Episode 15: Biotech Goes to Summer Camp

Who gets to be a scientist? At BioJam, a free Northern California summer camp, the answer is everyone. This week we talk with Callie Chappell, Rolando Perez, and Corinne Okada Takara about how BioJam engages high school students and their communities to create art through bioengineering. Started as an intergenerational collective in 2019, BioJam was designed to change the model of science communication and education into a multi-way collaboration between the communities of Salinas, East San Jose, and Oakland, and artists and scientists at Stanford. At BioJam, youth are becoming leaders in the emerging fields of biodesign and biomaking—and in the process, redefining what it means to be a scientist. 

Resources

• The BioJam website
• Callie Chappell, Rolando Perez, and Corinne Okada Takara wrote about BioJam for the Spring 2022 Issues: “Bioengineering Everywhere, for Everyone”

Transcript

Lisa Margonelli: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor in chief of Issues. And on this episode, we are going to summer camp. BioJam is a camp in the California communities of Salinas, Oakland, and East San Jose. The camp brings together teenagers, scientists, and artists to learn the principles and practices of biodesign to create art, and then to share what they’ve learned with their communities. I’m joined today by three members of the BioJam team, Rolando Cruz Perez, Corinne Okada Takara, and Callie Chappell. Welcome, Rolando, Corinne, and Callie. I’m going to start with a big question. BioJam is a little bit hard to describe—it’s a camp, but it’s also a way of engaging the community and embodying the future. Could you tell me what BioJam means to you in one word?

Rolando Cruz Perez: Happy to share one. Early on in the development of BioJam, I interacted with a professor, Bryan Brown, from Stanford. He said that BioJam can be activism. It brings together the practice of, of course biology or biodesign, and community engagement. I mean, all these different kinds of engagement, intergenerational engagement. So, you can look at, well, this is what’s happening in my community. These are the kinds of things that are important in my community. These are the dialogues that I engage in. And how can I then take action on even not necessarily solving a problem, that it may be food scarcity or something like that. It might be, well, we want to express ourselves and we want to have new ways of expressing our love and joy in the world. And that can also mean going out and having a support drive for farm workers, where you are making masks and visors for farm workers that are down the chain of priority for folks when we are distributing PPE and so on.

Corinne Okada Takara: So, you are asking for a word to describe BioJam. I would say it’s communion. I think so much of what we do, I’d agree with what Rolando is saying, is expanding who’s in that conversation space and who is elevated. So, he was mentioning agricultural workers. When Rolando and I started BioJam, we both, without realizing it, we were coming from a space of ag community history, Rolando from Salinas and me, my father’s side is from Maui and a plantation community. And we really came from this space of, how do we imagine a new space where we can have these conversations around biomaterial design and synthetic biology and create a space where everybody’s shaping the conversation and questions? And then have teens take what we are learning together back into their community.

So, for me, it’s about communion and storytelling and expanding everyone’s notion of what is science, what is science practice, and where does it exist already, in communities that may not see themselves as practicing science, when really their grandparents are. Their ancestral knowledge has much wisdom. And whenever we are talking about sustainability design, climate change, we do have to look at our more global ancestry and our global community for the best practices that maybe have been kind of shunted aside.

Callie Chapell: I think both of what Rolando and Corinne shared is so beautiful. Thinking about activism, thinking about communion, and then reflecting on that, I think the point where that intersects is courage. I think that BioJam is about humility and courage for everyone who‘s in communion, who‘s pursuing activism together. And my position is coming as an academic to this conversation. And we sometimes talk about how to create pathways that diversify science, and often times it‘s very reflective, of how do we diversify existing structures.

Instead of asking, how can we imagine completely new ways of doing things, of new ways of being, or new ways of thinking about what knowledge—or what science even—can be? And I think something that’s really beautiful about BioJam, is that it is the activism. It is the manifestation of that imaginative future, alternative world of what science can be. But I think from the perspective of an academic, it requires courage and it requires humility to imagine that, and from the perspective of the youth and educators and activists that we also engage with, that are not academic scientists, or don’t necessarily see themselves as academic scientists, it also requires courage to come into the spaces where we can create activism together, and we can have communion in that way.

Lisa Margonelli: Do you want to tell us the story of where BioJam came from, how it started?

Corinne Okada Takara: Sure. It kind of had two starts, I guess I would say. The first was when I met Rolando. We were in an Uber or a Lyft and we just got to talking about the need for, as I said earlier, just a non-existent space. There is a need for space for teens and youth in general, to engage in conversations about biodesign, sustainability design. So just to back up a little, I’m an artist, a biomaterial artist, and Rolando was a bioengineering PhD candidate at the time. And we both were coming at this idea of more equitable spaces and introduction to important conversations before university. Because we didn’t see people in these spaces that were reflective of Rolando’s community. And in my dad’s day, when he was at university, he also had similar experiences.

Rolando Cruz Perez: Just some background. I came to this kind of, second or third chapter in my life as an academic and bioengineer. It wasn’t a linear path. And so, starting now, and then all the way through to arriving at Stanford, I really didn’t fit in anywhere.

Lisa Margonelli: So, you and Corinne got in the Uber, and you started to talk?

Rolando Cruz Perez: We started to talk. I had been working with some youths at a local high school. They wanted to do some mushroom experiments, and Corinne had long been working with youth and the community. And we got to talking about that and then we said, “Hey, we should bring some youth together and have some workshops.” And then that turned into a camp, and then we were like, “Let’s bootstrap it.” And I was like, I’m at Stanford, they’ve got lots of resources. And it’d be great for Stanford to provide those resources in a way that isn’t uni-directional and that isn’t an extraction of the culture and knowledge from these communities. Instead, provide support, infrastructure, and knowledge for youth in these communities to do a kind of grassroots building, right, of their own, of what they envision of what the future should be.

Corinne Okada Takara: I have to add there, it was not “do a few workshops.” It was immediately, “Let’s do a camp.” So, Rolando is so passionate and so big picture. After the Uber ride, we kept emailing and he’s like, “Yeah, let’s do a camp.” I’m like, “OK, cool.” And I was thinking maybe a year down the road. He’s like, “No, this summer.” So, it was a pretty quick ramp-up. And I think Rolando’s so good at sharing the vision of what BioJam was that we had access to the bioengineering teaching lab. We had a lot of support from within the department in that way. And year one was a pretty quick ramp-up. And then year two, we were really lucky to have Callie join and really add structure, enable the sustainability of this camp as it moves into what it’s going to be in the future. So that was our start—Uber ride. Let’s not do a workshop, let’s do a camp this summer, and it was great.

Lisa Margonelli: So, tell me a little bit about the collaborative learning that happens at the camp.

Corinne Okada Takara: We didn’t want to do it within the standard framework of “We are the educators, and we are delivering information to you and you are absorbing.” Rather, we are entering a space, we are going to talk about these ideas, raise questions. We are going to engage in some biomaterial design activities, some bioengineering activities, but while you are doing it, we want you to think how you would do this better. So, from the start, we were collaborators, and we wanted them to express how they would redesign the whole program. And at the end of each day, we had an assessment board and thoughts for them to add to. So, they entered the program and left the program, knowing that whatever we were exploring together, they were going to take and redesign and take back into community. And so, I think that really changed the equation of expertise and knowledge because youth are experts in their communities, and they are also the trusted voices in their communities.

And so really elevating that, that they come from that place of expertise while Rolando and I may have experienced in these other areas and more years in it, they can look at it from different lenses. And so, I think that’s one way that we did the frameworks. Year one was different because it was in person. Every year’s been a pilot year, so let me just say that as well. First year was in person, it was just a short one-week experience. And then the next year we had to pivot to online and we delivered kits and same with year three, but we had some in-person. So, we are always reinventing it in a way. But at the core of it, how do we do this mindfully—that we are co-collaborating and it’s generative learning.

Lisa Margonelli: Callie, tell us how you got involved.

Callie Chapell: I was a first-year grad student at Stanford, and I found myself in some spaces where there was just this senior grad student who was just saying really awesome stuff. And that person was Rolando. And I met Rolando and he became a mentor for me, completely independent of BioJam. And one day, got an email from him and was like, “Hey, can you meet up with me and Corinne, this artist, and talk about this program?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure.” So, I meet up with them at Coupa coffee, which is the starting of many great ideas at Stanford, I think. And they were like, “Hey, do you want to come to Salinas with me today?” And I was like, “Sure, I can cancel all my meetings and go to Salinas with you today.” And I saw what they were doing was very aligned with things that I never even imagined that could be possible and was like, I have to support this in any way that I can.

And I feel like my role in BioJam has been to carry on the legacy and the vision that Corinne and Rolando inspired in me and share that out as much as possible. And part of that has been in growing the organization. I think what I’ve tried to bring to the conversation is some organizational management, in how we can expand the impact of the work that we have as broadly as possible. So as Corinne alluded to, the first year was in person, and I actually wasn’t involved that year, but then we pivoted to a virtual camp in 2020 because of the pandemic. And after 2020, we had a real conversation that’s like, “What is the future of BioJam going to be?” And we believed so strongly in what we were doing that we wanted to continue to grow it.

And so, with a lot of really generous sharing from Corinne, we’ve created an infrastructure around BioJam to allow us to continue to grow. And that includes and really is centered in the visions of the community and the needs of the community. And so all of our work is driven by three advisory boards. The first advisory board is the teens. So, teens that have participated in camp, they actually can come back and be teen mentors. So, help leading the curriculum and guiding the direction of camp the next year, but they could also join what we call our teen advisory board, which gives feedback about the long term overall direction of the program. In addition to our teen advisory board, we have a community advisory board with community organizations like community gardens, artists, educators who provide us with the vision for where camp should go and really deeply embed us in the world of the teens in a lot of different ways.

And the last advisory board is the academic advisory board. So, we have an interdisciplinary group of academics that also guide from a framing and paradigm-shaping lens where we should be going. And so those are the kind of vision-setting organizations that lead where we go. And they all interact with each other. We meet on Zoom; we are also working on having several in-person meetings. We also build relationships with everybody, right. So, dropping off cookies at people’s houses, right. Checking in on how people’s kids are doing. Those are all kind of central pieces to how we build trust and move with the speed of trust in our organization.

And then we have a variety of educators who lead the curriculum design, including Corinne and several others now that we’re growing. And the last component is the Stanford component, which is really the follow and support arm of these three groups that I’ve mentioned. And that is a student group of undergraduates, graduate students, staff, faculty, and post-doctoral researchers, that do a lot of the logistics in day-to-day to make sure that camp can run. But really the vision is not in Stanford. The role of Stanford is to really support the vision, direction, dreams, and imagination of the other groups that I’ve mentioned here. And so, we are hoping that with that structure, we can continue to grow BioJam into the future.

Lisa Margonelli: So let me just sum up here. So sometime in 2019, Corrine and Rolando got into an Uber in Pennsylvania and started talking and decided, OK, we are going to change this whole idea of how “science communication”—I’m using air quotes here,—is done. We are going to start something that’s based in a community. It’s going to be in the community of Salinas, and we are going to do a camp. And you did a one-week camp first, then that grew to a year-round program. So, youth came in the camp, and then they leave the camp, and they work year-round on projects in the community.

And then you have sort of a huge network of people. You have a youth board that steers this, you have a community board that provides feedback. You have an academic board that provides feedback. And you also have a group of Stanford students who produce sort of prep work and other things to enable this other experience. So, what started as a little camp turn into a giant web of people, right. This kind of reminds me of a mushroom. I mean, there is a sort of a mycelia sense to this whole thing. You started with a little thing and then it gets woven more and more into communities. Can you tell me, what are you doing with mushrooms and youth?

Rolando Cruz Perez: The first time someone to put a mycelium material object in my hand, it just blew my mind. I’m a bioengineer trained in molecular biology, all these other things, in synthetic biology, but this very simple artifact of taking corn cob waste and mixing it with a mushroom and then forming it into an object, putting it in your hand. I was like, wow, I can actually hold this thing, whereas everything else I do is kind of invisible to the eye. And Corinne was working with mycelium materials, I think already, at the time. And so, we wanted to incorporate that into some of the education or programming or trainings that we were doing. And Corinne, of course, tapping into her amazing art practice and knowledge, came up with the idea of a quilt made of mycelium, which is just ingenious.

And along the way, we engaged with the youth, collaborated with the youth, to, of course, build the curriculum, doing simple things like, “What do we want to learn today? And here’s a choice of things that we can learn today. Which ones would you like to, should we explore?” Terms that would come up or discussions that would come up of social justice. We would sit in lunchtime and breaks and have these discussions with youth. And we would define vocabulary with their own terms. And we named the program through, with input from the youth, and also the quilt as well was derived with Corinne’s feedback and the youth engagement, and I’ll leave Corinne to describe the quilts.

Lisa Margonelli: Yes, let’s turn to Corinne. But before that, just getting the youth to come up with the vocabulary is completely the opposite of the way that science is taught. Science is so often taught where you sit down, and you have to memorize stuff. And the barrier to getting into science is, so frequently, just this enormous vocabulary that you have to learn. And the fact that you sat everybody down and you came up with your own vocabulary to the start, seems like a very, it creates a space for everyone to be in there.

Corinne Okada Takara: I agree with that. And I think personally, I had the privilege of growing up with family that introduced science through making and story sharing on my grandma’s Lanai. We would collect materials from Maui, and you didn’t really know a material or a plant unless you knew its name in Hawaiian and Japanese and its uses and the legends that go with it. And so, the knowledge of science, it really does reside in community and ancestry. Rolando and I had many conversations also during COVID about our parents and grandparents and the knowledge they have in field labor. And so, we wanted to create a space where the students came with science knowledge.

So, for example, Rolando was mentioning the quilt project. Well, while I was working with mycelium from one direction, he was working from another, and we invited the students to bring in, day one, a mason jar full of—or baggies, we had the Mason jars. But to bring in materials from their own community and lives that we could then autoclave and feed to mycelium. And we had them emailing us saying, “Can I bring ramen, because that’s what I eat. Can I bring this or that?” And we are like, “Sure, we don’t know if it will grow or work. We haven’t tried it.” So, I think positioning ourselves as not being experts is really ideal and also positioning ourselves from a place where we are going to experiment and we may fail. So, for that particular quilt project, I had not succeeded in that yet.

I had tried to grow mycelium-grown assemblies through different meshes, and they’d all rotted. And I told them that. And we were going to try again, but we are going to try a synthetic mesh. And so, inviting them to work on something where we didn’t really have the protocols yet, I think was kind of fun and exciting. We didn’t know if it was going to work. It did, and it turns out the ramen grew the best. But it was great story share because they brought in the food of knowledge, a waste stream of knowledge, shared the story of it, and then after Rolando autoclaved them, they were able to share those substrates and then stuff it into their vacuuming form molds—which they also had designed that represented themselves or their culture. And so, it was physical sharing of the substrate to inoculate the mushrooms while also story sharing. And I think that just kind of set up for what Rolando would often describe as this mycelial network of people in community and space.

Lisa Margonelli: So, let me just ask you, can you tell me what the quilt looked like? So, everybody has brought food from home, then you autoclaved it. Then you stuffed it into a vacuum mold that everybody made, for form. And then they inoculated it with mycelium and then something grew and there was a mesh—how did the mesh play into this?

Corinne Okada Takara: I pre-cut nylon mesh and they stuffed their mold forms into the vacuum form mold. And then they clamped down sterilized mesh on top of it. So, the mycelium and the substrate grew together and then grew into the mesh. And then the mesh was such that I could bake it at a low temperature without the mesh melting. And then you had a square that you could hold up and it had the mushroom mycelium there, grown into whatever the substrate was.

Oh, and the mycelium shapes that the students had, they had designed—we had a pre-exercise for them to do. They learned how to design in Tinkercad. They designed their mold form, which is called, in vacuum forming, it’s called a buck. So, they designed their own bucks that we vacuum formed off of Shop-Vac. And we had a kind of DIY setup, but some of them designed one design, a Concha pastry to represent her Mexican heritage. Another one did a Kendama Japanese toy. We had another student do soccer ball, one did an Indian pastry. So just whatever they wanted to do, they represented themselves. And then those are all seen binded along the edges. For those of you who saw, individually because we knew we wanted them to take it home, each one separate, not stitched altogether.

Lisa Margonelli: And that way they could share it with their family. Interesting. And so, they also learn in addition to autoclaving and inoculating and thinking about mesh and experiments, they also were using CAD to design the mold. And then that was, I would assume, 3D printed. So, this is a very super high tech ecosystem. And you are bringing it to places like Salinas, where it could be really hard to access a 3D printer or CAD or some of these other things. Callie, tell us, how did BioJam camp make that transition to working remotely? Were people able to do these same sorts of projects or did you have to kind of rethink it?

Callie Chapell: Yes. We have “Lab on a Cookie Sheet” designed by Corinne. So, imagine at home you are living in one or two rooms, you’ve got tons of siblings running around, where can you have a lab? Well, turns out that all you need is a cookie sheet or a box and the right attitude, and any place can be a lab, whether that’s in your kitchen, whether that’s in a driveway, whether that’s in a garden. And we created these really innovative kits that had lots of different materials, biomaterials, circuitry materials, general making materials, fun tape and markers, scissors to really imagine in your own space. And scavenging for things that might be waste or might be treasures, depending on how you look at it. How you can create with biology at home? We made sure that all of the things that we shared were commonly available things at home.

For example, if you need to sterilize something, you can use isopropyl alcohol, rubbing alcohol, right. And all of the mycelium, for example, that we sent home was food grade. But the most important thing is, I think, doing science at home helps you realize that you’ve always been doing science at home. If you’ve been making yogurt in the kitchen, or if you’ve been growing things in the garden, even asking questions and trying to figure out how to answer them, that is doing science. And so, I think there was a real beauty to having people create in their own homes, even if we were interacting over Zoom as opposed to being together physically. Those people couldn’t imagine the science that already has been happening. And I think our curriculum really tried to emphasize that.

Lisa Margonelli: I think it’s really interesting that part of this education is, you’ve always been a scientist. We have all always been scientists. Corinne, do you want to talk a little bit more about what happened that first year that you all went remote and had this distributed lab in all these different places on cookie sheets?

Corinne Okada Takara: Yes. It was really fun. And I would just like to elevate the BioJam teams from the year prior who helped put these kits together and design them as well as create videos. So, some of the youth from our first year helped and were youth teen mentors and came back. So they helped put these kits together. So, you were asking about what kind of things can you do? And I think that’s a space where biomaterial design can step in as a really great first engagement spot. So, bio art growing bacterial cellulose. You can use a kombucha leather that grows on top, growing mycelium into forced geometries, using different mold forms, doing millifluidics with coffee filters and tape.

Lisa Margonelli: What’s millifluidics?

Corinne Okada Takara: So instead of microfluidics, it’s on the millifluidics scale and you can laser cut coffee filters into channels that you then sandwich between tape and then cut ports and do mixing experiments, pH mixing experiments.

Lisa Margonelli: So, it’s an analog to what you might do in a lab?

Corinne Okada Takara: Exactly.

Lisa Margonelli: So, I want to sort of step back from this a little bit. Two of you come from synthetic biology, I think. Which is sort of two different things. One thing is, it’s a practice of taking genes from one place in nature and sort of putting them in another to sort of enable new possibilities of life. So it might be that you change the way a plant grows, or it might be that you change a microbe’s capability, so it can eat old newspapers and turn it into some other useful chemical. So, on the one hand, there is this sort of researcher lab practice. And then the second aspect of it is really this sort of dream of creating a sustainable economy, where we replace petroleum products with other sorts of synthetic biology-derived chemicals.

But the one thing that nobody discusses is who is going to do it, and what is the world that they create going to look like. And that’s really interesting, because there has been kind of a preconception that the people who are going to do synthetic biology are wearing lab coats. They are people who have gotten access to very high-level labs, or maybe they work in a big industrial situation in a big refinery. And it strikes me that what you are doing at BioJam is changing who does this and who has the ideas and who asks the questions and who figures out which problems to solve. Do you want to talk about this?

Rolando Cruz Perez: The definitions you prescribe, outline for synthetic biology, of course, those are very canonical and accepted conventional definitions. I’ve tried to push my own thinking about it into a more abstract, higher-level layer of the word synthesis or the idea of synthesis, synthesizing together different knowledge or synthesizing something as art. So, to me, synthetic biology has evolved into, for me personally, into this space of synthesizing relationships with living organisms or living matter. For me personally, thinking about synthetic biology of this cultural socio-technical kind of cultural practice, I can then connect that to the development of maize or of potatoes or of “domesticating” animals and even ourselves and our microbiota, for instance.

And so of course, it’s important, absolutely—the who and the where and the what of synthetic biology. And that’s important; maybe one specific reason there, biosecurity, let’s talk about that. That world of distributed or open-source technology, it becomes realized, we’ll have questions in particular in the time of a pandemic right around biosecurity. It’s my, and others’ belief that in that world we are going to all need to love biology. We are all going to need to love synthetic biology because we need to have openness and transparency and care, transformative justice, as opposed to punitive justice, because in a world of punishment, there will be blind spots. There will be dark corners. And we don’t want that with biotechnology because of the intrinsic facts that we are biology and we are the technology—we are made up of it.

Lisa Margonelli: Corinne, do you want to talk a little bit about what it means for everyone to be a biologist?

Corinne Okada Takara: I come from a community arts activist space. and so any engagement that we have with the public I feel is really important, and we are part of the public. And how do we create these new spaces to address these concerns that Rolando has? So, if we can buy plasmas off Etsy, yes, we need to all be scientists, we need to love biology. We need to see ourselves as part of the conversation and not only growing our knowledge of the vocabulary of science, but expanding the vocabulary we are using—including more accessible words, accessible tools, and create those initial engagement spaces much earlier and multi-generationally, in spaces that people can access. And I know a lot of universities and museums do “community outreach.” I’m doing air quotes.

But I really think BioJam is a model for what should happen. And that is science communion, in community spaces, whether that’s a parking lot, a community garden, a farmer’s market, where are the spaces we can interact with people serendipitously in their places of expertise, their spaces. So, they know they can bring the vocabulary and knowledge to these conversations that right now are only engaging a few. So BioJam, I think, at its core, is asking that question, what might these new spaces look like? How can these be multi-generational; how can they span across spaces beyond academia?

Callie Chapell: Well, I think I just want to highlight something that has been brought up earlier, which is that BioJam is activism in changing what we consider scientific knowledge to be. And I’m not really a synthetic biologist. I’m trained as a molecular biologist, but I’m actually an ecologist now. And what I’ve learned was when I was growing up, I’m actually from the rural agricultural Midwest along the shores of Lake Michigan, was that ecology and evolution, ecological communities, and the way that evolution functions in the world is synthetic biology, right. Every time that we modify the atmosphere by emitting CO2, we are bioengineering every organism on the planet, right. We are also bioengineering organisms when we make bread at home, right? And in being an ecologist and thinking about the world from that perspective, you see that, for example, mycelium live in symbiosis with trees, in some cases.

And then when we had these organismal collaborations as artists working with bio-organisms, as scientists, working with other organisms, right, as biologists, or just existing in the world. That we can really expand how we think about what synthetic biology means, what art means, and what science more fundamentally means in this more expansive way. And so, the mission of BioJam is not just to create these experiences for teens that we are working directly with, but really changing the conversation and decentralizing how we think about knowledge production in biology. And not just knowledge production, but also who drives the conversations and who creates the technology. So we are really working towards a vision where everyone feels empowered to make with biology—not make with biology necessarily in academic labs or for companies or corporations—but make with biology for play, in their local communities, in their kitchens and agricultural fields, right. And empty lots.

And when people feel like they are biologists, that’s how we get innovation to address the most pressing challenges that everyone has a say in. Not just the people who see themselves as synthetic biologists. Just briefly, I want to highlight something that has been mentioned by both Rolando and Corinne about this being an intergenerational challenge. And something that we talk about a lot is power and transience, right. That what we think and what we see as liberatory biotechnology or biodesign is very reactive, like Rolando said, to current challenges that we have. But it should always be changing, right? It should always be re-evaluated and who we are liberating and what we are liberating ourselves from and also what our future could be. And I feel I’ve really learned a lot about what liberatory means in this context from youth.

And I think back to a really amazing webinar, they were thought leaders in Salinas on a local webinar. And they described what they envisioned their liberatory bio future to be. And their ideas, I’d never heard, policymakers, right. They are imagining worlds where we are addressing critical issues in climate change, social justice issues, incarceration, dynamics, power dynamics between the Global North and Global South, as it relates to decolonization using biology as a metaphor or as tools to enable those global changes to how the world can operate. And as they describe what they envision their future to be, I hope that we can empower that and actualize that vision.

Lisa Margonelli: That’s fabulous. I want to thank you, Rolando, Corinne, and Callie. This is just a fantastic conversation and hopefully a spore for future work and collaborations between communities and bio scientists. To see the BioJam artwork and learn more about the camp, visit issues.org, to read their essay, Bioengineering Everywhere for Everyone. Visit our show notes to find a link to the camp itself.

Thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode and this season of The Ongoing Transformation. We will return in September with new episodes. If you have comments, interview suggestions, or questions, please email us at [email protected], and you can also visit us at issues.org for more conversations and more articles. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor in chief of Issues in Science and Technology. Thank you for joining us for this season of our podcast.

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Episode 14: Rethinking Hard Problems in Brain Science

When it comes to exploring the mindboggling complexity of living systems—ranging from the origins of human consciousness to treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s—Susan Fitzpatrick has long been a critic of reductionist thinking. In this episode we talk with Fitzpatrick, who has spent three decades supporting brain research as president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, about new ways to understand the human brain, the difficulty of developing an effective Alzheimer’s treatment, and how scientific research can more successfully confront complex problems. 

Resources

• The James S. McDonnell Foundation website
• Susan Fitzpatrick’s review of Metazoa by Peter Godfrey-Smith and Life’s Edge by Carl Zimmer
• Her review of Brains Through Time by Georg F. Striedter and R. Glenn Northcutt
• Her review of Mind Fixers by Anne Harrington
• Her review of Chasing Men on Fire by Stephen G. Waxman and Understanding the Brain by John E. Dowling
• “Asking the Right Questions in Alzheimer’s Research,” Fitzpatrick’s Feature essay in the Fall 2018 Issues in Science and Technology

Transcript

Jason Lloyd: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a publication of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University. I’m Jason Lloyd, managing editor of Issues. On this episode, we’re in conversation with Susan Fitzpatrick, president of the James S. McDonald Foundation. Under Susan’s leadership, the foundation has supported research and scholarship in biological, behavioral, and complex system sciences. The philanthropy is particularly well-known for its work in funding emerging areas of research, such as cognitive neuroscience. Susan is a regular contributor to Issues. She’s written feature essays and book reviews on subjects, including Alzheimer’s disease, psychiatry and mental illness, and the evolution of consciousness. Susan, thank you for joining us on this episode of the ongoing transformation.

Susan Fitzpatrick: Hi Jay. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Lloyd: One of the topics you’ve written about for Issues is research into Alzheimer’s disease. Could you tell us about the disease and how scientists’ understanding of it has evolved over time?

Fitzpatrick: I came of age in neuroscience when the—so I trained as a biochemist, biophysicist working in a neurology department in New York City. When I first started graduate school, the idea behind Alzheimer’s disease, it was that it had to be some more generalized sort of metabolic failure. Neurons in the brain are exquisitely sensitive to energy supplies, glucose, oxygen, and so somehow was it that the brain was no longer able to keep up with the energetic demands of computation, and so therefore began to evidence this pathology. It was difficult to really show that.

Then there was this idea that came along that it was actually acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter. It was a deficit in acetylcholine that was the problem. These poor individuals with Alzheimer’s disease were being fed massive amounts of lecithin, which is a way to deliver choline, which has a terrible, horrible smell.These poor souls were being loaded up with choline as a way to drive acetylcholine synthesis. This also turned out not to be helpful in terms of cognition.

And then, I think, there was a series of studies that really looked at molecular neuroscience. We were moving from this more metabolic physiological kind of neuroscience into this more molecular approach to neuroscience. The idea came that there had to be this target, right? If you wanted to have something druggable, you have to have a target. The discovery that these plaques and tangles contained this beta-amyloid protein and that there were individuals who got early-onset dementia that had an autosomal dominant gene that coded for this beta-amyloid protein, that really established the idea that the cause of Alzheimer’s disease was some problem with metabolizing or handling this protein. Beta-amyloid has a tendency to form aggregates, that these were toxic to neurons, and this was the cause of neuronal loss and hence cognitive degeneration in Alzheimer’s disease.

Lloyd: How did the scientific community respond to this new idea?

Fitzpatrick: Early on, there has always been resistance in the field to this idea. There was a competitive camp that was interested in another protein, which was called the tau protein. In fact, these two groups were nicknamed the Baptists, because they were interested in the Abeta protein, and the Taoists, who were interested in tau. You can find these funny stories about the Baptists and the Taoists arguing in different meetings and this stuff about who had the right protein. But in reality, their underlying conceptual approach was pretty similar. That there was this one thing that we should be targeting and it was this, whatever it was, whatever protein they were favoring, its aggregation in the brain.

There’s been two difficulties—actually, there’s a number of difficulties with this, but you can imagine that what happens when you get this kind of a theory, you start generating enormous amounts of tools to work with it. You develop transgenic animals, and you have ways of studying this and you have markers and you have all kinds of things that are focused on this idea. Then you’re developing interventions based around that idea.

