucracies. The administration of science is neither democratically accountable, nor carried out in a democratic spirit.

My proposal is that 99 per cent of the research funds continue to be allocated in the usual way. But I suggest that 1 per cent is spent in a way that reflects the curiosity of lay people, who pay for all publicly funded research through taxes. It would be necessary to create a separate funding body. One possible name would be the National Discovery Center.

What questions capable of being answered by scientific research are in fact of interest to the electorate? The simplest way to find out would be to ask for suggestions. Some would come from individuals, through the Center's Web site. Some would come from local groups, like sports clubs and horticultural associations; from national societies like the National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club; from voluntary organizations like Narcotics Anonymous; from consumer protection organizations; and from local governments, schools, churches and trades unions. Potential subjects for research could be discussed in newspapers and magazines, and on radio and television. To find out in more detail what subject areas are of significant public concern, market research and opinion polls would probably be helpful.

The Center would be governed by a Board representing a wide range of interests, including non-governmental organizations, schools and voluntary associations. The Center would publish a list of the research areas in which grants were available, and would invite applications that would be evaluated on the basis of expert advice. This Center would only fund research that is not already covered by the regular science budget, and would therefore open up new areas of scientific enquiry.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), established by the US Congress in 1998, sets a precedent. Complementary and alternative medicine are of great interest to millions of American tax-payers, and the basis of a multi-billion dollar industry. But before NCCAM's predecessor, the Office of Alternative Medicine, was set up by Congress in 1992, research in these fields was receiving practically no support through established grant-giving agencies. NCCAM's current annual budget is about $100 million (less than 0.5 percent of the total budget of the NIH).

Diverting 1 percent of the present science budget to the National Discovery Center, open to democratic input and public participation, would involve no additional expenditure, but would have a big effect on people's involvement in science and on innovation. It would appeal to many voters, make science more attractive to young people, stimulate interest in scientific thinking and hypothesis-testing, and help break down the increasing alienation many people feel from science. It would also enable many working scientists to think more freely, and unleash some of the creative potential that is currently being stifled.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D.
Biologist
Author of Seven Experiments That Could Change The World and Dogs that Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.

Dear Mr. President,

A top priority for today's science advisor should be Alternative Energy, with a fleet of Think Again Tanks to reconsider the potential of cold fusion, hydrogen cells, more efficient solar power, better methods of drilling for methane, and employing wind and tidal energy.

Your science advisor would also need to be a political analyst, whose first hurdle would be overcoming West Wing Withdrawal. For all Martin Sheen's ability to multi-task, in reality, key problems are often pushed to the back burner, and domestic policy is naturally suffering by the current need to put out so many fires in foreign policy.

Reducing our dependence on foreign oil was a need that should have been addressed a few decades ago, a "Vision Thing". The long view so necessary in science is limited by the preference for short-term gains, i.e. how to be re-elected in 2004. Your father's success in foreign policy was quickly undone by discontent on domestic policies and a bad economy. So how to please the voters, create new jobs, and maintain sustainable development?

Develop a project of broad appeal, say, something that will make Baby Boomers look younger. (It was, after all, a marketing campaign targeting Baby Boomers that promoted SUVs as must haves for the adventurous.)

For the moment let's call this phase one Reinventing the Wheel. In reality, we're reintroducing the bicycle, along with Green Lanes, to combat urban sprawl. Lance Armstrong might be involved to give the project broad appeal, although there's hardly a town or city unaffected by this in the U.S.
Problems include loss of farmland, global warming from increased traffic, loss of wilderness and wetland habitat, death of downtowns, and voters stressed out by longer commutes. Americans are becoming increasingly obese, partly from lack of exercise, yet it's inconvenient and dangerous to walk in many US cities.

Green Lanes should accommodate bicycles, along with 3-wheel rickshaws, Segways or other non-fossil-fuel burning transport, including horse drawn carriages. These protected lanes could also allow golf carts, electric powered, quiet and producing no fumes. All should be registered and licensed to help fund the Green Lanes, designed with some clever coverage for in-climate weather.

This would be the first small step towards reducing traffic, and perhaps the beginning of an educational program that draws upon talents of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley to transform scientific research into ideas that engage, and offer doable solutions.

Finally, how can we return scientists and other thinking people to a mentoring (celebrity) role? When Albert Einstein arrived in New York, hundreds of fans turned out to greet him. I suggest the White House consider a New Year's List similar to England's peerage designations, to honor visionary leaders in science. The honorees could range widely, including conservationists, AIDs researchers, even novelists who write well about science and conservation. Instead of knighthood, recipients might be denoted by a tier of titles (the Order of the Helix) or put EMC after their name (Einstein's famous formula adapted to denote "Einstein Mentoring Colleague.") Recipients would be required to speak on issues that most concern them at Year's End, answer questions from students, and participate in a roundtable similar to "A Glorious Accident".

Delta Willis
Author of The Sand Dollar & the Slide Rule, The Leakey Family, and The Hominid Gang.

Dear President Bush,

We are entering an era of revolutionary scientific change, and you are fortunate to be President of a nation that leads the world in scientific and technological discovery. A top priority for today's science advisor should be on-demand matter, a new area of science now emerging that will have a far-reaching impact on the world's economy and the well-being of humankind.

Perhaps you have heard of printing "on demand," a technology that allows books to be quickly printed to meet the immediate needs of a customer. Similarly, on-demand matter (OM) is just on the horizon and will allow humanity to create new substances quickly and efficiently.

In particular, on-demand matter made from "quantum dots" will someday allow us to produce virtual substances with undreamed of properties. Let me give you some background.

Quantum dots consist of trapped electrons with no nucleus. Once confined, the electrons repel one another and form orbitals reminiscent of orbitals we find in actual atoms. Novel substances made from quantum dots will be able to change their properties as easy as a traffic light changes from red to green, and their properties can be adjusted in real-time through the application of light, electricity, and so forth. Visionary writer Wil McCarthy has coined the word "wellstone" to refer to hypothetical woven solids, made from entities such as quantum dots, whose bulk properties are broadly programmable.

With on-demand matter, humanity will be able to create ecologically friendly industries that produce low-cost and exceptional products. OM can be used to create novel sensors, computing devices, space vehicles, windows, protective clothing, medical prostheses, rooftops, auto parts, and a host of on-demand materials with limitless potential. With just a voice command, your toothbrush becomes a supercomputer, or your umbrella changes to a material that could never be available by other means.

One of the first steps I would make as your science advisor would be to recommend the formation of a number of think tanks to consider the potential of on-demand matter. A modest funding agency to explore OM may one day lead to a technology with the potential to solve a number of the world's problems and empower humanity to sail on a shoreless sea.

Clifford Pickover
Research Staff member, IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center
Author of The Paradox of God and The Science of Omniscience, Keys to Infinity, and the Neoreality science-fiction series.

Mr. President,

Scientists are now studying many fascinating and fundamental problems: What is the nature of "dark matter," the unseen and as yet unknown matter which apparently comprises most of our universe? What is the ultimate "theory of everything" that will unify our understanding of the forces of nature? Will such a theory let us predict the masses of fundamental particles?

But the single greatest mystery facing science today arises, remarkably, each time we see the red of an apple, hear the blast of a trumpet, smell the fragrance of a rose, or reel with anger from an insult. The mystery is this: What is the relationship between our everyday conscious experiences and our brains?

The issue is that brains seem to be physical objects with physical properties like spin and momentum, but conscious experiences seem to lack such properties. What, for instance, is the spin of anger or the momentum of my experience of red? The very question sounds like nonsense, and that raises the mystery.

The mystery is us. What kind of creatures are we? Are we composites of physical bodies and nonphysical experiences? Or are we entirely physical, or entirely nonphysical? Do brains create conscious experiences, or vice versa? Could some complex pattern of neural activity in my brain actually cause, or be identical with, my experience of red? How, precisely? Is the distinction between physical and nonphysical even useful here?

The mystery could hardly be more personal: What are we? And the fields of science potentially relevant to its resolution could hardly be more diverse: Quantum physics and chemistry, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, sociology and anthropology.

The mystery is as old as philosophy and religion, but today it engages many of the brightest minds in diverse scientific fields. An initiative to study this mystery could galvanize these fields and promote multidisciplinary collaborations.

What are the potential payoffs of such an initiative? At a minimum there is the intangible benefit of furthering our scientific understanding of what we are. The tangible benefits of such an understanding are anyone's guess. They might include payoffs of interest to any administration, such as a better understanding of the sources of interpersonal and international conflict and how these can be resolved. For if we better understand what we are, we might better understand why we behave as we do.

Donald D. Hoffman
Professor of Cognitive Science
University of California, Irvine
Author of Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See and coauthor of Observer Mechanic

Mr. President,

There is an opportunity to improve the quest for cures for many diseases, including cancers, by increasing the instrumentation budget for advanced detection of physical properties of the genome, such as being able to view the conformal shape of DNA in live cells as it twists and turns, winds and unwinds, achieving 5500:1 rates of compression in size, knowing when to unwind and transcribe, photon and EMF emission by DNA in cells in vivo and in vitro, which we have no way to measure today; etc. Included in this
proposed initiative should be the involvement of more physicists to aid molecular biologists in their interpretation of the state of activity, including quantum mechanics, at work in the nanoworld of live cells.

We cannot see into the nucleus of live cells very effectively, and most of our understanding of DNA, its role in cells, and cellular signalling, is deduced from chemical analysis and imputation. Not from direct observation and measurement. Advances in many technologies, including nanotechnology, neutron imaging, microscopy, SEM and AFM, X-Ray crystallography, and more, are widening our ability to see.

Only two years ago the NIH began funding instrumentation to facilitate sensing at the nano levels needed to really understand the processes of cellular biology.

Complicating this quest is the lack of much coalescence among fields of science. Few molecular biologists understand advanced physics, photonics, Van der Waals forces, et al. And the reverse is also true, few physicists are knowledgeable, in depth, about what goes on in cells, at the level of understanding the potential role of histones, microtubules, cellular signalling, and the complex, interrelated activities of the cells which make up our bodies and determine our health, longevity, aging and survival.

We are benefitted by the significant investments into nano/bio technologies being funded through NIH, NSF, DARPA/DOD. An increase, modest on the scale of the overall budget, with a research mandate encouraging exploring these new areas of potential discovery, can yield enormous benefits in developing diagnostics, and as a result of that, therapeutics, to tackle the many diseases afflicting humanity, and the current enormous cost of treating these diseases.

Mike Weiner
CEO, Biophan Technologies, Inc.

Dear Mr. President:

First, I should start off by endorsing virtually all the recommendations you have received so far. I would add another recommendation, which I believe addresses a fundamental, but ironically largely ignored, problem facing us today. Let me put the problem this way: why is it that in an age of unprecedented material wealth, a billion dollar self-help industry, and an economy designed to feed not stomachs but lifestyles, more and more people are depressed and go through life listlessly, with little sense of purpose or meaning? Why in the absence of such meaning do some people turn to destructive ideologies, whose manifestations in terrorism are all to real (I think a cult model is the way you should be thinking about terrorist organizations, by the way)?

Studies of our biological constitution make it increasingly clear that we are social creatures of meaning, who crave a sense of coherence and purpose. Yet, our modern way of life seems to provide fewer and fewer opportunities to engage in the group life that satisfies these human needs—indeed, many of its structures and institutions stunts these very needs. In addition to these obstacles within the design of modern life, it's my hunch that modernist culture is based on a profoundly mistaken view of human needs. The upshot is a deeply flawed view of human happiness as the private pursuit of self actualization. The implications are profound, and range from an enormous cost in public health terms to more and more social conflicts, terrorism being just one manifestation of these.

As science advisor, I would initiate a program at the intersection of science and culture to investigate what modern brain science reveals about human needs and how such an understanding can be applied to create both ways of living and a culture that better satisfies them—for lack of a better word, I'd call this "neurosociology."

I think we will find that the staggering advances in brain science reveal human needs to be vastly different from the modern view—for example, that we aren't the asocial, consumptive selves Freud thought we were, but instead are deeply social and need not only to belong but to identify with groups and purposes larger than ourselves.

This initiative would attempt to use this new knowledge to design ways of living that provide more opportunity for real meaning and social engagement that the human brain requires—from how we ought to think about the design of communities, the workplace, learning institutions, and entertainment and leisure. This initiative would also have to focus on a deeply troubling problem: although science is the engine of our society, its core values and insights have had only a weak influence on our culture. This is a troubling gap: for science, and therefore, our civilization, to sustain itself, we require a culture that is built on the core values and insights of science itself, one that endows human life with the meaning we all crave. Aligning the design of life and a sustaining culture with the human needs that brain science is beginning to reveal would, I think, have a profound impact on many of the most troubling social dilemmas we face.

To sum it up, I would recommend the creation of a new science of human flourishing and significance, a nascent neurosociology, whose goal would be a happiness worth having.

Steven Quartz
Neuroscientist
Division of Humanities & Social Sciences, and Computation and Neural Systems Program
California Institute of Technology
Coauthor (with Terrence Sejnowski) of Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are.

Dear Mr President,

You are fortunate in leading a nation pre-eminent in science. By any measure, scientists in the US are having a profound impact on our understanding of virtually every field of research.

But this sustained excellence is matched by the steady of growth of a culture of unreason, deeply opposed to the methods and conclusions of science. You are in a uniquely powerful position to confront this dangerous trend, but I'm afraid you are also in a deeply compromised position. For tackling the culture of unreason means confronting the core of your political support, the religious right.

Why is this important? The scientific issues we need to confront as a society are increasingly posing hard questions of moral judgement and of practical concern. This is particularly true in the revolution in biosciences which intimately affects who and what we are. Your administration has already compromised US scientific advance—and potentially the health of many of your citizens—by a politically motivated policy fudge over embryonic stem cells.

The questions in coming years will get harder, not easier. It will be the task of elected politicians to make societal choices on the basis of scientific evidence, not prejudice.

Your friend Tony Blair recently gave a speech where he declared, "We're at a crossroads. We could choose a path of timidity in the face of the unknown. Or we could choose to be a nation at ease with radical knowledge, not fearful of the future, a culture that values a pragmatic, evidence-based approach to new opportunities." Prime Minister Blair believes the second path is the clear choice. It's time you demonstrated the same conviction.

