When the Science is the Politics: Navigating Controversy in Challenging Times
(It's possible)
Fancy Comma newsletter readers, I could go on and on about the chaos of our political times, but let’s face it, politics always lends itself to chaos. As I write this newsletter on December 20, at an uncertain time as Congress debates yet another version of a US government spending bill to avert a shutdown, my opinion is that this work is not chaos — it’s just intensely productive political activity, and hey, that’s always good, right?
Amidst the political activity are small pockets of agreement and bipartisanship that gets stuff done. As I have written in previous newsletters, this work is unglamorous, and largely not undertaken by scientists. That’s too bad, because science’s role in policy is likely to become more important post-Chevron, as the input of scientific experts (largely in the executive branch) are weighted less, and the input of the legislative and judicial branches (which largely have no scientists) are weighted more. The solution, to me, is to help scientists work in the legislative and judicial branches. I don’t have any ideas on the latter, but I have written a guide to Congressional staffer positions to help scientists see where they can plug in to work in Congress. I talked about a lot of this in a recent YouTube GRWM (that stands for Get Ready with Me) that I did!
The battles we may or may not see in the upcoming Trump admin Senate confirmation hearings will involve a complicated political dialogue about science that involves talking about what does and does not legitimize application of scientific facts to real-world settings. It all happens in the wake of data that shows that public trust in scientists exists, but breaks down along political lines. It also occurs in the context of a post-pandemic which has been fraught with skepticism about the scientific facts that are by now well-established in science, such as regarding vaccines, and at a time when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy regularly post on X about different NIH studies they want to defund. I noticed on X that Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious disease researcher and doctor, has taken to the airwaves multiple times a day, talking to major media outlets about why vaccines do not cause autism. The explanations (here’s an example X post) seem to capture the scientific skepticism of the day and are pretty compelling, and I’ve never — in my whole life — heard anyone explain it that well, not even when I was a scientist. I also loved his recent post about vaccines as “American inventions” — way to turn a prevailing narrative into a pro-science one (*distant eagle screech*)!
Debunking vaccine myths is the kind of stuff scientists don’t take seriously (because, pffft, obviously vaccines save lives — we are scientists and the science makes sense to us), but it is the kind of thing that we really need as a nation right now — to help answer questions, to avoid creating a “vacuum” of information that leads to the proliferation of misinformation, and to combat the dominant political narrative that is, in some places, overtly anti-science.
I did not prepare for a second Trump administration, and to be honest, my feelings about it oscillate from feeling excited and even happy that we elected someone with so much “in-house” experience to tackle the big challenges of the next four years to feeling confident that toxic masculinity will undo our democracy. I already wrote about my work to help elect woman presidents on both sides of the aisle in a blog this month — the latest installment in our A Scientist in Politics series.
One thing that is exciting to me is Trump’s views on science and technology policy — his support of Right to Try, for example, which gives seriously ill patients new, experimental treatment options; his views on protecting US intellectual property; and of course, Operation Warp Speed, his administration’s effort to create the world’s first COVID vaccines.
So many questions swirl around my mind as I write this on the eve of a potential government shutdown, with the majority of the effort to pass a spending bill coming from engineer and entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has a pretty significant STEM background as the founder of several companies in the finance, aerospace/aeronautics, and even neuroscience domains. Can someone with a science background really “disrupt” governance? Is Elon Musk trying to make the political process more transparent and accountable, and more generally, better, or is he, as the richest man in the world, simply trying to get Congress to do what he wants? As the clock ticks toward midnight today, that is the main question on my mind. How much can disruptive tech company principles feed into governance, and if they really benefit it, where are all the scientists and engineers and why aren’t they running for Congress to fix everything?
The answer is pretty complicated, if you ask me, as it involves the way we talk about science and think about science as a society. Some of the answer involves what it means to be transparent in Congress, when most people don’t understand the complicated legislative processes anyway. Does Elon Musk really think that the House Appropriations Committee is not transparent enough and therefore not being held fully accountable when its members are literally elected by the people? Despite all of my disagreements with him on these issues, I think he makes a good point: trust is essential in communication, and transparency helps build trust.
My favorite science policy newsletter, SciLight, has written extensively about politicization of science. I recently talked to one of its cofounders, Jacob Carter, on our YouTube.
One thing is clear — scientists must adapt the way they communicate science and even formulate hypotheses to be able to fulfill the scientific enterprise’s mission of helping taxpayers who fund the research they do. That’s something I learned reviewing Anne Toomey’s new book, Science with Impact, for our blog.
It looks like our government is taking steps to make that more and more of a reality. The NIH Office of Science Policy released guidance earlier in December 2024 improving transparency for people who publish NIH-funded research, requiring that scientists make public-access versions of their papers available when they publish work.
Last, but not least, scientists must think about the best way to train students to science with society (I mean to use “science” as a verb here, in case you got garden-pathed by that last sentence). I chatted with two Howard Hughes Medical Institute Gilliam Fellows, JP Flores and Ya’el Courtney, about making research more inclusive this month and learned a lot.
We need to keep having these conversations — within science, outside of science, with lawmakers, with everyone.
By the time our January newsletter rolls around, we will have a new president, and the makings of a presidential cabinet. Only time will tell whether science will have a place in policymaking in the next few weeks — and beyond.