One of the other criticisms has always been that the degree to which somebody has the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is plaques and tangles in their brain, does not really perfectly correlate with their cognitive function. You can see people come to autopsy who have brains that don’t look so good who are doing just fine in their everyday life. It’s clear that yes, Abeta and Tau have something to do with damage to neurons and to brain tissue, but it’s not quite clear if it’s an effect rather than a cause. It’s secondary to something else. This has been further enhanced by all the recent clinical trials that have gone on over the last decade or so, where heroic attempts have been made to either limit the production of beta-amyloid in the brain, remove beta-amyloid in the brain. Some immune approaches that have been used. There was some studies for a while where people were draining CSF from people with Alzheimer’s disease as a way to try to lower their Abeta load.

Lloyd: That’s spinal fluid?

Fitzpatrick: Yep. And they don’t work. They don’t work in the terms of that they don’t stop what is most concerning to people with the disease: the degenerating cognitive impairment.

Lloyd: You can effectively get rid of these plaques and not have this build-up in the brain, but you don’t see an improvement in cognitive function.

Fitzpatrick: Right. And it’s probably, again, because if it’s a signal of damage that has occurred, the damage has occurred whether the beta-amyloid is in the brain or not at that point. Whatever caused these toxic proteins to build up and form these plaques and tangles in brain tissue, the process is probably still going on, and you haven’t solved what the actual problem is. Almost every iteration of this that’s tried really comes up with the same basic response: that you can clear the toxic protein, but you don’t seem to reverse or stop the degenerative decline.

Lloyd: We don’t have any treatments to reverse or stop cognitive decline, but the Food and Drug Administration recently approved a drug by a company called Biogen that’s called Aduhelm, which targets amyloid-beta. Could you tell us more about how this drug got approved and just why its approval was so controversial?

Fitzpatrick: Biogen went and had a clinical trial. They actually stopped the trial because they were not meeting their primary criteria of seeing any change in cognitive function. But there was this signal that it was decreasing the amount of beta-amyloid, based on marker scans of the brain. They went ahead and asked for FDA approval of this drug. When the data came before their 12-member panel, 11 of the members said no. They didn’t meet any of their primary endpoints. They’ve got this surrogate endpoint data, but the primary endpoint is not mattering. And it’s all based on this hypothesis, that if you believe that limiting beta-amyloid is going to help you then, OK—but actually that connection isn’t really made.

So 11 of the 12 members, 10 of the 11, I can’t remember the exact number, voted no, one person abstained, and the FDA approved the drug, even though it’s an immunotherapy, it’s extremely expensive, and it causes brain bleeds in patients. It’s not without serious side effects. This drug, which was supposed to be a blockbuster, and was the hope that everyone has been waiting for for generations, is an extremely expensive drug that seems to have no effect and can, in fact, be dangerous.

Several of the panel members that were reviewing this resigned over this. They were so appalled by the FDA’s decision—because giving this drug to people also means that you’re not going to be able to use those resources for something else.

Lloyd: I could imagine that that would have a pretty dramatic effect on, if you have this drug out there and you’re trying to help patients, but it’s effectiveness is limited, I imagine it’s quite frustrating to have patients wanting this to see if it would work and trying to focus on other things might be a bit of a challenge for both clinicians and researchers.

Fitzpatrick: It’s also been a real hit to the hypothesis. This has been a more visible failure than, I would say, some of the other drugs have been, because they just failed in clinical trial and then this is now out there in the public. Patients could be prescribed this, doctors know about it, families know about it. It’s something they could get access to because it’s been FDA approved. It’s not a clinical trial. But actually, there’s been very little usage of the drug.

Lloyd: Are there lessons to be learned from the Aduhelm controversy?

Fitzpatrick: It’s interesting on some level. It’s interesting from an Alzheimer’s perspective of how do you rethink a disease process when you have decades of a dominant hypothesis?

Because that’s how people are trained, again, that’s what the tools are, that’s where the investments have been made. It’s very difficult to back up from that and go into another direction. But it also is, I think, a cautionary tale for neuroscience in general, because this situation is not unique to Alzheimer’s disease. We don’t have really effective treatments for almost any neurodegenerative disease, and we don’t have very effective population-level treatments for people suffering from neuropsychiatric diseases.

Is there something fundamental in neuroscience that we’ve kind of missed about what’s really happening in these diseases? How do they really occur? How do they play out? What kind of intervention should they really be looking at? Is there a way that we should be less dogmatic about the way that we pursue our research so that we don’t allow a hypothesis to become so dominant early on in the process—but we allow for these alternative hypotheses to continue and to be supported, so that when something doesn’t pan out, you’ve got other avenues that you can go down? And they’re also robust and healthy and they’ve got tools and people and training and literature and all those things that you can build on.

I think it’s an interesting time for the field to begin to think back and say, OK, where have we been placing our bets for the last 40 years? Where did we not place our bets over the last 40 years that we should begin to think about placing our bets? Do we really have to start from scratch? Or are there ways that we can bring other theories, other tools, other ways of approaching a problem into the field so that we don’t have to throw everything out that we’ve learned, but can we put it into a different framework? Can we put it into a different structure? Can we add other components in a way that may get us closer to where we actually want to be?

That’s one of the things that certainly in the last couple of years, we at the foundation have been thinking about a lot and really trying to push some of those ideas forward. One of the areas that we’ve been looking at, and we have a small working group that’s been working on this problem, is thinking about what a new framework would look like in the context of schizophrenia.

Lloyd: To turn some of those really interesting questions that you’ve raised back to you, do you see initiatives, programs that really do take a different approach that seem promising? What we’ve been talking to up to this point, it seemed gloomy, the prospects for someone with neurodegenerative disease or someone who may have that in the future. One of the things that you talk about in an Issues piece is looking at the individual in context, looking at the brain in context, and looking at not just even their physical aspects of how the disease presents, but also their social context. I think you call this the network context for an individual. I was wondering if there’s anybody doing that kind of work that you see maybe as more promising than what’s traditionally happened over the past 40 years.

Fitzpatrick: Yes. I definitely take your message to heart. One of the things that I don’t like is when we just say, “This has all been wrong.” That’s not very useful, and it’s not very hopeful. In many ways I do think the soul searching that’s going on right now in the field is actually quite hopeful and encouraging because it’s really hard to change direction if you think you’re going in the right direction. I think in some ways, the fact that people are willing now to take a step back and say, “Wait a minute, let’s really think about what might be going on here and let’s try some other things,” is actually hopeful, because it means that we might be able to make progress. It may even be that some of the things that we’re trying in combination with higher-level interventions.

We certainly see this in certain neuropsychiatric disorders that a combination of pharmaceutical interventions with cognitive behavioral therapy with social support actually is better than doing those things alone. But what we don’t have right now is a conceptual framework for thinking about that. People have been trying this on the clinical level, and a lot of progress does actually come from clinicians sort of running these essential clinical experiments. Like, let’s do this and let’s do that and let’s see what happens.

But we can’t learn from that if we don’t have the theoretical framework that we can stick it into and say, “OK, this makes sense if you would give this particular agent that’s going to have this perturbative effect on the current way the brain is working, which now allows us to introduce new strategies, new ways of functioning—and we’re going to build some environmental supports in there. We’re going to help family members actually see how they can support this different way that this brain is working.” I think that’s where we haven’t really been active enough, is this idea that we’re also going to go in and fix whatever this problem is.

It’s unlikely that we’re going to be able to fix this problem. I think what we might be able to do is slow down processes, but I think you’re mainly going to have to say, “OK, how do we support a brain that just functions in a different way than neurotypically?” I think this is going to be true for neurodevelopmental disorders. So you have seen work going on in these areas. You see work in autism, you see work going on in depression, but it has not yet reached the point where we have a framework for thinking about it.

Let’s say, if you are someone who does suffer from serious depression, you may get put on a drug. It works, it doesn’t work, so they try another drug, but there’s no principled way for deciding what order we should be doing that. They may start with like, “Let’s start with the oldest drug,” or, “Let’s start with most popular drug”—but there’s nothing theoretical that’s sort of saying, “Well, we should start with something that affects the serotonin system, and then we should move to the dopamine system, and then at that point, we should begin to introduce cognitive behavioral therapy—or should we start with cognitive behavioral therapy and then introduce drugs?” We don’t really have that framework. I think it’s the kind of rethinking that’s going to be important, and again, I don’t want it to overnight become the dominant hypothesis. I don’t want any of these things to become dominant. I want us to be kicking them around more and really paying attention to what’s happening clinically.

Lloyd: Could you tell us a little bit more about what the research community could learn from the clinicians?

Fitzpatrick: We’re acquiring an enormous amount of information by people who are on the front line of trying to treat individuals who are suffering. I feel sometimes that the research end of the spectrum doesn’t often pay as much attention to what we’re seeing clinically. I think anything new that people are proposing, I want to see it constrained by what we actually know about patients. What do we actually see? Before you go running off with your one finding, your one gene, or your one molecule, your one whatever, and develop an animal model over it, and then you’re going to study that thing, this one thing—there has to be a bigger rationale.

In the many ways, I feel actually more optimistic than I’ve ever felt because I do feel that there is this change.I think the younger neurologists and psychiatrists who are coming into the field are more open to looking at some of these different approaches and are not so wedded to these molecular approaches. The difference is that—and this is going to sound really strange—but the other weird thing is that we don’t have the business model for this. We have a business model for what happens when you identify a druggable target and you develop a drug. We have a distribution model, we have a production model, we have all those kinds of things. We don’t have a model for thinking about how do you actually manage a complex neurodegenerative or neuropsychiatric disease in the community? We keep hearing about community health. We really don’t have a system. We don’t even have the model for what that system would really have to look like.

I was at a small meeting one time where a psychiatrist who does a lot of clinical trials was there. We were talking about the high placebo rate that there is in most neurological disorder clinical trials, and it’s quite high. Even deep sham deep brain stimulation has a pretty high placebo approach. There’s no current being turned on and off, and people get better. We were talking about this and he said, and this has so struck me and stuck with me. He said, “Maybe if we treated everyone the way we treat patients who are enrolled in clinical trials, a lot more people would be getting better.” What he meant was, when you’re enrolled in a clinical trial, you’re getting a lot of support. You’re getting your medical needs taken care of. You’re being seen by a lot of eyes, and you’re getting positive reinforcement, and you feel like you’re taking some agency over what’s happening to you, and your family thinks that you’re trying, and the whole ecosystem changes.

I said, “Well, why don’t we?” He said, “Well, we can’t afford it.” I was like, “I mean, we can’t afford not to do it to some extent.”

In the meantime, we’re willing to approve a drug for $50,000 that has minimal to no effect—possibly even negative effects. That’s what I mean. What if we were putting that into saying, “Okay, what does it mean to really support somebody who is suffering?”

So I’m excited about the fact that these kinds of conversations are happening and that there is work going on that is beginning to look at this. There are people who are looking at higher-level interventions. There are people thinking about the brain from dynamical systems perspective, that there are people who are looking at interactions with the environment. There are people who are beginning to think about, what are the different drug interactions that occur over time?

I think one of the weird things about biomedicine, in general, is that we’re always treating the disease you had. We totally ignore the dynamic, developmental nature of—I mean, we call these diseases “degenerative” or “neurodevelopmental” for a reason. They’re changing over time. We’re often looking at the disease that you had and not the disease that you have because every treatment is introducing some kind of change. We really don’t always have a good handle on that.

Lloyd: Your response to that last question raises some huge questions about how we, as a society, as a scientific enterprise, conduct research and think about some of these problems and approaches to solving them. This really shines through, I think, in your book reviews, where you have a real appreciation of authors who can navigate the complexity of the issue that they’re talking about, who explain the nuances, who don’t take this reductionist approach. I think one of the through-lines, in the several book reviews that you’ve written for Issues, is that you really appreciate and promote this idea that things are far more complicated than we understand. The complexity is often irreducible when you’re talking about consciousness (that was the most recent subject of a book review). But embracing that complexity goes against the reductionist tendency of scientific research as it’s currently practiced, scientific funding, the training of scientists.

Where the focus is, you find the causal mechanism at the lowest level, at the most basic level. The molecule, the protein that’s causing this, and then you develop a drug or pharmaceutical to treat it, or maybe a more complex device or something like that, but that’s what you focus on. That’s where all the money goes. That’s what you’re trained to do. And that’s how the thinking of the research enterprise is structured. I’m wondering, this is sort of a big question, but if there were a way to intervene in some aspect of that whole enterprise to better embrace the complexities that you think are really, really important in addressing and confronting these diseases, what would that be?

Fitzpatrick: It’s very difficult. One of our colleagues at ASU, Jason Robert, has this great phrase that I absolutely love where he talks about a “hedgeless hedging.” He’s a philosopher of science and has done a lot in neuroscience. It’s not that anyone in neuroscience doesn’t know that the brain is complex. They all do. In fact, what you’re seeing now sometimes is a lot of, “The brain is complex. It’s an ecosystem. It’s organized, blah, blah, blah, dynamical, adaptive, changing over time—now let me tell you about my gene.” So it’s like by acknowledging the complexity, you can brush it aside to some extent. I love this idea that it’s like a hedgeless hedge. You’re not really hedging your bets. You’ve got no hedge, really. This is what you do. And that’s because this is what you know how to do.

I was sitting next to a young neurologist one time at a talk that was really trying to embrace the complexity of some of the problems that we’re trying to solve. He looked at me and he said, “If you took this seriously, you’d have to stop what you were doing.” I said, “Yeah.” And like, I can’t! I’ve got to get my grant out. I’ve got to get my paper published. I’ve got to get my tenure. I’ve got to get promoted. This is the way you do it. Even though it was hitting him that there was something really wrong with what we’re doing, what’s the way out of it?

I think we really do have to take this seriously and change the reward structure: that you don’t get rewarded for tiny bits of incremental work on highly artificial systems that don’t reflect anything in nature. One of the things I love about some of the books that I’ve been able to review for Issues is that the writers are also very grounded in the natural world. They’re either looking at organisms that are living in the natural world, they’re looking at evolution across time, but they’re using real artifacts. They’re not trying to create this in the laboratory. I think we have to find a way of getting biology back into nature—and then getting biomedical research back into biology.

And then, I think, a lot of this falls into place because now you cannot do real organism biology without thinking of whatever it is that you’re interested in the context of the organism, in the context of its life, in the context of its environment, and the context of the problems it’s trying to solve as it goes through both its own developmental ontogeny and across evolutionary time scales. You can see, again, that there are attempts to do this. I know NSF has these new biological integration institutes that they’re trying to work on. I think it’s the right idea. I think the idea is, can you be patient enough to realize that this kind of cultural change doesn’t happen overnight?

Lloyd: Even if those changes don’t happen overnight, they do sound really promising. I think there’s a lot to learn from our progress and missteps with how the scientific and policy communities have handled Alzheimer’s research. Thank you, Susan, for taking the time to talk to us.

Fitzpatrick: Oh, thank you. This is actually a delight for me and a pleasure.

Lloyd: And thank you for joining us for this episode of The Ongoing Transformation. For more of Susan’s work, and I really encourage you to check it out, please visit the show notes for this episode, where we’ll link to her recent essays in Issues. Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with any comments or suggestions. If you enjoy conversations like this one, visit us at issues.org and subscribe to the magazine. I’m Jason Lloyd, managing editor of Issues in Science and Technology. Thanks for listening.

Pricing Unknowable Risks

Episode 13: Demystifying the Federal Budget

How do budgets evolve into policies? As Congress starts to appropriate money for President Biden’s 2023 budget requests, we talk with Matt Hourihan, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hourihan tells of his own introduction to the byzantine mysteries of the budget, how the process works (and sometimes doesn’t work!), and what the numbers reveal about today’s science policy priorities. 

Resources

• Find more resources to understand federal research and development funding by visiting AAAS’s R&D Budget and Policy Program
• Visit AAAS’s Science Insider for breaking news about and analysis of science policy
• Follow Matt on Twitter @MattHourihan

Transcript

Josh Trapani: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a publication of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University. I’m Josh Trapani, senior editor of Issues in Science and Technology. I’m joined by Matt Hourihan, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Matt is a valuable source of information and insight on science budgets for policymakers and the science community. On today’s episode, we’re going to do a deep dive on the recently released Fiscal Year 2023 budget, and see how understanding these numbers can help us understand priorities and values for the administration overall.

Matt, thank you for being here. It’s so great to have you with us. So the administration released its FY23 budget on March 28 this year, and you’ve studied federal R&D budgets and the budget process for years. I was wondering if there’s anything in particular that surprised you about this year’s budget request?

Matt Hourihan: Maybe the most surprising thing is the fact they released it so soon after the omnibus, right? The FY22 omnibus was adopted just a few weeks before the new budget came out. Among other things, it meant something of a complicated interpretation of this year’s budget request, because none of the numbers that showed up in the final omnibus appeared in the FY23 budget documentation. Instead, the administration simply assumed CR levels, or continuing resolution levels, for FY22. When they started, they used that as a baseline for their increases for FY23. And those numbers, I mean, you can throw them all right out; they’re meaningless because we now have an actual omnibus to work from.

So you had to jump through some hoops to get a clearer sense of what would increase, or not increase, in the administration’s budget. And it also, frankly, means if the administration was using a baseline based in unreality, you could say, and from a CR that was no longer in place, you have to take a lot of these numbers with a grain of salt. For example, the Institute of Education Science: technically, the administration in their budget request would tee up that institute for a 10% cut from FY22 levels, just because their budget documentation didn’t include that FY22 under the spending level where it did get an increase. Do they actually want to cut that institute by 10%? No. So it kind of complicated things, and there was a little bit of grumbling about that. Made it a bit harder. But beyond that, in terms of priorities, there’s a lot in the budget request that continued ongoing themes from this administration from last year.

Trapani: Yeah. I heard that using the CR numbers instead of the omnibus numbers was driving people crazy all over town, as they tried to put together comparisons and understand exactly what the administration was asking for, versus what they actually got, versus what had been in the previous budget. Can you talk a little bit about what some of those priority areas are in terms of R&D?

Hourihan: Yeah, I can. There’s a few I can mention. I think the number one priority for this administration—arguably anyway—the number one priority is probably climate science and clean energy. So on the climate side, there are lots of federal programs that deal with various aspects of understanding climate change, understanding its impacts on various ecosystems.You have the NASA Earth Science program. You have climate programs, climate science programs within the US Geological Survey. You have earth modeling programs within DOE. Of course, NOAA climate research is another one, and lots of programs like that. A lot of those would see big plus-ups, and bigger plus-ups than other parts of the budget. You also have, on the clean energy front, you have offices like the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, within the Department of Energy. It’s the flagship efficiency and renewables R&D office in government. They’d get a big increase of nearly 25%, as I recall. You have the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. One of these DARPA-style, dynamic, high-risk, highly innovative offices for energy, R&D would get a big increase.

So energy and climate, certainly a big one, maybe the biggest. Relatedly, you also have a lot of manufacturing programs that would see plus-ups, including DOE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office, certain manufacturing programs within the Department of Commerce, and some other places. Again, manufacturing R&D, manufacturing innovation has been one of those areas dealing with the supply chain, strengthening the domestic supply chain. These are all areas that the administration has been focused on from the beginning. We’d see plus-ups there.

Maybe two other areas, just to quickly mention, would be pandemic preparedness. And that would take the form of an $82 billion proposal for pandemic preparedness funding across Health and Human Services. From a research perspective, maybe most notable would be $12 billion of that would go towards NIH.

And then STEM education, again, much like energy and climate, lots of different programs throughout government. Many of those, not all of them, but many of them would see plus-ups as well. So those would be the, I think, big priorities for the administration. And again, these are echoes of what we saw at last year’s budget request as well.

Trapani: Thank you for that. Yeah, that’s really helpful. In addition to that, I wanted to ask you about two specific areas where there’s been a lot of attention lately. One is NSFs new Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, which they formally established just last month, and I think it’s the first time that NSF has set up a new directorate in about 30 years. The other one is ARPA-H, which is a new agency. It’s been in a lot of discussion. And for the moment, it turns out, I think as a compromise, they’re going to have it sit inside NIH, but report directly to the HHS secretary. And the thinking there is that they could use the administrative support of NIH without necessarily going through the same processes. What is the budget calling for in the cases of those two?

Hourihan: So I’ll start with ARPA-H first, or ARPA Health first. So they would receive $5 billion in the budget request, but that’s been a point of controversy for NIH. And again, this is a product perhaps of not having those omnibus numbers in place when some of these other numbers were baked in. NIH would get a big increase from a top-line perspective in the FY23 request, but almost the entirety of that increase would be eaten up by ARPA Health and by the aforementioned pandemic preparedness funding. Take those out and NIH would actually get—core NIH—would actually get less than a 1% increase from FY22. So certainly some controversy there.

And then on the NSF side and the new technology directorate… it’s kind of an interesting story. As you said, they recently established—authorizers and appropriators seemed to like it, seemed to want to fund it, but in the FY22 omnibus, NSF only got about a 4% increase,I believe, less than $300 million increase in the Research and Related Activities account, which funds the technology directorate. And appropriators also directed—while they provided some other plus-ups for some other programs, and climate, and energy, and quantum, and AI, and some other areas, and they also directed core NSF generally, and support for the core disciplines generally, to be at least flat, or no less than flat, from FY21 levels. So, most likely, we don’t actually know what the new technology directorate, what kind of funding it will get FY22, but there’s very, very little available. So having said all that, the administration in FY23 proposed about a $500 million increase for those existing programs in this new technology directorate, right? There are a handful that predate this new directorate, they’re now under the new directorate umbrella.It would include I-Corps, it would include the Convergence Accelerator program, a couple others. I think SBIR is in there now. So, for those existing programs, plus new programs, the administration would propose, all together, an increase of $500 million. That’s about what they proposed last year as well. In both cases, it’s a request for this new directorate between [$800 million] and $900 million.

So what happens with that going forward? Authorizers have teed up legislation through America COMPETES and through the USICA bill in the Senate (it’s the US Innovation and Competition Act); both of these would authorize much larger increases for this new tech directorate, over a billion dollars in the FY23 fiscal year—much larger than the administration has even asked for, let alone what appropriators were able to give in the most recent cycle.

So what actually happens there, we’ll have to see what happens. I think it’s unfortunate, certainly, that the final appropriation for NSF in the omnibus was so small and so limited, and probably limits their ability to do a whole lot of new things, because there’s a lot of promise in that new directorate. So we’ll have to see how things play out.

Trapani: So I want to pull back just a little bit. We’ll get back to the budget, but I wanted to ask you: you direct AAAS’s (the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s) R&D Budget and Policy Program, which has been around for quite a while. There’s always a lot of interest in science policy careers, and your career seems like an interesting one. And the work of your program seems very interesting. I was wondering if you could just say some more about what it is that you do, and maybe a little bit about how you came to do it?

Hourihan: So we often say that the program that I run, the R&D Budget and Policy Program, we often say it’s here to be an information resource at its heart. So it means a lot of different things. One of the things we’ve been doing the last few years is putting together interactive dashboards to help people follow along with the appropriations process, or, more recently, we’ve put together a dashboard on earmarks. So you can actually go in, this resource that we set up allows you to go in and find out which science-related or STEM education-related earmarks have been put in spending bills, what has been proposed, and all that.

We try to provide those kinds of resources to help people understand what’s happening. We often will do reports on long-term trends in federal R&D, so what’s up, what’s down, how the US compares with other international leaders including China and Korea and Germany. One of the most useful things we do, I think, and certainly the thing that seems to be highly valued by policymakers, is that, trying to be a source of information on comparative R&D spending. I give a lot of talks on both the “what’s happening in the R&D budget” front, as well as just breaking down the appropriations process and the budget process for audiences who aren’t experts on this stuff—grad students or fellows, and people like that. And then there’s some media work as well, dealing with reporters and helping them understand what’s happening and what’s changing.

The program itself has been around since the ’70s, and we try to make a useful contribution to the debate, helping people understand what’s happening, and help lay the ground level for “what are the facts on the ground” regarding R&D and R&D expenditures.

And in terms of how I got here: I actually started out as a journalist. My undergrad degree is in journalism. I’m not a scientist or an engineer. There’s an alternate reality somewhere where the print journalism industry is much healthier and I’m a rumpled ink stain somewhere in some mid-sized American city covering planning commission meetings, which would be A-OK by me. I actually really enjoy that super local, super wonky, boring policy stuff.

But it wasn’t meant to be. And after I’d been in DC for a few years doing communications work, I actually went back to grad school for a master’s in science and tech policy. While in grad school, I was an intern at AAAS in—it’s now called the Office of Government Relations, which is where I work now. The program I run is within the Office of Government Relations, but I interned there, working alongside many of the people I still work with today. And that was the introduction, really, both the organization to me, and also me to the organization.

And a couple of years later, when this position opened up, I applied, and they remembered me and the work I had done, and that’s how I got my foot in the door. And I’m not the only one, either. There’s actually several people, over the years, who have worked at AAAS, or currently work at AAAS, who started out as interns or science and tech policy fellows, which is another program I’m sure many of your listeners are aware of, but it seems to be a pretty good way to get one’s foot in the door at AAAS.

Trapani: So that’s a testament to the power of internships. And I’ve seen that at other places I’ve been too, interns are remembered—interns that do a good job are remembered—and sometimes they come back later. And now you run a program and you’ve been there for 10 years. Was that your first encounter with the federal budget? Because I think one of the services that you provide is taking these documents and these processes that are fairly incomprehensible to most people, even people who work in DC have a lot of trouble really understanding it and extracting it. How did you get up to speed on that?

Hourihan: Over an extended period of time, really. I mean, my first exposure with the federal budget, at a professional level—my first job in DC was at an ocean conservation nonprofit and an advocacy organization. I dealt with the budget a little bit there, budget for NOAA and things like that, we’d draft statements and things when a new budget came out. It wasn’t a huge part of my job, but that was my first introduction.

And then in grad school, I actually had a class on the federal budget and budget policy and public budgeting in general. That was at George Mason University, the professor was Siona Listokin, and it was actually a really great class. I loved it. I thought it was really interesting. I find the budget process, and the idea that you’re marrying big picture debates that fall on ideological lines, or very much driven by values, with like super wonky, detailed spreadsheets and just all the boring stuff that happens within the federal budget. I actually think it’s a really fascinating process.

Trapani: Yeah. That’s really, really interesting. You got a little bit of an introduction, and it turned into becoming a deep expert on it over time. So to turn back to this year’s budget, of course the president’s request is just the first part of the process, and now the Hill will get to work on the FY23 budget. What is your sense of how this request will be received on the Hill?

Hourihan: It’s kind of predictable when a new budget comes out, the opposing party declares it dead on arrival and has loads of criticisms over the amounts of spending, or the priorities, and it’s failure to address public issues X, Y, and Z. On the other hand, the president’s own party comes out speaking positively, embraces it, and then moves on, and everybody kind of moves on and gets to the hard work of making appropriations decisions. This year, I think hasn’t really been any different than that. If anything, my sense is that the response has been almost a little bit muted. Also probably has something to do with the fact that it’s just more difficult than usual to parse this budget, to understand what it’s really asking for, and which numbers to focus on versus which to ignore.

So in the long run, we’ll have to see what happens. I mean, it’s something that not a lot of people really understand, but one of the reasons that FY22 appropriations weren’t quite as big for a lot of science agencies as one might have hoped is because the overall discretionary spending limits were much smaller than the White House certainly had wanted, and that Democrats had been going for on the non-defense side.

Trapani: Yeah, that’s really interesting. There are so many variables at play, and I’ve even read about the role that elections may play this time, too. But separate from that, and tell me if this is not your impression, but I feel like one of the things that we’ve seen over the last 10 years or more is a breakdown of the process, from start to finish.

I can remember—I think I can remember a time when the president’s budget request always came at the same time in mid-February. It was accompanied by coordinated agency briefings.I joined a higher education association in 2010, and they had a very regimented process that they ran every year: getting those numbers and processing them, and getting them out to their members super-duper quickly, because everybody wanted them right away because they were treated as something very, very important.

And now, it seems like slowly, the process has kind of broken apart from there. We see late budgets, we see skinny budgets, we see budgets that don’t come, or they come late, or they have different amounts of detail. And then on the other side, I don’t know how long it’s been since we’ve had Congress actually pass a budget before the beginning of the fiscal year. Right? As we were talking about, they wrapped up FY22 in March, just a few weeks before FY23 was introduced.

So we’re living in a world of continuing resolutions, occasional funding breaks, which have really detrimental effects for science. What is your perspective on, first of all, whether that’s an accurate representation, but then why has this happened? And then I think even bigger, would there be any way to fix it? Or is this what we are doomed to do as a budget process from here on forward?

Hourihan: So first let me just say that, so the last year—it’s a fun bit of trivia I often bring up when I’m talking to folks about the budget—but the last year Congress had what’s called “regular order,” which is getting all their funding done on time before their deadline, was 1996. So, long time indeed. The issue is, and I don’t know that there’s any big secret: there really aren’t strong incentives for Congress to get their work done on time, especially in the age of political polarization. The parties have moved farther apart on some of these big fiscal challenges, and I think just the incentives line up that it’s easier for the parties to take harder lines on overall spending and deficits and some of these issues, and delay key votes and delay action.

Political incentives are there to be tougher about this kind of thing than they are to compromise, to get together, to get their work done on time, because there are downsides to not having budgets finished on time. From a science agency perspective, agencies can’t pursue new projects if they’re under a CR. The uncertainty makes things a lot harder if you’re an agency trying to plan out your year, plan out new or existing programs. It may mean delaying certain expenditures and construction, or repairs or acquisition of equipment or materials. So there’s a lot of downsides to it, but politically, the negatives that come from operating under CRs, and having agencies always spending half of every year, or a quarter of every year, under a CR is that the downsides aren’t sufficient political motivation or incentive to get something done on time.

