Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes

Don E. Kash was about the age I am now when I enrolled in his seminar, Technology, Science, and Public Policy, in the fall of 1997. Before becoming the Hazel Chair of Public Policy at GMU, he held faculty positions at the University of Oklahoma, where he was the founding director of the science and public policy program.

A recent LinkedIn post from the Democracy R&D Network made me think about an old problem—the dilemma of a science policy boundary spanner.

In 2004, David Guston wrote an essay in Issues in Science and Technology with a title that still feels bracing: “Forget Politicizing Science. Let’s Democratize Science!” His point was not that science should be settled by popular vote. Rather, it was that public science is already political because it is funded, organized, justified, and used through public institutions. The real question is not whether politics enters science. It always does.

Three recent observations have made me rethink the role of philanthropy in science. The first was a short exchange on X involving Jane Flegal. Jane’s point, as I read it, was not simply that philanthropy can do good or harm. It was that philanthropy at a very large scale starts to look like government. When private wealth is used to set priorities, build institutions, create markets, and shape public agendas, it is no longer just charity. It becomes a way of deciding what futures deserve to be built.

I have been thinking about the recent RCP8.5-related conversation not as a climate denial story or an argument against climate action, but as a case study in how science can sometimes get lost. Not how science got lost because scientists are corrupt. Not how science got lost because models are useless. Not how science got lost because climate change is not real. Those are not the stories I am interested in.

Three times, in three different settings, I found university presidents not just staying but listening. Not ceremonially, but substantively. Not as figureheads, but as participants in conversations that were, at times, uncomfortable, contested, and unresolved. And each time, it caught me off guard. The most recent instance was at Georgia Tech’s inaugural symposium on technology and civic leadership.

We are at an increasingly urgent moment in biotechnology, according to Sam Weiss Evans, senior advisor at the Federation of American Scientists, who spoke at a recent event at Arizona State University’s Barrett & O’Connor Center in Washington, D.C. “The world of security and emerging biotechnology is coming apart right now,” Evans said, “if only we could take a moment to see it.” As it exists, America’s system for biotechnology governance is “fragmented, reactive and outdated,” he said.

CSPO News From the Director Science, technology, and biomedical research policy are now firmly in a dynamic historical moment. CSPO’s longstanding argument that the success of federal research should ultimately be judged by the outcomes it creates for the public and American communities is increasingly becoming part of the everyday policy conversation in Washington. Focusing on key dimensions of these debates, CSPO ran a well-attended New Tools for Science Policy series this spring.

For nearly eighty years, American science policy has lived under the shadow of a single idea: that scientific progress depends on insulating scientists from politics. In 1945, Vannevar Bush’s report Science, the Endless Frontier argued that if government funded basic research and allowed the “free play of free intellects,” discoveries would eventually diffuse into society and produce public benefit.

CSPO News On February 19 at 9:00 AM, join us for the first event in our series featuring Professor Robert Cook-Deegan. This talk explores innovation at the intersection of government, industry, and academia, examining who owns biomedical discoveries, who benefits from them, and how publicly funded research moves from bench to bedside.