Sincerely,

Lance Knobel
Independent Writer and Strategist
Former Advisor, Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, London

The National Institute for the Scientific Study of Peace (NISSP)

Dear Mr. President:

The technologist Kevin Kelly has urged you to give more support to long-term, blue-sky, globally relevant research. I could not agree more. In that spirit, I recommend that you create a new governmental body, The National Institute for the Scientific Study of Peace, to address by far the most pressing issue of our time: the persistence of war as a means of resolving disputes between nations.

Fields such as evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science are now providing new insights into the brain, emotions, reasoning and the evolution of human nature. Findings from these fields as well as from economics, game theory, anthropology, and political science can help us to understand the causes of war and find ways to reduce its occurrence. Thus far, however, the scientific community has not given war-related questions the serious, sustained attention that they deserve.

The National Institute for the Scientific Study of Peace (NISSP) would redress that insufficiency. Its short-term goal would be to find more effective means of resolving conflict in the world today, wherever it might occur. The long-term goal would be to explore ideas on how nations can make the transition toward permanent disarmament: the elimination of armies, arms, and arms industries. Through its grants and publications, NISSP would encourage ambitious young scientists to see peace as a challenge at least as worthy of pursuit as a unified theory of physics, a cure for cancer, or a cheap, clean, renewable source of energy.

Just as a percentage of the budget for the Human Genome Project is allocated to ethical issues, so part of the Defense Department's budget could be allocated to NISSP. One tenth of one percent should be sufficient. Some might argue that war is not a scientific issue. Certainly it is a dauntingly complex one, with political, economic, and social ramifications. But the same could be said of global warming and population growth.

Scholars such as the Yale political scientist Bruce Russett have noted that democracies rarely wage war against each other. We need more rigorous investigations of correlations such as these, which can identify ways to promote stability within and between nations. What is the link between the risk of war and nations’ political ideologies? Trade and economic policies? Religious and ethnic diversity? Population growth and poverty? Education and womens' rights? Freedom of the press? Availability of energy, food, and other vital resources?

Darwinian theory is sometimes said to imply that conflict is inherent in nature and hence inevitable in human affairs. This view assumes that evolution is primarily what game theorists call a zero-sum game, in which one organism's gain is off-set by another's loss. War is the ultimate zero sum—or, more often, negative—sum game.

But as the journalist Robert Wright points out in his book Nonzero, non-zero-sum processes such as symbiosis and cooperation also play vital roles in evolution. The key to global peace and prosperity, Wright argues, lies in fostering trade, communications, and other mutually beneficial interactions between nations. (Nonzero has been touted by your predecessor in the White House, but don't hold that against it.)

Many scientists will dismiss total, global disarmament, which I believe should be the ultimate goal of our strivings toward peace, as hopelessly unrealistic. These skeptics will argue that at the very least some trans-national organization should always retain a military force, perhaps equipped with nuclear weapons, to deter or suppress attacks from outlaw states or quasi-states, such as Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Certainly global disarmament seems a remote possibility now, but that does not mean we should fatalistically accept armies and armaments, including weapons of mass destruction, as permanent features of civilization. Given the extraordinary advances our species has already achieved in science, technology, medicine, and human rights, surely we are intelligent enough to make not only war but even the threat of war obsolete. The only question is how, and how soon

Yours truly,

John Horgan
Freelance science journalist (Scientific American, the New York Times, the Washington Post, among others)
Author of The End of Science; The Undiscovered Mind; and Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality (forthcoming).

Dear President Bush:

One thing a science advisor should do is attempt to define science. The last definition we had was in 1892 when Charles Eliot, the President of Harvard, led a committee that decided upon the high school curriculum that is still in place today. They defined science as biology, chemistry, and physics (in that order.) These just happened to be the science departments at Harvard in 1892. They defined mathematics as algebra, geometry and trigonometry (— same reason.) But a few things have happened since 1892.

One thing that has happened is that there are new and different science departments at Harvard (and elsewhere.) Another thing that has happened is that nearly everyone goes to high school and half of those kids go on to college. In 1892 those who went to high school (and on to Harvard which probably what President Eliot was worried about) were preparing to become teachers, professors, ministers and statesmen. They were not preparing the bulk of the population to live.

One of your illustrious predecessors, John Adams—he was the father of another President of the same name, a confusion that I am sure you identify with—said that education was about only two things: how to make a living and how to live. Unfortunately our current school system does neither.

Science is a good example. Should people learn science?

I have recently become the academic dean at Grandview Prep in Florida. I am trying to build a realistic high school curriculum there. I will tell you a story that will help you understand my problem:

I helped build an on line physics course for Columbia, so I installed it in the curriculum at Grandview. There were immediate objections that it would be too hard. (It is a college level course, but actually it is intended to replace "Physics for Poets" at Columbia so it isn't that hard.) Nevertheless it was decided that the good students at Grandview could take this course but the bad students would have to take regular physics. (I thought this bizarre but went along.)

So, I asked the physics teacher what he taught in regular physics. The first thing he mentioned was Ohm's Law. Apparently, the bad kids could understand Ohm's Law but not space travel (which is the basis of the Columbia course.)

Now, I don't know about you President Bush, but Ohm's Law simply fails to come up in my life. And, while we are discussing things that come up in one's life, when was the last time you used the quadratic formula? Your father said every graduating senior would know the Pythagorean Theorem by the time his Presidency was finished (I suppose he was counting on another term eh?) I have it on good authority (from your brother Neil) that no adult member of the Bush family knows the Pythagorean theorem, you or dad included. I suppose you never needed it. (Neither did hardly anyone else.)

Our problems in science and in education come from our view that education is about preparing for Harvard in 1892 and not for life in 2003. So, as your science advisor I would propose three things:

• 1) Begin to help change our education policy to create students who prepare for the real world they will inhabit by learning how to wire their houses instead of quoting Ohm's law or how and when to refinance their house rather than learning Euclidean Geometry. I would create more curricula in science and other subjects that emphasized everyday reasoning issues like the use of stem cells or waste cleanup or snow removal or alternative energy sources. Why can't science be about real issues in real people's lives? I'll bet you didn't take a single science course at Yale. Who could blame you? I was a member of the Yale faculty for many years. The science professors are preparing future scientists not future Presidents. The nation suffers as a result.

• 2) We must call for a new curriculum meeting to replace the 1892 curriculum and to reinvent the schools. Stop going on about test scores and making sure every kid studies the same stuff and build hundreds of new curricula and let students choose. We need to teach people how to think not how to memorize information.

• 3) We must consider education (and science) as our most likely product for export. The world needs education more than it needs food. This is the best way to counter terrorism in the long run. We have the best and brightest in this country because a lot of our education system isn't broken. (We have great universities and superb Ph.D. programs for example.) Let's start considering how we export these great educational products with the intent not of taking others country's best minds and making them US citizens, but with the idea that if they cant read in Pakistan this can cause us a great many problems down the road. On line learning is the answer because it is easy to export. Why haven't we spent money on creating high quality on line literacy programs and science reasoning programs that would make the export of education a real possibility? Instead of spending money on making better tests why not spend money on better curricula?

The time has come to make science more accessible and education in it and other subjects more relevant.

Sincerely,

Roger C. Schank
Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science
Chief Education Officer
Carnegie Mellon West
Founder of the Institute for the Learning Sciences, Northwestern University
Author of Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane; Coloring Outside the Lines (Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking all the Rules), Engines for Education

Dear President Bush,

Like many of your other prospective science advisors I would like to urge you to provide more support for basic scientific research. But I would especially urge more support for the most productive, and most underfunded, scientific community in the country. This group of scientists and science educators do more to provide the basic intellectual infrastructure of the nation than any other. Every year they make fundamental discoveries in physics, biology, mathematics, and psychology, as well as ensuring that the discoveries of previous generations of scientists are transmitted to the scientists of the future. Yet they typically receive salaries somewhere between zero and $15,000.00 a year, and 20% are below the poverty line. Most of the science educators in this group actually make major financial sacrifices to do their fundamentally important work. They receive less federal and state support than any other part of the scientific community, no grants, no scholarships, no R and D write-offs, less even than public elementary schools or community colleges. In fact, both your administration and the preceding one have actually cut the small amount of funding that was once earmarked for this group. These unsung geniuses, are, of course, children under five and the many women (and a few men) who take care of them.

This may seem like a motherhood issue—well, actually, it is a motherhood issue. But really valuing families and genuinely leaving no child behind isn't just motherhood—its the soundest science policy too. And don't please, waste all this scientific talent on meaningless busy work by putting young children in junior versions of our notoriously awful schools. America's science has always been most successful where it is least constrained—we need blue sky research up and down the line. In fact, blue sky research is our most fundamental competitive advantage, not just as Americans but as Homo Sapiens, too. Human beings have thrived because, more than any other creature, we are naturally driven to learn about the world around us. Our greatest scientists and most creative companies regularly borrow the best practices of mothers and preschool teachers. Give all our scientists, old and young, lunch, the right toys, a safe place to play, interesting problems to solve, and someone to talk to, and watch them fly.

Sincerely yours,
Alison Gopnik
Professor of Psychology
Coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

I am pleased you are considering me for this advisory position. However, before proceeding further, I would appreciate some clarification about your vision for my role in your administration. Particularly in these tumultuous times, I would like to know that you will not neglect the advice of the scientific community. Since you have moved my predecessor's office away from the White House and downgraded his role, refusing to give him the customary title "Assistant to the President," I cannot help but question your commitment to furthering and best utilizing scientific advances.

This apprehension is compounded by your having eliminated my predecessor's deputy from the National Security Council, explicitly indicating that science is no longer an integral part of national decision making.

The views of the scientific community could be especially relevant today. Many pressing issues that will shape the lives of Americans and the world in the coming years will be best addressed by leaders who recognize that science, science education, scientific expertise, and international scientific cooperation are crucial to formulating the best policy.

Take the issue of national security. How can we assess other countries' potential for creating weapons of mass destruction without detailed understanding of potentially dangerous materials and what is required to transform them into truly dangerous ones? How can any agency hope to protect "the homeland" without evaluating our reliance on technology and how best to safeguard it from interference? And how can we hope to have a stable world unless the benefits and advances of technology are more widely distributed?

I fear I will disqualify myself from this job by pointing out that the threat of global warming is an issue the scientific community has finally reached consensus on. Yet the detrimental effects, both economically and environmentally, of excessive carbon dioxide emissions have been completely neglected in formulating current policy.

I do not wish to give the impression that I think the role of scientific advisor is only to attend to the most pressing issues of our day. It is critical that the importance of a long-term view of the role and significance of science does not get subsumed by the more immediate issues. Like a college education, which is absurdly expensive yet repays itself in spades, science is difficult to assess with a cost-benefit analysis. Current scientific policy focuses on short-term achievement and success, to the exclusion of investigating long-term potential and possibilities.

The long-term future of science might well involve big expensive tools that take time to develop and employ. It is essential to develop some riskier ideas if in the end we are to remain competitive. This is particularly true for Particle Physics, where progress will only be made with adequately funded big projects that will most likely happen only with meaningful international cooperation. It is important that you, the President, recognize that with action or inaction, we are making a choice about our long-term competitiveness in this field and physics as a whole. Europe devotes twice the percentage of its GDP than America to physics. The European collider facility in Geneva, CERN, has twice the budget of the main American facility, Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois. CERN has been able to develop new projects using only its operating budget; American facilities lack that luxury.

My focus on Particle Physics is because it is my field of expertise. But I want to emphasize that the benefits of Particle Physics, like most scientific endeavors, spread beyond their immediate goals. Accelerator technology was developed for purely scientific reasons yet is now routinely utilized in hospitals. Advances in processing and coordinating large databases has and will filter out of the physics environment to the world at large. And exciting ideas and better understanding are essential to stimulating and promoting the advanced education which sustains our economy.

In summary, a coherent scientific policy is particularly imperative in the world of today. There is a real danger of losing the priceless environment, both physical and intellectual, that enhances our way of life. With so many technological and scientific issues at stake, it is critical that corporate interests and political calculations are not the sole determinants of scientific policy. Let's not sacrifice support for major scientific advances to short-term political agendas whose legacy will forever be regretted.

Lisa Randall
Professor of Physics
Harvard University

No one can dispute any longer that when a Nation's science and technology weaken, the Nation itself is in danger—economically, militarily, intellectually, and in terms of its image and power as a world leader. Therefore it is essential to realize that behind the many pressing scientific issues facing our Nation today, one stands out far among the rest: The persistent decline for several years in the past, and into the foreseeable future, of the very health of the scientific/technological workforce of America. This decline—which, if not reversed, may well turn out to be the Achilles Heel in the battle for maintaining the historic high standing of American science and technology— has several indicators. I will here confine myself to two:

1) As the non-partisan Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable determined by consensus a few days ago, the number and quality of American S&E workers is dropping precipitously—with over 50 percent of federal S&E workers expected to retire within the next ten years, with U.S. production of scientists decreasing since the 1990s (in part because of the long-term decline, in real $ and as a fraction of GDP, in federal funding for true research, except for biology). As the American Physical Society Science News of December 2002 stresses, "Overall, the number of PhD students in science and engineering is at a 50-year low, and there is little sign of a turn-about." To make up for the low enrollment of U.S. citizens, that of "foreign students, in particular, ballooned in the '80s and '90s," and continues to do so—with many major university science departments now having half or more of their graduate students recruited from foreign countries—students which in large numbers return to their home countries after graduation.

2) Not unrelated to the first point is—with few great exceptions—the deplorable state of science/technology/mathematics knowledge and teaching in K-12 classes, and even in U.S. colleges, where now only about 30% of them require even one hour of science instruction for graduation. In April 1983, just twenty years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published its unanimous report on American schools, titled "A Nation at Risk." Its five main recommendations were endorsed, in several public addresses, by President Reagan. To a small degree, these recommendations, and others like them, were adopted by some Governors and schools. But in fact the performance, on average, of America's students is still painfully poor, not only in science and not only with respect to international comparisons with students in other main industrial nations. The Nation is still at risk.