What do we do about it? I mean, really the question is, what do we do about polarization? That I don’t know. I’m not a political scientist, and there’s lots of other people who probably have better ideas than me on how to address that. One idea that has been floated for many years, and actually going back, I mean, I think the first congressional hearing on this was something like 40 years ago, and that is operating under a biennial budget cycle, or two year budget cycle. Over many years, there’s been proposals and legislation introduced that would shift government from a one year annual appropriation cycle to a two year cycle.

There are different ways you can do it, but it’s gotten quite a bit of support from different legislators over the years. One of the arguments in favor of it would be that because Congress just seems totally incapable of getting their work done on time, if you’re on a two year cycle, you’re still dealing with all the same stuff, CRs and debates over fiscal clips and all that, but you’re only dealing with it half as often, right? You get to take a year off from it every other year, which provides a little more stability. And there’s reasons why maybe this isn’t such a great idea. There’s arguments for and against it. And lately, the pandemic has put this topic on the back burner, but before the pandemic, there had been a fair number of legislators who thought this was a pretty good idea. Whether it happens, we’ll have to see, but that is one idea that often comes up.

Trapani: One of the things that concerns me, as someone who’s in this space, about this situation is, despite all the talk about the need for a stronger, more inclusive STEM workforce and international competitiveness, every time this happens, it puts this pipeline in jeopardy. Because you have postdocs, you have graduate students who are relying on grant money which is being withheld or delayed, and there’s no alternative for a lot of those people, and where do they go? And I know that would take a while to bubble up to being a political concern of maybe sufficient magnitude. But it’s one of the things that seems like a bit of a disconnect in this whole process.

Hourihan: Yeah. That’s a great point, and you’re absolutely right. I mean, just generally speaking, when legislators hear from young scientists or students, that often can be a really useful and important source of input and influence on legislators. And clearly I think there should be much more attention focused on the downsides of CRs, and the uncertainty, from a human capital perspective, when grants, assistantships, or different forms of federal support, when that gets cut off because of this fiscal uncertainty. Those are absolutely stories we should be telling, and I’d certainly encourage anybody who’s dealt with that to try to share their story in ways that they feel comfortable with, because those are all really important anecdotes, and the kinds of things that may get legislators or their staff to pay a little more attention.

Trapani: That’s a great point. We should never forget that budgets affect people. Thank you, Matt, for sharing your insights on the FY23 budget, and what they can mean for federal science programs. And thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of The Ongoing Transformation. To find more of Matt’s work, follow him on Twitter @MattHourihan and visit his program’s website at aaas.org/rd.

Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcast. Email us at [email protected] with any comments or suggestions. If you enjoy conversations like this one, visit us at issues.org and consider subscribing to our magazine. I’m Josh Trapani, senior editor of Issues in Science and Technology. Thank you for joining us.

Opening Up to Open Science

The modern Hippocratic Oath outlines ethical standards that physicians worldwide swear to uphold. “I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk,” one of its tenets reads, “and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.”

But what form, exactly, should knowledge-sharing take? In the practice of modern science, knowledge in most scientific disciplines is generally shared through peer-reviewed publications at the end of a project. Although publication is both expected and incentivized—it plays a key role in career advancement, for example—many scientists do not take the extra step of sharing data, detailed methods, or code, making it more difficult for others to replicate, verify, and build on their results. Even beyond that, professional science today is full of personal and institutional incentives to hold information closely to retain a competitive advantage.

This way of sharing science has some benefits: peer review, for example, helps to ensure (even if it never guarantees) scientific integrity and prevent inadvertent misuse of data or code. But the status quo also comes with clear costs: it creates barriers (in the form of publication paywalls), slows the pace of innovation, and limits the impact of research. Fast science is increasingly necessary, and with good reason. Technology has not only improved the speed at which science is carried out, but many of the problems scientists study, from climate change to COVID-19, demand urgency. Whether modeling the behavior of wildfires or developing a vaccine, the need for scientists to work together and share knowledge has never been greater. In this environment, the rapid dissemination of knowledge is critical; closed, siloed knowledge slows progress to a degree society cannot afford. Imagine the consequences today if, as in the 2003 SARS disease outbreak, the task of sequencing genomes still took months and tools for labs to share the results openly online didn’t exist. Today’s challenges require scientists to adapt and better recognize, facilitate, and reward collaboration.

Open science is a path toward a collaborative culture that, enabled by a range of technologies, empowers the open sharing of data, information, and knowledge within the scientific community and the wider public to accelerate scientific research and understanding. Yet despite its benefits, open science has not been widely embraced. One approach to advance open science adoption has been to ask scientists to take an oath or pledge that includes open science as a tenet; several of these pledges have been proposed (in 1999, 2013, 2017, and 2018), but none have been broadly put in practice. We believe this is because the commitment was focused on individual scientists rather than the framework and communities they work within. Open science pledges can only work where organizations are already fully committed and supportive. Even if an individual researcher wants to openly share knowledge, institutional policies and reward systems create barriers.

Although some institutions recognize the opportunity that open science provides for attracting a more diverse workforce and increasing collaborative networks and innovation, others continue to equate the sharing of knowledge with relinquishing a competitive advantage. This manifests in a range of institutional policies and workforce incentives. Some institutions are limited by what publication expenses they can cover for making articles open access, while those with large computer clusters may prevent their researchers from working in more open, collaborative, cloud-based platforms. Outdated institutional intellectual property policies often conflict directly with open-source software contributions and software development, and awards commonly recognize individuals rather than teams. From small annoyances to larger career impacts, institutional policies create friction that inhibits participation in open science.

This tension between individual and institutional incentives and the progress of science must be recognized and resolved in a manner that contributes to solving the great challenges of today and the future. To change the culture, researchers must do more than take a pledge; they must change the game—the structures, the policies, and the criteria for success. In a word, open science must be institutionalized.

Open science is better science

A powerful open science story can be found in the World Climate Research Programme’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), established in 1995. Before CMIP, with the internet in its infancy, climate model results were scattered around the world and difficult to access and use. CMIP inspired 40 modeling groups and about 1,000 researchers to collaborate on advancing modeling techniques and setting guidelines for how and where to share results openly. That simple step led to an unexpected transformation: as more people were able to access the data, the community expanded, and more groups contributed data to CMIP. More people asking questions and pointing out issues in their results helped drive improvements. In its assessment reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relied on research publications using CMIP data to assess climate change. As a platform, CMIP enabled thousands of scientists to work together, self-correct their work, and create further ways to collaborate—a virtuous circle that attracted more scientists and more data, and increased the speed and usefulness of the work.

While the increased volume of data was a sign of success, over time the community began to struggle to provide access to all its data. The Pangeo open science community stepped in to help. Established in 2016 when a group of scientists began trying to address barriers to big-data oceanography, Pangeo was designed as an inclusive, open community of scientists and software developers to create an ecosystem where anyone could raise an idea or issue, with community members organically teaming up to contribute their unique skills. Pangeo scientists and software developers worked together to create a cloud-optimized version of the 800-terabyte dataset as well as open-source tools to help with analyses. Today, instead of spending three to six months downloading the CMIP data to a local computer and years developing analyses, model data are freely available on the cloud, and anyone can examine them in just a few minutes.

Open science communities such as these exist in many different areas of science, and they are helping science move faster and work better. But the type of knowledge-sharing and collaboration exemplified by CMIP and Pangeo must become standard, which requires institutionalizing these practices.

Taking open science mainstream

Even as individual scientists and groups decide to be more open, they could still face institutional roadblocks. Organizations must therefore incentivize researchers to build inclusive, diverse research groups that facilitate true interdisciplinary work, remove roadblocks to collaboration, and foster an environment where knowledge is shared and scientists are trained with open science as a core principle.

Some communities are already working toward these goals, including the Fort Lauderdale Agreement in biomedicine and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge. There has also been a flurry of recent recommendations on how to advance open science from the National Academies—which has developed a toolkit, software, and a vision for institutional design—and from UNESCO. These reports lay out clear guidelines for institutions, universities, funding agencies, and scientists to improve how science is done and expand who can participate (e.g., through open-access publications).

The most important message from these reports is that all parts of science, from individual researchers to universities and funding agencies, need to coordinate their efforts to ensure that early adopters aren’t jeopardizing their careers by joining the open science community. The whole enterprise has to change to truly realize the full benefits of open science. Creating this level of institutional adoption also requires updating policies, providing training, and recognizing and rewarding collaborative science.

Update policies to support open science. Agencies and universities must update their software and data release policies so that scientists can work together quickly, effectively, and without fear. Institutions are too often mired in slow, cumbersome approval procedures that are incompatible with open software and collaborative science practices. For instance, while working at a NASA center, scientist Jane Rigby wanted to release a simple software tool to the public, a process, she laments, that “took five months and 38 pages of paperwork—to release 217 lines of nonsensitive code.”

Although careful approval is necessary at some institutions and in some fields where sensitive material is handled, these roadblocks should be restricted to projects that deal with that specific information. A tiered or more nuanced approach to risk is needed. For basic science, openness should be the default, especially as agencies and universities work to update disclosure requirements to account for national security risks.

Updating such policies to speed software and data releases will expand contributions to open-source software libraries; increase sharing of code so that results are more easily replicated and extended; and open new pathways to collaborations. The American Geophysical Union is working with its communities to move the norms and culture toward sharing data and code as the default. As societies and publishers move toward more open science requirements, they are nudging institutions to adjust their policies. Once these policies have been changed, they need to be clearly and loudly communicated within organizations—otherwise the effects of the previous policies will linger, making scientists fear the paperwork of participating in open science.

Provide training in open science. Although data science programs are increasingly being added to university programs and curricula, computational training should occur in tandem with training in best practices for open science. Understanding how to work in an open science framework is a skill that scientists and project managers need to acquire.

A global effort to facilitate scientists’ move to more open practices requires investments in learning resources that teach how to practice open science, build and participate in inclusive teams, and acquire basic data science skills and knowledge. Grassroots efforts—Google Groups, posts on Medium, Jupyter notebooks—have been filling this gap but could be built on, updated, and extended by teams with representation from all stakeholders and communities. Such resources should be freely and openly available online to be available to teachers and working groups.

Training in open science should begin at the undergraduate level and be offered to scientists and managers throughout all career stages. At every level, researchers should understand how to do open science, and funding agencies should support these efforts and tailor them to their communities. Asking scientists to change involves work, but such work can be incentivized through curated tutorials with badges or credits, and participation in open science should be rewarded by funding decisions.

Recognize and reward collaborative open science. We believe the hero scientist is a myth and that all science requires teamwork, even as the current incentive structure continues to reward individual achievements almost exclusively. This has remained the case despite the achievements of team science, as described, for example, in a 2015 report from the National Research Council: “Team science has led to scientific breakthroughs that would not otherwise have been possible, such as the discovery of the transistor effect, the development of antiretroviral medications to control AIDS, and confirmation of the existence of dark matter.”

To truly recognize and value teamwork, the scientific reward system needs to be reconfigured from the ground up. Individual researchers must not suffer career consequences for openly sharing data, and funding agencies, hiring managers, institutions, and researchers need to consider everyone on a team as an actor. Only by moving toward a more inclusive, team-oriented model will science develop voices with different perspectives to challenge established beliefs and develop creative new answers.

Funding agencies should also review proposals with an eye toward their ultimate community benefits and open science activities. University performance evaluations, for their part, need to integrate documentation of community-building efforts and open science activities—including in hiring and tenure review—and assess how their policies should be revised. Professional society awards and fellowships could include open science in evaluations, and awards could recognize teams rather than individuals.

Sustaining momentum for change

In September 2021, the National Academies Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science released toolkit elements designed to help organizations ensure that their incentive systems encourage open science. In October 2021, NASA announced a new $40 million, five-year mission, Transform to Open Science (TOPS), and declared 2023 as the Year of Open Science. TOPS’ Year of Open Science jumpstarts a suite of coordinated activities designed to increase the understanding and adoption of open science principles and techniques, accelerate major scientific discoveries, and broaden participation by historically excluded communities in science. In November 2021, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science was formally adopted by 193 member countries and includes priority areas of actions to advance open science.

This momentum must be sustained. Now that major organizations have provided valuable road maps, institutions, agencies, and research centers must be convinced to follow them. Action at the individual and team level can only go so far toward solving what is truly a systemic shortcoming. It is only through changing institutional frameworks that open knowledge, data, software, and resources can become the rule rather than the exception. Moving to open, inclusive, community-driven science is a powerful way to rebuild trust with the public while also accelerating scientific discovery.

Religious Action and Climate Change

Episode 12: Chasing Connections in Climate Action

There is scientific consensus on climate change and its human cause, but how to understand and address global warming remains a divided topic in American life. Art and religion are two lenses through which new perspectives on climate change might be discovered. In this episode, we talk to photographer James Balog and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe about how their work creates connections across different ways of knowing, such as art, science, or religion. How can religious and artistic practices—along with a better understanding of influences such as personal geographies and socioeconomic backgrounds—inform meaningful ways to confront climate change?

Resources

• Visit Katharine Hayhoe’s website for more of her work and links to her social media
• Visit James Balog’s website and the Earth Vision institute
• Extreme Ice Survey: James’s innovative, long-term photography project to give a visual voice to the planet’s changing ecosystems
• Read Katharine’s new book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World
• Watch Katherine’s Global Weirding: Climate, Politics, and Religion videos on Youtube
• Read James’s new book, The Human Element: A Time Capsule from the Anthropocene
• Watch James’s movies, The Human Element and Chasing Ice

Transcript

JD Talasek: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a publication of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University. We feature new essays most days on our website at issues.org. I’m JD Talasek, director of Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences, and on this episode, we’re in conversation with photographer James Balog and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. James has been capturing images of our relationship with the natural world for nearly four decades, and Katharine is a chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy and a professor at Texas Tech University. Both James and Katharine have been thinking about the impacts of climate change for a long time, from very different perspectives. Katherine and James, welcome. I’m glad you’re with us.

James Balog: Thank you. Good morning.

Katharine Hayhoe: Thank you for having us.

Talasek: James, could you tell us about how you became a photographer, and what inspired you to create the Earth Vision Institute to use art and science to help us think about our impact on the environment?

Balog: Well for me, all of this comes out of an entire lifetime of being interested in the outdoors. Ever since I was a little boy, that was my main area of interest. I had to go to school and do all the things we do in school, but it was really being outside that animated me and got my spirit stirred. And that led into a lot of mountaineering all around the world, that led into studying earth science and doing a master’s degree at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. And that really is the foundation that eventually, several decades later, took me into the Extreme Ice Survey. But in between those late-70s works in science and then the Extreme Ice Survey which began in 2005, I did a lot of projects that were around endangered wildlife, around America’s forests. I went to a lot of different glacial areas and photographed them from a scenic standpoint for different assignments for National Geographic or Smithsonian or Outside or whoever the client was.

And I resisted going into photographing climate change for a while because I couldn’t figure out how to do it in an interesting way. On projects where I spent years doing my own, essentially personal production of the work, I want to look for something creative, something novel, something that takes you to a new level of perception. I couldn’t figure out how to do it, and one day I got an assignment from the New Yorker to go to Iceland and photograph glaciers. That was in 2005. That assignment led to an idea that I then took to National Geographic, and that led to an assignment that took me to the Extreme Ice Survey. That was 15 years ago, and here we are still talking about ice and receding glaciers and climate change.

Talasek: Well, I think it’s interesting because as you mentioned you started down this path studying science as a scientist, so you come with this informed knowledge. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about the ice survey, because it’s not every day that we meet an artist whose work is actually cited and quoted in research papers and used within the science community as much as yours.

Balog: The Extreme Ice Survey has been a project of looking at receding glaciers. One of the essential pieces of the project has been a series of time-lapse cameras that were semi-permanently installed around the termini of various glaciers around the world. The sites included positions in Alaska, Glacier National Park in Montana, Greenland, Iceland, Austria, South Georgia, Antarctica, and Nepal. And at any one time, we have had as many as 43 cameras out. The network has shrunken quite a bit because of funding issues, staffing issues, and frankly, it’s been a long time that I’ve been working on this and it’s time to do some other things as well. But there are still some cameras in the field. And what the cameras have been doing is photographing every half hour around the clock as long as it’s daylight, making a record of how the landscape is changing.

At the same time, there’s a lot of sites where I’ve revisited these places every few years, essentially put my camera in the same position—whether it’s up in the air in a helicopter or down on the ground where my old tripod holes were—and I look at one frame versus another frame three years later, versus another frame three years after that, how the landscape has changed. The total archive of imagery right now is somewhere pushing 2 million pictures. We’re still in the process of editing, cleaning up, consolidating, cataloging, but that seems to be where the numbers are going. It’s about 2 million frames between the timelapses and the conventional landscape studies.

Talasek: That is really incredible, James. So Katharine, let’s hear from you. How did you find yourself as a climate scientist and living in Texas too, I might add—that’s an interesting place to be working?

Hayhoe: And I’m a scientist who does a lot of communication as well. So, a bit of a similar arc to James there, starting with the science, but then recognizing that when we’re talking about connecting it to people’s lives, there’s more to it than just data and facts. We have to engage people’s hearts, not just their brains, and often we can do that through art, through imagery, through storytelling, through connecting things to people in places that people are familiar with, or places and people that they aren’t, and really evoking that sort of more emotional response. So I began in science, my dad was a science teacher. So I grew up thinking that science was the coolest thing you could possibly study. I mean, who wouldn’t want to know why grass is green or why the sky is blue or why polar bears have black skin?

So, I was studying astronomy and physics as an undergraduate student. I was preparing to go to graduate school to study astrophysics. I was already doing research with professors looking at variable stars and galaxy clustering around quasars, and I needed an extra class to finish my breadth requirements. I looked around and there was a brand new class on climate change over in the geography department. I thought well, that looks interesting, why not take it? Fateful thoughts. So I did, and I was completely shocked because growing up in Canada I learned about climate change and I learned about it as a package of environmental issues—so biodiversity loss, air pollution, deforestation, climate change—issues that are serious and bad, issues that environmentalists care about and environmentalists try to fix and the rest of us wish them well (and watch their documentaries).

That’s the way I thought about climate change. But in taking the class, I was completely shocked to find out first of all, how urgent climate change is. It is already here now, it is not a future issue. But what really changed my perspective was learning that climate change is not only an environmental issue, which of course it is, but climate change is truly an everything issue. As the US military now calls it, climate change is a “threat multiplier.” So it takes issues of access to food and water, it takes our infrastructure and our economy and our national security, it takes our health, and most important of all, it takes issues of poverty and justice and suffering and hunger and inequality, and it exacerbates or magnifies them to the point where we can’t fix anything that’s wrong with this world and with our society if we leave climate change out of the picture. The way I think about it is climate change is not a separate bucket in a row of issues that we care about and we’re trying to work on; climate change is the whole in every single other bucket.

So, no matter who you are, no matter what you care about, no matter what you’re working on, if you’re trying to fix something, anything, we are not going to be able to fix that if we leave climate change out of the picture. That’s when I decided to become a climate scientist, and in my naivete as a student I thought, “Well, it’s so urgent, surely we’ll fix it soon, and then I can go back to studying galaxies.” That was a very long time ago.

I think at this point, if we fixed it and I could quit, I would probably open a yarn store, something that has nothing to do with science and policy and politics. But that’s how I became a climate scientist. And I decided to do policy-relevant research because I knew that people needed to make real-life decisions today that was informed by science, in terms of preparing for the impacts we can no longer avoid, in terms of the motivation for reducing our emissions.

I led the first study for California, and I think the first study in all of North America, that implicitly compared the difference between a higher versus a lower carbon future. And of course, what is that difference? The difference is our choices. It’s human agency that will determine whether our future looks like this or this. But how do we know what choices to make if we don’t know what we’re going to avoid, what the benefits are of action today? So that’s why I became am a climate scientist, that’s why I focus so much of my work on helping decisionmakers make real-life decisions.

But then I moved to Texas. I didn’t move here on my own, my husband is an academic as well and as you know it’s very difficult to find positions at the same university. So he was actually an endowed professor at the University of Notre Dame and I was working at a research center at University of Chicago and doing some consulting and doing some other projects, and we really wanted to find a place where we could both be at the same university. So, it turns out that a university in Texas wanted him and they were willing to make me an offer to get him. That’s how I ended up the only climate scientist within a 250-mile radius in the second most conservative city in the whole United States.

And who knew, but it turned out that that was the perfect place to be a climate scientist if you really wanted to understand first of all, how climate change is affecting people (Texas is the most vulnerable state in the country to climate impacts), if you really want to understand, second of all, the potential for clean energy (Texas is number one in wind and number two in solar of all states in the US), and even most importantly, if you really wanted to understand why people are rejecting 200 years of basic physics because of their politics, living in West Texas is the perfect place to be. And so that’s why I do just as much communication as I do science these days. And that’s why I’ve so immersed myself in this social science of how we as humans interact with information. Because it isn’t enough to just give people facts and maps of Greenland and Antarctica and tell them how much the ice sheets are melting; people need to understand why that matters, how it affects them personally, and most importantly what they themselves can do about it.

So, that’s why my latest project was to write a book called Saving Us—not saving the planet, because the planet will be orbiting the sun long after we’re gone. But quite literally, it’s us, we are the ones on the chopping block. Our civilization is most at risk.

Balog: What city in Texas are you based in, the university?

Hayhoe: So, the university is Texas Tech. Thank you, James, I totally forgot that part of the story. It’s Texas Tech University and it is in the city of Lubbock, Texas. If anybody’s curious, the most conservative city in the US, according to the survey I’m quoting was, Provo, Utah, home to Brigham Young University, and I have spoken there too, and the second is Lubbock.

Balog: Well, I’ve been down in that country quite a bit and I picture you being pictured by the residents of that area as being some sort of hippy, liberal, crazy, wiggy outlier. You’re not working within the main intellectual framework that that part of the world works within. So is that good for you? You’ve already touched on that, it gives you a chance to understand what the other folks are thinking about, but does it make it problematic?

Hayhoe: It absolutely does and first of all, may I say how much I like the adjective “wiggy.” I think I’m going to have to use that in the future. Although, this hair is all my own, as of today. Yes, so moving there was really interesting because I’m a Canadian, and I already had moved to a different country which was the United States—but then I felt like I moved to a different country, which was Texas. Especially West Texas. Not Austin, not big metropolises like the DFW area or Houston.

You really hit the nail on the head, James; it is not easy at all. In fact, I get hate mail on a daily basis. Daily. Handwritten letters, typed letters, phone calls, attacks on social media.I have a rule: I don’t read the comment sections online, and I have another rule: I don’t answer my phone when I don’t know who’s calling. Because unfortunately, there is a lot of opposition, and I see it almost like as a mission to show people that who they already are is already the perfect person to care, and if they don’t think they care, it’s simply because they haven’t connected the values they already have—which might not be the same values as me, but in some cases they might be the same values as me—they haven’t connected what they already care about to how climate change is already affecting them today and how climate solutions truly can make it better.

So it isn’t easy and there’s a lot of pushback, and in a way I feel like the pushback I get is proportional to how effective the message is. Because if I wasn’t making people uncomfortable, they wouldn’t be pushing back at me like that. So it is hard and it is challenging and I definitely feel like I’ve been pushing a boulder uphill for a very long time, but the way I feel is this, if we can change in Texas, I think we can change anywhere. And I am seeing changes in Texas today because of all the hands that are on that boulder. It is definitely not just mine; there are many hands in Texas on that boulder. And if we can change here, I think that could be a catalyst that changes a lot of other places as well, so that’s why it’s worth it.

Talasek: Katharine, you identify as a person of faith as well, and so it seems that you’re in a unique position to speak with and to understand—a lot of times we talk about these things as absolutes, and I was born in Texas too, so I understand and agree with the way that it’s described, but it’s also more. There’s delightful people who really do want to make a better place; we just may not agree on how to do this.

So, I’m wondering for both of you, how do we resolve and how do we bring these different ways of knowing and understanding—whether it’s religious or science or art or just our backgrounds—how do we come together? Because I love what you said earlier, Katharine, that climate change is not a science thing, it’s an everything thing. It’s an issue in all areas and science is an important tool through which we can address that, but so is art and so is religion and so is our belief structures. So I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about maybe how do you talk to other people of faith about something that is not assumed to be congruent with that?

Hayhoe: I love that you brought that up because that’s exactly what I feel like I’ve learned. We often assume that if people are doing things or saying things that we don’t agree with, that they lack morals or they lack ethics. We often judge people very severely if we see them saying or doing things that we don’t agree with. But when we spend the time to actually get to know people, we realize that in fact they do have very strongly held morals and ethics, and we might agree with all or most or even all of those, but they’re just drawing different conclusions based on the culture that we live in, the ideology that we’re part of, the life experience that we have, the people that we’re surrounded with, the thought leaders who we listen to. And so when we are able to begin our conversations with something we agree on and we have in common, and when we’re able to then connect the dots to how that affects the issue that we’re talking about, that conversation starts and it ends, often, in a very different place than if we begin by actively disagreeing with each other.

For me, a big part of what I connect with people over is things that I share. So obviously I’m a scientist, so I connect with people who love science and want to talk about science. I also live in Texas, so just connecting over the shared experience of where we live in Texas, and the events that we have lived through, and how climate change is loading the weather dice against us, making many of our extremes even more extreme. I’m a mom, and so I connect with people over shared love of our children and shared concern for their future, and that’s part of what led me to help create an organization called Science Moms, that’s for moms who are worried about climate change—which 83% of moms in the US are worried about climate change, and that certainly crosses partisan lines.

But even more deeply, the reason I’m a climate scientist is because I’m a Christian. Because I truly believe that we are not only to be responsible for every living thing on this planet, as it says at the very beginning of the Bible, but also that we are to be recognized by our love for others. And how loving is it to put our fingers in our ears, metaphorically speaking, and close our eyes and say, “I don’t hear, I don’t see the suffering that is already happening around this world, that is already affecting the poorest and most marginalized people right here in Texas, as well as in Southeast Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa, and that is being amplified and exacerbated and magnified by a changing climate”?

Often I do have conversations with people, and that’s part of I think, James, what leads to some cognitive dissonance—which is good. Cognitive dissonance is good. I think of it as we’re always trying to pigeonhole people, So it’s like you meet someone or you hear them say something and you might not like it, so you immediately want to stick that pigeon in a hole so you can categorize, label, and dismiss. Well, so I think of myself as a pigeon, and they’re like, here’s this liberal, hippy dippy, wiggy climate scientist, like you just said, I’m just going to stick her in that hole—that she probably comes from UC Berkeley, she probably has never had to work a hard day’s work in her life, she does not understand what life is like in the middle of the country—and so they’re padding right toward that stereotypical hole to stick the pigeon in. And then I say something like, I’m a Christian, I’m actually a pastor’s wife, I grew up as a missionary kid and the reason I care about climate change is because I’m a Christian.

They’re like, wait a second, that pigeon can’t go in that hole, it doesn’t fit in that hole. So then people have to listen to you for a little bit longer to figure out where to put you, and the longer they listen to you, the more opportunity there is to find those points of connection, those shared values, and maybe they might end up having to create a completely different hole because this pigeon does not fit in any of the holes they thought it did, and that hole might be a lot closer to what they care about than the hole they were going to put you in, which is way over there.

Balog: I want to talk a little bit about questions of belief, because I think that word and everything it implies is so much at the heart of this issue. And this question of belief versus thinking came to me when I was on a flight about 10 years ago, and I was reading a big stack of science papers that I had photocopied. I was coming back from Greenland or someplace, and the man opposite me on the aisle looked over at me and said, “What are you reading?” And I told him it was a stack of papers about climate change. And he said, “Do you believe in that?”—as if to say, what kind of an idiot are you? And I said, “No, I think climate change is happening based on the information that’s in these papers.”

And he said, “Oh, that’s interesting. Well, I don’t believe in climate change, but I live in Minnesota, and we’ve been having tornadoes up there, and we never had tornadoes up there before, and we have these floods now. And so I’ve been thinking that maybe climate change is real.” I said “Well, exactly the point.”

So, what I’ve come to is to express, in an awful lot of the public presentations I do, that we need to get away from the notion of, “Do you believe or not believe in climate change it?” Many, many, many people, I would say a significant majority of people, still use the word belief. “I believe in climate change,” “I don’t believe in climate change,” when they speak about these things. I think it’s critical that we get away from the notion of belief.

My impression and my semantics are that belief is a really good thing to apply to issues that are unknowable, that are spiritual, that are about things we can never know about. But at its highest level, belief is to deal with things of eternity. We don’t know where we came from, we don’t know where we’re going, so we believe in X or Y or Z as a way of giving shape and substance and meaning to the unknowable. But climate and the changing environmental system in the Anthropocene, I don’t think calls for a belief system, I believe it calls for a thought system. Thought, to me, is a more important way, thinking is a more important way of looking at where we are than belief is. And I’m curious to hear you parse that out.

Hayhoe: Well, it’s a podcast so you can’t see how widely I’m smiling, but I love what you said so much, because you’re the only person who I’ve heard parse that out so clearly, other than what I do myself. I have given entire presentations, at Christian colleges or chapel services, where I literally begin by stating “I do not believe in climate change.”

Balog: That’s what I’ve done too! Actually, I’ve had a number of shows where I started with that on the stage, and people are back in their seats like where are we? What’s going on? I thought this guy was talking about climate.

Hayhoe: Exactly. So, what I go on to do and I definitely take a theological perspective on this for people who would identify as Christian. And that’s so important, starting wherever people are at and continuing with that frame of how they think about things. And so being somebody who is from that environment, I then say “Well, let’s look at the definition of what ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ is.”

