Under Review
Addiction Revisited
Two recent books on addiction “weave an overlapping synthesis of the current state of addiction scholarship,” writes Susan Fitzpatrick—and identify where that scholarship falls short.
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The Latest
The Ongoing Transformation
Bhavya Lal Charts a Future for Humans in Space
Bhavya Lal, a leader in space policy, shares the unexpected trajectory of her career. She discusses how policy and governance became her passion, how she went from writing reports to leading programs at NASA, and the big questions that drive her work.
Urgent Care
A Brief Note From the Guy on the Table
A traumatic brain injury gave Robert Cook-Deegan a crash course in a medical research system tangled in technological dilemma and political paradox, a dysfunctional insurance bureaucracy, and the healing powers of superglue.
Motion Capture
The Measured Body
Redesigning motion capture systems to be more representative of real human bodies and movements could make them fairer and more useful for applications including law enforcement and medical diagnostics.
The Ongoing Transformation
Making AI Chatbots Safer
AI chatbots generate conversations with users and can appear, at times, quite human. J. B. Branch discusses who is using chatbots, what the companies behind these AIs are doing, and how they might be regulated.
Real Numbers
Stony the Road We Trod: The Tradeoffs Universities Face in Chasing the R1 Designation
As America’s science enterprise is challenged to be more competitive with fewer resources, recognizing and supporting the research capacity of non-R1s offers a path toward a more dynamic innovation landscape.
Book Review
Beauty in Every Body
Anatomy has long been recognized as a field at the crossroads of politics, medicine, crime, taboo, professionalism, modesty, racism, sexism, and much else. A new book goes beyond these issues in exploring anatomy’s past, asking if early anatomical illustration could have been a space for the exploration of homoerotic desire, hidden in plain sight.
Responding to War
Not Now, But Soon: The Art of Portraying War
Brigitte van der Sande has spent 25 years studying how war is represented in art—research that brought her to many active conflict zones. She discusses how art humanizes the victims of war and spurs action, and how humor and imagination can be forces for resistance.
Digital Data
How “Archive” Became a Verb
Debates over a proposed national data center in the 1960s reveal how anxieties around privacy and digitization led to the shift toward corporate control of personal data.
Understanding Uncertainty
Build Confidence in Science by Embracing Uncertainty Rather Than Chasing Reproducibility
Despite calls to fund reproducibility studies, resources would be better spent on developing tools that enable efficient collection and sharing of experimental protocol details and metadata to enable study comparisons.
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Superglue for Fragmented Policy
Vol. XLII, No. 1, Fall 2025
A remarkable treatment for subdural hematomas involves, essentially, using superglue to repair the brain. The superglue procedure inspires the question of whether there exist analogous policy tools that could help fix systems that suffer from a lack of coordination: the health care bureaucracy, state and federal cannabis regulation, biosecurity, or artificial intelligence.
Browse the Issue
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Subscribe to the Print EditionForum
In response to essays published in Issues, our readers weigh in on critical topics in policy related to science, technology, and society.
Fall 2025
A Firebreak for Mirror Life
A Discussion of
Building Decision Points Into Research’s Slipperiest Slopes
Responses By
Fall 2025
Securing STEM-in-Society Programs
A Discussion of
STEM-in-Society Programs Deserve Institutional Support
Response By
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A Lion Roars in Longyearbyen
Following the mass extinction of most species, the animals that fill a zoo in a future Arctic metropolis are lab-made—with one exception: an aging lion. When the lion escapes in the middle of the city’s Christmas festivities, a complex hunt ensues.
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The Dawn of the Synthetic Age
An expert in environmental philosophy and wildlife recovery responds to Margrét Helgadóttir’s “A Lion Roars in Longyearbyen.”
Response
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Subsidence
The AI boom means more demands on data centers—and running a data center requires complex technical infrastructure, vast environmental resources, and experienced human talent. In E. G. Condé’s story, a labyrinthine data center is in the middle of a massive outage. When the corporation that owns the center fails to diagnose the problem provoking the outage with its fancy technical systems, it’s forced to turn to human intuition to sniff out a more fundamental dilemma.
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Can We Cool Down Data?
The energy demands of data centers—accelerated by artificial intelligence—are steering us toward disaster. Could biology help bring us back from the brink?
Response
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Yellow
If there were an app that estimated the risk of every decision, would you use it? B. Pladek’s short story “Yellow” explores how data changes the way we think about risk—and what happens when that data is manipulated.
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Can Your Health Be Boiled Down to a Single Number?
If a medical treatment for a life-threatening disease had a 60% chance of success, but another treatment with a 50% success rate had a lower risk of bankrupting your family, which would you choose? What if the success rates were 95 and 90%? Would you change your answer?
Response
Over four decades, Issues has hosted many articles discussing science’s “social contract”—the idea, as physicist Harvey Brooks articulated it in 1988, that the scientific enterprise would provide “social benefits in exchange for an unusual degree of self-governance and financial support free of strings.” Today, this contract is clearly defunct: The federal government has cut funding for science, cast doubt on scientific findings, and prioritized investment in research outside the university system. Whatever the future of federally funded science is, it’s no longer “free of strings.” As the scientific enterprise tries to decide how to respond, it first needs to figure out what happened.
The collection of these articles is part of an exploration of science’s social contract that is generously supported by The Kavli Foundation.
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Discussing Science’s “Social Contract”
If the public funds science and gives it autonomy to govern itself, then benefits such as economic growth, innovation, and national security will follow. This unwritten social contract was long thought to underpin policymakers’ relationship to the scientific enterprise, but recent events suggest those days are over.
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No Longer Free of Strings
Why has the idea of an implicit social contract between society and science had a hold on scientists’ imaginations for so long? And what does it mean now that the relationship has frayed?
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It’s Time for Universities to Redesign Their 75-Year-Old Contract
American research universities have unleashed an age of massive technical innovation—but they’ve failed to innovate their own designs to meet the changing needs of society.
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“The More Inclusion We Have in Science, the Better Outcomes We’ll Get.”
Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson spent five decades in public service, during which she ushered through landmark science and technology legislation and helped to advance opportunities for all Americans.
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