In the days after Sputnik, the nation's leadership aroused our population to make major investments, in both scientific research and science education. The time has come for analogous acts of national leadership, on both points, and along the whole "pipeline," from early schooling to the most advanced research labs. For example: With nearly 2 million new school teachers expected to be needed in the next 10 years, and many existing ones in positions still far below what a true professional would deserve, a large-scale (perhaps State-centered) set of Academic Year (or Summer) Institutes is needed to bring science teachers up to speed, and to be ready to help the more educated pupils reach the next levels. And, at the other end, talented Americans need to be brought back in sufficient numbers into the U.S. research labs, many of which are now demoralized by having to fight again and again in the face of refusals of funding for their admittedly meritorious projects.

I conclude by expressing my willingness to collaborate with others interested in these (here much abbreviated) observations and recommendations. Just as President Eisenhower invented, and brilliantly used, a wide, non-partisan circle of science advisers to deal with key aspects of the international challenges confronting America at that time, so has history brought our current leadership to an analogous moment. And history will judge the success or failure to seize that moment.

Gerald Holton
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University
Author of Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought; Science and Anti-Science; and Einstein, History, and Other Passions.

The issues at the edge of neuroscience are clear.

The first and most important issue at the edge is the biology underlying conscious experience, particularly the biology of self-awareness: How do you study it? Where is it located in the brain? How does it develop over time?

A second problem is how is memory perpetuated to last the lifetime of an individual.

A third problem is the future of stem cell biology in the brain. To what degree will we be able to replace cells in the nervous system that die with stem cells that take on similar properties?

Sincerely yours,

Eric R. Kandel, MD
Nobel Laureate
University Professor, Columbia University, Center for Neurobiology & Behavior
Senior Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Neuroscientists have recently discovered that a given visual perception of the Universe activates the same group of neurons than just to imagine that perception. Surprisingly, the discovery did not make headlines in the press.

Apparently, it does not matter that much to perceive a fraction of the tiniest part of the Universe—that is to say, the visible part—or imagine instead the dominant invisible reality of atoms and void, in order to feel something, the glory of colours in Newton's words, or to be self-conscious.

The immediate corollary for corporate life of the absence of barriers between visible and invisible at the level of consciousness is that the same degree, at least, of attention should be paid to evaluating customers degree of satisfaction, than to what is going on in their imagination. Both might be very different and equally relevant. It is obvious that some corporate projects might be geared to fulfill consumers visible needs, and others to short-cut this lengthy process by direct access to the imagination.

By and large people have not realized yet the impact of the sudden crumbling down of all sorts of barriers. From the neuron's point of view there is no difference between a visually perceived or imagined bit of the Universe. From a professional chemist's point of view, it has become irrelevant too to distinguish between a synthetic or a natural compound. Both are likely to be impure, more so natural extracts usually made of complex mixtures, unless processed to separate the components.

Biologist John Bonner at Princeton has, following more than forty years research, proved that it is impossible to distinguish between human intelligence and that of a social amoeba like slime molds. You just cannot demonstrate that slim molds—or bacteria for that matter—are unconscious. Since Darwin and modern genetics, the old debate around what distinguishes humans from other animals has become redundant. If anything, we are looking now into the differences betweens humans and minerals.

Astrophysicist John Gribbin—to the dismay of many—has been meticulously unscafolding away the existence of that last barrier. Life and the Universe are inextricably intertwined. There would be no planets like the Earth, and no life forms like us, if there were no clouds of gas laced with tiny traces of dusty debris produced by the previous explosions of supernova. There is no doubt now. We are made of interstellar galactic mineral dust.

Last but not least, the mother of all barriers, the last frontier between life and death is becoming ever more suspicious and difficult to ascertain. Hardly three years ago it was discovered that we humans too—like mouse and rats—have stem cells. Or, stem cells happen to be immortal. Stem cells command the process of morphogenesis from the incipient and magic zygot to the finished embryo. They are not the least important cells in the body. On the contrary. No wonder if the mother of all barriers has been deadly shaken. If atoms are eternal, and stem cells are immortal, what on earth dies out when somebody dies.

The unprecedented disappearance of barriers clashes with every social convention. Most people only feel comfortable within the narrow limits of his or her own identity, if duly ranged with equals from the same species, tribe, generation, church, country and culture. And identical cultures provide similar sight, taste, tact and hearing. That is the way the neocortex works. But the sudden lack of barriers tunes very well with the unconscious brain and its capacity to allucinate under the effects of LSD. The most powerful drug on earth happens to destroy barriers between people, between mind and body, between oneself and other living organisms and, finally, between the spirit and the Universe.

Science is pointing towards an LSD-like world without LSD intake. And we are wholly unprepared for both. Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Psychology—the things we are made of—are inextricably intertwined. People though, remain interactiveless and disentangled.

Governments have no more urgent task than to help to conciliate individuals, corporations, institutions, and society at large with the new frontierless Universe. Otherwise, managers will continue to hold that science has nothing to do with their entrepreneurial projects, citizens and their legal systems will be crushed by unexplained violence, Universities will go on focusing on specific subjects amidst growing demands for global interconnectivity between humans, robots and computers, the practice of medicine will continue to exorcise symptoms instead of regenerating tissues, and in a frontierless Universe nations will continue to fight and hide behind frontiers.

Eduardo Punset
Professor of Economic Policy at the Chemical Institute of Ramon Llull University in Barcelona
Director and Producer of Networks (a weekly programme of Spanish public television on Science).
Author of A Field Guide to Survive in the XXI st Century.

Dear Mr Bush,

I am pleased to have this opportunity of sharing with you some of the insights from science that are relevant to the situation you face at home and abroad. Let me start by reminding you of something you learned at school that holds the key to your own and everyone else's future. It's a chemical process that looks like this : 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O + energy.

Remember? Hydrogen burns with oxygen to produce water and energy. Water and energy are the key to the future, as I'm sure you realise.

You learned from the oil business that whoever controls energy controls the world. You are about to seize the billions of barrels of liquid energy that lie beneath the sands and the coastal waters of Iraq in order to secure the future for your country and gain control of the uncertain politics of this fractious global village in which we now live. However, this isn't a good policy and I want to persuade you of a much better alternative.

Apart from the international political turmoil and increased terrorist activity that this action will provoke, there are direct consequences that will follow for the future of the US . Unrestricted access to all that oil for US industry, with no effective Kyoto-type constraints which you have refused to accept, will accelerate CO2 build-up in the earth's atmosphere to a rate that guarantees a sudden failure of rainfall over the bread basket of the American mid-West. We now know from studies by your own scientists that it is the remarkable volume of water transpired by trees in the Amazon basin that produces the climatic conditions for rain to fall in Kansas and the mid-Western states.

Accelerating the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere by profligate use of Iraq's vast oil supplies, together with the continuing deforestation of the Amazon, will not only turn the Amazon basin into a parched desert but plunge the entire mid-West into prolonged drought, resulting in famine in your own land. History would then judge you as an apocalyptic Burning Bush, bringing the scourge of parching fire to your country and its people.

The alternative that science provides for you comes through the blessing of water. The little formula that I reminded you of contains all the answers. You start with water and end with water, pure and unpolluting. Use the sun's energy via solar panels, wind, wave and hydroelectric power to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then use the hydrogen to drive industry, cars and other means of transport. The science and technology is all there, and the countries that develop this industrial potential will lead the recovery from the recession that is now deepening.

As we undertake this technological and economic transformation, we will need to make other major adjustments to our world-view. However, just as science has shown how to become sustainable in energy use, it is providing the vision needed to follow ecological principles, resulting in no waste or pollution in industrial production, consistent with the principles of the hydrogen economy. And, most important of all, there is a shift occurring both in sc silence and in society that is taking us from preoccupation with quantities of goods to concern about quality of life.

We have learned through science and technology how to turn the bountiful resources of the earth into vast quantities of goods, enough to provide for all if we share. However, in the process we have lost sight of the qualities on which our lives depend, which make them worthwhile and meaningful : health and well-being, relationships, community living, sharing, caring for the planet and all of its inhabitants, human and non human alike.

We have tried to substitute quantities for qualities and found that this produces poverty in the quality of our relationships, in the meaning and value of our lives. Science is now expanding so that qualities of persons, communities, cultures, ecosystems, landscapes, farms and animals, the Amazon, the planet , are primary, with a focus on health, creativity and meaning. A science of qualities is now developing in response to the recognised limitations of our science of quantities, to refocus our attention on the qualities and values of life. It's the path into the future. Why not take it? Then you'll go down in history not as Burning Bush but as Bush the Bringer of Universal Sustainability through Hydrogen.

Prof Brian Goodwin
Schumacher College
Dartington, Totnes, Devon, UK
Author of How The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity; (with Richard Sole) Signs if Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology

Mr. President,

The most critical science policy decisions that face you can all be reduced to a three words: education, education, education.

In 1957, I was a little kid growing up at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, Werner Von Braun's first American test site. I well remember the news stories in the paper on Saturday, October 5, when Sputnik went up, and well remember the flood of money that came to our missile base and to educational institutions everywhere in the months that followed. Three of my classmates and I got our pictures in newspapers all over the country posing thoughtfully with models of missiles because we—growing up at White Sands—were supposed to be the hope of the next generation. (Me, I decided a few years later that rocket science was what middle aged guys in suits did, so to be truly rebellious I went off to study Greek and Latin, but another few years later I wound up as CIO of a great university, so the education money wasn't all mis-spent.)

American science in the near half-century since has done wonderful things—but we train fewer scientists every year, we can't fill secondary school classrooms with trained science teachers, we cannot support the building of research facilities in our universities, and the mass media and the houses of congress are full of scientific illiterates. Scientific research will not fix all humankind's problems—but so far it has made us healthier, better fed, more prosperous, and better able to achieve the potential of human intelligence and human society than my grandfather's generation could have imagined.

But we will go nowhere near where we need to go without the smart, trained people to take us there. We must be as relentless in hunting down that talent as we are in pursuing terrorists, and as committed to winning the hearts and minds on the American street to an understanding of the power of science as we are to winning hearts and minds on middle eastern streets. We can probably win wars, but to make them worth winning, we must build a world that makes all humankind thrive in ways that are only possible with that most rigorous application of our most precious resource—human intelligence.

James J. O'Donnell
Professor of Classics
Provost
Georgetown University
Author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.

How do our brains create Infinity?

The Infinite is one of the most intriguing ideas in which the human mind has ever engaged. Full of paradoxes and controversies, it has raised fundamental issues in domains as diverse as theology, physics, philosophy, literature, and art. Moreover (and strangely enough), the Infinite, elusive and counterintuitive, has played a central role in defining a fundamental field of human intellectual activity characterized by precision, certainty, objectivity, and effectiveness in modeling our real finite world: mathematics!

Without the Infinite, mathematics as we know it, would simply not exist. But where does the Infinite come from? How do we grasp the Infinite if, after all, our biology is finite, and so are our experiences and everything we encounter with our bodies?

From the point of view of the scientific study of the mind (i.e., cognitive science and related disciplines) several other questions need to be addressed: What cognitive mechanisms make the Infinite possible? How such an elusive and paradoxical idea structures an objective and precise field such as mathematics? Why the various forms of infinities in mathematics, such as infinite sums, limits, points at infinity, infinite sets, and infinitesimal numbers, have the exact conceptual structure they have?

Recent studies of human conceptual systems in cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics, and psycholinguistics show that like many abstract ideas, the Infinite is created via very specific everyday cognitive mechanisms that make human imagination possible such as conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies, conceptual blends, and so on (which are very precise inference-preserving inter-domains mappings).

Now the big question for cognitive neuroscience is: How does the human brain orchestrate and enact these cognitive mechanisms that bring Infinity into being.

Rafael Nunez
Cognitive Scientist
Member, international board of the International Group for Psychology of Mathematics Education
Author (with George Lakoff) of Where Mathematics Comes From; Philosophy of the Flesh; and En deçà du transfini: Aspects psychocognitifs sous-jacents au concept d'infini en mathémathiques.

Mr. President:

We are entering an era of scientific change that is rocking no less than human nature itself. This directed evolution is unprecedented. It is convulsing everything from the affairs of state, to defense, to commerce, to labor, to education, to health, to welfare, to the economy. It is not science fiction. It has begun to occur and is accelerating this decade. You need an advisor who can help you try to ride this curve of change.

Human organization is always structured by the technology of the time—"We shape our houses, then they shape us," as Churchill put it. But culture moves more slowly than invention.

So in the '50s, for example, we may very well have been rocked by the atomic bomb, television, mass-produced suburban housing, and all the rest. Yet the '50s was the notoriously quiet Eisenhower decade. The cultural upheaval of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll—enabled by The Pill, synthetic psychedelics and the transistor—did not occur until the '60s.

Similarly, the '90s saw the rise of a suite of technologies that are fundamentally altering the underpinnings of our world. These are genomics, robotics, information networking, and nanotechnology. Yet the '90s was an astonishingly quiescent decade. The big news was peace, prosperity, and Monica.

Only now are we beginning to sense a hinge in history, a time when the earth is beginning to move beneath our feet. For only now is technology augmenting and enhancing our very bodies and minds and personalities.

This transformation of humanity demands leadership. It needs a guide to what is being born. It will require someone with a road map and a tout sheet and a cultural compass to the driving forces behind this transformation, identifying opportunities. It needs a chief of state who will provide a sense of intention. We can't live without this transformation and we can't kill it. Trying to let it pass will only turn our lives into a political and philosophical curiosity.

For all recorded history, humans have been trying to transcend human nature: Think of Socratic reasoning, Buddhist enlightenment, Christian sainthood, Cartesian logic or the Marxists’ "New Man." Now such transformation may actually be in reach because of technology. Is it a good idea after all?

Little stands in the way of the transcendence of human nature occurring in your lifetime 20 to 50 years from now. That's the one thing on which everyone who looks at this compounding curve of change agrees. You can get an argument about whether this is inevitable. Biotech critic Francis Fukuyama proposes a broad program of government intervention to preserve the human nature we've always known. Others scoff, saying such efforts are like placing a rock in a stream. There are more than enough labs run by brave souls in adventurous parts of the world for events to just flow around any barriers.