In the Bible, there’s actually a whole chapter in the book of Hebrews that talks about what faith is, and faith and belief are very similar. It says faith is the evidence of things that we hope for, of matters or proof of things that are not seen. And so I say, “You know, if I was back then, 2,000 years ago, I would’ve jogged the author’s elbow and I would’ve said, ‘Hey, you forgot the second half!’ So, faith is the evidence of what we hope for and we do not see, science is the evidence of what is here now, what we do see. That’s what science is.”

And so I go through the, “I don’t believe that climate is changing. I think it is based on here is the evidence. I don’t believe that it’s humans. We’ve looked at every other thing that there is out there, and we know that according to natural factors, we should be getting gradually cooler right now. And I don’t believe that it’s bad, I know it’s bad, and here’s why I know it’s bad. Here’s what’s happening right here where we live that’s affecting you today”—like that man from Minnesota—“and you can identify with that. But what I believe is I believe that we need to fix it as soon as possible, because my motivation for wanting to fix it comes from my heart.

It comes from really recognizing that, again, the most marginalized peoples, right here in the US as well as on the other side of the world, are being most affected by it. And I believe that we humans have responsibility over every living thing on this earth. And I really believe at all of us—no matter who we are, no matter how we identify—we truly want to, deep down, care for others and have compassion for others and have empathy for others. And when we help people, when we’re part of a solution, we feel better. And part of the reason why we see so much resistance is because people don’t see how they can be part of a solution in a way that’s consistent and compatible with their values. So I end with what is my favorite verse in the Bible, which is a verse that talks about our emotions.

It says, God has not given you a spirit of fear. So when we experience fear, which we so often do, right?—on both ends of the spectrum. So, there’s fear of what’s going to happen if we don’t fix climate change, which is a completely justified fear, in my opinion. And then, on the other hand, denial is based in fear. It’s fear of solutions that’s motivating denial; it’s not rejection of basic physics we’ve known for 200 years. If it was, they would also reject airplanes and stoves and fridges, but they don’t—they only reject climate science. That’s how we know it isn’t the science; they’re just afraid of what it would look like if we fixed it.

So it says, God has not given you a spirit of fear, but rather a spirit of power, which means agency, the ability to act, which is the opposite of what fear does, it paralyzes you, a spirit of love, to think about others and care for others, and then this is my favorite part: a sound mind, to make good decisions based on the information that science gives you. And is that not what climate change is? We can tackle climate change, being empowered, having agency to act, caring for others, and with a sound mind that’s informed by science.

I have a question I would love to ask James, which is: for many years now, I have used your movie Chasing Ice in my classes as required viewing. And because I’m curious, I always ask my students what part of this module, in terms of the lectures, the readings, the activities, or the viewings, really stood out to you? And I have to say that most times, they pick a scene from Chasing Ice.

Often it’s when the glacier falls into the ocean, just crashes into the ocean, but sometimes it’s different parts of that movie, and they talk about how it wasn’t just the facts and figures and statistics about what is happening in Greenland or Antarctica or anywhere else that hit them—it was just that visual, visceral image that hit them right in the chest and made them realize that this is real and this matters and this is incredibly powerful. I imagine that what I’m saying is not new to you, I imagine you’ve heard this from many people. So what do you feel like you’ve learned from that process? And you mentioned that you’re actually making Chasing Ice 2 now, what did you learn from that process that you’re now putting into practice today in terms of really engaging people and helping them understand how real this is, how urgent it is, and why it matters so much?

Balog: Well, it’s amazing, you and I are circling around the same issues in very similar ways. It’s really great to be with you having this conversation. You mentioned a little while ago about the relationship between faith and science—I think about the relationship art and science. I’ve come to realize that science is accessing one part of our cognitive processes, let’s call it the left side of your brain, supposedly, that’s quantitative, rational response to measurable things, whereas art is supposedly the right side of your brain responding to subjective, intuitive, emotional experience, the images themselves, but the stories that go with them provide a human connection that those dry numbers simply don’t.

Many years ago, I heard an anthropologist on the radio speaking about how the signal characteristics of the human mind are that we look for patterns and we seek stories about those patterns.Well, science is the patterns, and art is basically the expression of the stories about those patterns. So when those two things come together, light bulbs go off, but the key part of it, the secret sauce, is that the imagery and looking at guys risking their lives in these dangerous places for the sake of collecting the story really touches people. And I’ve heard over and over again at that one part in Chasing Ice where I’ve wrecked my knee and I’m on crutches out there at midnight shooting icebergs really affects people—because so many people have had injuries and so many people have been beaten down psychologically the way I was, and I just refused to let myself not get a good picture from that trip. And people appreciate that somebody put their neck on the block for that. It’s human, in other words, and they enjoy that.

And in the meeting that we’re having on Monday, one of the debates will be this broader thing we talked about earlier that all these different issues of environmental change are connected with climate, and they’re connected with the human condition. And it’s vitally important that we understand things in that holistic fashion. I use a term that I think I am the one who invented, I use the term “human tectonics.” We know about the concept of plate tectonics, that the earth is broken into these rock slabs and they’re crashing into each other and it makes earthquakes and volcanoes and whatever, but I propose that humanity is its own form of tectonic force, and so I use the word human tectonics to express the collective accumulated weight of all of these things that we do. Our population multiplied by our needs for survival multiplied by our desires for affluence and multiplied by our technologies. You multiply all at stuff together, that’s an incredible amount of force on the biological system. Maybe not on the continental plates, but certainly on the biological system and on the air and the water and the weather.

Hayhoe: I love that phrase and I love that concept and I’ve never heard that phrase before, so I will attribute it to you from now on, because so many people speak very simplistically about solutions. They say, the problem is too many people. Just get rid of the people and we’ll fix the problem. Well okay, if you got rid of all humans on the planet, sure, that would fix the problem. But as a human myself, I would like to see my children continue into the future and grandchildren and so on. But the way you put it is clearly, human population part of it—but there’s so many other plates at work, to where we know now that the 3.5 billion poorest people on the planet have produced 7% of our carbon emissions. So, if there was a Marvel-movie-Thanos-type movement where Thanos snapped his magic glove and removed half the people on the planet, if it was the poorest half of the people on the planet, it wouldn’t even make the tiniest dent in our climate problem.

And that’s because of all those other tectonic plates that you talked about. It’s the way our population interacts with technology, the economy, resource use, and more, and that’s why climate solutions, I think, are so powerful. Because good climate solutions, and of course there’s bad ones too, but good climate solutions, they have benefits here and now today—like cleaning up air, cleaning up our water, providing habitat, preventing zoonosis, efficiency, which saves us money, improving the quality of our food, increasing our health. They have all these win, win, win, win, wins, and then they help with climate change too. It’s almost like an afterthought, like yeah, they’ll help with climate change too. But there’s so many good things to do today that we have every reason to do.

It’s incredibly frustrating when we see the obstacles to sensible actions today that give us healthier lives. Just knowing that 10 million people around the world every year die prematurely from air pollution from burning fossil fuels—that’s double the number of COVID, but it happens every year from air pollution. You can probably hear the anger in my voice when I speak about this, like how can we live in a world where that happens? It isn’t because the number of people, it’s because of those tectonic plates or those different pressure points, we have to learn how to live a different way because it will give us better lives, it will give us healthier lives, it will give us happier lives—oh, and it will fix climate change too.

Balog: Katharine, you come across as the happiest, most optimistic, angry person I’ve ever seen.

Hayhoe: I love that. I think I might have to make an embroidery of that and put it on my wall.

Talasek: This has been the most wonderful conversation and I hate to be the one to have to bring it to a close. It’s just been a joy to hear both of you talk from different perspectives and yet find commonality in the things that I heard that are so important, so beneficial to how we think about each other and how we communicate with each other to move towards positive change.

Thank you to everyone for joining us for this episode of The Ongoing Transformation, and thank you to our guests, James Balog and Katharine Hayhoe. To learn more about their work, visit their websites at katharinehayhoe.com or earthvisioninstitute.org. James’s latest book is called The Human Element and his latest movie shares the same name. Katharine’s latest book is Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, and you can find her on all social media platforms.

Find links to these resources and more in our show notes. Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with any comments or suggestions. If you enjoy conversations like this one, visit us at issues.org and consider subscribing to our magazine. I’m JD Talasek, director of Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences. Thanks for joining us.

Innovating for Equity

Protecting the Integrity of Federal Science

In May 2020 Rick Bright, the scientist directing the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority at the Department of Health and Human Services, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging he faced retaliation. That retaliation, the complaint claimed, came in the form of being transferred to the National Institutes of Health after he “insisted on scientifically-vetted proposals, and … pushed for a more aggressive agency response to COVID-19.”

That same month, the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published an internal survey from 2018 about the agency’s scientific integrity policy. Although a majority of EPA employees said they were satisfied overall with the implementation of the policy, 59% were dissatisfied with the agency’s culture of scientific integrity. In addition, of those employees with a basis to judge, 21% (368) expressed concern over reporting of their research findings without alteration or suppression. Nearly 400 employees said they had experienced, but did not report, potential violations of the policy due to fear of retaliation and the belief that reporting would make no difference. They were not outliers: 42% of the EPA employees surveyed who were involved in science said they would not feel comfortable reporting a potential violation of scientific integrity.

Although breaches of scientific integrity during the Trump administration were widely reported, concerns about the issue go beyond one administration, or one party. In response to concerns about scientific integrity under the George W. Bush administration, the Obama administration directed attention to the issue. But also under Obama, a judge ruled that actions by then secretary of health and human services Kathleen Sebelius to revoke a decision by the Food and Drug Administration on contraception access was “politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent.” And integrity concerns at EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics and Office of Pesticide Programs have continued in the current administration.

President Biden’s Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking, which he signed during his first week in office, builds on the last time that federal science integrity received presidential attention. The Obama administration undertook similar efforts, beginning with a 2009 presidential memorandum assigning John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), with “ensuring the highest level of integrity in all aspects of the executive branch’s involvement with scientific and technological processes.” Holdren followed up in 2010 with some general guidance but left the details up to the agencies.   

President Biden’s memorandum is broader in scope and more detailed. It includes more agencies and applies to all federal employees and contractors. The president directed agencies to designate a scientific integrity official (SIO) to oversee implementation and improvement of scientific integrity policies. The memo also directed OSTP to convene a government-wide Task Force on Scientific Integrity to conduct the first ever comprehensive assessment of scientific integrity policy and practices in the federal government, and to develop a framework for regular assessment and iterative improvement of agency scientific integrity policies and practices.

Although the task force’s January 2022 report, “Protecting the Integrity of Government Science,” overall constitutes a good start in addressing its charge, it does not go far enough in critical areas. Moreover, the task force still needs to develop a framework, and OSTP recently put out a request for information to receive input on what should be included.

There are several steps the administration should further take to strengthen federal scientific integrity, and the framework—if developed properly—can be a valuable tool. In the long run, federal science will only be protected if senior leaders are held accountable and all employees feel comfortable filing reports of possible violations. However, for federal scientific integrity policies and practices to really work, rather than being dependent on the attitude and commitment of each successive administration, they must have the full force of law behind them.

A Close Look at “Protecting the Integrity of Government Science”

Members of the Task Force on Scientific Integrity were given three main tasks. First, they were told to assess whether existing scientific integrity policies in federal agencies prevented political interference. Second, they were asked to analyze any instances in which scientific integrity policies have not been followed or enforced. And third, they were tasked with identifying effective policies and practices that protect scientists’ independence. The number of agencies included was vast, as evidenced by the task force’s membership: 57 representatives from 29 agencies.

The task force report’s findings on the first task—assessing whether existing scientific integrity policies in federal agencies prevent political interference—highlight the need for agencies to strengthen their scientific integrity policies to deter political interference. The report thoroughly and comprehensively documents the types of scientific integrity problems that can occur in conducting scientific research, managing science, communicating research results, and making agency policy decisions. After reviewing the full range of problems, the task force concluded that although agencies were well equipped to deal with research misconduct and security breaches resulting from the actions of individual scientists, they lacked procedures to address scientific integrity violations by senior leaders.

Regarding the second objective of analyzing instances in which scientific integrity policies were not followed or enforced, the report falls far short. The task force focused on only two examples, writing that it was “neither charged nor equipped to address new allegations of scientific integrity violations.” The report does not include any of the highly publicized examples of political interference in communicating the public health threats from COVID-19 and climate change. Instead it highlights political interference in the Hurricane Dorian forecast by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and in the decennial census questions by the Census Bureau. By focusing only on these two examples, the report fails to convey the magnitude or seriousness of instances when science was censored, manipulated, and hindered. Compiling and analyzing a complete record of scientific integrity violations is a critical step toward recommending procedures that will prevent such violations from happening in the future. Appendix C of the report provides an excellent list of the ways scientific integrity policies can be violated, and the task force should have highlighted at least one example for each type of violation.  

For the final task of identifying effective policies and practices, although the task force provided general recommendations, these do not go far enough in specifying either a minimally acceptable scientific integrity policy or appropriate enforcement of such a policy. The report rightly states that a one-size-fits-all scientific integrity policy won’t work: policies must be tailored to the specific mission of each agency while adhering to common principles. This is true, but there are certainly minimum standards that could be laid out. With regard to enforcement, the report recommends that “violations of scientific integrity be considered on par with violations of government ethics, with comparable consequences,” but it provides no details on the consequences or who should decide or implement those consequences. And there are no recommendations on how to address violations from senior leaders, even though the task force report identifies this as the most critical problem. 

Further Strengthening Federal Scientific Integrity

After the report, the task force’s next step will be to develop a framework that must, according to the presidential memorandum, “inform and support the regular assessment and iterative improvement of agency scientific-integrity policies and practices, to support the Director and OSTP in ensuring that agencies adhere to the principles of scientific integrity.” The framework represents an opportunity to flesh out the details—in particular, to strike the appropriate balance between government-wide and agency-specific definitions and policies, and to include enforcement policies with teeth.

Defining terms is key to ensuring common understanding, and the federal government needs to adopt a standard definition of scientific integrity. The task force, in its report, noted this, stating that “some, but not all, agencies provide definitions of scientific integrity in their scientific integrity policies. These definitions vary across agencies and would benefit from greater harmonization. The Task Force intends to produce a definition of scientific integrity for adoption by Federal agencies as it develops a framework for assessing scientific integrity policies.”

The task force should consider adopting the definition that the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) uses in its model scientific integrity policy for agencies, universities, and other research institutions. The CSLDF defines scientific integrity as “a condition that exists when scientific research and publication of the results thereof adheres to the accepted standards, conduct, and professional values of the relevant scientific community. Adherence to these standards is designed, insofar as possible, to ensure objectivity, clarity, reproducibility, and utility of science and scholarly activities and assessments and to prevent bias, fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, outside interference, censorship, and inadequate procedural and information security.” 

To go along with this standard definition, the framework should present a default scientific integrity policy that would be in effect until an agency replaced it with its own customized policy approved by OSTP. This default policy should include the minimum elements of an approvable policy: the standardized scientific integrity definition, a process for reporting problems to someone with the authority to investigate, a range of specific consequences for those found in violation of the policy, and identification of who should decide those consequences.

This default policy should also apply to all interagency work done by groups, such as the US Global Change Research Program, to ensure consistency for participating agencies. To promote development of customized policies, the framework should describe how to enhance these minimum elements to develop exemplary scientific integrity policies and practices. The task force should identify best practices from current agency policies as recommended enhancements and commit to a periodic evaluation of their effectiveness.

The other critical area is enforcement. Scientific integrity violations are a misuse of critical, costly government resources. They can disrupt policymaking and could ultimately harm people. The framework should specify serious consequences for scientific integrity violations. Assigning roles and responsibilities is key—for reporting as well as for who investigates, decides, and implements the consequences for each type of violation. The framework should clearly delineate the responsibilities of the SIO, chief science officers, inspectors general, general counsels, and agency managers.

The framework should also explain how whistleblower protections can be used for scientific integrity complaints if an agency’s scientific integrity process fails to investigate and remedy allegations of violations. The Whistleblower Protection Act protects federal employees who disclose illegal activities or instances of fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government. Violations of scientific integrity involving intimidation or coercion, obstruction and interference, and immunity from consequences are also violations of the act. Before scientific integrity policies were established, employees could only rely on whistleblower protections to address such violations, and many feared taking on that protracted legal process. Agencies must make their scientific integrity policies an effective alternative to the whistleblower route. This requires developing a culture that encourages employees to report possible violations without fear of retaliation. It also requires an expeditious process to investigate those reports and approaches for correcting the scientific record and holding accountable those who knowingly violated scientific integrity policies. 

One particularly difficult area is allegations of scientific integrity violations by high level officials, which should be handled outside the agency involved. The framework should call for the establishment of an interagency Scientific Integrity Council formed by all the SIOs to assess, investigate, and adjudicate such allegations.

Although a federal scientific integrity framework is a necessary step forward, even if it is perfectly designed, its implementation will depend on the commitment of the executive branch. In the long run, federal science will only be protected if policies and practices are backed up by the full force of law. One approach that could give these policies permanent standing is H.R.849, the Scientific Integrity Act, which would require agencies that fund, conduct, or oversee scientific research to adopt and enforce scientific integrity policies with specific protections for scientists. Until minimum elements of a scientific integrity policy become law, the American public must rely on each successive administration to ensure that federal decisionmaking is based on rigorous and independent research that is free from suppression, manipulation, and other interference.

Episode 11: Can Bureaucracy Build a Climate Revolution?

Between 2009 and 2019, India brought electricity to half a billion citizens, and then turned around and presided over a grid where power from wind and solar became cheaper than electricity from coal in 2018. India’s carbon-heavy government ministries have shown a surprising ability to engineer deep change. Kartikeya Singh, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, talks with us about what role these ministries—which employ upwards of 20 million people—could play in creating an energy sector that is ecologically and economically sustainable.

Recommended reading

• Kartikeya Singh, “Bureaucracies for the Better,” Issues in Science and Technology 38, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 57–63

Transcript

Lisa Margonelli: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a publication of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University, and we feature new essays most days on our website at issues.org. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief of Issues. On this episode, we talk to Kartikeya Singh, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has spent his career engaging with India’s energy concerns. In his winter 2022 Issues essay, “Bureaucracies for the Better,” Singh details how government institutions could be redesigned to combat climate change.

Kartikeya, thank you very much for speaking with me today. To start off, I’d like to ask you about this weird question that we’re going to start on: can bureaucracies start a climate revolution? I mean, we tend to think about climate revolutions coming through technology, entrepreneurs, money, big policy changes—and you’ve come up with this answer of bureaucracy.

Kartikeya Singh: Yes. And based on my experience and observation and engagement with bureaucracy in a couple of different countries, but one in particular, a place that I was born, India, I would like to believe seeing the arc of progress that has been made in terms of the revolution in the power sector in particular, that the bureaucracy can really be behind a climate revolution.

Margonelli: So let me dive a little bit into that. We’re talking about India, which is a huge country, and we’re also talking about how climate policy is not one size fits all. There are certain opportunities and certain possibilities in different places. And what you suggest is that there is a particular way of approaching the issues in India, and that grows out of your experience, because you’ve been going there as an academic and as a policy person and as a thinker for at least 15 years as an adult. Tell me what you’ve seen. Tell me about this revolution that you’ve already seen in India.

Singh: Yeah, and it has, I think in the last 15 years, the country from a climate and energy standpoint has been transformed. So when I first went as part of a fellowship to Delhi—to very naively think I was going to solve India’s climate and energy problems and write the policies—I was very quickly told that in India I needed to focus on the question of energy poverty, and how could a country like India address climate change when 500 million people at that time didn’t have access to electricity.

And rightly so, India in the international climate negotiations that we hear about on an annual basis that have been going on for decades, India was advocating for the right to emit more carbon to provide more cheap electricity powered by firing coal to this unelectrified population. And I think at that time when I went and did surveys in villages and started to really ask about, OK, what are the alternatives to providing access to electricity, not through a grid, which was much smaller at that time in its reach—what could be some of the solutions? And so I really started to focus on the decentralized renewable energy solutions that had been being tested out for many years prior, I would say probably about 10 years prior, there had been many experiments and deployment efforts. And by “these kinds of technologies,” I mean solar home lighting systems, a panel, couple light bulbs in a house to provide basic lighting, other solutions like taking a small stream and attaching a generating unit to it and generating electricity from a small hydro unit, or taking biogas that people could generate at their house if they had cows—allow the cow manure to ferment and feed it water and stuff. So figuring out how people were interacting with this.

Margonelli: You’re talking right now about the before times. You’re talking about, like, 2006. The thinking then was solar lanterns—moving from kerosene lanterns to solar lanterns. It was moving from maybe animal-powered processes to something that had a small hydro power process. Where are we now? I want to give people the sense of this revolution that happens. So where are we now? What happened to the 500 million people with no grid?

Singh: Yeah. So a lot happened to the 500 million people with no grid. In that backdrop of trying to deploy smaller systems, the government amped up its efforts and its grants and programs to extend the grid aggressively out to literally every home. So around 2018 is when the government managed to get wires and poles out to every home, to basically electrify every single household.

And what I was trying to say before is that even the smaller home lighting systems that had barely brought about integrating LED bulbs—so India was not really a place where LED bulbs existed, today the cost of LED bulbs by over 80% have decreased in a country like India. And hundreds of millions of these bulbs are everywhere because of new institutions designed by the government to get this energy efficient lighting solution out everywhere.

So that was on the power sector side, the conversation changed dramatically. And then people wonder, do we even need these small solutions anymore? I think of course we can get to it, but the conversation’s coming back full circle to the value of decentralized, renewable energy. But that transformation has been one of the starkest, getting electricity to nearly every household.

The other thing that I witnessed, I was participant in a journey, 2,500 miles across the country in an electric vehicle that was manufactured by an electric vehicle manufacturer back in 2009. That manufacturer was since acquired by a larger conglomerate called Mahindra. And we were trying to demonstrate that this indigenously manufactured, lithium ion battery powered Indian vehicle could have a role to play in India’s mobility solutions at a time when electricity was not available everywhere. And today we’re talking about government policies that are fully backing an electric vehicle revolution for the country. We’re talking about banning the internal combustion engine in the not-too-distant future and all kinds of incentives for the deployment of electric vehicles—not just four wheelers, but three wheelers and two wheelers.

So I would say that the India of 15 years ago and the India of today has made tremendous progress in terms of the direction it’s headed, and we haven’t even touched on the fact that on the renewable side, the equation has really been turned on its head in terms of which kind of energy will dominate India’s power sector.

Margonelli: I want to get to that. So first, hooking 500 million people up to the grid and thinking about a future of electric vehicles is not trivial. I mean, it is changing the whole concept of energy poverty. It is making things available to people, other sorts of income streams. It’s potentially transformative on many levels, from political, to inside the home, to India’s position in the world. And that alone would enough. But let’s talk a little bit about this thing that happened in 2017 when renewables suddenly became cheaper than coal. So 70% of India’s grid right now is coal. Is that correct?

Singh: Yeah. And in 2017, India was really hitting its stride in terms of designing auctions led by state government agencies for the bulk procurement of power from solar through long-term contracts. And one state in particular, the state of Madhya Pradesh, that’s in the heart of India, really managed to crack this code and get all kinds of relevant financing institutions from international financial institutions, as well as structure the project in a way that would drive down the cost and the bidding that was done by the developers to an incredible low. And since then, India hasn’t really looked back. And just, I think, last year, the latest of auction for solar brought the cost of solar power down to another tremendous low.

So we have reached a point in India where the cost of new renewable energy is certainly cheaper than the cost of new coal-fired power plants. And the projections are such that coupled with the declining costs of energy storage technologies and the combination of packaging these technologies together, renewable energy plus storage will be cheaper than existing coal-fired power plants. So we’ve come a long way, I think, in terms of which type of electron is going to really be the dominant force in the electrify-India future, if you will.

Margonelli: So there’s a couple of interesting things here that you’re talking about, and I want to reflect them back. And one is India accomplished this incredible thing of getting the cost of renewable energy beneath coal-fired electricity. And that set off a chain reaction because if your power sector is all set up to use coal, and they’re all dependent upon coal and someone can suddenly undercut them in cost, then what starts to happen?

Singh: Yeah. Then if you are having too many institutions that are locked into the coal value chain and they are being financed by public financial institutions, in many cases, for more and more projects, then you’re end up left holding a bag of stranded assets, potentially really bad debt, that you need to figure out what to do with. And there’s a lot of people that are at work in trying to solve this problem. But one of the things is that the planning process, I think, maybe didn’t envision the rate at which both business innovation and technological innovation pace would pick up to really allow renewables to start undercutting the cost of power generated by coal. And so now the challenge is really ensuring that this coal-centered economy can really start to pivot and be a part of the energy transition story and the green electrons that we really want to bring on.

And I think that’s critical for a place like India, where so much of the coal value chain is state owned and not just privately owned, because they are responsible for the welfare of entire communities where they operate.

Margonelli: How many people are we talking about?

Singh: We’re talking about somewhere between 20 to 30 million people, according to some estimates, that are dependent on the coal-based economy in India. And not just that. I mean, coal is really embedded as part of government revenues for the central government, as well as certain states. And I think this is the case in other parts of the world as well, where part of your state budget comes from revenues from extraction of certain mineral wealth. That’s a hole in their budget that they’re going to have to try and find a way to fill.

And then coal is transported by the Indian Railways, which is a national carrier, and it’s a part of their business plan. It’s something that’s burned by the National Thermal Power Corporation. And it’s certainly something that’s controlled and mined by the largest [government]-owned coal mining agency, Coal India Limited. But these institutions are really important to the economy. So I think their business plans will need to reorient to be a part of the growth story as the cleaner source of electricity really starts to dominate.

Margonelli: Now we’ve got all the balls in the air here. We’ve got 500 million new people online, on the grid. You’ve got that renewable energy is suddenly cheaper than coal. You’ve got 30 million people tied to the economy of coal, including all of these different structures. The railroads are also dependent upon coal. You’ve got all of these things moving. You’ve got India also moving to take a center role in dealing with climate change and reducing carbon emissions. And you also have India moving to take a central role in providing solar solutions to other parts of the country. Tell me how bureaucracy can help get this thing moving in the right direction.

Singh: Yeah, well, I think we need to understand a little bit about the bureaucratic structure of India. And there are far smarter people than I that have studied the Indian bureaucracy. I have had the privilege of engaging with a lot of bureaucrats in the Indian administrative system, which is one of the oldest bureaucracies in the world.

Margonelli: How far back does it go?

Singh: Definitely to the time of the British Empire. So it was definitely a part of the system that the British brought to help govern a pretty large area across South Asia, I would say. So a system that was meant from the district level to the capital to have people be able to track processes, to tax people, to deliver government services. And it’s obviously evolved since that time period and since the partition of the subcontinent into several countries. But it is very much adept at trying to deliver those services. So the system is in place and once given a mission, it can accomplish its tasks.

So I think we’ve come to a point where the system in itself can be given new mandates, a new guiding star to really help better leverage the resources that the country is trying to deploy towards this new target, which the prime minister of India certainly this last winter, in December of last year, announced a net zero target for India. So what does this mean? This now means that the machinery is going to have to figure out a way to rethink its mandates to help meet that target.

Now, the challenge is that the energy governing agencies in the country—there are many, right. They are bifurcated, focused on the power sector, which is controlled both by the central government as well as state governments, so state bureaucracies matter there. But when it comes to oil and gas, that’s controlled by the central government. When it comes to nuclear energy, that’s controlled by the central government. And by power, I also include renewables in that. And the drive to electrify everyone, there was a tremendous opportunity now to deploy electrons of any type to every corner of the country. But at the same time, there’s a mandate to create a gas-based economy, to get gas to every home for cleaner cooking fuel. But I think that there is possibly a way to combine these efforts, now when the electron can do so much more, to really bring some of these agencies together and align towards a vision of a decarbonized energy service delivery agenda.

Margonelli: So bureaucracies are known for being big and lumbering and they have a not-fully-earned reputation in the United States for being slow on the uptake. And I wonder how do you get a bureaucracy to do this? Do you just aim a bureaucracy at a new target and tell them to go for it and they do it?

Singh: Yeah. It’s easier to birth new bureaucratic institutions than it is to kill them or wind them down or completely overnight rewrite their mandate. So I think there has to be a gliding path to reorienting them. And I think this is not specific to India, I think this is around the world. This is in the intergovernmental processes. It’s easier to birth new intergovernmental organizations too than to wind them down. So I think it requires some political will of course. You can go down that route to really mandate a pathway to transition.

But I mean, where do we go? 50 years from now, will there be a need for a Ministry of Coal, not just in India, but anywhere? What happens to that? Do we know what that looks like? Do we know how we slowly meld that into something else? And I would say that there you need to examine the mandates and roles of the different departments in a ministry and think through how you can start to tweak them. The mining section of a Ministry of Coal being reoriented towards critical minerals mining, which is so important to the building blocks of renewable energy, to a department that focuses on just transitions, which is really the topic that everybody is starting to coalesce on.

Margonelli: Explain what that means, just transitions.

Singh: What that really means, and I think this is what I’m trying to say about even these energy institutions and bureaucracies, we’re talking about changing mandates and technologies. And we’re not talking about leaving behind the people, even of these ministries, right. They’re part of a process. And so as the energy transition happens, from fossil fuels to renewable sources, there will be new jobs created and people who will get them. There will inevitably be people who will be left behind, who may, if we don’t plan for it, really be in dire straits and the entire communities that depend on them.

And we see this in the West all the time. I think the classic examples is West Virginia is one key geography here. I’m here in Europe. We’re talking about it in Germany and Poland and Bulgaria and places. So India is at this place where publicly run institutions that are responsible for the welfare of people that are wedded to the fossil fuel value chain have the time and space and the resources to begin funneling capital towards transitioning their own business models and whatever the communities might need to do next.

And I think that’s what a just transition is, is making sure that those people aren’t left behind. And I do think it’s a little bit easier to do with fossil fuel institutions that are state run, because it’s not private sector. So the shareholder is the government and it’s taxpayers and the voting public. They can actually take care of pension plans in a way that I would argue bankruptcy is not the same pathway for a state-owned enterprise as it is for a privately owned one.

Margonelli: I want to jump ahead a little bit, and talk about taking very creative mandates so that the coal company, for example, is no longer earning their keep by finding coal and digging it up, but perhaps by cleaning up previous industrial accidents or areas that have been heavily mined. How do you start to redirect this all in a much more futuristic direction? And I think you have done a lot of creative thinking about these mandates. It’d be very cross-cutting, affect poverty, affect industrialization, affect pollution. Let’s talk a little bit about that creative mandate.

Singh: Well, let’s take the example of an environmental pollution watchdog going around to make sure that industries are compliant in whatever they’re releasing, is it clean and up to standards, the emissions into the air. One typically thinks of a bureaucratic system that’s in the environmental pollution monitoring space as going around to check, to offer citations, to force implementation or closure. Instead, imagine an institution that is able to bulk procure pollution control technologies. And when they’re going to a firm that is making whatever it is making and seeing whether or not they are emitting pollutants—rather than a citation, making sure that everybody has the pollution control technology to at least mitigate for that particular externality, so that we’re not actually generating economic activity at the expense of the environment.

Margonelli: Lay that out a little bit more. So the inspector goes to the ice cream factory and right now the inspector is likely to say, “Hey, you’re shut down. You are dumping something into the water.” So then the ice cream factory shuts down, people lose their jobs, who knows what happens, provided everything works. But then in your scenario, you’re saying the ice cream inspector goes, he looks at the factory. He says, “Look, we have a contract to get scrubbers for your water. We will get those ice cream particles or whatever’s in there out before they go back in the water. Plus, we are also supporting this industry of scrubbers, which also employs other people.” So what you’re saying is that it’s this virtuous circle of environmental protection and jobs.

Singh: Yeah. I imagine then you are potentially creating an ecosystem where you have new firms setting up to not only manufacture, but also innovate upon that incredible amounts of new kinds of pollutant control technologies.

So I think in coming with solutions rather than citations, that whole conversation is changed. And similarly, if a mandate is to get fossil gas into every household for cooking, and by the way, you have to import large amounts of that because you don’t have it for any particular country, why not make it that you are basically ensuring that you can provide cooking energy solutions, and at the same time make the country more energy secure by reducing imports. What does that do to the mandate? In what ways could a bureaucracy start to rethink its own mandate within those confines, rather than, “We will just dig it up, lay pipelines and find more ways to pump those molecules through the pipelines to every home”? Which the price fluctuations on that fossil gas will continue to be a political headache time and again, and subsidies will have to be found from some part of the budget to make sure people are kept happy so that they can cook their food.

Margonelli: And so this is moving to electric food cooking it runs on, that uses this grid and uses all these different sources. So a word I’ve heard you use is “intrapreneurs,” and that is bureaucrats as creative as an entrepreneur. Tell me about your experiences with this. Tell me why you believe in an entrepreneur.

Singh: I have had a short stint in a bureaucratic structure myself, and I know what it’s like to be a part of a process, work things up a chain, make sure that bilateral or multilateral policies are in line with what we want domestically. And I think that you get used to a process, but I think there are windows where you can then think about ways to improve the process. And particularly, depending on at what level of governance and the chain of bureaucracy you are in, my experience has been in conversation that, particularly in federal systems, where states have quite a bit of power, there is ample space for innovative new things to be tested. And for those ideas to end up becoming national policy. And we’ve seen this in the US, we’ve seen it in India, other parts of the world where such structures exist.

And so I think as we are at the cusp of more clean energy, more disruptive technology being deployed, it’s at the subnational level, where the money is being deployed, where the technologies are being deployed, that there is scope, if given the space, to individuals who are willing to put their ideas out there to be able to test these waters and to innovate new types of policy design for sure, and that happens, but even think through how the institutions at the state level can be recast.

Margonelli: It’s interesting because the story that you’re telling about bureaucracies, we tend to think it’s top down, but you’re also saying it’s bottom up, and that the experiences from the states or the towns or counties can percolate up while also directives can come down and support can come down. And you can end up with this meshing of the different levels that you don’t necessarily get with higher level climate policy. And in fact, part of what you’re talking about is getting the whole bureaucracy engaged in this process.

Singh: Yeah. And I think the ways that I have seen it play out, and I think I’ll use a very specific example, if there’s time. I’ve traveled to an Indian state of Assam. It’s in India’s northeast. I’ve been there a couple times. There’s the state-based arm of India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy called the Assam Energy Development Agency. I’ve gone there to have a meeting outside the agency, where the relics of the agency’s past, right, from an era when the states and the central government was really trying to socialize the importance of renewable energy and educate the masses about what it was and the real government push behind it, right? So there’s a huge demo vehicle with a solar hot water heater, a solar panel, a wind turbine not at scale, and solar lights and things like that.

It is in this moment in time when I visited, I think it was in 2014, tires were deflated. It was rusted and dusty. Outside the agency was also a government-run solar shop, again, meant to help people buy subsidized solar products, cobwebbed, dust covered. Went inside and the flurry of activity in this place was unbelievable. I mean, a passionate group of committed staff talking about floatable tanks, which is basically how to leverage ponds and water bodies as a means to deploy solar panels on top of them to generate electricity in places where you don’t have much land, but maybe you’re living in a water world situation, which is Assam. And calling up a local entrepreneur who is busy setting up an electric vehicle charging business for a booming three wheeler automotive market, that three-wheelers are used to basically transport goods and people and are cheap, and anybody can get in the business of maybe putting together a vehicle or buying a vehicle and recuperating their costs to transport goods and people. And so it was a completely different thing happening on the inside than the shell, which was the outside.

So the technologies had changed. The times have changed. The business models had changed. The people were still the same and they were one step ahead, if not several, in trying to make sure that they were mastering the changing energy transition around them. And I think that’s what we’re talking about here.

Margonelli: That’s such an interesting thing of really, really figuring out how to deploy the people who understand how all the little parts fit together. And for floatable tanks you really need to understand your local farmers and your local ponds and solar. And you can’t fly in and come up with a wacky idea like floatable tanks and expect it to work. Can you say a little bit about what kind of retraining would be necessary for the bureaucrats? What sorts of process funding process changes would be necessary?

Singh: Yeah, well, listen, I think that I’d be curious to know if such models have been tried by different governments. One way that I have seen it play out in India more recently is giving a certain level of autonomy to bureaucrats to approve projects above raising the threshold of budget line item that a bureaucrat might be able to approve a project for, or use discretionary funds for. I think that would be a really interesting way to allow bureaucracy or those in leadership positions in bureaucracy to be able to experiment with new ideas.

I think exchanges with innovative institutions or think tanks or labs as it may be within the country or outside the country to get exposure is a way to get one out of a system they’re so entrenched in and where resources are not there. I mean, I think that’s where funding could be made that is more nimble to allow that flexibility for creating flexible ministries, like transition ministry even. Can we pilot this out, this new initiative, park a team somewhere together whose time will be covered if we’re afraid to use taxpayer dollars to do it?

And I think those are solutions that are worth trying where governments open to it, of course, because we don’t know what kinds of solutions might emerge from such a process. So those are some of the ways that I think could be tried, and maybe are already being tried by certain governments somewhere.

Margonelli: I wanted to ask you a little bit. We tend to frame the policies as having winners and losers. And I think another way of framing it is that everyone has burdens to bear in the global climate regime. And one of the things I thought was very interesting about this thinking through the bureaucracy is that you start to see that there are opportunities to share, you start to see the problem in an entirely new way. So talk to me a little bit about that. How did this start to open up for you as you started thinking about it? And how can it be applied to elsewhere?

Singh: I think some of these ideas were coming more fast-paced post pandemic, of course. Right? You hit a wall, you shut the global economy down, and then you’re emerging from that, and it’s a struggle. And there’s a lot of talk about “building back better,” right, in many parts of the world and unleashing tremendous amounts of capital, the likes of which we haven’t seen, even in the US, for quite some time. I think that’s even the infrastructure bill is an incredible infusion of funds that we’re still figuring out how it’s going to be used.

And so that all that money needs to be guided by a rethinking on the institutional side. And also every dollar spent now matters more than ever, and it should be going towards building a more climate resilient society and one where we have less social unrest caused by economic insecurities is what I’m really getting at here, because there’s no time to lose. I mean, I think the pandemic really showed that we need to build back better. So the guiding paths really need to be making sure that we create jobs and that we’re repairing ecosystems while we’re doing it because the pandemic is also, let’s not forget, driven by a zoonotic disease that really came out of the problem that we have, the constant battle with the ecosystems that surround us.

And I think to get at can this be done around the world, in other parts of the world? Is that what you were wanting to—

Margonelli: Yeah. I’m wondering is this a thinking that we should apply elsewhere? When you make carbon the center of the problem, you have winners and you have losers. And how do you figure out more winners?

Singh: Carbon, we have made that the problem, right? And you see at the global stage: who’s going to emit how much more carbon before we all burn up, right? That’s been part of the reason why the global debate and the negotiations on climate have been slow. And many would say that climate change is happening, it’s going to happen, now we need to survive what’s coming, and build a more resilient society fast and find ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

So, I mean, I think now we need to bring everybody along and not be antagonistic entirely. I mean, it’s true that many more ships need to be guided in the right direction and there needs to be more advocacy. But I would say that this is where the just transition piece really becomes, again, critical to making sure that the machinery in place that is fossil fuel value chain driven, that is carbon driven, is made a part of the electron delivery value chain, and is part of the opportunity unleashed by the discussion of everything getting electrified. And I do think that the fact that we’re headed in that direction of a electrify-everything moment really presents that opportunity for so many more jobs to be created, for so much more ecosystem to be restored, and so much better use of our financial resources.

Margonelli: This does present an exciting opportunity to really rethink industrialization so that it benefits more people without harming the environment. Thank you, Kartikeya, for speaking with us today about how bureaucracy can be used for energy and climate innovation. And thank you for listening to this episode of The Ongoing Transformation. To learn more, check out Kartikeya Singh’s article, “Bureaucracies for the Better,” on issues.org. You can also look at our show notes to find links to these articles and more. And please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts. You can email us at [email protected] with any comments or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. And if you enjoy conversations like this one, visit us at issues.org, consider subscribing to our magazine, and definitely sign up for our newsletter, so you know what’s going on. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief of Issues in Science and Technology. Thank you for joining us.

Independent Science for a Daunting Future

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Vannevar Bush to conceive a new future for American scientific research in the waning days of World War II, Bush responded with a breathtakingly bold proposal. He called for massive, sustained federal investments in science—driven and overseen by researchers, not politicians. Bush saw this centralized model as the only means possible to assure the scientific progress that he considered essential to this nation’s future. For Bush, the “endless frontier” of science began directly at the steps of Congress. “There are areas of science in which the public interest is acute but which are likely to be cultivated inadequately if left without more support than will come from private sources,” he stated. “These areas—such as research on military problems, agriculture, housing, public health, certain medical research, and research involving expensive capital facilities beyond the capacity of private institutions—should be advanced by active Government support.”

The brilliance of Bush’s vision has been validated across 75 years of scientific discovery and innovation. Yet, when looking back at his groundbreaking report, it is both perplexing and significant that Bush—then president of the legendary Carnegie Institution for Science—barely gives a mention to the role of independent, private research institutions in supporting and advancing American science. Now, looking forward, it seems clear that independent scientific research institutions are once again at an inflection point. It is time to take a thoughtful look at these institutions’ past successes (and shortcomings) and develop a strategy that will enable them to exert a new level of leadership and help negotiate the complexities of an increasingly challenging future.

For the first decades of the twentieth century, independently funded private organizations held the reins of discovery science. The Carnegie Institution, endowed by its founder with a then eye-popping $22 million, set the international standard for astronomy, biology and Earth science. Bell Laboratories, initially founded to develop commercial telecommunications technologies, grew into a research powerhouse, making groundbreaking discoveries that included radio astronomy, sonar, and first-generation computing. The Rockefeller Foundation’s largesse launched the study of molecular biology, while the Guggenheim Foundation’s investment in wind tunnels and other aircraft-testing equipment at universities across the country essentially created the academic discipline of aeronautical engineering.

Yet even the greatest scientific achievements enabled by the private sector were dwarfed by the massive scientific advances driven by the war effort in the 1940s. As director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, Bush knew firsthand that no private sector endeavor could ever hope to match the scale of a Manhattan Project. So, in his response to Roosevelt’s request, Bush focused his advocacy on the urgent need for federal funding on an unprecedented scale. His fervent demands were heeded, leading to more than seven decades of public funding that has yielded immeasurable dividends in US prosperity, health, and national security.

The rise of the federal government as the primary funder of American scientific research gave private research institutions a new freedom and a new responsibility. Relinquishing leadership of the scientific enterprise to the federal government made it possible for independent research institutions to fund unconventional, even eccentric lines of inquiry, ranging from basic science to medicine, energy, and environmental science. Again and again, their independent approach led to significant discoveries—as when Carnegie’s astronomer Vera Rubin ignored conventional wisdom and persisted in studying the rotation of spiral galaxies, making observations that eventually confirmed the existence of dark matter and revolutionized humans’ understanding of the universe. Or with virologist Renato Dulbecco’s study of oncogenes, which earned him and his colleagues the Nobel Prize and paved the way for the Salk Institute to carve out a leadership role in cancer research, producing decades of discoveries that have transformed scientists’ basic understanding of disease and have saved lives.

But looking toward a future shadowed by the existential challenges of galloping climate change and global pandemics, it is clear that all independent research institutions must find new ways to adjust their historic strengths to the needs of a changing world if these institutions are to retain their position and expand their influence in the research ecosystem.

The challenge is increased by the need to make necessary changes while staying true to the priorities of the founders and funders who have made this work possible. It is a difficult needle to thread. Many large, well-established, independent, privately endowed research institutions and foundations that have the financial capacity to make a meaningful contribution to climate science must contend with the legacy of founders whose massive fortunes were accumulated through carbon exploitation and emission. These institutions must learn to honor their founders while acknowledging the environmental and social devastation that may have been left in their wake, and they must be forthright in addressing troubling aspects of their own organizational histories. These institutions also must find ways to reassure loyal longtime supporters that candor about the founders’ flaws enables these organizations to maintain and even expand their legacies in an evolving social context.

These institutions also face the sometimes daunting task of expressing the urgency and revolutionary potential of their research to the public. Basic science research and exploration may seem dry in comparison to the contributions of philanthropic organizations whose annual reports showcase examples of their emotionally compelling work, illustrated by gripping images of people in desperate circumstances. Independent research institutions can feel reticent to celebrate intellectual discoveries when confronted with pressing, immediate human needs, and they often stumble in trying to explain the relevance and potential impact of their work without taking refuge in scientific jargon and baffling acronyms. As a result, these organizations struggle to attract popular attention and build an enthusiastic base of support as they seek funders and partners for their most ambitious projects.

At the same time, these institutions are fortified by distinctive and powerful capabilities. Unlike the federal government, whose funding cycles are influenced by the two-year and four-year power shifts of Congress and the White House, financially independent research organizations have the flexibility to support work that may require a time horizon of a decade or more. By providing scientists with the time necessary to pursue promising ideas, these organizations make sure that important new lines of research are not interrupted or even abandoned because of politically motivated funding shifts.

These institutions’ smaller size and restrained bureaucracy give them the agility to initiate or terminate research programs swiftly in response to new discoveries or more urgent questions. Scientists in these institutions also have the great luxury of devoting themselves to research without the responsibilities and time commitments of a formal teaching requirement. Although the independent research sector plays an important role in preparing the next generation of scientists, its educational mission is primarily devoted to hands-on training of graduate students and postdocs. Researchers are thus released from the duties of classroom lectures and grading, which, although often rewarding, require countless hours away from the laboratory bench.

More fundamentally, independent research institutions such as Salk and Carnegie have developed interdisciplinary and collaborative models that provide a research blueprint for investigating the complexity of an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. After achieving worldwide fame with his development of the first safe and effective polio vaccine, Jonas Salk in 1957 launched a new institute to create a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment where top researchers could follow their curiosity in exploring the basic principles of life. As his namesake institute’s first director, Salk underscored the importance and potential impacts of its open-ended research philosophy: “We cannot be certain what will happen here, but we can be certain it will contribute to the welfare and understanding of man.”

Similarly, the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory combines astronomy, astrophysics, chemistry, planetary physics and dynamics, atmospheric science, experimental and theoretical petrology, and mineral physics to answer fundamental questions about the nature of exoplanetary solar systems and the characteristics necessary for rocky planets to develop and sustain life. By bringing together a wide range of experts, equipping them with highly specialized instrumentation, and giving them the freedom to follow their curiosity across disciplinary boundaries, the project hopes to answer bold questions about the potential for life on other planets.

These institutions’ independent status allows them to remain true to their founders’ insistence on the central importance of fundamental research, driven by curiosity and undertaken without immediate need to establish its practical use or relevance. In an increasingly impatient and utilitarian world, independent research organizations bear a deep historical responsibility to keep on interrogating the fundamental mysteries of life and the universe.

In part, the independent research organizations’ ability to pursue basic research across disciplinary boundaries reflects narrower missions; unlike universities, they can focus financial and intellectual resources on targeted areas of inquiry, with the goal of delving into fundamental questions and potentially making profound, high-impact discoveries. When their researchers have satisfied their curiosity, or when a line of inquiry expands beyond their capabilities, they can then hand their discoveries off to colleagues in academia and the national laboratories for continuing study, collaboration, and innovation.

These institutions’ flexibility and independence also enable them to pursue research on topics that may be politically controversial. Consider the Salk Institute’s Harnessing Plants Initiative, launched in 2017 as President Donald Trump was announcing the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. Undeterred by political headwinds, this initiative’s geneticists, plant biologists, chemists, and computer scientists began working together to design carbon-capturing plants—literally from the ground up. Through selective breeding and genetic programming, the Salk Institute hopes to develop plants that can more efficiently sequester large amounts of excess carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their roots, with the goal of scaling use of these plants to sequester up to 20% of humanity’s current annual emissions by 2035. Without the institute’s financial independence, this crucial work might have been delayed for years by partisan political considerations—and frankly, it might have begun too late to have much impact on the quickening pace of global warming.

These institutions’ financial and political independence also enables them to serve as trusted conveners, building collaborations that combine the strengths of government and academia to tackle enormous tasks. In 2009, for example, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation seeded $50 million over 10 years to create the Deep Carbon Observatory, a diverse global community of more than 1,000 scientists who spent a decade investigating the quantities, movements, forms, and origins of carbon on Earth. This interdisciplinary effort brought together geologists, mineralogists, geophysicists, chemists, biochemists, microbiologists, and technologists from hundreds of institutions and nations, and ultimately drew hundreds of millions of dollars in international investment. Beyond the scientific impact of this unprecedented effort, the Deep Carbon Observatory demonstrated another unique strength of the nonprofit research sector by setting the explicit goal of strengthening the geophysical research community through the training of the next generation of scientists. Thanks to the Sloan Foundation’s ability to think in terms of decades rather than years, the ideas, techniques, and collaborations created by this project will continue to yield novel results and exciting insights from this talented, diverse group of young researchers for decades to come.

The independence, agility, and interdisciplinary approach of nonprofit scientific research institutions are likely to become even more crucial in the race to halt and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Perhaps just as importantly, these independent science institutions also bring a unique sense of optimism to their work that is inherent in their histories. Their founders endowed and established these institutions because they believed in a brighter future, and they further believed that scientific research was the surest path toward achieving that future. As Jonas Salk said in a 1985 television interview, “I already see enough evidence for this optimism.… In recent years, I find that perhaps what I’m seeking is a scientific basis for hope, and I think I’ve found it.”

That optimism in the face of massive challenges, pragmatically combined with thoughtful recruiting and robust fundraising, will position these exceptional institutions to continue making unexpected discoveries, building powerful, mission-driven teams, and bringing together far-reaching collaborations that exceed even the reach of the federal government. Despite the daunting scale of the problems the United States and the world face, private research institutions will endeavor to continue serving as scientific pioneers and trusted partners, guided by Jonas Salk’s personal motto: “The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.”

Improving the Quality of Biomedical Research

Democratizing Engineering for Every High School Student

One of the greatest and most enduring strengths of the United States has been its ability to attract global talent in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to bolster its economic and technological competitiveness. To this end, the White House recently announced new actions and pathways for international STEM scholars, students, researchers, and experts to contribute to innovation and job creation efforts across the United States. But it is also crucial to recognize the importance of increasing and training the domestic workforce of scientists—especially engineers. The nation’s current STEM shortages within research, development, and innovation communities cannot be addressed solely by attracting more global talent.

Indeed, the United States is facing a crisis in its K–12 pipeline. According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the percentage of US high school students enrolling directly in college in 2020 showed an “unprecedented” decline of between 4% and 10%. And while the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts STEM jobs will grow twice as fast as other occupations by 2029, research continues to show high school students have declining interests in STEM fields.

The gap in the US STEM pipeline is exacerbated by the large proportion of international graduates who either return overseas or work for foreign companies that compete with US companies. According to the 2020 Industrial Capabilities Report to Congress, China is producing eight times as many STEM graduates per capita as the United States (despite its population being four times as large)—and the trend continues to worsen.

This geopolitical dilemma requires a three-pronged response. First, the United States must make continued investments in basic scientific research. Second, the country must expand the pipeline of diverse STEM graduates. And third, engineering must be a requirement for every high school student. Together, these policies are an urgent national imperative.

With a growing number of high school graduates who are first-generation immigrants, from underrepresented minority populations, or both, it is abundantly clear that the nation’s interests are best served by fueling the K–12 pipeline in ways that encourage more high school students from diverse backgrounds to pursue engineering programs. But how do educators inspire these students to discover engineering as their calling? Most students have a basic understanding that engineers “design and build things,” but possess an extremely limited sense of what engineers actually do. Aggravating matters further, many students are intimidated by the math requirements and never consider the profession for themselves.

One successful approach to expanding the K–12 pipeline is the National Science Foundation-sponsored pilot program Engineering For US All (e4usa), which seeks to bring engineering principles, skills, and design experiences into the high school curriculum. As the National Science Foundation’s Don Millard puts it, e4usa attempts to “democratize engineering for every high school student.” The program’s novel 30-week curriculum requires only high school algebra as a prerequisite and focuses on four major themes: discovering engineering, engineering and society, engineering professional skills, and engineering practice.

Several features of this program make it worth emulating. No prior knowledge of engineering is required and any teacher can be trained to deliver this first-of-its-kind engineering course. Students are empowered to create change in their local communities through exposure to problems that are personally meaningful or associated with society’s grand challenges, including sustainability, clean water, and human health. Teaching techniques engage students in the creativity of engineering early in their education. Research has shown that consideration of differences in how students learn has a marked impact on student retention. And if universities can retain first-year students through completion of their engineering degrees, the number of engineers graduating in a given year could increase by as much as 40%.

After three years of implementation, e4usa is now in 50 high schools in 19 states, plus Washington, DC, and the US Virgin Islands. It has helped over 3,000 students across the United States. The demographics of the 2021–2022 cohort is approximately 42% underrepresented minority and 43% female and nonbinary genders. By every measure, this program is expanding the pipeline of diverse high school students interested in pursuing STEM degrees. Surveys of the first-year cohort showed 52 out of 82 participants going into STEM degree programs at either two-year or four-year schools. In addition, students can receive credit and placement at seven colleges and universities around the country.

Besides changing high school curricula, educators must also work to convince students of all backgrounds that pursuing an engineering career is not only possible but also deeply rewarding. The engineering of mRNA vaccines, for example, was performed at record speed and remains a wonder. When Kizzmekia Corbett, a leading coronavirus researcher and an African American woman at Harvard University, talks to young high school women, the first thing she wants them to know is that if she—raised in a tiny Southern town—can perform the groundbreaking research that led directly to the development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, then so can they.

These stories make a difference. The girls hang on her every word as Corbett explains that she could never have imagined completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, working as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health, and then joining the faculty of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health—before seeing her research successfully harnessed by Moderna to create a life-saving medical intervention in a global public health emergency. Incredible stories like Corbett’s highlight how government investments in basic scientific research fuel the pipeline to future discoveries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has showcased the need for greater STEM investments and for a diverse workforce trained to develop new interventions, new processes, and new materials. Fortunately, Maryland’s political leaders understood early in the pandemic the need to leverage the combined expertise of science, medicine, and engineering via formation of the COVID-19 Task Force. Thanks to this advice, the governor and state legislature have the enviable task of deciding how best to invest approximately $2.5 billion, the largest surplus in its history, after years of structural deficits. The next round of vaccine breakthroughs or game-changing technology may well come from a student who grew up in a small town or underprivileged community but who participated in a program like e4usa.

These engineers of the future will need the ingenuity of Nikola Tesla, the scientific insight of Albert Einstein, the creativity of Maya Angelou, the determination of the Wright brothers, the leadership abilities of Bill Gates, the conscience of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. The nation’s economic competitiveness, military strength, public health, and standard of living depend on these values—and growing the domestic engineering workforce is an essential step to making this future possible.

Which Way to Run?

Episode 10: Creating a “High-Minded Enterprise”: Vannevar Bush and Postwar Science Policy

Vannevar Bush is a towering figure in US science and technology policy. A science adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman during and after World War II, he mobilized the US research community in support of the war effort and was a major figure in the creation of the National Science Foundation.

Although his influence on the history and institutions of US science and technology is unparalleled, the full breadth of Bush’s thinking remains underappreciated today. We talk with writer and educator G. Pascal Zachary, Bush’s biographer and editor of a new collection of his writings, about this remarkable polymath, the background behind his landmark report, Science, the Endless Frontier, and his surprising legacy for the information age.

Recommended reading

• An excerpt from a 1955 letter Vannevar Bush wrote to employees and supporters of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, featured in the Winter 2022 Issues: “Faith & Science”
• The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush, edited by G. Pascal Zachary
• “Beyond the Endless Frontier”: a series of essays examining Vannevar Bush’s legacy and evaluating the best path forward for science’s ability to deliver societal benefits

Transcript

Jason Lloyd: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a publication of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University, and we feature new essays most days on our website at issues.org. I’m Jason Lloyd, managing editor of Issues. On this episode, we’re in conversation with Gregg Pascal Zachary about Vannevar Bush, who was the key advisor to presidents Roosevelt and Truman during and after World War II and a leading figure in the creation of the National Science Foundation. Bush’s influence on the history and institutions of US science and technology is unrivaled, and his thinking and insights are still relevant for today’s science policy. Gregg Zachary is the author of Endless Frontier, the biography of Vannevar Bush, and is also the editor of a new book, The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush, published in February by Columbia University Press. Gregg, thank you for joining us today.

Gregg Pascal Zachary: Glad you invited me.

Lloyd: Near the end of World War II, President Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush to create a report outlining what US science should look like after the war. This report became pivotal to how the federal government funds basic research in the United States. So could you tell us about that report? Which was called Science, the Endless Frontier.

Zachary: The creation of Science, the Endless Frontier, occurs simultaneously to Bush being on a committee to decide whether to use the A-bomb and against what targets. So this is important because it lends a sense of urgency to the idealistic aspects of Science, the Endless Frontier, because Bush knows the report will be delivered about the same time as the bomb is used, or at least tested. Because there was no question about whether to test the bomb. The Trinity test in mid July, that was going to happen even if they had decided not to use the bomb. That was going to happen for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which that having spent $2 billion on the project—they wanted to know if it worked. So Bush is under a lot of pressure. He thinks to create a report that shows science as positive and humane because he knows if those A-bomb are used, science is going to get blamed.

And so he stresses how science can promote national welfare and also health. And there was a National Cancer Institute formed in ’37. But up to that point, there was no concerted research on health. Bush had the experience in World War II of the mass production of penicillin in which he brought together Merck and other major performer companies, and simply said to them, “You’re not getting any patents out of this. We’re not going to allow that. You had better just work together because we’ve got too many people dying, especially in the Pacific, from lack of antibiotics, from lack of penicillin.” Penicillin had been discovered, but it was very hard to use. It was hard to move. So he had the experience of mass production of penicillin as an achievement that he was very proud of. And you see that’s in the report a lot.

That’s his key thing—and then prosperity. Why prosperity? Why is science going to help prosperity? Because two reasons: one, many serious people during the thirties until the verge of World War II insisted—we’re talking people in Congress, economists, others—that the depression was caused by too much innovation, too much automation, too much investment in production infrastructure. And then second, nearly everyone assumed that at the end of World War II, the depression would continue. And so Bush also stresses and emphasizes that science and research will deliver economic benefits, even though he does not have any actual evidence or a process in which to derive this conclusion. He’s just hoping that it does this. So the two major things in the report are in the back of his mind that are related to A) the depression and B) the atomic bomb, which he knew would darken feelings about science.

Then he had a third motivation, very important. He had enlisted in his enterprise hundreds and thousands of scientists to work on military projects, some to leave their homes and some from their university purchase. And he was quite insistent that these people deserved a reward for their efforts. And at the time ,scientists were paid about what high school teachers were paid. They were paid what a policeman was paid. They were paid poorly, and he saw no reason for that to continue. So he wanted a lot of money for scientists. And then the beneficiaries of that, where the downstream of that was, it would draw more people into science. Higher salaries for scientists would mean people would start going into it because he was insistent, privately and publicly, that Americans had depended highly on Europeans for science. And I think that’s undeniable. And he was wondering, we’re not going to get the Europeans again, are we? So when are we going to start doing stuff?