You can also find disagreement about whether the biological revolution or the computer revolution first will lead us to becoming trans-human. Gregory Stock, director of the UCLA Program on Medicine, Technology and Society, foresees widespread reworking of human biology via genetic engineering that cannot be stopped by either governments or religious groups. Others, like the much-honored computer pioneer Ray Kurzweil, agree with Stock that the biogenetic changes will take place, but believes that we also see profound integration of our biological systems with non biological intelligence, enabling routine integration of machines and the brain by 2030. As you know, Mr. President, your Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has already demonstrated remarkable progress on this front this year.

What none of these scientists dispute is the notion that as exponential technological change continues to accelerate into the first half of the 21st century, "it will appear to explode into infinity, at least from the limited and linear perspective of contemporary humans," as Kurzweil puts it. This will result in "technological change so rapid and profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."

The towering question is whether this is good or bad. In the near term, the world could divide up into three kinds of humans. One would be the Enhanced, who embrace these opportunities. A second would be the Naturals, who have the technology available but who, like today's vegetarians, choose not to indulge for moral or aesthetic reasons. Finally, there would be The Rest those without access to these technologies for financial or geographic reasons, lagging behind, envying or despising those with ever-increasing choices. Especially if the Enhanced can easily be recognized because of the way they look, or what they can do, this is a recipe for conflict that would make racial or religious differences quaintly obsolete.

There are a variety of scenarios for such a future. One critical uncertainty is whether the technology is seen as benign or malignant. Another is whether society coheres during this transformation or bursts into shards. Some of the possible outcomes: The secrets of human consciousness and the human brain elude us, and the change is stately. Or incremental change continues to accelerate, aging is reversed, the revolution has occurred, and we are just trying to deal with the consequences. Another possibility: new intelligent species roam the Earth in 20 or 30 years, some of them mainly flesh and blood, and some of them mainly not.

In whatever case, what we're talking about here is transcendence becoming separate from or going beyond the gritty world we've always known. The realm of religion and mythology is being challenged by that of science and technology as the key to overcoming the confines of human nature. This is the stuff of Nietzsche, in his declaration that "Man is a rope, fastened between animal and overman a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal."

"To me, that is what human civilization is all about," says Kurzweil. "It is part of our destiny and part of the destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever faster, and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially. To contemplate stopping that to think human beings are fine the way they are is a misplaced remembrance of what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it's the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially, and that's what we're talking about."

The question then becomes whether we want to be evolving human nature beyond what we've known for millennia. They involve difficult choices. These go to those eternal questions of who we are, how we got that way, where we're headed, and what makes us tick.

Joel Garreau
Cultural revolution correspondent, The Washington Post
Principal, The Garreau Group
Author of Edge City: Life on the New Frontier and The Nine Nations of North America

Mr President

I have a dream.

I have a dream that one day we shall look back on today’s society with the same abhorrence with which we now view Victorian child labour, the oppression of women, and the evils of slavery.

We shall look back with horror on terrorist attacks, street crime out of control, and violence marring everyone’s lives—to a time when neither police nor the law were respected, and half our children were criminals before they even left school. And we shall wonder why so few people were prepared to stand up and shout "Enough."

In my dream I can walk down any street in Bristol, Boston, Bogotá or Bombay and no one will steal my phone to get their next fix. No heroin–dazed beggar will plead for my change. No crack-crazed youth will kill me for my credit card. And why? Because in my dream they, like me, can walk down that street and buy any drug they like.

Cannabis and ecstasy, heroin and cocaine, LSD and aspirin, will all be sold – clean, legal, properly packaged in precise doses, with appropriate warnings and proper regulation. Tax revenue will be more than enough to treat addicts and to guide problem users. Scientists will be free to research the effects of any drug without fear. Children will be given true advice, and real drugs education that teaches wise drug use, not ignorant abuse. And global terrorism will have disappeared for lack of funds.

Our prisons will have room to spare. No one will be there for wanting the freedom to control their own mind. And no one will be there because gangs have lured or threatened them into a life of dealing and violence. Police will once more earn the respect of the majority whose lives they work to protect.

In my dream, the peasants of Afghanistan will work their poppy fields for legal wages, the farmers of South America will labour free of the fear of the drug barons, and the profits of world trade will not be siphoned off by the criminals but returned to the people who earned them.

Mr President, it is the United States of America who long ago brought the evil of prohibition upon the world, and still holds the power to prevent the rest of us from seeking freedom from prohibition. Mr President, you could win the war on terrorism, not by fighting, but by refusing to fight the war on drugs.

As your prospective scientific advisor on issues of mind and consciousness, I know that there is no more pressing issue than the problem of drugs. I urge you to act now to free us all.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Susan Blackmore
Psychologist
Bristol, England
Author of Dying to Live, The Meme Machine, and Consciousness: An Introduction.

Dear Mr. President:

As you no doubt recognize, your scientific advisor is essentially a soothsayer. This individual is called upon to make key predictions about different aspects of the scientific enterprise, enabling the President to make appropriate decisions for the benefit and welfare of the American people. To assure you of my qualifications for this position, I will go out on the proverbial limb and make three specific predictions that you will find to be borne out by future events.

First, I predict that all the other applicants for this position will urge you to increase federal funding for science. Second, every applicant will make a special case for increased funding for the scientific field in which he or she specializes. The biologists will plead for more money for biomedical research, the physicists for particle research, and the psychologists for behavioral studies. This is not to belittle the worthiness of such advice. All branches of science can make good use of more funding, and who better to make a case for a particular field than an expert in that field.

Before providing you with my third prediction, allow me to identify what I consider to be the most significant problem in science today. In my opinion, our nation needs to get more of our young people interested in pursuing a career in science.

We are just beginning to unravel the secrets of the universe, from subatomic particles to the molecular cues that guide the building of the brain. As Cole Porter wrote: "the best is yet to come,"and I believe you will agree with me Mr. President that it is vitally important for America to lead the world in this effort. Regretfully, there has been a pronounced downturn in the number of young Americans choosing to dedicate their lives to science. As I travel around the country giving talks at our leading universities, it is readily apparent to me that more and more graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are from abroad. This is to be expected since at present we are the world's leader in scientific research. But, I believe that it would be a grave mistake for us to rely on foreign talent for our future scientific breakthroughs. For one thing, there is no guarantee that these individuals, whose costly training was paid for by the American taxpayer, will remain in this country. It is also shortsighted to assume that foreign scientific talent will be drawn to our shores for evermore. Without in any way discouraging the world's best young minds from coming to the United States to do science, we must come up with a strategy to encourage the best and the brightest in our nation to do the same.

My first recommendation to you, Mr. President would be to budget a relatively small amount of money for a program that might be termed "GWB Science Allstars of the Future." The program would annually select 1000 high school seniors and 100 college seniors with outstanding potential for future scientific achievements. (It might be prudent to distribute the number of nominees and subsequent winners in proportion to the congressional seats held by each of the 50 states, but others are better suited than I to deal with such matters.) The selection committee could be comprised of science teachers as well as preeminent scientists from industry, government and universities. A key aspect of this program is the prize: $100,000 to each high school senior and $1,000,000 to the college counterparts. The total annual cost of the program (including administration) would be less than $250 million, while its impact would be dramatic and long lasting. With serious prize money on the line science would no longer be just for the "weird" kids. Indeed, doing science would be seen as cool. With the right kid of publicity the GWB Science Allstars would become national celebrities, on par with sports heroes. One can even imagine rap songs describing the travails and triumphs of particularly charismatic young scientists.

This brings me to my third prediction, Mr. President. When the young people in our nation get as much money for scientific achievement as NBA draftees, the entire educational enterprise in this country will be raised to a level unprecedented in the history of the world. This could become the greatest the legacy of your presidency, perhaps even rivaling our eventual victory in the war on terrorism, and at a cost of much less than that a single stealth bomber.

Sincerely yours,

Leo M. Chalupa
Professor of Ophthalmology and Neurobiology
University of Irvine

Dear Mr. President,

In the mad hysteria of the moment, when all your intellectual resources are focused on finding someone in the Middle East to play Tit for Tat, whether Osama, Saddam, or Abu Nidal, I would remind you of some common sense truths about the complex dynamics of living systems.

First: Punishment doesn't work.

We know that beating a child doesn't make them peaceful, it makes them more violent.

We know that exercise doesn't make you tired, it gives you more energy.

If you have dandelions growing in your lawn, would you selectively blow their heads off or fertilize the lawn to choke out the weeds? Each dandelion you crush results in many more next year, while a stronger lawn resists their invasion.

The moral of this story is that striking back at terrorists may merely create more terrorists, while engaging the people in peaceful commerce inhibits terror.

Second: You can bet your last nickel that masses are fickle.

The mass coherence which supports your initiatives can turn on a dime. Spending $200B on war will cause severe "buyers remorse" when the people realize they bought nothing but national debt, a mess in Iraq, and higher prices for oil.

Third: Optimism is necessary.

Optimists behave different than pessimists. They buy more, invest more, take risk for future gains, and work harder. One doesn't have to be a genius to realize that the threat of continual war, while enhancing power, leads to economic woes because investors and consumers are uncertain. While oil profits may rise, all the rest of our modern industries, from Airlines, to Investment Banking, Telecommunications, Software and Chips will continue to collapse. To end the depression, the country needs optimism about economic growth driven by expectations of peace and stability.

Taking all three points together, my advice is to stimulate optimism by making a bold move turning America's focus from its negative role in war brinkmanship to a positive role as a leader who stands for peace, freedom and economic growth.

Jordan Pollack
Professor of Computer Science
Brandeis University

Dear Mr. President,

Whether or not you choose to follow up with me specifically, I want to thank you for reaching out to a scientist who doesn't benefit from prior personal connections to someone associated with your administration. Your sphere of advisors has seemed unusually distant from the scientific and technical communities.

I can understand, in a way, why you have been reticent in the past. Many scientists work in the academic environment, which tends to be liberal minded, and perhaps you've worried that there would be an ideological coloration in the advice you would receive. It would seem that the scientific mainstream is often at odds with your administration on issues such as stem cell research, global warming, and so on.

But the best way around this is not to retreat from the scientific community as a whole, but to embrace it, and demand that it find a way to transcend ideological colorations in its interactions with you. After all, much of the discipline of science is devoted to reducing personal bias. We spend a lot of our time repeating work that's already been done before because we're so cautious about our all-too-human vulnerabilities that could lead to self-deception. In a way we are the most skeptically conservative community around, and you would probably find more common ground with us than you expect if you gave us more of a try.

I suppose a science advisor has to be part speech writer and part budget warrior.

With that in mind, I would like to give you a sense of what my advice would be like on a variety of difficult issues.

You are in an amazing position. You are the most powerful president in a generation. Be bold! Science and technology are the most potent tools mankind has for improving our circumstances. Let's use this amazing moment in history to create a new period of happiness and prosperity. Please don't let your marvelous position in history go to waste.

In this note I will address the four toughest issues, which present the greatest opportunities and the most difficult political dilemmas. These are:

1) New medicine

2) New energy and transportation solutions.

3) Global warming response.

4) War on terror.

America's success on every level has depended in the past on government lead research initiatives.

There are three models from the twentieth century for giant government research and development projects: The Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, and the era of massive public works, including the TVA, much of the WPA, and the Interstates.

We have to be bold and imagine a new type of national initiative that combines the best of all three models. The Manhattan project showed what can be done by gathering the very best minds in one place. The Apollo Program showed that it's possible to do big science in a way that engages all the world in a positive way. The massive public works projects I listed, while they might be abhorrent to your economic advisors, should be appreciated because they showed that government can create a giant infrastructure without damage to democracy or capitalism.

I do not propose that big centralized science initiatives are the best method of tackling all our hardest problems, only the ones I listed above.

Private industry can sometimes address a big problem, even one that is serious enough to threaten our survival. In such cases, government should still play role of oversight and be ready to step in should industry fail for some reason. Some examples in this category:

1) Impending loss of efficacy of antibiotics

2) Need for new desalinization technologies and other fixes for looming shortages of fresh water

3) AIDS crisis. In this case, private industry has the research and manufacturing infrastructure in place already, but is not structured to do as much as it should to help patients in most of the world. An enhanced government role is crucial, because this problem as well as other related ones in the Third World will have a huge impact on our security in the long term.

About stem cells, cloning, and such things:

Here we have the potential to extend and improve human life, and it's just the sort of research that is better undertaken under governmental lead. It's expensive, high risk, and fraught with ethical concerns. Furthermore, if the vast new intellectual property riches are either Balkanized or monopolized, humanity will suffer, and America's role in the world order will be seriously challenged.

You face a tough situation here, though, in that one of your core constituencies, the faith-based voters, is understandably queasy about the whole direction. So you've sought compromises on such things as embryonic stem cell research, but the available compromises don't quite give the scientific community enough room to make progress. I understand how difficult these decisions are.

There are two likely negative outcomes from your policies as they stand. In the short term, legitimate research on new fundamental medicine will often be overshadowed by weird proprietary outfits, such as the supposed cloning achieved by a UFO cult or stray doctors here and there. These events poison public discourse.

In the long term, foreign countries will enjoy an economic advantage because the US will not be a center of expertise in medicine. In twenty years we could see a phenomenon in which masses of Americans who can afford the trip head to Europe or Asia for medical care, leaving their dollars abroad, so that there's increasingly less wealth to go around for those Americans who had to stay home.

I don't need to tell you how significant this would be to the long term economic health of our nation.

I would advise you to use your bully pulpit to be tough with both your religious constituents AND the scientific research establishments.

To the scientists, I would say something like this: "You have yourselves to blame in part for the public's reticence to fund the new age of medicine. You seem to love making claims about life's fundamental questions. I'm sick of reading that some robot at MIT has gained emotions, that some new gene explains as much as you seem to claim about a person's character, or any opinion of yours at all about consciousness or God. I don't believe you have expertise on these matters and you embarrass yourselves."

Yes, I want you to be that tough on us, because we deserve it, and because it is what your religious constituents need to hear in the public sphere.

Of course you can have a speech writer smooth these thoughts out so they sound nicer. I'm used to combative debates so you have to tone down any advice I give you in matters of rhetoric. I'm sure you have people who can handle that job.