And this was very appealing because American universities were relatively small and there was a large potential to expand education to include the best high school students, at least. So he has these three temporal motivations that people repeatedly misunderstand or ignore when looking at Science, the Endless Frontier. He knows the bomb is coming. He witnessed the test. Before the report comes out he has witnessed the test. He and [James B.] Conant took a train or somehow they got to the desert in New Mexico and waited on the floor and watched what happened. And second, the palpable fears that the economy would collapse again without the deficit spending of war. So that if science and engineering and technological innovation could be part of the solution, or the defenses against the resumption of the depression, well, that would be welcome.

And let me just say one last thing that is always ignored—by people in the academy and by people in academia—the initial concept for the National Research Foundation, which later becomes the National Science Foundation, is equal emphasis on military research. Bush saw military research as the engine for this research community. And that ends up getting hived off. And in the five years between the Science, the Endless Frontier report and the legislation that’s enacted in 1950 to create the National Science Foundation, the military uses that time, particularly the Office of Naval Research especially, to gain a dominant role in funding of physics, chemistry, physical sciences, things like that. And so that undercuts the role of the National Science Foundation, but not of Bush’s own agenda. Because his first job under Truman is to be in charge of military research through the new Department of Defense, formed in 1947.

So a lot of the reasons that the Science, the Endless Frontier is misunderstood, say in the recent addition that Rush Holt, former Congress member prepared for Princeton, it’s all about science. Well, in fact, very little of that report is about funding of civilian science. It is really about linking research to national security, linking research to economic prosperity in the sense that the depression had to be stalled the resumption of it. And then third, medical advances, because it was clear that the experience with penicillin made Bush and George Merck realize that there was a big upside. And of course, as we know, the 1950s, there was an enormous outpouring of vaccines, right? So I think that Science, the Endless Frontier morphed into a talismanic statement for academic scientists and civilian scientists generally. And this is especially after Sputnik, of course, the late fifties, and to this day.

Lloyd: So one of the things that Science, the Endless Frontier is famous for is this idea of having free minds have free reign over their curiosity and pursuing the research that they’re interested in doing. And one of the things that I’m curious about is the tension there between that idea that has sort of famously come down to us as the role of funders should not be telling scientists what to do or how to conduct their research. But that seems almost in direct opposition to what actually Vannevar Bush was doing during World War II in directing these research programs with specific purposes in mind, that would then be used by the military and the war.

Zachary: Yes. And so I would throw that his insistence in freedom of inquiry in particular, as opposed to unfettered research, but freedom of inquiry in the basket of rewards to scientists for their work on behalf of the nation. And second, to his adherence to not the linear model as such, but his notion that there was scientific seed corn. That’s present in the Science, the Endless Frontier report, this notion that we had used up all this scientific capital and we had to rebuild it. But that rebuilding process, that commitment to freedom of inquiry and pure research was, in his mind, going to happen alongside applied research, applied engineering, and focus on military problems.

They were going to happen alongside each other. And he was mindful that the US was initially after the war going to be constrained by the numbers of scientists, that they needed to grow this quite a bit. But you’re right, this is a paradox, and it’s why I think many academic and senior science statesmen and stateswomen and administrators have tended to screen out the other part of Bush’s thinking, because what they’re interested in is this freedom of inquiry and unfettered research.

Now with that said, the character of the research contract, which was Bush’s key technical innovation, implied that scientists would not be punished for failing. You were required to provide an honest effort, but if you didn’t succeed, you were still getting paid. And I think that while that’s not the same as unfettered inquiry, it does bleed into scientists got to make the decisions over the direction of their research because they didn’t have to fear are failing. They were going to get paid anyway.

Lloyd: And the other factor that seems relevant for how easy it is to kind of ignore that other aspect of the report is that we have, actually in the issue that we’re publishing the excerpt in, a piece from Bill Bonvillian, who writes about debates between Bush and John Steelman over what ultimately the NSF would look like. And Steelman, in a lot of important ways, kind of won that fight, resulting in a bit of a weaker, more decentralized system where there was a lot of research happening at agencies rather than all being centralized at the NSF. And so it becomes very easy to take from that report “unfettered research” and ignore the parts where he wanted a very centralized system where the federal government was, under the ages of the NSF, doing 90% of the funding of scientists in the United States.

Zachary: Yeah. Steelman is an interesting figure, and his own report is worth looking at. It didn’t look to Truman or Steelman like they had won. What happened that they did win was Bush had insisted that a committee of scientists would decide who’s the director of the National Research Foundation, that the NSF would be run by a person the scientists chose. Truman vetoed the bill for that reason, and that reason alone. I think what Steelman represented was a realization among democratic political leaders, initially Kilgore, but also Steelman was an aid to Truman, was that much of the United States, or nearly all of it, was not received any of these funds. And so Irvin Stewart, who was one of Bush’s key administrators at OSRD, he becomes president of the University of West Virginia. Well, West Virginia wanted money for research. And so there was a lot of pressure to spread this around more.

And then the other thing was Steelman wanted a more explicit understanding of public purpose, but in the wind up, we never saw that from Truman. You really don’t see that until the sixties. But I do think that Steelman is one of the challengers to the World War II generation. He’s a lawyer, not a scientist. And I think that he wants to normalize in a political sense, in an administrative sense science funding research fund. And I think his report is very interesting.

So Science, the Endless Frontier cements Bush’s public association with a high-minded enterprise that he wants science to be perceived as, because immediately after the A-bomb, and especially after some public statements by Oppenheimer himself, that suggested great regret, and by Einstein, who famously said he wished he’d never gone into physics after this (and of course he greatly regretted that letter). This bogs down the scientific community in the United States for quite a while, and having a balance on the scales of a high-minded enterprise that’s trying to promote human welfare, material progress. That was very important. And it remains important to this day. To this day, the militarization of American science is not small and it is continually a point of some tension.

Lloyd: You’re the editor of The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush. So can you talk a little bit about some of the other writing that he did?

Zachary: The second most important piece of writing is “As We May Think,” published in July, the same month that Science, the Endless Frontier is published. And in the introduction to Science, the Endless Frontier, Bush actually says, “I wrote this introduction.” “As We May Think” is an essay about a revolution in information that Bush anticipates, engendered by computers and aiming to reduce what Bush calls “mental drudgery.” That he sees mechanical means to liberate the mind or ease the burden on the mind that are comparable to the mechanical means that are easing the burden on the body. This is one of the most reprinted, talked about essays in the history of the Atlantic Monthly. The editor of the magazine at the time was the legendary Edward Weeks, who was very impressed with Bush’s thinking but also his writing. And this is the first time that a working scientist in the United States writes a widely read piece.

And it begins a process by which Bush becomes known, to an extent, as a science writer. To me, one of the reasons I did the book is because his writings remain striking, and it is hard to think of an American. Now, the British scientists, they did have a lot of writers—Whitehead, you go back to Charles Darwin, Arthur Edington, any number of people; they had a bunch of scientists that wrote popular works. But it was not done in the United States. And Bush always paid attention to the perils of innovation as embodied in the bomb. He was very focused in a number of writings, which are collected in the book (about eight of them), about the rise of computation and the revolution of information, how we store information, how we retrieve it, how we organize it, and how we use it. For this reason, Bush is revered by some people in the digital innovators today. People like Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, et cetera.

Ted Nelson in the 1970s, the creator of hyperlinks, a piece of software that Apple made famous by incorporating into its operating system—you would embed a link and you would hop to another page—that was Bush’s idea. He called these “associative trails” in his own paper on hypertext in the 1960s. Ted Nelson credits Bush for this idea, and so does everybody else.

And then the final area that he makes a big contribution in is the life and mentality of the scientist. He has a very high-minded sense of the scientist in that the pursuit of new knowledge to him is humbling, not aggrandizing. This is very important, but Bush was very concerned about the surprises that science might deliver. And then the working life and the mentality of the scientist, the excerpt from the book that you chose for the current Issues in Science and Technology about “Faith & Science” suggests that Bush felt scientists could maintain religious perspectives while at the same time working in science. They were not in conflict, they were parallel domains. This is a view that many still hold, but is disputed. But Francis Collins, for instance, the outgoing NIH director, a legendary figure, he holds this view, and famously Steven Jay Gould holds this view.

So Bush creates, for the first time, literate writing by an American about science, and he has a large audience. And I think that those who come after him—Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Ralph Lapp, Stephen Jay Gould, famously Carl Sagan—they put a greater focus on the ills of techno science. Obviously Rachel Carson, Silent Spring: all that chemistry that we loved in the fifties, we didn’t like in the sixties. The distortions of nuclear weapons: for the 25 years from 1945 to 1970, about 50% of spending on science went to nuclear weapons science. 50% of all R&D was gobbled up by the nuclear complex. Whether you were in favor of that or not, it distorted people’s priorities. You had a whole set of people working on stuff that maybe they would not have worked on.

And then another thing that later science writers focused on was space exploration in an enthusiastic way. I have an exchange of letters with Bush and James Webb, the head of NASA. And of course, James Webb was responsible for this remarkable feat of getting the Apollo program so far along. And he was a confidant of John F. Kennedy and of Lyndon Johnson. But Bush told him that with due respect, he was totally wrong to be trying to put people into space. It was foolish. It was a kind of spectacle that was designed to make Americans feel better about themselves. Now, whether he was right or wrong about that, it was an example of how he was willing to advance unpopular ideas.

Lloyd: You anticipated my question in that I was really struck and surprised by this exchange with James Webb, that Bush was so unenthusiastic about crude space flight, maybe space flight in general, or exploration of space. And I was wondering if there were other things, other writings that you came across that you found surprising when you were assembling this collection?

Zachary: Well, I think that Bush, throughout his writings on a number of subjects to deal with national security, was concerned that we were not funding in science, but that we were placing too many hopes on science, too many hopes on research. That it couldn’t deliver all the things we were asking for it. And he was concerned that the pressures on science were too great for tangible results. Listen, I would say that the space program was exceptional, his disquiet, his discomfort with the space program. And remember, during the sixties, the space program took up 2–3% of US GDP. I mean, it took up an enormous amount of money.

Lloyd: And was not very popular.

Zachary: It had a mixed reception. there was a whole set of people that were opposed, strange bedfellows. But another thing that Bush was concerned about and this comes through in an essay called “The Qualities of a Profession,” the 10th selection, was ethical obligations of scientists and engineers. Now his notion of ethical obligations stem from an older, perhaps aristocratic or elitist model, that as the bearers of a special knowledge or expertise—which he thought of as embodied in a profession—there were special obligations, morally, socially for these people. And this is an older model. It’s not an accountability model. And it begins at the onset of the scientific inquiry. It is not a bag on the side, which most science regulation has been deviled by this problem, that you’re trying to use normal means of accountability and applying them to a group that wants to self-regulate. This is doctors, the whole biogenetic field, they want to self-regulate.

And so how does NIH’s Office of Accountability all these, how do they do it? Well, they investigate what the science is doing and they decide that this isn’t right. Well, Bush’s attitude was that we had to acknowledge that at the wellsprings of science and at the wellspring of engineering, the source was an ethical dimension that was existential. You were condemned to carry this existential obligation. And I mean that seriously, because it’s only for that reason that it works, and it’s not an option to go without it.

And so I think that we are again facing a crisis in ethics of scientists and engineers, whether they’re at Facebook or Google, I think the search will continue for ways of thinking about social responsibility. I mean, we’ve had a lot of discussion about responsible innovation, and I think the good part of the concept is it also depends on embedding at the outset concepts of responsibility. The problem has been that in a pluralistic system, people disagree on what’s responsible. Bush held to an older ideal that seems self-evident: you helped others; you did not help yourself.

Lloyd: That kind of public service ethos.

Zachary: Yeah. And I think that we are going to have, maybe, efforts to revive this, but it’s a long process, and I think the science establishment is now so large and varied that it’s very difficult. Because if you have collaborative relationships with People’s Republic of China, how do you draw the line? How do you know that the people you’re working with have fragmented loyalties or are working to undermine you? I mean, why would you know? So what is it about the cosmopolitan ethos that can survive an era that we’re in now, where accountability is getting more attention? But I think that historically, the self-sacrificing activities of people like Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe and any number of scientists that are legendary is striking compared to now, where many successful scientists think they are owed large amounts of money, and they write books that celebrate how great they are. And I’m drawn to the hard-boiled humility that Bush at times showed.

Lloyd: Yeah. I think a lot of researchers, scientists, policymakers would really benefit from reading some of The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush.

Zachary: Yeah. Some of them very moving about the joy of the pursuit of knowledge, as opposed to the rewards of discovery.

Lloyd: You can really sense that in Science, the Endless Frontier, and in his other writing. He talks about the rewards that come from following your curiosity, and I think that principle really became foundational to modern science’s idea of basic research. So thank you, Gregg, for joining us today to talk about the history and impact of Vannevar Bush. And thank you for joining us for this episode of The Ongoing Transformation. To learn more about Bush and postwar science policy, check out Gregg’s book, The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush. You can read an excerpt from the book at our website issues.org, along with our article series entitled “Beyond the Endless Frontier,” which features in-depth essays that grapple with Bush’s legacy for today’s science policy. Check out our show notes and links to these articles and more. Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcast. You can email us at [email protected] with any comments or suggestions. And if you enjoy conversation like this one, please visit us at issues.org and consider subscribing to the magazine. I’m Jason Lloyd, managing editor of Issues in Science and Technology. Thank you for joining us.

Episode 9: Maximizing the Good of Innovation

The United States is justifiably proud of the accomplishments of its taxpayer-funded biomedical innovation system. But these innovations don’t benefit all Americans equally, which means, among other things, that the richest live 10 to 15 years longer than the very poor. In this episode we speak with Shobita Parthasarathy, a professor at the University of Michigan and director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program. Parthasarathy explains how to think differently about the country’s innovation system—by removing societal bias, rethinking patents, and ensuring equitable access to medical advances—to allow all Americans to thrive.

Recommended reading

• Read Shobita Parthasarathy’s Issues article, “Innovation as a Force for Equity”
• Explore more of Parthasarathy’s work by visiting her website
• Check out Parthasarathy’s podcast, The Received Wisdom, a podcast about how to realize the potential of science and technology by challenging the received wisdom

Transcript

Lisa Margonelli: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief of Issues in Science and Technology. And on this episode we’re talking with Shobita Parthasarathy about innovation. Shobita is a professor at the University of Michigan, where she’s a director of the science, technology, and public policy program.

In her Winter 2022 Issues essay, “Innovation as a Force for Equity,” Shobita argues that bold, systemic change is required to ensure that innovation serves everyone equitably.

Shobita, thank you so much for joining us today.

Parthasarathy: Yeah, I’m excited to do so.

Margonelli: You wrote this wonderful piece for the Winter Issues in Science and Technology called “Innovation as a Force for Equity.” And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what you were thinking and what we mean when we talk about innovation.

Parthasarathy: Yeah, sure. I have been working in and around questions of innovation in my entire career on some level. My first book was Building Genetic Medicine, and in that I was looking at genetic testing, and I kind of followed one genetic test for breast cancer. And then through that case, learned about and eventually intervened a little bit in the discussions around human gene patents and also became completely fascinated by the patent system and stories we tell ourselves about innovation and the things we don’t talk about when it comes to innovation.

I suppose, as somebody who is really dedicated to the project of equity and justice in the world, I don’t think we talk enough about what the responsibility is in science and technology and science and technology policy. So I wanted to kind of think really hard about that.

Margonelli: One of the things you mentioned in the piece is that the top 1% of the country by income lives on average 10 to 15 years longer than the poorest 1% of Americans, which is an amazing figure. Especially considering that all of us are taxpayers, and we spend a lot of money and are really proud of all of our biomedical innovation. We spend, I think, $45 billion a year on biomedical innovation. What are the things that our innovation system innovates for—if not for equalizing society?

Parthasarathy: I think it’s sometimes hard to talk about and think about, and I kind of put that caveat here because I might be saying some controversial things, but it requires us to be critical in ways that I don’t think we’re necessarily accustomed to being when it comes to science and technology. I really do think that it maximizes the good of expanding the scientific workforce. And I think when I say that—

Margonelli: What does that mean?

Parthasarathy: Right, so what I mean by that is that we’re really selecting for basically the priorities of scientists and the priorities of the marketplace. And I think that we—now I’m taking off my hat as a scientist and putting on my hat as a member of the public, let’s say—we’re taught that those are public priorities. We’re not taught to kind of unravel those things.

But if we actually unravel them, we see that at the very least I would not argue that the scientific community is representative of the needs of the public, right? Certainly not racially or in terms of gender or in terms of socioeconomic status. And so the kinds of problems that scientists may think are important, they might be interesting, elegant solutions, they may be cutting edge in the context of their fields, but they may or may not actually be addressing the problems that publics think about and see.

Margonelli: So, how does the public get in there?

Parthasarathy: Well, ideally, I think we need to actually engage publics at the very earliest stages of discussions about scientific priorities. And I mean that really at the outset. What should the priorities of scientific funding agencies be? How should we evaluate the kinds of things that we fund and not? How do we evaluate success in a scientific study? Those are places where I think that publics can play a really important role.

We tend to think of publics as the recipients of our knowledge, right? We talk a lot increasingly about scientific communication as a means—we want to make sure that publics are believing and engaged and interested in what we do. But I actually think that if we really are interested in service, and if we’re interested in making everybody’s lives better, then we have to acknowledge that publics often have knowledge about their lives that we, basically as elites—certainly at research universities; we’re generally pretty privileged—that we don’t have easy access to. And we live very different lives.

Margonelli: So, it seems to me that what you’re talking about is that right now we conceive of those people as patients, like you call them publics, but we consider them as either citizens who pay taxes into the system, or we think of them in the system as patients where they’re seen as consumers. Every time I go to my asthma doctor, I get this horrible quiz afterwards about whether or not every single person I encountered in the office was polite to me. And it’s like, that is actually not what I care about at all. I do not see myself as a consumer of this.

But the way that we framed what health care is, and what biomedical innovation is, is around the idea of commodities and consumers also. Can you talk a little bit about how, for example, trying to work on asthma by thinking mostly about sprays I can put down my throat is a different way of conceiving of the problem than if you came at it not trying to sell something?

Parthasarathy: I talked a little bit about this assumption that our innovation policies should be made with the scientists’ priorities in mind. And one of those things is, of course, that science, through its hypothesis driven approach, hypothesis testing driven approach, and its focus on generalizability, right? There’s a real focus on developing truths that can then be scaled. And that dovetails really well with market priorities. But what’s interesting is that the generalizability that scientists go for and the scalability that markets go for kind of work in tandem with one another, and it’s almost like they kind of supercharge certain kinds of solutions over other kinds of solutions.

So, in the context of asthma, which I talk about in the article, we are then oriented towards an inhaler. And if we’re oriented towards an inhaler or particular kinds of pharmaceuticals, then we’re also tied to a particular pharmaceutical complex—whether it’s monopolies or intellectual property-driven monopolies, what have you, the prices that the market sets—as opposed to structural solutions. We tend to think that the market solutions not only are scalable, but they’re standardizable, that makes them better, they’re simpler, there’s the simple technological fix. And we tend to see the changes to the built infrastructure, changes to the environment, which we know are likely to be also useful—certainly in the context of asthma—we see those are more complicated, more difficult to actually implement.

But the problem, of course, is that there’s an inherent inequity embedded in that, right? Because a commodity is going to be more accessible to people who have more financial privilege, and changes to the built environment are going to be more available and accessible to everyone. And those are the kinds of things that we don’t really talk about.

I think it’s absolutely important, and I do talk about it in the article, that we need to think differently about health care access. We need to think about availability of health technologies and innovations early on in the design process. But I also think that part of the issue here is that we’re a little bit too focused on commodifiable innovation, and trying to lower the prices of commodifiable innovation isn’t going to get us all the way towards our goals in terms of equity because there are going to be large parts of our population who are never going to be able to afford or access some of these technologies.

Margonelli: Another thing that you brought up in your piece is that some innovation doesn’t just sort of ride on the coattails of inequality, it actually amplifies it, and it kind of amplifies a bias that’s found elsewhere. Do you want to talk about that? Can you tell me how that comes into play, and then how do we start to kind of turn this giant ship?

Parthasarathy: Right, I fully acknowledge it’s a giant ship. I think there is a huge body of scholarship in the field of science and technology studies, which is where I’m coming from, but now in a variety of other fields, that shows that values are embedded in technological design. That’s been demonstrated in all sorts of ways. And I think that what that also means is that societal biases are embedded in technological design. And for some that might be surprising or shocking. We tend to think that, OK, maybe humans are biased, but technologies are objective. They’re unbiased.

In the piece, I talk about the case of the pulse oximeter, which you know is on everybody’s mind in the context of COVID, which works by light refraction. So, if you thought about it for a minute, the most obvious conclusion would be, “Oh yeah, if it works by light refraction, then the skin tone is going to affect that,” right? But nobody was thinking about that. And I’m not sure how many people are really thinking about it now.

But interestingly, in the spring of 2020, a colleague of mine at MIT wrote a piece that said, “Hey, wait a second, I think that there’s probably some bias in this technology that has now become absolutely essential to COVID care.” By that point, I think the article she wrote came out in the summer, I was aware that in Detroit there was an emerging story of how a number of Black people were being turned away from the hospital—and later dying of COVID. And I hadn’t followed those stories in detail, but invariably the stories have some component of the blood oxygen being checked. The blood oxygen is usually a measure of whether or not somebody has severe COVID, and it’s used around the world.

My extended family members in India were using the pulse oximeter, and I know this because they now say, after I’ve written about this case a couple times, they’re like, “Hey, wait a second. I didn’t know.” And we haven’t actually talked about this beyond Black and white.

So, she published this article and actually a group of University of Michigan physicians did a quantitative study and found that, in fact, the pulse oximeter was less accurate among their Black patients. That is, it undercounted the blood oxygen for Black people. And now, in that particular case, you have a technology that is never really interrogated. So, it is able to use its monopoly position, including its intellectual property position, to prevent anybody from questioning its accuracy, from looking at the data on which it’s based its technology.

What I want to suggest by using that particular example, is that we tend to say, “Oh well, these are questions that should be addressed by the regulator,” right? In this case the Food and Drug Administration. Well, it turns out the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t regulate this sort of thing. But even if it did, I think these kinds of concerns are far too important to simply leave to the regulator. These are the kinds of things that we should be considering from the outset. At every stage of the innovation system, these kinds of questions that are, in this case, particularly easy, we need to be asking.

And it’s by far not the only example of this, so another famous case is the spirometer, which actually has embedded in it race correction software that, again, assumes that Black people naturally have inferior lung capacity to white people.

Margonelli: The spirometer, if I can just interject, is used in treating asthma. So, every person with asthma who goes in to any sort of institution is asked to breathe in to this machine and then the software apparently corrects according to very biased tables about what can be expected. Which would affect how they’re treated and even the sorts of treatments that they’d be eligible for.

Parthasarathy: Exactly. Exactly. And we’ve seen this sort of thing. It’s come up more recently in terms of discussions about concussions and the NFL, it comes up with assessments of kidney function in terms of transplantation. Again, these are just the cases that we know about because there’s a collision of events that leads somebody to raise a flag and that flag to be recognized by others. I think the point is that this is there all the time, it’s everywhere, and we need to become more sensitized to it. The costs are great and, to my mind, yes, it might mean that the pace of innovation is a little slower. It would require a little bit more reflection, assessment, attention at early stages of innovation. But the benefits are vast, again, when it comes to equity.

Margonelli: I think it’s really interesting just to sort of go a little level deeper. The story that you tell in the article about the pulse oximeter is interesting because originally the first developer of a pulse oximeter was Hewlett-Packard, and they had actually done fairly elaborate studies to make sure that it worked with different skin tones. And then when another upstart company began doing it, and also pulse oximeters that were ripped off started showing up in the market at much cheaper prices, you had no oversight, no monitoring. People are just sort of accepting this piece of innovation into their lives and assuming that it’s accurate without really any way to calibrate it at all.

Parthasarathy: So, I think what’s so interesting about what you just pointed out, I don’t draw this out in the article, but I think it’s really crucial and relates to the question you asked at the outset and something I think about a lot, is how the culture of innovation has changed, especially in the last 20 to 30 years. So, when you’re talking about Hewlett-Packard, I’m sure that many people in Silicon Valley would scoff at a company like Hewlett Packard, they’re the old guard, they’re slow, they’re these old technologies.

Margonelli: They didn’t move fast and they didn’t break things.

Parthasarathy: They did neither of those things. Certainly not in the case of the pulse oximeter. And now, right, we cultivate a culture, we certainly aspire to a culture that moves fast and breaks things because there are so many problems and everything needs to be fixed. But there’s a cost to that. There’s a real cost to that. And in some of the other work that I’ve been doing recently, it’s really become apparent to me that that “move fast and break things” is implicitly a critique of the state, of the role of the state.

And you see this year very clearly, it’s not that this upstart company takes advantage of the fact that in this new moment nobody is paying attention, and the culture doesn’t want people to pay attention because they want fast, exciting innovation. And there’s an assumption built into it that it has to be better than what came before. Not only is it not clear that it’s better than what came before, it hides all of these really potentially problematic dimensions.

Margonelli: So, one of the things that you propose in your article is that we could sort of reengineer our innovation system for equity. And it’s just striking. There’s billions of dollars going into the biomedical innovation system in particular, and I wonder, how do we turn that big ship around and make it work better for everyone?

Parthasarathy: Well, I think it starts with some courage.

Margonelli: Actually let’s back up one second. What you just said about the importance of the state is really key. The state kind of has to say, “Hey, we’re big. We represent everybody. We’re paying out all this money. We need to get something back.” The government, the taxpayers paid money for a lot of patentable medicines that now are very expensive for people to buy back. So, start by talking about the state, and then let’s talk about who’s an expert.

Parthasarathy: Yeah, this is a preoccupation that I’ve had in different ways for a long time because I think one of the things that I identified in the patent book, I sort of foreshadowed this before, is that certainly in the US context, there is an assumption that the private interest and the public interest are the same. And while there are ways in which innovation policy generally, and patent policy more specifically, have converged internationally, at the root I actually think that we see from other countries that they—most other countries see these as distinct, the public and private interest. In the US we really don’t.

And not only that, we kind of leaned more and more into it, perhaps as we’ve become more frustrated by political polarization and gridlock, some of us have felt more alienated. I understand all of the critiques of the state, but the bottom line is that there really isn’t any other unifying force that can represent the needs beyond the private sector, and there are many. And that is what the state is kind of meant to do.

So I want to resurrect that. I want us to think clearly about that, and I think it may be easier, it might be more straightforward, in regulatory domains. People are already thinking in those ways. But I think in the innovation system specifically, that’s really, really hard because we are so structured, certainly our science funding agencies, whether you’re talking about the NIH or the NSF or Department of Energy, etc., these agencies assume that the way to achieve technology for the public interest is through the marketplace, is through technology transfer offices.

And I’m not suggesting that that isn’t a place for that, but I think at the first level we have to reflect on—I mean, I would argue that it’s not the only place. There are many, many other potential ways in which we can benefit the public with technology or with innovation that may not be a technological solution at all, and that the science funding agencies have an opportunity, I think, to explore those kinds of interventions, for example, as I suggest in the piece, with offices that are dedicated to things like community-based solutions or non-market-based solutions that are actually going around looking for and trying to cultivate those things, these agencies that work really, really hard most of the time to argue that they’re outside of politics, right? And to demonstrate that.

I think my take on that is perhaps surprising, which is, I think that these agencies are always engaged in politics to a degree, and that the choice to focus only on the market as the mechanism for ensuring that their science achieves the public interest is itself a political choice. And it’s actually leaving a lot of people out.

Margonelli: We think our current obsession with innovation seems very, very now because we’re right in teeth of innovation. Everything’s happening all around us and last week it was Facebook, this week it’s the metaverse. But our cultural interest in innovation goes right back to the founding of this country. And in your book, called Patent Politics, you look at how this particular view of innovation was very much baked into the very initial founding documents. The patent office was one of the first things they set up. It was the only manifestation of the government in some ways. And it’s funny, once I started thinking about the patent office, everything around me says “patent pending.” There’s patents listed on everything. It’s so ubiquitous we don’t see it.

So, we tend to think of patents as a bureaucratic stamp of approval maybe from the government or, “Yes, you own this,” or a formality at the very least. But they encode a lot of ideas about moral society. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Parthasarathy: Yeah, sure. So, I would say that some of us think about patents as kind of government certifications. We think also of patents as themselves signifiers of innovation, right? Because you got a patent, it’s extremely innovative. Think about the number of advertisements that you see where they talk about how this “patented technology” or “there’s a patent pending on this technology.” It is, in essence, not only a sign of innovation, but also kind of a government certification of the morality of that innovation, right?

And I think that that is something that, certainly if someone in the administration of the Patent and Trademark Office is listening to this podcast, they would say, “Absolutely not. It is not moral at all. It has nothing to do with morality.”

Margonelli: It’s expertise.

Parthasarathy: Yes, “It’s purely a technical certification.” As I was saying before, it is essentially saying that “We are trusting the inventor in operating for the public interest. We believe that this is the way that we should build our society by investing, by providing.” So, remember, what a patent is is that it provides to the beneficiary a right to commercialize their invention for a limited period of time. Today it’s 20 years.

And so it’s essentially the government saying, “We are trusting this inventor to commercialize this technology. We think it’s really important, and we think this is the way that we’re going to benefit society, build the economy, by creating new markets, and the technology itself is going to be good.”

And in the process, it actually is erring on the side of saying, “We want more technology and we don’t mind if it’s,” for example, as I talk about in the book, “a patent on human gene or a stem cell or genetically modified organism or, for that matter, a genetically engineered human embryo or COVID-19 vaccine.” Whatever it is. If we accelerate the conversation and think about an issue that has been top of mind for many now, the question about the patents on the COVID vaccine for example, by providing that patent, it is more than just certifying that it’s novel, non-obvious, inventive, etc.

It’s about saying, “This is such an important technology that we think this person should have a monopoly on it”—at the expense of people who might not be able to afford it, at the expense of people who need the vaccine and can’t get access to it, and other providers who might be able to offer this, both in the United States and elsewhere. These are moral choices. We can call them technical choices if they make us feel better, but I actually think that that obscures really, really important moral choices that we’re making.

And it’s more complex than just saying, “Oh, they’re captured by big industry.” I think that just like the science funding agencies we were talking about, they’re captured by, in fact, this idea that the work that they’re doing is actually technical, right? So, the problem is that they assume that the work that they’re doing is technical, and so it prevents them from really grappling with the moral consequences, the moral dimensions of what they’re doing and the moral consequences of what they’re doing. And that’s actually the problem.

Yeah, corporate capture ends up being a result because who has more technical capacity: your environmental justice organization or Monsanto, for example? Obviously it’s going to be Monsanto, right? So, it’s tilted in that direction. Obviously I could talk about this forever.

Margonelli: I think this is the beginning steps of starting to really do what you say we need to do, which is to reimagine innovation, rethink what its moral obligations are, rethink how it happens, who does it, whether it’s low tech or a commodity, whether it’s about better lives, what is innovation? I want to thank you. This has been such a fascinating conversation. It’s been really a trip into how we come to think the way we do about innovation.

Parthasarathy: It’s been really fun. Thank you so much for having me.

Margonelli: Thank you for joining us for this episode of The Ongoing Transformation. And thank you to our guest, Shobita Parthasarathy, for talking to us about reimagining innovation. For more of Shobita’s work, read her essay, “Innovation as a Force for Equity,” in the Winter 2022 edition of Issues in Science and Technology, and visit her website at shobitap.org.

Check our show notes to find links to these articles and more. Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with any comments or suggestions. And if you enjoy conversations like this one, visit us at issues.org, and subscribe to our print magazine. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief of Issues in Science and Technology. Thank you for joining us.

Involving the Public in Space Missions

Foreign Students in the United States

Scientific Integrity as Recruitment Tool

Episode 8: Fighting COVID with Art

Because art is a powerful tool for connecting with communities, building stronger relationships between artists and public health programs may be a way to increase people’s confidence about vaccines. On this episode, cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz and Jill Sonke, director of the Center for Art in Medicine at the University of Florida, join us to explore the question, “What role could artists and culture bearers play in discussions of vaccine confidence?”

Recommended reading

• Lalo Alcaraz’s website: https://laloalcaraz.com/
• The COVIDLATINO.org project
• The Center for Art in Medicine at the University of Florida
• Art & Response Repository: art and other resources to aid cross sector collaboration.
• CDC Vaccination Resources. Find vaccine field guides and other vaccine information. 

Transcript

Talasek: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University. I’m J.D. Talasek, the director of Cultural Programs at the National Academy of Sciences. On this episode, we’re in discussion with cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz and Jill Sonke, who is the director of the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. We’re coming up on two years since COVID first began altering our lives, and it doesn’t seem to be going away, despite the tools we have to reduce its impact—including a highly effective set of vaccines. The decision to be vaccinated or not to be vaccinated is often rooted in cultural and often very personal reasons, which begs the question that we’re going to address today: What could the role of artists and culture bearers play in discussions of vaccine confidence? And I’m very excited to have this conversation with both of you. Lalo, Jill, thank you so much for joining us today.

Sonke: Thank you, J.D. Happy to be here.

Alcaraz: Thanks for having me.

Talasek: Absolutely. Lalo, let’s start with you. I’d like to ask—it’s kind of an origin/background story: What motivated you to become an artist, a cartoonist? And take that up to how you became involved with discussions around COVID vaccines.

Alcaraz: Just yesterday, I think on Instagram, a user asked me, “I would love to know what your process is?” And I said, “Well, my process is I get pissed off and then I draw.” And that is the origin story, basically, of why I draw cartoons. I grew up on the US-Mexico border in San Diego and Tijuana, and my parents are Mexican immigrants. And I just kind of grew up with a sense of injustice, seeing how my parents were mistreated, how the system mistreated them, and then watching it happen to me too. You go to school and they tell you all this stuff about how great the US is and how everyone’s equal and all that, but I wasn’t buying it because I was getting treated as a second-class Mexican immigrant, even though I was born in the US or whatever.

It just kind of made me reflect and sharpen my sense of irony. I carry that chip on my shoulder to this day, that when I die they’re going to throw me in a hole and I’m still going to be mad. And that’s good, I think, because it’s my gasoline, it’s my fuel, it’s my motivation. So looking at how the inequities in the Latino community, specifically for the project I’m working on now, specifically with the farmworker community in the Central Valley of California.

Talasek: Lalo, you might also describe that in detail for those who aren’t familiar with that project.

Alcaraz: Sure. So the project that I’m working on, the campesinos, the farmworkers of the Central Valley of California. The Central Valley is a place with lots of glaring inequities in work conditions, healthcare, income, you name it. It’s really stark and the community suffers from misinformation on vaccines and healthcare, lack of healthcare, and also results in vaccine hesitancy for many reasons. And so the project that I’m working on is in conjunction with the ASU School of Transborder Studies. I’m the virtual artist-in-residence for that, it’s really nice, and I work with Dr. Gil Lopez, and we have created a series of about 15 editorial cartoons in English and Spanglish. We’ve done a couple in Spanish I believe, and Dr. Lopez has also facilitated other artists to do artwork, culturally resonant artwork, that reaches out to that population of farmworkers and Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants that reside in the Central Valley. But it’s really been a campaign that’s taken off, so I get to use all my cartoon tools to spread science, which is nice.

Talasek: That’s wonderful because Jill also has a lot of experience and perspective on this integration of art with medicine, even predating this pandemic, as director of the Center for Arts in Medicine. Jill, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about your role at the Center for Arts in Medicine, and the conversations that you’ve been a part of recently regarding vaccine confidence.

Sonke: Sure, J.D., thanks. I have, as you mentioned, been director of the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida since 1996, when we created it. I was working at the time as an artist-in-residence in the hospital. Dance is my primary artistic background. So in my role as director of the center, I oversee academic programs, I also focus quite a bit on research. I run two research labs at UF: one that does an array of prospective studies, mixed method studies, primary data collection and analysis, and another, which is called the EpiArts lab, it’s a National Endowment for the Arts lab. And we do epidemiological studies, in partnership with Dr. Daisy Fancourt at University College London, that associate arts participation with an array of health outcomes at the population level.

I began conversations with the CDC when I was invited to meet with the COVID-19 vaccine task force’s vaccine confidence and demand team in the spring of 2021. And in June, I was appointed as a senior advisor to that team in order to expand the conversation in the United States about how artists and culture bearers can be engaged, and how the arts can be engaged, in vaccine confidence work, just like we’re hearing from Lalo, it’s such a beautiful example. So in that work, I’ve created field guides for guiding both partnerships and health communication programs and campaigns and helped support the effort that just awarded $2.1 million in grants from the CDC Foundation to arts organizations all around the United States.

The reason that I was invited to work with the CDC is because many of the members of the task force at the CDC are public health professionals who have worked in emergency public health situations around the world and recognize that you would never mount a major public health campaign without artists, and without songs, and drama, and film, and all of these art forms. Why would we approach this pandemic without artists when we know how important they are in these moments?

Talasek: Yeah. That reminds me of what happened during the ’80s during the AIDS epidemic, and how it became so evident that the gay community was effective at communicating protocols and safe sex practices within their community that it became sort of a model for understanding that one public service announcement doesn’t fit everyone—that it’s not just an issue of stating information and just assuming that people are going to absorb it; there’s a lot of cultural filters that we go through. Lalo, I’m kind of wondering what you have found to be effective, or even exciting? Maybe even some of the responses from the community that you’ve experienced in this direction.

Alcaraz: Sure. Well, as a political cartoonist, I am used to getting hate mail from everyone, including the community, but overall I think the responses have been very positive. When I do a political cartoon that’s not vaccine related for my regular editorial feed, the whole point of it, to me, is to get the community to—I’m not trying to brainwash anybody, but I want to at least start a discussion, or at least have them understand how to talk about an issue. For instance, immigration, I do a lot of cartoons about immigration, and regular people on the street don’t really know sometimes how to talk about that or think about it. And I hope that I help that conversation or that consciousness come.

I sweeten the conversation with some sugar: some comedy, some satire, some cultural images. I will use images in my regular cartoons to make a point, to get across to Latinos, and everyone else can read them too. And so the response for the vaccine cartoons has been kind of along the lines of the responses we’re all getting from the wide community: some people love it, some people accuse me of being in the pocket of big pharma, other people have called me a sellout. And I’m like, “If I’m a sellout for wanting farmworkers to be healthy, then I’m the world’s biggest sellout.” It’s alright. I’m used to all this battering anyway.

Talasek: I want to make sure that Jill’s part of this conversation too. Because I know one of the discussions that comes around this is we are engaging with artists for a lot of different topics—vaccines being one of them, creating conversation and empathy around climate change—there’s always this sort of issue of engaging with the artist or using the artist. And there’s got to be a sensitivity on our part that this is not—I heard somebody put this perfectly a couple of weeks ago, that the role of the artist is not to communicate but to expand our imagination. Jill, I know that you and I have talked about this before, but I wonder if we could dig a little bit more into that as far as the sensitivities in the ideals of how we engage or use artists in these capacities. What’s the word on that?

Sonke: J.D., I appreciate this line of dialogue so much, and I’ll start by reflecting a bit on Lalo’s comment, which I loved. It’s not about brainwashing. It’s true that something we’ve been really sensitive to in the development of these field guides with the CDC is that we’re not seeking to use artists to persuade people to get vaccinated—though the goal is vaccination—but rather to understand that artists do facilitate dialogue. As people engage in the arts, they engage with characters, storylines, narratives that they relate to personally and culturally. And in doing so they’re able to consider their own lives, their own values, their own decisions.

That’s really important because health communication isn’t, as you said, J.D., about providing factual—I mean, it is about providing factual information, but it isn’t that information that leads us to change our behaviors. We know a lot about what is and isn’t good for us, but we make choices because things are culturally relevant, or they nourish or benefit us in other ways. So it’s really important that we recognize that this isn’t about the arts persuading or brainwashing, but facilitating that dialogue.

And around the notion of using artists, that is language that I feel particularly sensitive to. We often do hear people talk about using the arts or using artists for particular goals. And for me, what’s really important in that, and this reflects, I think, a cultural orientation to the arts in the United States—our arts can be a bit hierarchical and exclusionary, there is a social gradient around the arts, who participates, who doesn’t—and so when we think about partnering with the arts, other sectors will often think, “Well, let’s reach out to artists because if we engage them it’ll be really great for them. It’ll give them great opportunities for exposure. They don’t need to be compensated because this is what they do, artists love doing what they do.”

Talasek: Yes. Artists are supposed to be starving. You can’t be a starving artist if—

Sonke: —If you get paid, right? So there’s an undervaluation of artists in our culture. There’s also an undervaluation of the knowledge and the expertise that artists hold. And in this moment with the pandemic, what artists know about engaging people in dialogue, what artists know about capturing attention, what artists know about translating information in understandable ways, and in culturally relevant and personally relevant ways, has tremendous value. Public health needs these understandings. We see this again playing out more in other countries, but in this country, the public health sector really needs this understanding. And so I advocate very strongly for really equitable cross-sector collaboration in which everyone is compensated equally, all forms of knowledge are valued equally, all forms of communication are valued equally. And I think this is a moment where we have the potential for greater understanding of the value of artists as equal partners in these spaces.

Talasek: I would also add to that just based on my experience of bringing artists into the conversation earlier, in the planning, in the discussion stage, as opposed to, as you were alluding to, Jill, the idea of that it’s an add-on value. It’s something that we decide what we’re going to do and then we ask an artist to illustrate or communicate.

Sonke: Yeah. To make something prettier or more exciting.

Alcaraz: I agree with you 10,000%. And it made me think of one of the cartoons. The themes that kind of popped up in our campaign to reach out to Latinos is through the most obvious way, which is through the family situations and portrayals of the family. And we kind of discovered this character, Tío Rigo, Uncle Rigo, who kind of—sometimes cartoon characters will tell you what they want to do. If you’ve been a cartoonist long enough, I know it sounds crazy, but the characters start having a life of their own. Tío Rigo ends up being that conservative uncle that we all have that is a little over the edge. And we kind of started not using him as a punching bag, but portraying the family situations where he can’t go to the party where everyone’s vaccinated or masked. He refuses to get masked and vaccinated. And we all have that guy in our family—he probably won’t hear this podcast. But it’s that portrayal of the Latino family that we hardly get to see in TV and the media. We only get certain portrayals, the narco family or something. In my cartoons, we have this very average family in this extraordinary situation of this pandemic. And I think people like to see themselves. I bet you, Uncle Rigo in everyone’s family will love seeing themselves even though we kind of slap him around a little bit.

Talasek: That’s a wonderful example and I appreciate you sharing that. I would say, Jill, since you’ve had experience with a broad section of artists who are working with communities, and also in this sort of position of eventually evaluating some of these so that we can learn from the experience, what are maybe some other examples that you’ve come across with other communities and other artists who are working maybe in a different medium?

Sonke: There are so many great examples happening right now and the guides feature some of those examples, the CDC field guides. But I really love, for example, what’s happening in Lalo’s home state of California, in San Francisco with the Creative Corps program, and at the state level with the Creative Corps program, the major financial investment on behalf of the state and local governments to invest in artists in this moment. So in San Francisco, for example, the Creative Corps is designed to employ 60 community artists as community health ambassadors, so putting artists overtly in the position of being ambassadors in communities and preparing them with accurate and up-to-date health information so that they can be facilitating those dialogues in small groups and in broader ways through arts participation.

I also love the White House has the Shots [at] the Shop program. It’s a program of similarly educating barbers and hair stylists, because they’re folks who are talking to people, who have time to sit one to one with people in communities, so preparing them with, again, accurate and up-to-date health information so that they can facilitate those dialogues.

I also really love what’s happening in New Orleans. We were talking about New Orleans earlier, J.D., and they are just doing a beautiful job of embracing Mardi Gras culture. They implemented early in the pandemic a program where they’re engaging those Mardi Gras performers and Mardi Gras traditions, everything from popup performances on the streets to billboards around the city that use that culture as a relatable means for people to consider vaccination in their community.

Talasek: Those are really wonderful examples. Thanks Jill. Since both of you are in the trenches, are there questions that I haven’t thought to ask? Are there issues or concerns that you would like to bring up?

Alcaraz: Can I jump in and say, what Jill just said made me think of the challenges of implementing that up-to-date information. I mean, it’s a back and forth with me trying to come up with a concept and then having it alter the punchline because it’s scientifically wrong. I’ve never been in that space where I’m like, “Well, this punchline is not scientifically correct.” I’d never thought of that before in my life, but here we are. Just yesterday, an animation that we were working on, the punchline was a Thanksgiving dinner and the turkey believed in social distancing, ba-dum-bump. The turkey’s running away from Thanksgiving dinner.

And the client, which was the State of California Department of Public Health, said, “You know, social distancing is going to trigger someone because that’s a past protocol that we’re not really embracing right now.” And I’m like, “You just killed my punch line.” But I came up with another one because that’s what we do. That’s a cartoonist’s superpower, I think that’s an artist’s superpower, is taking a massive concept and simplifying it. And that’s always fun for me.

Talasek: Yeah. Taking something complex and simplifying it, but also making us feel the complexity in a way that you can’t articulate with words is another sort of role to manage.

Sonke: I think there’s so many layers of that, that are really important right now. I especially love, Lalo, the way your work draws people in individually, and it has a collective impact as well. I mean, it’s reaching a lot of people. It exemplifies the ways in which the arts do draw people in. I mean, if I have a choice to look at a standard informational public health billboard as opposed to a comic, I’m a little more interested in that comic. Similarly, standard PSA or really beautiful music video—I’m going to be drawn more into those mechanisms. And as Lalo articulated, the arts have a way of clarifying information; they also use mechanisms like melody, rhythm, repetition. They use aesthetic mechanisms which we know not only draw people in, but they linger in the senses, they stay with us.

And when people have aesthetic experiences that are paired with ideas and information that’s important to them, they’re very likely to talk about those experiences to others. We know from work that’s been done, for instance, in Uganda with HIV health behaviors, that the people who hear about, for instance, a radio drama from someone who heard it and is impacted in those ways, that person who hears secondhand through that social learning process is even more likely to change their behavior. So there’s a lot of power to delivering information in these aesthetic ways that linger in the senses and that people want to talk about, because I’m affected by the passion of someone I trust. And it’s going to help me again consider my own values and be more likely to lead to a really sustainable or approachable behavior change. Lalo, I would love to hear, what are you hearing from people who read your comics?

Alcaraz: Well, we recently had an event to showcase the artwork in the Central Valley. We went to Merced, California, and did a special appearance for a couple days there, and the reaction’s great on the ground. I’m encouraged that the nonprofits that are on the ground are welcoming the artwork and the effort, the thrust. These people are going to swap meets and getting people vaccinated and just giving out good information. They’re going to swap meets at 6:00 in the morning on Saturdays. They are on the ground reaching out to where the people are at. That’s the part where I’m not involved, I just create the stuff and I send it off. And I hope that the various agencies that are involved with our program are handing it off, getting it delivered, getting it to eyeballs. But I’m encouraged by all the other organizations that aren’t involved that want to get the cartoons and distribute them. I’m like, yeah, hell yeah. So I feel encouraged by the organizations on the ground that want to expand on this concept. And we’re breaking new grounds.

Sonke: One thing I’m super excited about that I think is going to emerge here is new partnerships that can be sustained and used for other public health needs and issues. I think the relationships being made in your program, such a beautiful example, Lalo, between public health programs and professionals and artists and culture bearers will serve not only this moment, but probably even more so after those organizations have more experiences of working together, getting to know each other, and seeing the value across each sector in the partnership. So I’m really excited to see what’s going to happen.

And that’s one thing that we’re excited about continuing to look at from a CDC perspective, as well as how sustainable and durable these partnerships will be in the future. The arts, I want to say, came organically to bear right away in COVID. When people started engaging the arts, artists started making work about COVID right away. So that happened organically, but the connection between the public health sector and the art sector was slow to come to bear in this pandemic. And I really hope that we’re building a foundation now that will be able to come to bear much more efficiently and quickly in whatever health emergencies come our way in the future.

Alcaraz: Yeah. You said it. I was about to say it, it still feels like an emergency and that’s why I jumped into it when I was approached by Dr. Lopez. He had told me, years ago, we had met over a bowl of menudo in Boston, in the Cambridge area because we were at a conference at Harvard—that was our origin story. But he told me, “We’re going to work together one day,” and then boom, this thing happened. I hope it goes on and we’re less of being in an emergency situation where—it’s stressful enough to come up with cartoons on deadlines. We’re fighting a fire here, you know.

Sonke: That’s right. I mentioned Uganda earlier; I’ve done a lot of research on how the arts are used in health communication and public health in Uganda. And when I’ve been there, I’ve had more than one artist say to me, “Thank God I’m an artist, because I can always work.” Because the arts are so central to public health. And I really hope that we will get there in this country as well with recognizing the importance of arts and culture in public health.

Alcaraz: Since we’re cross chatting here, I’ve mentioned my parents were Mexican immigrants. Children of immigrants are basically translators and we become mini adults. And we have to navigate bills, and the contact with the schools, and also doctor’s offices. I mean, I can’t tell you how many doctor’s offices I was in as a child, and I had to translate for my mom what was going on. But being in those offices, I always remember the posters inside the offices that are kind of graphic, like a cross section of your intestines and your heart. And those would always fascinate me, but they were kind of just these kind of passive, anatomical posters with their charts. They didn’t have much life to them—or they were a pitch from a pharmaceutical company. But I’m excited, this is a new thing and I’m really digging it.

Talasek: And Jill, I wonder, what would you say are the next steps? I mean, you talked about having this sort of methodology and this protocol set up for other crisis situations. What do we need to do to build this network and to build this protocol that we could go to more quickly, as you say? What would you say are the most urgent needs?

Sonke: So, I think there are a number of things that will be helpful in this regard. One is just that the major public health organizations like the CDC need to be more aware. That’s happening right now, the World Health Organization has launched a major arts and health initiative, the CDC is on board. We need also to be measuring outcomes. Right now I think we’ve got strong theoretical and lived experience framework that we’re building from. There is some really good research from other parts of the world in particular, and we need more research in the United States to really understand the potential power and efficiency of these methods to impact health communication. And I think what’s important in that is that we need to measure how they’re an important partner in health communication as well.

And I think policy and funding always come to bear. So these partnerships that we’re advocating for have needed funding. Fortunately, the CDC Foundation has stepped in, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts to make funding available. The National Association of Museums has also funded thus far 50 arts-based vaccine confidence programs taking place in museums and libraries. And they’ve got another RFP out now. So there are really great individual examples, and I mentioned the state of California before as well. But I think we need to put in place funding opportunities from major funding agencies that combine departments of those agencies that are often separate.

Health most often works separately from arts and culture in those funding organizations. So I think funding organizations need to be providing more cross-departmental, or cross-unit funding, or braided funding opportunities, because it’s taken us well over a year to get those funding opportunities in place in this pandemic. So I’d love to see them in place going forward—not just for emergency situations, but for all of the health issues that we’re working on every day and the health inequities that we’re working on every day in this country.

Talasek: Jill, thank you. I wonder if you could tell us what are the websites or locations we can go to, to find more information about the work the CDC is doing on the field guides, as well as your work at the Center for Arts in Medicine?

Sonke: Sure. You can go to the CDC website, cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/vaccinate-with-confidence, and you’ll find the two field guides there. You can also find those field guides on the Center for Arts in Medicine website. We also developed a repository of programs, so you can find examples of programs, organizations working in this space, a lot of resources there. And there’s a webinar featuring the CDC and National Endowment for the Arts and artists who are doing this work. Those resources are available both on the CDC website and on the University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine websites.

Talasek: Wonderful. Thank you, Jill. And Lalo, one of the disadvantages of being a visual artist on an audio podcast is we can’t see your work. Where could we see your work?

Alcaraz: Trust me, it’s beautiful and very effective. You can go to covidlatino.org and look for it there. We just got a new web guy that’s going to revamp the site so that people can download the art, print it out, do whatever they want except make t-shirts. I mean, don’t make t-shirts of my art—or mouse pads. But you can go there and see all the art cartoons I’ve done, and also the other artists from Arizona that have done some standalone pieces. And then they have some animation that they’ve done. And we are working on a new animation that’s a little more raw called Super Vaccine Vato, and he is a cholo superhero that interacts with Tío Rigo, that one uncle.

This thing’s headed into new dimensions with animation for me, so it’s really great. Real quick, for the future I would love to tackle diabetes in the community, plus all the other problems we got going. But diabetes I think is a really—one of my haters (and I love my haters) said, “Why weren’t you concerned about heart disease or diabetes?” Well, you can’t give me diabetes, I give that to myself. I can’t contract diabetes from you because you’re not vaccinated against diabetes. But it is an endemic problem in the Latino community. I know people who have suffered from it, and I would love to do something on that and just the wider issues, we got so much.

Talasek: Well, I suspect you saying that opened up a lot of doors, so I think you should get ready. Jill, Lalo, both of you inspired me so much. Thank you both for joining us. Art is a powerful tool for connecting with and communicating with many different communities, and both of your work have shown us the value of building a strong relationship between artists and public health programs.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of The Ongoing Transformation. Check out our show notes to find links to Lalo’s artwork, the CDC field guides, and other resources. Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with any comments or suggestions. If you enjoy conversations like this one, visit us at issues.org and subscribe to our print magazine. I’m J.D. Talasek, the Director of Cultural Programs at the National Academy of Sciences. Thanks for joining us.

Supporting a New Innovation Ecosystem

Fossil Preparators and Inclusive Science

Episode 7: Shaky Science in the Courtroom

Eyewitness testimony and forensic science are forms of evidence frequently relied upon in criminal cases. But over the past few decades DNA analysis—and the exonerations it has prompted—has revealed how flawed these types of evidence can be. According to the Innocence Project, mistaken eyewitness identifications played a role in about 70% of convictions that were ultimately overturned through DNA testing, and misapplied forensic science was found in nearly half of these cases.

In this episode we speak with Jed Rakoff, senior US district judge for the Southern District of New York. Judge Rakoff discussed the weaknesses in eyewitness identification and forensic science and offered thoughts on how judges, policymakers, and others can reform the use of these methods and get stronger science into the courtroom.

Rakoff is the author of the 2021 book Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free: and Other Paradoxes of Our Broken Legal System. He cochaired the National Academies committee that wrote the 2014 report Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification, and served on the National Commission on Forensic Science from 2013 to 2017.

Recommended reading

• Read Jed Rakoff’s book Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free: And Other Paradoxes of Our Broken Legal System
• And two National Academies reports: Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification and Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward
• In 2000, associate justice of the Supreme Court Stephen Breyer wrote for Issues about the role of science in the justice system: “Science in the Courtroom”

Transcript

Frueh: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University. I’m Sara Frueh, consulting editor for the journal. I’m joined today by Judge Jed Rakoff to talk about flaws in forensic science and eyewitness identification, their use in the courtroom, and what can be done to address these problems. Judge Rakoff is a senior US district judge for the Southern District of New York. He co-chaired a National Academy’s committee that issued a landmark report on eyewitness identification in 2014, and his recent book is called Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free: And Other Paradoxes of Our Broken Legal System.

Frueh: Welcome, Judge Rakoff, it’s great to have you with us.

Rakoff: It’s my pleasure, and thank you so much for inviting me.

Frueh: I’d like to start by talking about eyewitness identifications. People and juries often assume that if a witness in a criminal case says, “I was there, I saw that person commit the crime, I’ll never forget his face,” that it’s reliable. But several years ago, you led a study that found that these identifications often aren’t as reliable as people think. Why is that?

Rakoff: First of all, in the words of the Innocence Project, inaccurate eyewitness identification is so common that it’s the single greatest factor in the wrongful convictions that, through DNA, have led to exonerations. The Innocence Project has exonerated, to date, almost 400 people. These were people who were convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of very serious crimes—murder, rape, things like that—and yet were eventually proven to be absolutely innocent. And in over 70% of those cases, eyewitness identification evidence was introduced. In one of the earliest cases, the case involving Kirk Bloodsworth, a murder rape case—terrible crime—no fewer than five eyewitnesses said they had seen him commit the crime or had seen him fleeing from the scene of the crime. And they were all wrong. eventually, the DNA testing of the semen from the victim proved that it was someone else, who later confessed, but not until Mr. Bloodsworth had spent nine years in prison, [two of those years] on death row, I might add.

So it is a real conundrum for the legal system because, as you point out, this is powerful evidence. It’s not only evidence that’s frequent, particularly in state crimes, but it’s quite powerful. The eyewitness typically has no motive to lie. The eyewitness is usually a responsible citizen. The eyewitness is someone who, by the time a case goes to trial, or even when it just goes to a hearing before a judge, or even before that, when he or she is talking to the prosecutor, has become quite sure that he has identified the right guy. Juries naturally believe them. So why are they wrong? Well, sometimes they’re wrong for reasons that are understandable to a jury: bad lighting, the fact that the guy was carrying a weapon so that the eyes of the witness were focused on him, the fact that the eye witness’s own view is obscured.

Unfortunately, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of things going on in the human perception equipment and the human memory that jurors are not aware of, and that can make for false identification. Just to give you two examples: one is the racial effect. People of one race are much better at perceiving and remembering the fine facial features of someone of their own race than someone of a different race. There is some controversy over why this is so, but there’s no doubt that it is so. Another more subtle problem, and one I think you see frequently in the exoneration cases, is where two different memories have merged together—unconsciously, but for very real. And the way this works, for example, is you see the culprit committing the crime, and maybe you see it for a minute or two. And if one could take a photo of the inside of your brain at that point, one would see that you only had a very fuzzy perception of what the guy looked like.

But three hours later, you’re shown a photo array, seven photos. And if it’s done properly, you’re told, “No one here may be the guy, but if there is someone who is the guy, let us know.” You’re a conscientious citizen. You pour over those photographs very carefully. And finally you say, “Well, I’m not sure, but the person who looks most to me like the guy that I saw commit the crime is number two.” And in studying number two, you notice, among other things, that he has a scar over his right eyebrow. Now you did not, in fact, perceive that at the time. But over the next few weeks and months, those two memories will merge. And by the time you come to testify, you will say, “I am really absolutely sure this is the guy, because I will never forget that I saw this scar over his right eyebrow.” And what you’re really remembering is the photo, not the guy you saw, but the two memories that merged unconsciously and just reinforced your wrongful identification.

Frueh: In your book, you discuss those fundamental problems with our vision and memory, and you suggest that one way to limit the damage they can cause would be to educate prosecutors about those flaws and how they can lead to mistaken identifications. How would that education work, and how would it help solve the problem?

Rakoff: You have to understand that because of laws, many of which I think are unfortunate, that were passed in the 1960s, seventies, eighties, and nineties, 97% of all criminal cases are plea bargained. And this is, it used to be no more than 80%, sometimes 75% in some jurisdictions. Now it’s overwhelmingly the case. And so the prosecutor is really the key player. To be frank, he or she wields much more power than the judge in determining who gets charged, who goes to jail, and so forth. And most prosecutors are very well intentioned, but very young. I was a prosecutor for seven years. I was three years out of law school, two years out of clerkship. I knew nothing about most of this stuff. I learned it on the job, so to speak. And what I regret is that I didn’t have what I had when I became a judge.