To your religious constituents, I would say this: "Your concerns are legitimate and sane, but it's possible you've been mislead a bit by those who enjoy exaggerating the true nature of the new frontiers in medicine. You must remember that scientists have to sell themselves in order to be funded, just like everyone else, so you need to learn to discount a little bit of the science fiction-like atmosphere that surrounds reporting on recent research.

For instance, they talk about 'clones', but that's a science fiction word. Dolly the sheep was really no more than a delayed twin, and in fact less similar to Dolly than a regular twin would have been. That's not to say that I support the creation of human delayed twins—I don't. But it's important not to allow the scientific community to mystify what it can do.

It is essential that we hold life precious. Unfortunately, Americans don't always agree on specific questions like abortion, but I know that almost all Americans do hold life sacred and precious. I want to suggest to you that defining the chemical moment of conception as the start of life is not going to work, because it is a definition based on scientific concepts which are themselves in the process of being transformed. We can't reduce human life to a mechanical interaction of molecules, or whatever objects scientists are talking about in a given era. I believe that there is a difference between a collection of cells and a person—call it a soul if you like. If you believe there's a soul in a Petrie dish, you reduce what you mean by a soul.

I want my family and friends to be relieved from disease when it is possible and I want the same for your family and friends. Please join me in a loving quest to achieve this possibility."

I think this approach can work.

Once you win the hearts of both sides, and I think you can, an ethics policy should be based on open information and consent. A person should know and approve of what happens to their tissue. No viable embryo should be created outside of the rule of law. And so on.

But please, let us proceed to improve our lives using the means available to us.

I'll next address Energy, Transportation, and Climate:

We have to address the possibility of climate cataclysm. If we take the position that Kyoto is flawed, and I think there's a strong case that it is, we must articulate an alternative soon, so that the world doesn't think we're crazy.

The revolution in transportation and energy must come about anyway, whether the climate scare is legitimate or not.

I have a bit of a confession to make here. My colleagues and I might have contributed to your falsely optimistic sense about the near term potential of the oil economy. In the last twenty years, ever more powerful computers have created the illusion the oil supply is increasing. I worked on some of the first virtual oil field exploration tools, and such tools have made oil fields far more productive than we ever imagined. Furthermore, computer-aided design has helped produce a new generation of oil extraction machinery that can get at the oil we discover through our simulations. That's all fine, and I'm proud of how much computer science has been able to contribute to the oil exploration business, but there's also a hidden danger. Without computers, not only would oil have been running out by now, but it would have run out gradually, with prices going up as a warning sign. I'm afraid that computers are creating the illusion of an ever increasing supply, and will therefore reduce the period of warning before the supply runs out, which it will.

So, I suppose I hope to make you aware of how my colleagues and I have inadvertently fooled you on this matter. But this issue can be framed positively even better than it can be framed negatively. Why don't we invent new, better fuels and engines and then sell them to the world? What's wrong with that picture? It seems like such a win-win solution.

We should create a new energy/transportation infrastructure, presumably based on a cleaner and more efficient chemistry than the current one. I agree with the emerging consensus that it would probably consist of decentralized hydrogen production, possibly using biotechnology to make the hydrogen. I also see cars that can drive themselves, almost never getting into accidents, and merging flawlessly and automatically into trains to create ad-hoc mass-transit solutions. Car accidents cause more deaths than wars, so the introduction of this technology would create a new boom in wealth and happiness even aside from the curing of problems related to dependence on oil.

If the world saw us building the next energy cycle, our policies related to the current energy cycle would be less contentious.

We might have already contorted the climate enough that switching fuels will not be enough. We might need to resort to a massive technological fix. I dearly hope this will not come to pass, but I believe we should set up an institute that explores such high risk measures as re-carving the ocean floors or intercepting the sun's energy in space on its way to the Earth. Once again, I would grieve if it came to pass that we had to attempt measures such as these in the future, but I must regretfully recommend that we begin to prepare ourselves just in case.

The recent surprise announcement by the Japanese that they had created the world's fastest computer, in order to model the weather, should be treated as a friendly Sputnik-like event. I'm on the science board for what had been the world's fastest civilian computer, at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, and I have to tell you my heart sank when I read the announcement, even though I'm also happy that the new Japanese machine is being put to a good use. I hope you felt as embarrassed as I did, and I wish you would share that emotion with the public.

About the war on terror.

War is Hell. I lived right by the World Trade Center, and I dearly wish I had not been home that day. It is clear that in our connected world, in which many technologies become cheaper and more widely available because of Moore's Law-like processes, and in which communication is easy and essentially free, the old equations about privacy and liberty have to be re thought. I hate this fact with the whole of my being, but I acknowledge it's a fact.

I don't think your administration has been handling this matter very well. For instance, your attorney general comes off badly in public. He seems to be enjoying this turn of events, as if it vindicates his beliefs. If you want Americans or other people in the world to make the mental transition and emotional commitment into a new order, your administration ought to be able to show that it shares in the pain.

You might be thinking to yourself, "This matter is none of my science advisor's business." But privacy these days is about digital policy, and that overlaps both socially and institutionally with the scientific and engineering communities.

I believe you have to have these communities on board in order for your policies to be successful and for the country to be more secure.

I have two specific suggestions.

First, if you want the public to accept less privacy, make it symmetric. Instead of merely building a new domestic spying capability that itself would be vulnerable to corruption, as secret centers of power always are, make key institutions more open and transparent.

This serves multiple purposes. Let's not forget that since the war on terror began, corrupt accounting cost the country more, in monetary terms, than the terrorist attacks. The direct costs were tremendous, but the indirect costs due to the gutting of investor confidence were immeasurable.

We have the greatest information infrastructure in all history, and yet investors weren't tipped off about a wave of massive fraudulent schemes until it was too late. This cannot stand. The remedy is to make big companies and yes, big government agencies, as transparent to the public as the public must become to the new security apparatus.

This might sound counterintuitive at first. Would this not give terrorists more information and therefore advantage as they planned attacks?

I think there are strong arguments that symmetry increases security. No matter how big the spy agencies might be, they can't employ enough trusted eyeballs to look at all the data. And no, as your advisor I can assure you that you cannot count on artificial intelligence programs to make up the gap. The only solution is to have the whole public looking. It was widely distributed public information that lead to the capture of the Unabomber, the DC snipers, and so on.

The strength of Islamist terrorist cells is not so much that they are well trained as that they benefit from a surrounding society that doesn't call in tips. This leads to the second reason to support symmetry. Transparency can be used to make the world friendlier to the US.

Here I would like to add a specific recommendation. The Arabic-speaking world is encountering the power of modern propaganda for the first time via satellite TV. Our response has been to craft infomercials, but why not try to find the next generation of leaders when they are young. They are undoubtedly oriented to new media just like their Western counterparts. Why not make language translators available on the web so that kids in Arabic speaking countries can browse English language websites and learn for themselves about us? Why not encourage personal links using the web? Why not make science and technology education materials available in this way?

None of these proposals would be easy to implement. Computer access is restricted in repressive countries, for instance. Nonetheless, there is considerable room to maneuver and it doesn't cost much.

In a related vein, we could do more to help empower and win the hearts of young people in the exploding populations of the third world by cleverly using inexpensive technology. We could use the latest advances in speech recognition and synthesis to empower illiterate people with access to basic information, for instance. Even undernourished populations often gain access to consumer electronics these days. This strange situation could be turned to advantage. Why not design a hard-to-detect, human powered, wireless communicator designed for illiterate people and give away millions of them in the poorest parts of the world? Why not bring these people into the web of modernity, in which they might find their way to a better life and coincidentally might just send in tips?

All of these ideas relate to security, because as soon as terrorists realize there's even a slight increase in the chance that someone in their home environment might rat on them, they rapidly lose maneuvering room. A little openness could go a long way.

I believe that if such devices were in place, we'd have given out the unclaimed cash award for information leading to the capture of Bin Laden by now.

Respectfully,

Jaron Lanier
Computer Scientist And Musician
Pioneer of Virtual Reality
Founder and former CEO of VPL
Currently the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative.

Dear President Bush,

Science and the technology that flows from it have been great strengths of the United States; without them the US would not be the single superpower that it is today in the world.

For the last fifty years that science has been carried out largely in the open and has been shared with the rest of the world. That sharing has been a source of great strength. The US graduate education system is the strongest in the world and many international leaders have had some of their training in our Universities. The openness and the way in which our universities have been run as meritocracies, not places where national origin or religion is considered in evaluating one's work, has attracted waves of immigration of great scientists and engineers to this country.

There is a place for classified and restricted research but it is mostly in areas that are close to application, not in fundamental scientific and engineering questions. The place for that research is not at our universities. The great universities of the US should remain as open arenas for all areas of research where they act as an engine of creativity that feeds the scientific needs of the US and the world.

As science advisor I would urge you to continue, and strengthen, this policy of openness. I would urge you to set aside perhaps a billion dollars to fund new fellowships for graduate students from predominantly Islamic countries to come and study science (broadly construed) in the United States. I would urge you to direct the INS to treat foreign students as welcome guests rather than suspected criminals who must be monitored constantly by their host universities, and who are to be arrested, as has recently happened, when the courses they end up taking at a respected first rate university do not match some preconceived plan.

To reach out this generous hand to aspiring young students would be courageous in the current domestic climate of fear. But the long term payoff for the United States will be immense. It will create long term personal links between people in the countries we currently most fear and our own country. Based on past experience we can predict that many of those people will rise to positions of leadership and authority within their countries. In the shorter term it will be an act of generosity rather than aggression, and one can hope that it will have positive effects in the way the US is viewed. Besides that we will gain access to a large number of very smart, very driven, young minds who will help us and the world in making scientific progress.

Once I have convinced you to follow this advice I will get to work on some more radical ideas which involve funding science that is deep and curiosity driven, rather than dressed up as responding to politically justifiable immediate needs. Such science has been the well spring of the great advances throughout history.

Rodney Brooks
Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
Author of Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us

Dear Mr. President,

Thank you for your invitation to advise you on matters of science. Science is after all the most public form of knowledge.

Scientific knowledge consists exactly of those pieces of information that can in principle be verified by anyone with the tools and desire to do so.

My advice to our highest elected official is to keep science public. Secret knowledge, no matter how laboriously acquired, is less than science.

Some knowledge, of course, must remain secret for the security of the nation. Do not have the National Security Administration publish its cryptographic keys.

But unless there is a clear security risk, publish all else. Why? Science belongs to the public: they pay for it; they benefit from it. The benefits of scientific knowledge accrue far more rapidly when that knowledge lies open for all to see, to test, and to try.

Your administration has presided over some good examples of the benefits of open dissemination of scientific knowledge. I will restrict my attention to my own field of quantum computation.

Quantum computers are devices that store information at the level of atoms, and that process that information in a way that respects the wave like nature of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is famously weird, and one of the consequences of quantum weirdness is that even a small quantum computer, consisting of a few thousand atoms, would be able to break all existing public-key cryptosystems.

By their potential power, quantum computers pose a significant threat to the security not only of classified encoded material, but to the security of most commercial transactions, in particular those that take place electronically. Despite the clear application of quantum computation to problems of national security, your security agencies have elected to pursue the majority of their research on quantum computers by open competition for public funds, under the stipulation that the results of the research be published and made available to all.

This is a wise course. Although potentially highly disruptive, quantum computers are hard to build. Large-scale quantum computation is a decade away, at least. To construct such large-scale quantum computers will require the scientific and engineering community to solve wide-ranging problems of nanofabrication and control. The solutions to such problems will have wide application in the design and manufacture of high precision, high-power technologies across the board. The potential benefits of such research are a thousand times greater than any drawback from potential disruption to security.

By keeping the science public, your agencies are dramatically speeding the development not only of quantum computers, but of a wide variety of other quantum technologies, ranging from enhanced lithography to more accurate atomic clocks, to precise global positioning. The frontier of the very small offers huge space for development: keep this frontier open to all.

Science is public knowledge. But science is not the only field where openness is important. The security failures of 9/11 were caused not by too little, but by too much secrecy. And the discussions that form public policy should be public.

I know that other advisors are offering you conflicting advice: keep your cards close to your chest—don't let our enemies (or our allies) benefit from our hard-earned knowledge. Don't listen to them. Science isn't poker: it only works when the cards are dealt face up. Don't go down in history as the Texan who closed the scientific frontier.

Yours,

Seth Lloyd
Professor of Quantum-Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dear Mr. President,

Many thanks for your invitation to apply for the position of Science Advisor to the President. Alas, there is some mistake, for I am a philosophy professor. At their best, scientists respond to problems with answers, and this can be useful to presidents. Philosophers have a cranky habit of responding to answers with more problems. You don't need that.

Taking into account all of the poor scientific policy advice that has been promulgated in Washington for the last forty years, you'll need luck in your search for the right person. The record shows that scientists are as much victims of fashion as other ordinary mortals. Recall a few examples of science in predictive mode:

• In the mid-1970, many climatologists warned of a coming Ice Age that would severely diminish agricultural productivity by year 2000.

• Frightened by dramatic allegations in the 1960s about the environmental effects of DDT, the U.S. banned the pesticide in 1972. In retrospect, the allegations of harm were so much hyperbole. In the meantime, millions of people, especially in Africa, have died of malaria, with Europe and the U.S. reluctant to support them in DDT mosquito eradication.

• Let's not forget the scientific predictions about oil and mineral resources. In the 1970s your predecessors in office were being told that there would be essentially no oil left by the 1990s. Gold would be $10,000 an ounce, of course.

• Overpopulation? When I was in the Peace Corps in India in the 1960s we all "knew," in line with expert scientific advice from the U.S. government, that the population explosion would cause massive, worldwide famine by the late 1980s.

This list could be expanded into periodic cancer scares, worries about the ozone hole, silicon breast implants, acid rain (another wildly exaggerated threat), air pollution, and so forth. It's odd when you think about it: though you and I might have enjoyed scary Frankenstein movies, when we were children, science and technology were seen as great forces for the benefit of mankind. Things shifted in the 1960s, and a spirit of pessimism began to invade science.

Today, it is much easier for scientists to receive grants if they indicate their research might uncover a serious threat or problem—economic, medical, ecological. Media fascination with bad news is partly to blame, along with the principled gloominess and nagging of organizations such as Greenpeace. But government itself has played its natural part. After all, as H.L. Mencken once remarked, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Since I'm sure you're keen to avoid such alarmism, you'll need an advisor who can see through the fashions of science, and understand something of their psychology. The epidemiologist who slightly overstates the conclusiveness of his study suggesting that french fries might cause cancer (in mice) or the young climatologist on the global-warming gravy train are not basically dishonest people. You too might more easily buy into some doomsday scenario, if it meant regular business-class flights to major resorts to compare computer climate models with other experts (models that you know in your heart could not possibly predict average atmospheric temperatures fifty years hence, but what hell, the food's great).

I hope your new Science Advisor comes to the job armed with knowledge of the rich history of junk science and false predictions served up to government in the last forty years. The point is not to be cynical about fads and careerism, but wisely to choose where best to support both pure science and science that can give us beneficial technologies.

Denis Dutton
Founder and Editor, Arts & Letters Daily
Department of Philosophy
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand

Here two answers to the Edge Annual Question. In the first version I have followed your instruction to stick to science and to those scientific areas where I have expertise. The resulting memo is practical and unimaginative. It may not be of much interest to the Edge community, but I think it would be more useful to the president than a wider-ranging document. The second memo is the unpractical and imaginative version. It is not very imaginative, because I still want it to be taken seriously as an agenda for the twenty-first century.

Memo to the President (I)

The scientific enterprise in this country is generally in good shape and needs only modest increases in support to keep up with inflation. One weakness of the enterprise that needs to be addressed is the system of peer review that governs the support of investigator-initiated proposals. The peer-review system works well for proposals that lie within established disciplines of science. It works badly for proposals that lie outside or between established disciplines.

A glaring example of the failure of the system is the lack of support for large underground detectors of elementary particles. During the past year, the two most important discoveries in particle physics were made using such detectors, one in Canada and one in Japan. The United States has fallen behind in this highly promising area of research, because underground detectors lie between the disciplines of physics and astronomy. Physicist peer-reviewers failed to support underground detectors because they are not accelerators, and astronomer peer-reviewers failed to support them because they are not telescopes.

Similar failures of the peer-review system occur in areas of space technology that lie outside mainstream disciplines. They probably also occur in areas of biology and medicine with which I am not familiar. A possible remedy for this state of affairs would be to assign a small fraction of the national research budget, perhaps five or ten percent, to proposals that are exempt from the normal process of peer-review. The choice of exempt proposals to be supported could be made by directors of federal agencies, with the help of panels representing science as a whole rather than specialized disciplines.

Memo to the President (II)

During the last ten years, the human genome project has laid the foundation for a comprehensive understanding of human biology. The translation of the new understanding into cures for human diseases will be a slow and difficult process.

Meanwhile, a new century has begun. It is time for you to launch a bold new initiative in biology, a planetary genome project to sequence the genomes of all the millions of species that live together on this planet. This will require first of all an aggressive development of new sequencing technology, comparable to the development of computer technology during the last half century, so that the cost of sequencing will continue to fall as rapidly as the cost of computing.

The goal will be to complete the sequencing of the biosphere within less than half a century, at a cost comparable with the cost of the human genome. The successful completion of the project will bring an enormous increase in understanding of the ecology of the planet. Increased understanding could then be translated into practical measures to sustain and improve the ecology while allowing continued rapid economic development.

Detailed understanding of the ecology could lead to large-scale and cost effective use of solar energy and to stabilization of the atmosphere and the climate. Let this century be the century of cures for planetary as well as human diseases.

Freeman Dyson
retired professor of physics
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey
Author of Disturbing the Universe; Infinite in All Directions; and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet.

Dear Mr President

Your administration has commendably focused not only on the urgent ways in which science can help the nation, especially through the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Homeland Security, but also in boosting the broader and longer-term interests of the country by increasing the budgets of, for example, the National Science Foundation, whose science constituencies underpin critical sources of knowledge and skills. I am troubled by the half-hearted approach adopted by your administration towards alternative energy sources and climate research, but will leave those issues for another day.

However, every President should leave a personal legacy that goes beyond the national political and social goals of the moment. If that legacy addresses one of the major issues facing the wider world, so much the better.

Malaria provides you with precisely that opportunity. It affects hundreds of millions of people and kills well over one million every year. It affects countries across South America, Africa and South East Asia. The challenges are made all the more urgent by the development of multidrug resistance by the parasite.

There have been some positive moves from philanthropists and charities for the control of malaria and for the development of vaccines and drugs, and some limited progress with private-public partnerships. But these funds—two or three hundred million all told - are a drop in the ocean. Furthermore, they do not seriously address the longer term need to investigate the malaria parasite at a basic scientific level.

Some people will argue that we already have enough science, we simply need to develop better drugs, or a vaccine, or have better controls of the disease through prevention. History shows, however, that every one of these alternative routes has its own chronic difficulties. Addressing new opportunities in the basic science of the disease could, in the long term, deliver more far-reaching solutions.

The journal Nature recently published the sequence of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum's genome, and other related fundamental information critical in understanding the parasite. That's a key step along the way, and provides a new platform on which to develop essential insights into the many biomolecular and cellular pathways by which the parasite survives and interacts with us, its indispensible hosts. New techniques are beginning to be applied, such as high-throughput analyses of the pattern of gene expression and of the interactions of proteins at key phases of the parasite's lifecycle. The new availability of the genome combined with these techniques will undoubtedly spur progress significantly—if there are funds to permit it.

For the United States to provide significant help in this battle would not simply represent an act of great good will. It would also be in the nation's long-term strategic interests. The less that so many developing countries have to battle with the illness and mortality of malaria and the social burdens that they bring, the more they can focus on economic and social development and provide new opportunities for US businesses and other organisations.

There are many excellent researchers who would make rapid progress in malarial "post-genomics" if substantial new money became available. It would therefore be widely recognised as a wonderfully enlightened action if you were to ensure that the National Institutes of Health introduced a malaria post-genomics programme, with a new budget of at least $300m, as a first step towards the prevention and cure of this devastating disease.

Philip Campbell, PhD
Editor-in-Chief
Nature

Dear President Bush:

At no time in our history is science more important in our society and thus to your administration than now. We have made exciting and promising advances in so many areas of scientific and medical research yet we still have so much to learn. This is especially true in the rapidly growing field of genomics.

In just the last 10 years we have gone from having the complete genetic map of just a few microbes to today having completed the sequencing of more than 100 organisms. With the genetic material in hand of organisms such as human, mouse, and fruit fly, researchers now have the opportunity to understand these complex creatures so that we may one day better treat disease, fully understand evolutionary biology, and thus understand the most fundamental aspects of life and how we as humans function.

The future is indeed bright but only if we have a science-literate administration to help translate this basic research into potential treatments. With these great advances also come tough ethical issues. But we must not become mired in these debates nor let fear and ignorance win out over progress for us all. While I cannot accept the offer to be science advisor I would like to outline a few ideas for your administration to consider.

There are three key areas that need immediate attention:

• 1) Revamping the health care system using genomics and other predictive tools to move toward a preventative medicine based system.

• 2) Stepping up our efforts in developing deterrents and defensive mechanisms to overcome the biological warfare threat to humans and agriculture.

• 3) Moving as rapidly as possible toward a hydrogen-based economy.

Our health care system is suffering from double digit inflation while the number of uninsured and underinsured continues to rise beyond any acceptable level for a civilized nation. We have now the potential to dramatically change the cost of health care by using the new predictive tools that will come from the genomics revolution. It is imperative that we make the commitment to go the less costly route of preventing and limiting the extent of disease rather than treating symptoms after they occur as we do now.

On this same preventative theme we can greatly diminish or effectively eliminate the threat of bioterrorism by using the modern tools of genomics to more quickly and accurately detect a suspect agent including genetically modified organisms; develop new effective vaccines without the risk profile associated with current small pox and anthrax vaccines; and develop new effective antivirals and antibiotics.

While your administration has made great progress in providing new funding for these efforts, more direct funding for the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) at the NIH will move this field faster.

Despite much discussion on the topic of alternative energy solutions, the United States continues to rely almost exclusively on fossil fuels. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) approximately 80 percent of all human-caused carbon dioxide emissions currently come from fossil fuel combustion. The DOE also estimates that world carbon dioxide emissions are projected to rise from 6.1 billion metric tons carbon equivalent in 1999 to 7.9 billion metric tons per year in 2010 and to 9.9 billion metric tons in 2020.

This continued consumption of fossil fuels is ample evidence that there is a growing need to eliminate carbon dioxide output into the environment and capture back some of the carbon dioxide associated with global warming. Recent climate modeling from Scripps Institute of Oceanography suggests that if climate change is allowed to continue unabated a temperature increase of just two degrees will be enough to dramatically reduce annual snowfall and ultimately food production due to the drought that will develop in our most important agricultural states.

As a nation we must invest in finding new solutions for our energy needs. I believe that genomics could provide a viable avenue for alleviating some of the problems associated with carbon-based fuels.

I believe it is imperative that we push forward on all the fronts outlined above to insure energy independence, national security, and an improved environment, health and well-being for future generations.

Sincerely

J. Craig Venter
Pioneer in sequencing the human genome
President of the Center for the Advancement of Genomics
President and Chairman, J. Craig Venter Science Foundation

The best thing that happened to U.S. science in the last half-century was the Cold War and its consequences—one of them being the Space Race. Americans cared about space in the 1960s as they'd never cared about any science or engineering project before, and never have since. The social catastrophe of the late '60s tends to obscure the spectacular achievements of those years.

What the president ought to do is obvious: focus the nation's mind on a big, real and exciting problem. Ideally we ought to have a competitor to keep us playing our best game—but if the problem is interesting enough, maybe the competitor doesn't matter.

We know several things for sure about what this Big Project ought to be. "Men on Mars" is not it. (It's a fascinating prospect, but too close intellectually and emotionally to the Moon program.)

The right answer will have nothing to do with environmental doomsday stories; it will deal with people's everyday lives, making them better.

Nowadays nearly everyone travels by air; it might be time to reconsider supersonic passenger travel—but the solution has to be cheap and clean and quiet enough to be acceptable, nothing like the Concorde; a hard problem; that's what makes it interesting.

Or: a nationwide magnetic (or some other post-iron-on-iron technology) rail system. Or: practical rocket planes for New York-Tokyo in two hours or less. Or: anything whatsoever to get people between New York and New Haven in under an hour.

That's the sort of science and engineering that changes lives, by manufacturing time, the world's most precious commodity. (Maybe its only precious commodity.)

These are the sorts of practical problems that scientists and engineers (for the most part) no longer give a damn about. But transportation has a lot to do with the nation's quality of life, and transportation is headed downhill fast. For most people, travel is substantially more of a pain today than it was in 1950. Why is that acceptable? I don't give a damn how fast my computer runs if moving my carcass costs more time, effort and pain every year.

David Gelernter
Professor of computer science, Yale University
Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies
Board Member, National Endowment for the Arts
Author of Mirror Worlds and Drawing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber

Mr. President,

During the past several months, I've been frustrated by the smallpox puzzle and the accompanying national agony about vaccination. Dozens of people have cornered me asking "what should I do about vaccinating my family" or, more pointedly: "are you or your family getting vaccinated?"

I was vaccinated against smallpox hundreds of times in the smallpox program in India, and again by CDC last year during the "smallpox bio terrorism" sessions for first responders. In this regard, it is appropriate that as President, you were recently vaccinated. My children, wife, mother, brother and neighbors have not been recently vaccinated and I do not recommend it, at least not yet. Based on the risks and benefits of what we know today, I do not recommend anyone rush out to get vaccinated unless they will be a "first responder" or work in a hospital emergency room.

Why? My decision is based on trying to solve many simultaneous equations. The smallpox dilemma has no simple answers, and making the correct decision may, literally, be a matter of life and death.

The facts today: Smallpox as a disease does not exist. It has been eradicated. A very small amount of the virus which causes smallpox, Variola, has been held frozen in liquid nitrogen in two "legal and secure" facilities in Atlanta and Moscow, as agreed to by the 150+ member states of the World Health Organization. It is easy to "awaken" the demon of smallpox if it is removed from these freezers. Except for a very controversial and potentially destabilizing removal last year of some viral material by U.S. Army scientist Peter Jahrling who used those viruses to infect monkeys with smallpox with the thought of testing smallpox anti viral agents and improved vaccines all the other legal viral samples remain in place. The fear of smallpox as a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists is based either on the public information, which is speculative and anecdotal, or on military or secret intelligence sources which are unavailable. Vaccination of 280 million Americans could cause potentially fatal vaccine side-effects in tens of thousands and death in 500 to 1000. In order to justify so many vaccine side-effects, there must be real evidence of incremental risk of an epidemic caused by vaccine preventable smallpox. There are at least three gating items, all of which must be true before it is logical to begin vaccinations against a disease which does not exist:

• Gating item #1: Smallpox virus must exist outside of the two "legal and secure" repositories where, with the only known exception being the Jahrling experiments, it has resided securely for nearly three decades

• Gating item #2: That smallpox virus which is outside of the two "legal and secure" repositories must have reached the hands of terrorists or nation-states that would use smallpox in war

• Gating Item #3: That smallpox virus which is outside of the "legal and secure" repositories, in the hands of terrorists with an intent to use it, must not have been genetically altered so as to be impervious to the vaccine we currently have.

As is quite clear from credible journalistic sources, Gating Item #1 appears to have occurred-Russian scientists operating under a Gorbachev approved billion dollar 5-year plan manufactured as much as 100 tons of Variola virus annually at a then secret facility called, ironically, Vector, near Novosibirsk, Siberia in the Soviet Union during the 1980's. There may have been other programs that have remained secret, just as the CIA program "Bacchus" to build a miniature anthrax production lab stayed secret virtually until the anthrax attacks of 2001.

There is no public knowledge, and I stress "public" for obvious reasons, that Gating Item #2 is true. The major known sources of concern are:

• a) Saddam Hussein used saran gas and anthrax in missiles and shells and attempted to use Camelpox in horrid experiments against the Kurds. Logic dictates that if he does have smallpox, he is a serious threat to use it as a "doomsday" weapon.

• b) Weapons inspectors found a refrigerator in Iraq, "ominously" labeled "smallpox" during the last round of inspections-we do not know if the "smallpox" referred to the disease of smallpox or the vaccine against it, but there were active cases of smallpox in Iraq as late as 1972 and there is no reason to believe harvesting viral specimens from those cases was not done. Iran, Iraq's neighbor and sometime enemy, certainly hid cases of smallpox from WHO inspectors (I was one of these) as late as the Shah's ceremonial coronation in 1972-73. When Iran and Iraq went to war a few years later, Saddam Hussein had reciprocal regional reasons for hoarding the Variola virus.

• c) Al Qaeda documents, including some found on a personal computer purchased by a Wall Street Journal reporter, contained references to smallpox as a weapon to be used by terrorists. Taliban fighters and Al Qaeda terrorists frequented a Soviet era "weapons dump" just North of the Afghanistan border; it is not known if any biological weapons were included amongst the other weapons acquired there.

• d) Soviet smallpox epidemiologists, who had betrayed many of us in the World Health Organization by lifting smallpox scabs from patients in India and elsewhere, and then smuggling these infectious specimens back to Russia to become part of Vector's "collection" used to create the infamous India-1 "weaponized smallpox", fell on hard times after the breakup of the Soviet Union. So did some of the virologists at Vector who worked on weaponizing smallpox and other biologicals; there is evidence some of these scientists visited Iraq, and were paid to consult with colleagues in Saddam Hussein's government on biologicals. There has recently been an active US program to find other work for these scientists to rid them of the financial necessity of such activities. There is even the suggestion, strongly denied by her Russian colleagues, that the eminent smallpox virologist Dr. Nelja N. Maltseva, might have visited or even collaborated with the Iraqis.

As for Gating Item #3, no one knows. The well known Australian experiments altering a gene in mousepox suggests it would be easy for terrorists-or even college microbiology students who had access to pox to create a "superpox" impervious to today's vaccines. I won't go into the details but the bottom line is that if anyone had enough hatred and enough money, the creation of a vaccine-proof smallpox variant is well within the realm of the possible. Obviously, if the terrorists have vaccine-proof smallpox, it is silly to vaccinate anyone with a high risk vaccine that is impotent against genetically altered smallpox.

How great is the risk of adverse reactions? Again, no one can really quantify it because much has changed, for better and for worse, since the 1970's from which the last large datasets are available. At that time the death rate from vaccine was about 2 or 3 per million vaccinated, and the risk of serious side effects about ten times higher. There are factors today which might raise or lower the rate of complications. Thirty years ago far fewer Americans had immune systems compromised by chemo therapy or AIDs, and the prevalence rates of eczema, a serious contra indication to smallpox vaccine, were lower as well. On the other hand, recent data from Israel and from vaccination in the US military suggests that vaccinating young healthy pre-screened men and women carries very few risks of side effects and today's ICU medical care for vaccine complications is likely to markedly reduce fatalities. All in all, it is likely that ten to one hundred people per million vaccinated from the general public would have a very serious reaction or even death from the vaccine-somewhere between 3000 and 30,000.

And so, here we are, faced with the need to decide whether to vaccinate our families. We will each need to make personal decisions under conditions of uncertainty.

Here is why I chose not to vaccinate my family:

• 1) To the best of my knowledge, there is no proof of any link between the experiments at Vector and either Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, but concern is understandable. If any proof of linkage arises, I might change my mind.

• 2) If Saddam Hussein has smallpox, I believe he might well be crazy or desperate enough to use it as a "doomsday weapon" if he were about to be destroyed; but it is also likely that Iraqi scientists have the ability to genetically alter the virus to make it vaccine-proof. If it is an end game, why would he use a virus that we have a vaccine against? It makes no sense.

• 3) If Al-Qaeda has the smallpox virus, I do not believe they would be willing to use it. Unlike Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda seeks the victory of an entire people, a culture, a religion-not the hegemony of any individual. Smallpox is the ultimate boomerang weapon. If it is released from its captivity at Chicago O'Hare airport, it is only a matter of days before it infects Mecca and Medina. It is not a likely weapon for a war that is a "Clash of Civilizations" unless a combatant sought the destruction of both civilizations.

• 4) Smallpox can be prevented if an exposed person is vaccinated as late as four or five days after exposure. While there is some risk that smallpox could be spread unseen for the first attack, within two weeks cases would start to appear and for nearly all Americans, there would be ample time and ample vaccine to be vaccinated after the first attack and still be safe.

• 5) I do not want to go into the fear that a small minority of Americans have that the your administration is prone to exaggerate the risks of terrorism in general and smallpox in particular as part of an attempt to frighten the public into accepting the erosion of civil liberties. As horrible as that allegation is, I simply have no information on which to make any comment other than to note the fear exists. And for my purposes here, it really does not matter. Based on the evidence I have seen to date, the risk of getting a case of vaccine-preventable smallpox today is just not as high as the risk of an adverse reaction to the smallpox vaccine.

That is the conclusion that I have reached as of today. And unless or until that changes, I will not vaccinate my family and the ones that I love.

Lawrence B. Brilliant, M.D.
Interim CEO of Cometa Networks, Inc.
Medical officer for the United Nations World Health Organization(1970s) helping lead the successful effort to eradicate smallpox.
Author of nearly 100 scientific articles and two books and is an expert on smallpox.

FIRST, consider the following: would-be bioterrorists have no need to put their "inventions" through the FDA for approval. But the scientists we are depending on to develop the defensive technologies (for example, new anti-viral medications) are required to go through this extremely cumbersome process. Complying with these regulations not only takes many years, but slows down the entire innovation process.

If we look at an analogous offensive-defensive standoff, that of software viruses, we find that the cyberterrorists are indeed creating and unleashing ever more sophisticated software pathogens. But development of the defensive technologies (for example, antiviral software) has been able to keep pace, and software viruses are at worst a nuisance. We have done so well precisely because the development of software technologies is unhampered by sluggish regulatory procedures. We will need the same speed of innovation and implementation in the biological sciences.

In the current environment, when one person dies in gene therapy trials, there are congressional investigations and all gene therapy research comes to a grinding halt. There's a legitimate need to make biomedical research as safe as possible, but our balancing of risks is completely off. The millions of people who desperately need the advances to be made available by gene therapy and other breakthrough biotechnology advances appear to carry little political weight against a handful of well publicized casualties from the inevitable risks of progress.

This equation will become even more stark when we consider the emerging dangers of bioengineered pathogens. What is needed is a change in public attitude in terms of tolerance for needed risk. The leadership for creating this change can only come from the top official, the President of the United States.

SECOND, on another biotechnology front, pressure will heat up considerably this year in the controversial area of stem cell therapies. The number of available germ cell lines has turned out to be a small fraction of the 60 lines that were to be made available for research purposes. Although I would advocate that this policy be reconsidered, my proposal is on a different front: to dramatically increase funding for promising new methodologies in the field of "human somatic cell engineering," which bypass entirely fetal stem cells. These emerging technologies create new tissues with a patient's own DNA by modifying one type of cell (such as a skin cell) directly into another (such as a pancreatic Islet cell or a heart cell) without the use of fetal stem cells. There have been breakthroughs in this area in the past year. For example, scientists from the U.S. and Norway successfully converted human skill cells directly into immune system cells and nerve cells.

Consider the question: what is the difference between a skin cell and any other type of cell in the body? After all, they all have the same DNA. The differences are found in protein signaling factors that we are now beginning to understand. By manipulating these proteins, we can trick one type of cell into becoming another.

Perfecting this technology would not only diffuse a contentious ethical and political issue, it is also the ideal solution from a scientific perspective. If I need pancreatic Islet cells, or kidney tissues, or a whole new heart, to avoid autoimmune reactions, I would strongly prefer to obtain these with my own DNA, not the DNA from someone else's germ line cells. The feasibility of doing this has been demonstrated, and there should be a crash program to perfect a technology that could dramatically improve the health of all Americans.

THIRD, on a different front, that of energy, there has been dramatic recent scientific progress in developing hydrogen fuel cells, including microscopic-sized fuel cells using the same technology that fabricates electronic circuits. These fuel cells, based on micro-electronic mechanical systems (MEMS) can be scaled from tiny devices that will power everything from portable electronics up to cars, appliances, and homes. These systems use safe fuels such as methanol and generate no emissions other than tiny amounts of water and carbon dioxide. The fuels can be fabricated without environmental impact from widely available coal and shale oil with new technologies that capture emissions. All of the requisite technologies have been demonstrated.

Perfecting these new hydrogen-based energy sources would have profound and positive implications for the economy and the environment, not to mention the geopolitical minefields of our current fossil fuel-based economy.

Ray Kurzweil
Inventor and Technologist
Author of The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines

To President George Bush

Re: the new Institute for Educational Sciences

We are faced with a paradox. On the one hand, the United States leads the world on nearly every dimension of scientific and technological achievement, in both the biomedical and the physical sciences. At the same time, we have a precollegiate educational system that is mediocre at best. It is natural to ask whether we can use our scientific strength to improve American education. And, indeed, that is the purpose of the recently created Institute for Educational Sciences. This Institute promises to improve the quality of educational research by embracing models from biomedicine. Indeed it singles out "randomized trials" as the "gold standard" for educational research.

By all means, we should ask science to do what it capable to do, but not what it cannot do. (I am sure that, wearing your religious hat, you would agree with that statement. No one is calling for randomized trials in the church, synagogue, or mosque). Education differs from medicine in three crucial respects and these need to be understood and respected.

First of all, education is an endeavor that is laden with human values. While almost no one disputes the medical goals of longer and healthier lives, we in a democracy differ deeply about the kind of education that we value. How could we ever design a single educational system that would please Jesse Helms, Jesse Jackson, and Jesse Ventura? We cannot conduct meaningful scientific research on educational practices unless we articulate a value system with some specificity. And so, to be concrete, we can’t just compare three scientific methods in terms of efficacy. We need to decide whether we want a science education that focuses on factual knowledge, laboratory skills, deep understanding of a few essential concepts, asking good questions, or some amalgam thereof. Only thereafter can proper studies be launched.

Second, young persons are not seeds of corn, nor are they informed adults who can give consent to their involvement in an experiment. It may be appropriate to have randomized trials for certain questions (e.g. what are the benefits and losses of beginning secondary school one hour later each day) but it is not appropriate to institute them for other issues (e.g. teaching a class without any opportunity for student questions, only to determine what the costs and benefits are of such an approach). Certainly, as a parent, I would not give consent for my child to be a guinea pig in order to demonstrate the merits or liabilities of some educationalist’s pet theory.

Third, teaching is and will always be in part an art or craft, and properly so. Teaching depends upon human interactions over long periods of time and on the transmission of wisdom as well as the gradual elimination of pernicious practices. The educational systems that we admire all over the world are not ones that are based on scientific research; they are the ones where skilled practitioners have cultivated wise procedures over the generations and passed them on to their successors carefully though not uncritically. Attempts to create teacher-proof environments are destined to fail. We need to honor the craft of teaching, and not try to eliminate it by scientific (which are often pseudo-scientific) manipulations.

So two cheers for the New Institute, Mr. President, but remember above all: You went to Andover, Yale and Harvard, respected educational institutions where educational values are debated up front, where you were not a guinea pig in randomized trials, and where you had some of the most gifted teachers in the world. Your children, our children, deserve the same respect.

Howard Gardner
Professor of Education at Harvard University
Author of Frames of Mind, The Mind's New Science, and Extraordinary Minds.

Mr. President,

As the year 2002 draws to an end, your Administration is preoccupied with the prospect of war with Iraq, and with a more shadowy adversary in the form of global terrorism. Much has been said in that context about 'weapons of mass destruction.' It goes without saying that such weapons are the products of science and technology; one might say they are perversions of science and technology. What could be more pressing than finding a way to promote the beneficial aspects of science while curbing the misuse?

I do not wish to repeat here the well worn arguments about defensive versus offensive military research, the development of better sensor and detection technology and more efficient intelligence gathering systems. Arms races have dogged mankind from the dawn of history, and history seems bound to repeat itself.

What America, indeed the world, needs most urgently is a positive and uplifting project, a project born of a vision that transcends the factional squabbles that divide us, something to celebrate the creative side of science by the world's greatest scientific power. Forty years ago, when the world was in the grip of the Cold War, the United States committed itself to putting a man on the moon. Although the Apollo program was undeniably a by-product of the Cold War arms race, viewed with hindsight it was the crowning achievement of twentieth century science and engineering. Apollo continues to stand as an emblem for the triumph of the human spirit in a world dominated by dark fears and ideological divisions.

What, then, should be the Apollo program of the Bush Presidency? The answer has been clear since your own father articulated the concept in 1989. The United States, together with its partners in space, should commit to sending an expedition to the planet Mars. The Red Planet is probably the only body in the solar system on which a permanent self-sufficient colony might eventually be established. Although relatively hostile to humans, the surface of Mars is far more congenial than the moon. By establishing a human presence on Mars, our species will be afforded an insurance policy against a global cataclysm at home.

But that is not the prime reason to go to Mars. Rather, the exploration of the Red Planet will represent a scientific bonanza of unprecedented value. By general consent, Mars offers the best—quite possibly the only—hope of finding life beyond Earth. It harbors vital clues to the origin of life on our own planet; indeed, it is possible that life came to Earth from Mars. So the search for life on Mars is a search for ourselves: who we are and what our place is in the great cosmic scheme.

Many commentators are urging George Bush Jr. to finish in Iraq what President George Bush Sr. began in the Gulf War. Mr. President, I urge you to apply this advise in space. Take up the challenge. Go to Mars!

Sincerely,

Paul Davies
Physicist, writer and broadcaster, now based in South Australia
Author of The Mind of God; Are We Alone?; The Fifth Miracle; and The Last Three Minutes.

We all share a strong belief in democracy. But it can only function well when the people understand the choices they need to make and are in a position to make trade-offs rationally. As issues get increasingly complex, ignorance decouples the people from the knowledge they need to help guide policy choices that can shape our future. Illiteracy in all forms—and especially in scientific matters—is a threat to a functioning democracy.

Woodrow Wilson said about a century ago "what are we if we have to be taken care of by a handful of experts who know the job, for if we don't know the job we are not truly free". Therefore, as Science Advisor I would work to greatly enhance the scientific literacy of the public—but not just the public, also government employees, elected officials and the media.

Science literacy is not just about the "facts"—knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology or economics per se. More important for non-specialists is to understand the process of science, and how science interacts with public policy issues and gets communicated via the media.

The media and political institutions are typically advocacy based—if a reporter gets the views of a Democrat, she must also get the views of a Republican. That is certainly appropriate in covering political stories, but rarely are complex issues of science simply decomposable into two polarized positions. Moreover, not only are there many possibilities, but relative probabilities are attached by scientific assessment to each of these possibilities.

Thus, an "equal time" doctrine is in fact a miscommunication of what science knows or how it works. Science is about quality, not equality. However, equality of opportunity to get your data and ideas heard is essential too, but via forums in which people who are knowledgeable about the complexities are present and in peer reviewed publications. Such institutions of science are where probabilities get thrashed out.

Science does not allocate equal time or space to all ideas once the winnowing process of quality assessment has begun. To follow the political doctrine of "balance" diminishes democracy since it distorts the knowledge base upon which sound decisions should be made. In science all views are not given equal time or credence because the scientific process of assessing likelihood takes precedence over mere inclusion. This leads to many conflicts over controversial policy issues, like climate change, strategic defense or health policy.

Climate change—in particular Global Warming—is a good case in point. No honest scientist can assert with total confidence it will turn out to be mild or catastrophic. But a dozen scientific assessments have shown that the "good for you" and "end of the world" scenarios are the two lowest probability outcomes. Some benefits are likely, but so too are a range of risks—especially for natural systems and in poorer countries.

The current political debates in which mild/catastrophic views are polarized and get the bulk of the attention in the media and in front of congress is an unfortunate distortion of what the scientific community has reported in its assessments. Such false dichotomy debates impede, rather than enhance democracy since they are not accurately representing what is known and at what likelihood.

The role of science the is clear: assess what can happen and what are the odds of it happening. The role of policy—driven by the beliefs of the public—is to make value judgments on how to react to the odds of various possibilities. It will take some major realignment of institutions like the media and congressional hearings apparatus to back away from the model of polarized advocates toward a doctrine of "perspective": reporting and debating based on the assessment of the likelihood of various events, not giving advocates of extreme opposite views equal time or space.

Over time, better applications of science by a public and officials who understand what can happen and at what odds will strengthen democracy and distance it from both the special interests that spin and distort to bolster ideological or client interests and the elitism of the few people who are the only ones who currently "know the job".

Stephen H. Schneider
Professor, Dept. of Biological Sciences
Stanford University

Dear Mr. President,

American scientific success, as measured for example by the number of Nobel Prize winners who live in the United States, helps to sustain an illusion that the American educational system is fundamentally healthy. This illusion is further aided by the fact that American higher education is rightly the envy of the world. And it is helped along by the fact that most Americans believe that, though there may be serious problems with most U.S. schools, the ones their children go to are an exception. (This is a variant of the same phenomenon that gets people re-elected to Congress: the public has a low opinion of the Congress in general, but people tend to regard their own Representative as an exception.)

You are well aware that math and science education at the secondary and elementary level is substandard in comparison to most of the rest of the developed world. And education at those levels too often fails across the boards to serve minority populations. You have commented on these facts in public. But you sometimes speak as though we knew how to improve education in all respects. The fact is that most of what we know about education—when we know anything at all—is mostly at the level of widely accepted anecdote rather than solid scientific findings. Enough progress has been made in the last 30 years by cognitive psychologists, as well as by developmental and social psychologists, to allow for an avalanche of research on what is effective in education if a serious national effort were to be made.

Generating support for a serious research program would likely be impeded by pessimism on the part of the public. It is distressing how many people assume that little can be done to improve education—especially for minorities. But in fact we have a large number of demonstrations that it is possible for minority students to perform at levels well above the national average—the "Jaime Escalante Effect." Beneficial results for innovations in minority education have been obtained at every level from early elementary school through college. Unfortunately, it is frequently assumed, even by educators, that such results are possible only for charismatic individuals and that they cannot be duplicated by normal people in normal school systems.

Jaime Escalantes may in fact be rare, but there may be ways to help minority children achieve high levels of educational success short of providing each of them with an inspirational teacher. There are already many hints about how to improve teaching of students in general and there are some suggestions that not all students learn in the same way. An example is tentative evidence that minority children are particularly likely to benefit from interacting with computers as opposed to traditional methods of reading books and listening to lectures.

An all-out effort to find both the generalizations about what kinds of education are good in general, and what kinds are most helpful for minority children, would pay back many-fold. The obvious agency to handle this is the Department of Education. You have directed the Department to spend more money on basic research in education. Perhaps that will be effective, despite the very poor record of the department in spending money wisely for research. My recommendation, however, is to establish a special bureau within the National Science Foundation and avoid any situation where traditional educational researchers have a veto over what kind of research gets funded.

Sincerely yours,

Richard E. Nisbett
Psychologist
University of Michigan
Author of The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently—And Why

For a while after the defeat of Fascism and Nazism in the Second World War, there was a hope for an era of enlightenment. It was thought that a scientific understanding of its sources could help avoid a repetition of the fascist nightmare. The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno and co authors was a well known effort to achieve such understanding.

Today political and religious fanaticisms are a source of world wide anxiety. Al Qaeda is the most frightening at present. But it is not only Islamic fanaticism that leads to atrocities. The Oklahoma City bombing, mass murders of Moslems by Hindu mobs in India, the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in Israel and of Martin Luther King in Nashville were the work of non-Islamic fanatics.

The torture-murder of a young gay man in Wyoming, the bombing of abortion clinics, the torching of black churches and of Jewish synagogues, all were associated with fanatical beliefs and movements.

Legislative, military, and educational solutions are proposed and undertaken, but without any prior understanding of how fanaticism is being fostered, both wittingly and unwittingly, or what causes certain fanatical individuals to resort to individual or mass murder. Neither is it well understood what factors or measures might counteract or inhibit fanatical violence. At present, specialists concerned with these issues focus either on social antecedents (including political, economic and religious factors) or on personality variables .
.
The problem of political and religious fanaticism is beyond the scope separately of psychology, political science, or historical study. An interdisciplinary program building upon current efforts but addressing the issues with the use of multiple methods is needed. Such a proposal is made while recognizing that no single approach, however carefully planned, can fully meet the challenge of fanaticism in contemporary society. But a major and well-planned study, devoted to causes and solutions, could make a contribution to the urgent task of decreasing fanatical violence. President Bush should initiate such a program as a scientific response to the sense of incomprehension and despair so prevalent in the world at present.

Vera John-Steiner
Presidential Professor, University of New Mexico
Author of Notebooks of the Mind and Creative Collaboration

Dear Mr. President

Of all the scientific issues currently confronting us it seems to me that one is paramount—the woeful state of the public understanding of science in our nation. Some of your other correspondents have already raised this issue and I concur with much of what they have said. But I would like to bring to your attention a further dimension of the problem—the degree to which ignorance about science is correlated with gender, age, race and socioeconomic position.

At present the serious science readership in the USA is estimated to be around 1.5 million people, the combined subscriber base to our 2 major popular science publications, Discover and Scientific American. Readers of these and other science-based magazines are well served and scientifically fluent. But who precisely are these readers? Overwhelmingly they are white, male, over 35, well educated (often employed in science and technology fields) and in the upper socioeconomic brackets. This 1.5 million people constitutes just a little more than half a percent of our population, yet they are the audience at whom almost all scientific publishing is aimed. This is also the readers at whom science book publishers pitch their wares. The question I would like to raise is what about the other 99% of our population?

In a climate of growing religious fundamentalism and rising skepticism about science, the scientific community itself has began to understand the importance of reaching out to the wider public. Yet for all the admirable rhetoric on this subject, most science communication continues to be aimed at an already-well-informed audience. What I would like to propose, Mr President, is the establishment of a National Office for the Public Understanding of Science—an organization that would be charged with responsibility for reaching out to the "other 99", those who at present read almost no science and who, as polls continue to show, are almost universally ignorant about the subject. Such an office would have as its mission the task of finding and supporting truly innovative ways to communicate about science outside the box.

One major group of people who are disenfranchised from science are women. One of the tasks for our proposed National Office could be to explore ways in which science might be made more accessible and exciting to women. It is a sad but true fact that few women read science magazines, yet women buy and read an enormous number of magazines per se. One thing our office might explore then is ways to get science content into women's magazines such as Vogue, Elle and Glamour. What about science programs on television that might appeal to women? At present almost all the science on television is watched by men—is it possible that there are other ways of presenting science on TV that might also appeal to a female audience?

Another task our office might consider is ways in which scientific organizations could be partnered with cultural organizations such as art galleries and museums. So often science is presented as an isolated activity, but like all human enterprises science takes place within the context of the wider social and cultural spectrum. One way to draw more people into science, I believe, is to bring them through the portal of their other interests. There are, for example, many artists today producing work based around scientific themes—genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and computation in particular. This work, and the immense interest in the arts world in scientific issues right now, constitutes a formidable resource. Our office could work to create links between artists and scientists in specific areas of mutual interest.

We urgently need to improve our nation's pool of scientific literacy. If we are serious about achieving this goal we must be serious about reaching out to those who are disenfranchised. That means taking seriously who those people are and how to speak to them effectively. 99% of our people is too large an audience to ignore—it is no good sitting around demanding that they come to science—science must find ways to go out to them!

Margaret Wertheim
Science writer and Commentator
Author of Pythagoras' Trousers and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet.

Today I retire from 43-year career as a physicist for NASA. I look back to when I began working at Langley Research Center in 1959. At that time, NASA research centers had a base program and there was no expectation that our research was to be applied. My goal at that time was to work on long term problems and solutions.

The current method in government research is to work on projects with a one or two year payoff. This is where our nation's corporations have gone in the last few years. Government is now following corporate America's lead in pursuing instant gratification rather than research which reaches over the horizon. It is now an MBA-driven culture, one which is anithetical to the long horizon stuff that inevitably leads to future breakthroughs.

I have had a wonderful career at NASA and I've been at the edge as I watched research from our laboratories change the world. But I am not pleased with the direction the agency is now pursuing, and I regret that a young physicist now beginning his or her career will not have the same opportunities I have had to dream, to explore their vision. This is to the detriment of NASA and to our nation.

The one big lesson I have learned in 43 years as a scientific researcher: the type of research we pursue is not as important as the horizon.

Philip Brockman
Physicist
Distinguished Research Associate
NASA—Langley Research Center

Dear President Bush:

Recent geopolitical events bring into sharp relief the inadequacy of foreign language training in the United States. I am dismayed by the inability of our high schools and universities to impart a truly useful competence in foreign languages to any but the most self-directed and dedicated of students.

Obviously, our country is in dire need of people proficient in Arabic, to assist us in defending ourselves against Islamicist terrorists. The shortage of such people in the FBI, CIA, and Foreign Service is truly chilling, as we see days go by before we even have worthy translations of Arabic-language statements and documents.

Yet not only are few institutions of learning equipped to impart Arabic to students, but even fewer are equipped to do so at anything beyond an elementary level that will serve little use in the urgent circumstances that confront us.

This is an especially serious problem with Arabic, a language that seems to present a virtual hydra-head of challenges. The script is elaborate, takes a great deal of practice to master, and only approximately spells out the sounds of words. The vocabulary is too different from English's to ease learning through ample cognates (opportunity/opportunidad in Spanish, milk/Milch in German). And on top of this, spoken Arabic varies from country to country to the point that Egyptians, for example, speak essentially a different language from Moroccans, and all of the spoken varieties are almost as different from the written one as French and Spanish are from Latin. The typical college student who has studied Arabic for a year has essentially learned how to decode text and utter simple sentences—which is useless in decoding a memo written in running script by a terrorist, or even in understanding a speech by an Arab official.

Military institutions, and other bodies with a concrete reason for teaching their charges foreign languages well, such as religious bodies, have long used truly effective, intense language-learning programs that produce competent foreign language speakers. It is also clear that European countries regularly give their students a solid grounding in English that has always been the envy of Americans. For years, I have been amazed at how an obscure series of books published by the Assimil company in Europe can give the solitary learner a decent conversational competence in any language in just six months of home study, so cleverly are the lessons arranged to impart what is really needed to speak the language in real life.

But meanwhile, school textbooks, for all their claims to teach "the language as it is really spoken", continue in a tradition of foreign language teaching descended from conceptions of grammar based on how Latin happens to be constructed, imparting tiny vocabularies ("my uncle is a lawyer but my aunt has a spoon") and rarely lending the learner any genuine sense of the "feel" of how native speakers actually put living sentences together. Language training rarely affords the student any serious time speaking the language at length on meaningful subjects. It is common to come away from several years of classes in, say, French or Spanish unable to even carry on a simple conversation with a native. Language training that leaves the student unable to say "This smells like a rose", "Never mind", "The car is stuck in the mud" or "Take your feet off the table"—sentences that eight years of dedicated French "teaching" left me unable to render—does not deserve the name.

The time has passed when our country could afford for excellent language teaching to be limited to circumstances lending specialized training to a few. Language teaching schools like Berlitz, the military, and even findings from academic specialists in second-language teaching have long bypassed our schools and universities in foreign language teaching. In our moment, it is high time that an effort on a nationwide scale be made to not only impart foreign languages to students, but to do it in an effective way.

And in these times, our efforts must be focused as much on languages like Chinese, Arabic, and Persian as the "old standby" languages like French, Spanish and German. Our geopolitical situation requires this, and the marvelous ethnic mixture of our country since the Immigration Act of 1965 renders it even more urgent, in helping to foster understanding and exchange in a new kind of America.

Sincerely,

John H. McWhorter
Associate Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
Author of Losing The Race: Self-Sabotage In Black America and The Power Of Babel: A Natural History Of Language.