When I became a judge, like all federal judges, I was sent to something called baby judge school. But it’s a week-long program in Richmond, Virginia, where you’re taught things that you probably don’t know about being a judge. Well, I would like to see the same kind of thing for prosecutors. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a whole week, but several days. It could be done, ideally, in person, but it could be done by video and pre-packaged programs and so forth in which, among other things, prosecutors would be made aware of how often eyewitness identifications are wrong and why this is so. And you see the importance of this in the cases where there were exonerations, because almost always the guy who they then discover really was guilty was one of the suspects originally. But then the eyewitness came along and said, “Oh no, it’s Jones.” And so the police stopped looking at Smith and they started focusing exclusively on Jones.

But the prosecutor, if he knows of that danger, could say to the police at that point, “Before we charge this guy, have you looked into Smith? Let’s follow up a little bit more with Smith.” Because they would know that this testimony is not as reliable, in many cases, as it appears. So that’s the thing I have in mind. Now, I have another suggestion, which I feel will probably not be adopted in the United States, but it’s based on the British system. And my idea would be that for every three years that a prosecutor is a prosecutor, he has to spend six months of those three years as a criminal defense lawyer, defending indigent people. This would have to be in another district so there wouldn’t be conflicts of interest. And that would give him a much greater feel for where weaknesses in his approach may lie. Not just in eyewitness identification, although that would be certainly a key one, but also in areas of doubtful forensic science, for example.

Frueh: Speaking of that, I’d like to switch gears and talk a little about forensic science, which in the last decade or more has faced similar problems in revelations in terms of it not being as reliable as many people think. In your book, you talk about how the emergence of DNA analysis in the 1990s revealed the weaknesses in some other forensic science methods, like hair analysis and bite mark analysis and other techniques. In other words, that they’re not really grounded in science. What does it mean to say that a forensic science method is truly scientific?

Rakoff: So the great report—done by the National Academy of Sciences, let’s hear it for the National Academy of Sciences, and published in 2009, and the co-chair of that was the very great Judge Harry Edwards from the DC circuit—that report went through virtually all the major forms of forensic science and concluded, as you say, that most, if not all, were not really grounded in science. And what do we mean by grounded in science? Well, the Supreme Court has spoken to this in the Daubert case. We mean first, that the theory has been tested, tested in scientifically sound studies, blind studies, studies that meet all the requirements of a good scientific study, that [it] has then been peer-reviewed in publications that are well-known as being the publications that monitor developments in the relevant areas, that it has then been used sufficiently so that we can calculate an error rate, and if the error rate is too large, say more than 10%, that would cast great doubt on the reliability of the method—and finally, that it’s generally accepted, not just in the narrow community of people who administer these tests, but in the broader scientific community.

The National Academy report found that DNA was really the only one that met all four of those requirements, probably because it was developed by scientists for other reasons. Most of what we think of as forensic science was originally developed by police labs as a way of helping leads. And that’s perfectly legitimate. You don’t have to have rigid science in order to have something that may help you go identify another lead to follow. But then, beginning in the early 1900s, it began to be introduced in the federal and then the state courts. And a lot of it proved to be very unreliable, although we didn’t know that until things like the Innocence Project came along. There’s something called The National Registry of Exonerations, which is put together by several law schools, which records all court-ordered exonerations since 1989. And there are now about 2,500 of those. They found that in 40% of their cases, there was inaccurate forensic science testimony introduced.

I’ll give you an even more extreme example. It used to be that the FBI and various local police people would do what’s called a microscopic hair analysis, where the theory was that everyone’s hair is unique, just like everyone’s fingerprint is unique. I think many barbers would disagree. In any event, just taking that—without ever having tested it to see if that was true or not—the theory that developed [was] that if you look carefully enough at a blown-up slide of the hair found at the scene of the crime and compare it with the hair of the suspect, you can make a match. And in the lingo of forensic science, this got introduced as, “I am sure to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, that the hair found at the scene, the crime matches the hair of the defendant and the likelihood that it could be anyone else is extremely remote.”

Well, that turned out to be wrong. It was bad science and it wasn’t true. And finally, the FBI, to its credit, did its own study of the 3,000 cases in which its own experts had testified to the effect that I just indicated. And they concluded that in 95% of those, what the experts said was either flatly inaccurate or, more often, considerably overstated. Many courts now preclude the emission of this bogus forensic science. Now, the bad news is there are still states that allow it.

There is a lot of problem with forensic science. Not all DNA is good. Fingerprint is better than things like bite marks and microscopic hair analysis, but it still has a degree of subjectivity, and that’s the last thing I’ll make mention of.

In a really scientific test, subjectivity plays no role, but as the National Academy found in their report, even in things like fingerprints, subjectivity plays a big role. So you have two fingerprints that you’re comparing, and it’s a subjective decision based on “experience,” which things to look at for comparison and which not. And so you may say, “You see that little swirl over there and the one that’s in the other slide, and that only occurs when it’s the same person.” Another examiner will say, “No, the swirls are really not central, and you have to look at something else.” There have been cases in which fingerprint experts have gotten it flat wrong, but it is better than some of the others.

Frueh: Is there a way to make some of the subjective forensic approaches more objective, or are they just intrinsically subjective?

Rakoff: Well, I think the biggest suggestion from the National Academy of Science 2009 report that I really do not know why it hasn’t been followed up, but it hasn’t, was to create a National Institute of Forensic Science staffed by high level scientists. And they would look at each form of forensic science and they would say, “This one’s good, but it could be made even better in the following ways. This one’s so bad, we don’t think it’s salvageable. This one’s bad, but it could be made salvageable if the following steps were taken.” And they would be in a position, as scientists, to bring to bear a kind of rigor that no judge is capable of doing and no party is capable of doing. So that would be, I think, the ideal solution—it was the proposal from the National Academy. I’m not sure why it was never followed up. There is some opposition to all of this from local police labs and the like. They have understandable biases in favor of what they’re doing, which I can fully appreciate. But I’m not sure why it didn’t attract greater national attention.

Frueh: Given that that hasn’t happened so far, have you seen any areas of forensic science where there has been progress made, either to put disciplines on more solid scientific footing or to make courtroom testimony more accurate and to reflect more fully the limitations of these methods? Have we made any progress at all?

Rakoff: Yes. It varies a lot from state to state. And please remember that the criminal justice system is mostly a matter of state prosecutions. Something like 90% of all criminal prosecutions are brought by the state, not by the federal government, so that’s where the action is. I think 37 of the states have now adopted Daubert and therefore, at least in theory, could subject forensic science, so-called forensic science, to the four-part analysis that I mentioned previously. And some cases have done that. There was an early case in Oklahoma, for example, where the federal judge threw out a microscopic hair analysis because after a Daubert hearing, he realized that this was just not good science at all.

A number of judges, and I would have to admit including myself, have also experimented with putting limits on what the expert can say. So I had a case a few years ago involving ballistic testimony. The theory of ballistics is that when you fire a bullet, it makes certain markings on the cartridge, and more importantly, on the barrel of the gun that are unique because the physical situation is never totally identical—it could be in a room with more pressure or less pressure, whatever. There has been doubt cast on that theory. But in the particular case that I had, and some other judges have done similar things, I said, OK, I will allow the expert to show two blowups, one of the bullet and one of the barrel of the gun, and to point out what he thinks are the commonalities of the two. But he can’t say there’s a match. And the most he can say is that it’s more likely than not, a much lower standard than proof beyond a reasonable doubt, more likely than not that this bullet came from this gun.

A number of judges have taken that approach, and I did. I’m not so sure in the end that’s the approach I would take today. I think I might throw it out altogether. But that is the approach that’s been taken. One of the reasons is judges are, I think, reluctant in a criminal case to exclude evidence that they think might make the difference between a determination of guilt or innocence. And they sort of feel, “Gee, the jury should see it all and then make their decision.” But seeing it all is not really meaningful when the jury has not the slightest scientific clue as to whether this evidence is good science or bad science. But nevertheless, that is, I think, deeply ingrained in many judges: when in doubt, let it in. And I think that happens too often in these cases.

Frueh: What about the role of the federal government in all of this? It sounds like a lot of these decisions are made on a court-by-court basis, on a state-by-state basis. Is there a role where the administration or Congress could take a more active part in driving change beyond the founding of the National Institute of Forensic Science, which I know you said was your first choice? Short of that, are there other steps that they could take to improve forensic science and its use?

Rakoff: The government, to its credit, in the last term of President Obama, created a National Council of Forensic Science [National Commission on Forensic Science] and they brought together all the players. So there were defense lawyers, there were government prosecutors, there were hard scientists, so to speak, and scientists who had devoted themselves to particular forensic disciplines. There were lab technicians and there were some judges. There was even one federal judge—they were desperate. Anyway, over the course of the four years that that existed, the group made no fewer than 59 recommendations. Now, these were technically recommendations being made to the Department of Justice, but they were written in such a way that we were hopeful would also impact local police and prosecutors as well.

To give you one example, we came down very strongly—this was almost unanimous—against the formulation [of] reasonable degree of scientific certainty, saying A) that’s not good science, science’s probability is not certainties, and B) it conveys completely the wrong view. It basically says to the jury, “Don’t be skeptical of this, it’s certain.” So we recommended the Department of Justice adopted that recommendation. I think some states have followed suit as well. I think it would be not as good as the so-called National Institute, but I think a useful step would be to revive the National [Commission on] Forensic Science. In the early days of the Trump administration, it had a four-year term and it was allowed to lapse and not be renewed. But a majority of the members felt there was still work to be done and asked that it be renewed. I think that would still be a helpful step.

Frueh: OK. As a final question, and we’ve talked about some areas where progress has been made, sometimes piecemeal, sometimes slow, and where progress hasn’t been made, and I’d like to ask, do you have hope for the future of forensic science and for fundamental change in forensic science? And if so, where does it lie, and what part of the system do you think is most fertile ground for change?

Rakoff: Well, being American, of course I’m optimistic. I’m always optimistic. I do think—and this goes not just to forensic science, this goes more across the board—movements for reform in the criminal justice area will go up and down depending on crime rates. So crime rates, until the last year or so, were tending down quite dramatically, and that made people more willing to consider reforms. But with the increase in violent crimes in the last year or so, I think that consensus may be broken up. The other thing though that leads to reform is something that is continuing and has been quite well publicized, which is the exoneration of innocent people. You can pick up a newspaper every week, practically, and find another case where someone who’s been in prison for a substantial period of time is found to be totally innocent and the court says, “Oops, sorry about that, you can go free.”

And the American people, I do think, are fundamentally a very fair people, and they are affected, as they should be, by that knowledge. So against that big background, what needs to be done is educating the public that it is things like eyewitness testimony and bad forensic science that is such a big factor in these wrongful convictions, so that they can see the connection. They’re more used to seeing on TV where the CSI type of approach—“Oh, it’s brilliant.” And they solve this problem, this case that could not otherwise be solved, and so forth. So I think that’s where you read these newspaper accounts of exonerations, rarely do they get into the weeds of why the person was wrongfully convicted. Usually it will be either wrongful eyewitness identification or bad forensic science. There are other factors as well, but those are the two big ones.

So I think the focus needs to be there. Where reform will ultimately come from, I think the courts can’t escape responsibility. These wrongful convictions occur on our turf and sure, Congress sets a lot of the rules, the president exercises a lot of discretion, but, when all is said and done, it’s in our courtrooms that the wrong occurs. And so if we don’t start doing something about it, we will have evaded our responsibility.

Frueh: Thank you, Judge Rakoff. I want to give you a hearty thanks for being with us today and just for all of the efforts that you’ve made to educate people about the importance of science in the courtroom.

Rakoff: My pleasure and thank you so much for inviting me.

Frueh: Thank you for joining us for this episode of The Ongoing Transformation. To learn more about forensic science and eyewitness identification, check out Judge Jed Rakoff’s book, Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free, and also the National Academy’s report, Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification. Check our show notes to find links to these publications and more. Also, please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with any comments or suggestions. And if you enjoy conversations like this one, visit us at issues.org and subscribe to our print magazine. I’m Sara Frueh, consulting editor for Issues in Science and Technology. See you next time.

Photography of the Anthropocene

For four decades, James Balog has photographed the beauty of the world’s natural resources as well as the impact of climate change on the Earth and its inhabitants. His projects explore the consequences of human behavior as it has begun to affect the stability of the natural world and the health of its citizens. He has focused his camera on the intertwined events of melting glaciers, rising seas, warming oceans, polluted air, increased temperatures, and the destructive forces of ferocious hurricanes, floods, and wildfires.

As an artist, Balog pushes aesthetic boundaries to create simultaneously engaging and disquieting individual photographs, as well as websites and films. Through his work, he aims to stimulate public awareness and mobilize action on behalf of the Earth and its populations. Widely published and exhibited as a photographer, Balog also collects data and visual evidence on climate and environmental change. He created the Extreme Ice Survey in 2007 to document and measure the retreat of glaciers around the world. All of Balog’s photographic essays relate to his conviction that human behavior is changing our globe and that these changes are, in turn, having serious impacts on humanity.

The exhibition James Balog: Photography of the Anthropocene is on display at the National Academy of Sciences building from October 4, 2021, through May 2, 2022. The traveling exhibition is accompanied by Balog’s new book, The Human Element: A Time Capsule from the Anthropocene (Rizzoli, 2021). All works are courtesy of the artist.

Climate Change and Communities

Designing a New AI

Episode 6: The Marvelous and the Mundane

The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to reveal secrets of every phase of cosmic history, going all the way back to the Big Bang. In this episode we talk with Washington, DC-based artist Timothy Makepeace about his exhibition Reflections on a Tool of Observation: Artwork Inspired by the James Webb Space Telescope. Makepeace’s artwork celebrates the awe-inspiring technology of the space telescope while drawing attention to the fact that it is a human endeavor, revealing the nuts, bolts, and wires of the instrument. Makepeace is joined by art historian Anne Collins Goodyear, whose research exploring the relationship between art and technology provides thought-provoking historical context.

Recommended reading

• See a selection of pieces from Tim Makepeace’s exhibition Reflections on a Tool of Observation: Artwork Inspired by the James Webb Space Telescope, and visit the CPNAS website to learn more about the exhibition. 
• Visit Tim Makepeace’s website for more artwork. 
• Follow Anne Collins Goodyear’s current work at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Transcript

Talasek: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and Arizona State University. I’m J.D. Talesek, and I’m the director of Cultural Programs at the National Academy of Sciences. On this episode, we’re in discussion with DC-based artist Tim Makepeace, whose exhibit, entitled “Reflections on a Tool of Observation: Artwork Inspired by the James Webb Space Telescope,” was organized by Cultural Programs of the NAS. To see Tim’s artwork and get more context for this discussion, visit his website at www.tmakepeace.com, or check the notes of this podcast. Also joining us is art historian Anne Collins Goodyear, who is the co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Welcome to you both, Tim, Anne, I’m so glad to have you with us today.

Makepeace: Thanks for having us.

Goodyear: Wonderful to be here, J.D.

Talasek: So Tim’s most recent work as an artist has been based upon his interest in the James Webb Telescope, a highly advanced instrument, which hopefully will allow us to observe parts of space that we’ve never seen before. But telescopes are not typically objects that we think of as subjects for art, which begs the question: Why? Why would an artist be drawn towards such technology for inspiration as a subject matter for their artwork? So Tim, maybe we can start with you. How did you become interested in the telescope? And what drew you to that as a subject for your art and for inspiration?

Makepeace: Well, counterintuitively, I’m not that interested in space and telescopes. I just happen to see a call for artists, it was a contest that was run by folks at Goddard Space Flight Center at NASA here in Greenbelt, Maryland, just outside DC. And they were looking for some artists to come make artwork about this new telescope, which I had never heard anything about. And so I applied for it, and in the meantime, I started looking up this thing. And the more I looked into it, the cooler it was, and I thought, well, I’ve just got to be a part of this. This sounds really amazing. So in the end, I was one of a handful of artists that was selected to come to the space center where they have the telescope under construction in the one of the world’s largest, cleanest rooms, for fabricating such a spacecraft. I got a couple tours, I went out there twice and took a lot of photographs. The more I learned about it, the more excited I was, and it just drove my interest. And from there, I made a lot of artwork and just kept going.

Talasek: Tim, that’s fantastic. Thank you. So Anne, the relationship of art and technology has long been an interest for you, as a scholar and as a historian. And through your work, we know that this is not an uncommon topic for artists. But I’m wondering if you could tell us, what drew you into this terrain between art and technology as an area of research?

Goodyear: Absolutely, J.D. And again, it’s a pleasure to be able to be part of this conversation. And as you mentioned, this interest of mine in the interconnection between art, science, and technology is a very deep-seated one. In fact, funny enough, I have recollections of having done a term paper, way back when in high school, about Leonardo da Vinci, who of course, is somebody who is understood as sort of a consonant unifier of art and science, especially in his own era. And in many ways, I think the type of curiosity that we associate with Leonardo da Vinci is very much at the core of why I find it’s so interesting to look at how artists, scientists, and technologists can come together. It does strike me that there have been very special moments throughout history at which visionary individuals have come together, sometimes in person and very deliberately, and other times perhaps in spaces that were adjacent to one another, but spaces that nevertheless pushed the development of new breakthrough ideas.

I think, for me, at the end of the day, I really do see a core principle of creativity at work in scientists and engineers and in visual artists that are helping us, quite literally, to see the world and perhaps to see the future. And ultimately, that’s what I find so compelling. I think I like looking at this question of the intersection between art, science, and technology through the eyes of an art historian because there are ways in which visual artists quite literally picture our world. That is to say that they create images that may reflect back to us or preserve for us extraordinary and exciting sites around us. But I think there are also ways in which artists distill and pick up on themes that we may not yet even recognize the significance of. I think that that often grows out of this special curiosity that an artist may bring to subjects that grab their attention. It’s one of the reasons that I’m so interested in the ways in which Tim Makepeace has chosen to picture the James Webb Space Telescope.

And I have to say, I think it’s very special to picture a telescope, in the sense that once it is in orbit, once it is in action, we will see images that are gathered by this telescope, but this may be our one and only opportunity to really picture the instrument itself. And so I think there’s a way in which Tim’s artwork is helping us to be more cognizant of some of the decisions that were actually made in engineering the instrument that will allow us to penetrate in new ways into our universe. So I think it is a very suitable and exciting topic for an artist, but I think it’s also an invaluable subject for us as human beings: to be able to reflect on the instrument that is reflecting back to us the world, the universe that we inhabit.

Talasek: I think that’s a really great observation. And to that point, since we are on a podcast right now, and we’re listening and not seeing the artwork, Tim, I wonder if we could go back to what you were saying about this clean space and this room. And I wonder if you could describe to us not only the space that you were inspired by, being in with the telescope, but also can you describe your work to us in a little bit more detail as to what it represents?

Makepeace: Sure. There’s two parts, there’s the science and then there’s the art, and the art is always hard to talk about and describe. So I’ll start with the science of this beast, this beast that the NASA engineers have come up with. They spent over 20 years developing this telescope. Its purpose is, some say, to replace Hubble, which is going to burn up in a few years, it’s past its lifespan. This new telescope is a space telescope they’re launching a million miles out into space, it’s going to be like 100 times better than Hubble. Hubble is an amazing instrument. So it’s very expensive, very technologically tricky, right on the edge of what is possible. When they first designed the telescope, they didn’t even know how to build it, it was so advanced. They had to invent certain technologies just to fabricate it. Every part of this thing is tricky, from where it orbits to how they get it there. It’s an infrared telescope. Infrared is a reflective telescope, like most large telescopes, and the reflective surface is not silver, it’s gold, because gold reflects infrared energy better than silver. So it has this stunning appearance. It’s a 24 gold-plated dish that’s 21 feet in diameter.

It’s so big, it doesn’t even fit in the rocket, so it has to fold. So anytime you have moving parts, you’ve got complications. And because it’s an infrared telescope, it images heat. And so to image heat, you have to be in a cold environment, you have to have cold instruments, and by cold they mean really cold. It’s like 40 degrees above Kelvin or minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. So they have this enormous sunshades size of a tennis court and that has to unfold. And it’s just, it’s just wild.

So I got to see this thing under construction, and I took a lot of photographs of it. What inspired me mainly was it’s sort of very abstract quality. I was less interested in its iconic imagery, you know, what it looks like as a piece. If you think about an old-fashioned telescope, it’s a tube with an eyepiece. I wasn’t interested in capturing the hole and just describing it as, “here’s this thing, it looks kind of like this”—I was interested in focusing on narrowing my focus, cropping to tighter elements of it, which highlighted the geometry and the materials and the architectural elements of it. I kinda like to think of myself as a modernist artist, and one of the founding principles of modernist architecture is form follows function. So the forms that I was able to see and focus on all derived from this very specialized function that they’ve invented this machine for.

It’s a very abstract concept that is the driver behind these abstract shapes, that I am composing in an abstract way to illuminate some of the really interesting sculptural things about this. My work is based on photographs; they are large charcoal and pastel drawings that are taken directly from the photographs I took and that the official NASA photographer took, and I am drawing them in a very photographic way—very precisely. To me, it’s very important to not be inventive, because what these engineers have invented is, there’s no need to invent anything more, artistically. It’s an amazing artistic piece in itself.

Talasek: I’d like to talk a little bit about your choice of material. I find it wonderful, if you think of drawing in pencil, charcoal, pastel—any of those is technology. To represent such a high-tech, engineered piece of technology with something very, very basic, is, in my mind, quite wonderful. And I wonder if both of you would talk about that a little bit.

Goodyear: Maybe I could jump in for a moment here. I know Tim is going to really have something very insightful to say in response to that. But I’m so glad that you honed in on this question of the choices that Tim is making. Because in a sense, while I would certainly describe the idiom in which Tim is making his drawings as a “photorealistic idiom,” at the same time I would say that there’s really in some senses no such thing as an impartial transcription of reality, in the sense that we know that each of us as human beings is going to make certain choices about what we want to represent that reflect on our own sensibilities. I think in some ways, Tim may be selling himself a little bit short in terms of describing the work that he has created, because in fact I think what makes it so exceptionally compelling, both visually and intellectually, is that he has been very deliberate in a number of the choices that he’s made.

J.D., I’m just going to pick up the gauntlet that you’ve thrown down here for a moment. You focused on the question of medium, which I think is really important and interesting; I think that would be very exciting to ask you to unpack further, Tim, because you are an experienced photographer. And yet you have chosen not to present photographs, you’ve made a very deliberate decision to interpret photographic material, to make particular choices about what you include in an image, how you center an image.

For example, there’s a beautiful drawing now on view at the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Acoustic Test Chamber.” It’s stunning visually, and at the center is, it looks like, a portal of some sort. But it’s no accident that you placed that circular element so prominently in this composition. Another thing that I find really exciting about some of the choices you make is the choice, specifically, of going with a square format, a format that evades the traditional use of a horizon line in landscape painting, particularly, but you defy some of our expectations about how these images might be intrinsically oriented, specifically by going with this square format. I think that’s really exciting, given the fact that space is one of the things that you’re evoking now. I think J.D.’s point about your use of charcoal, which is, and this is a point that you make about your own work, one of the most ancient of human mediums, to depict one of the most sophisticated tools of our era, this telescope, is incredibly exciting.

It becomes even more exciting when we realize that one of the explicit purposes of this telescope is in fact to allow us to peer back into the origins of the universe. There’s this really interesting way in which your choice of the medium, of drawing, in and of itself provides this really beautiful connection between history, the present moment, and of course, what might be possible in the future. Really, I’m just amplifying J.D.’s question. But I did want to comment for a moment on the beauty of the choices I see you making, and to emphasize the significance of those because of course, that’s what makes your work art.

Makepeace: The drawing that Anna’s referring to is a drawing of the acoustic test chamber, it’s this room where they tested the telescope for vibrations, higher frequency vibrations, and it is a specialized room, but it’s just a very basic thing. It has a couple interesting things in it, this big circular tweeter speaker, and it has gantry and some high beams and stuff. But it is not something that Goddard is particularly proud of—they don’t bring tourists there to show them this, you know, beautiful room. It’s just a tool. It’s just a boring, besides a special use, it’s just a tool.

But I liked it because I’m interested in the working elements and finding beauty in everyday things, and particularly in structural things and mechanical things. And so this was a perfect subject. It’s just a derivative element of the fabrication of this telescope. It’s just a tool that they use for the telescope, but the picture does not have the telescope in it. The picture has a large circular tweeter in the center left and then it has a bunch of other structural elements or gantry elements that they can lift things up with, but the net result is this composition of lines and triangles—it’s a very classic composition. And it’s something you could find in the Renaissance, you know, force perspective, all these elements of classical painting or art.

They were there. I didn’t invent this, I just saw it, and I compose this picture to bring these elements out. And one of the intents of that is to, in a way, glorify the mundane, glorify the workaday. That’s what I was focusing on. I just love the architectural elements, the geometry, I love the purity of it, the Euclidean geometry of it.

That’s what drew me to it, and I drew it in the most precise way I could. It’s not just bold, gestural, rough ideas of these formal elements. It was a combination of those things, because this work is an exploration of the relationship between sculpture, photography, and abstraction—finding abstraction in the real world and finding those sculptural elements and putting it all together in various ways. Some of them are more photorealistic, some are less.

It’s this combination of the exquisite and the mundane. This telescope is as exquisite an object as you can imagine. And yet, I’ve included in the image the reflections of the telescope, some of the structural elements of the room—there’s high beams, there’s railings, there’s fluorescent light—things that the telescope was not intended to image. But I liked it because it showed the architectural elements of the environment it was in. It’s an odd contrast.

And then to the point of, why did I use charcoal? Why didn’t I just leave it as a photograph? Whenever you draw something, there’s always an element of simplification, amplification, streamlining, and you’re able to more easily emphasize what the point of that image was, you know: Was it about the sky? Or was it about the land? Or the wall? You can, subtly or not so subtly, amplify those elements and heighten either the emotional content or the physical content of it. That’s one reason I draw them.

And then pencil makes a lot of sense. Only a fool would use charcoal to try and draw something so precise. Charcoal is very hard to control; pencil is much easier to control. But a pencil is really designed for making lines. And I’m not really interested in lines, I’m more interested as a photographer in tones, and particularly black and white tones. And so with charcoal, you can smudge it, smear it, and you can get tones very easily. It’s sort of inherent in the media to get tones from black to dark gray, medium gray, light, just by smearing it. That’s what’s attracted me to photography. So I’m able to bring that part of it into these drawings. And that’s inherent in charcoal. The trick is, how do you control it? You figure out a few tricks and making masks and so forth. A side interest is how primitive the idea of using charcoal is. People have been using charcoal to describe their environment for 50,000 years. And here I am, describing the most advanced engineering thing that they’ve made, with charcoal.

Goodyear: I find it so exciting, as an art historian who has looked at the history of the emergence of the NASA art program in the 1960s, that we actually are talking about a telescope that is named for James Webb, who I believe was the second administrator of NASA. At any rate, James Webb was definitely the initiator of the NASA art program in 1962. And so I also find it really exciting that almost to the day, it is 60 years later, we are reflecting upon his legacy, with respect to creating an expectation of programmatic strategies by which artists can, and could, and perhaps even should reflect upon the emergence of space technology.

If I may, maybe I’ll just share a comment—this was actually in 1963, so it’s a little bit after the program was begun. But Jim Webb said, in June of 1963, that “an artistic record of this nation’s [program] of space exploration will have great historical value for future generations and [may] make a substantial contribution to the history of American art.” So I think Webb recognized, as did some of his contemporaries, the important ways in which it actually took the vision of an artist, perhaps, to create ways of picturing and recording space exploration that could bring together the sense of wonder that these extraordinary, ambitious technological undertakings stimulate in our souls. It is exciting to imagine—right now it’s hard to—but it’s exciting to imagine what it will be like to see those first images that come back.

Makepeace: Part of my excitement when I first saw the thing was knowing that I’m standing there, 30 feet from this telescope that soon will be a million miles from Earth for eternity. And this is a very brief moment in time when it is in this position, in this place on Earth, available to see—it was a very special thing to be part of. And so that also was super inspirational.

Talasek: I so appreciate that there’s so many threads here. That brings up a question in my mind, and I’m so glad that you brought up Director Webb’s creation of the NASA arts program. It’s actually one of the first things that I thought of when I saw Tim’s work—this ode to constructivism, which has influenced Tim’s work, and the Russian space program and the propaganda that was associated with it and space programs from other countries as well—I was thinking about the idea of this as propaganda versus the artwork with the artist’s voice. I was thinking about that in terms of what you both have referred to as the mundane and the marvelous, where we might think of propaganda as just a basic, single objective. Whereas the marvelous is where the artist reminds us of the humaneness and the wonder and the marvel. I wonder, Anne, if you could talk a little bit more about the role of the artist in that context. You quoted Webb talking about how the artist’s role was to help us to imagine the history of space and art in years to come. I’m reminded of a phrase that I heard: that it’s not the role of the artist to communicate or to teach or to be didactic, but to expand our imagination. I love that, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that in the context of the history of the arts programs within space exploration?

Goodyear: I couldn’t agree more that I think the role of the arts at the end of the day is always about expanding our imagination, no matter the medium in which that artistic vision is carried forward. This question of the relationship of art and propaganda, I think, is an extremely interesting one. Probably at the end of the day, it has a lot to do with context, both in terms of the circumstances under which artists may be permitted certain privileges of viewing something—that might be part of the equation. But perhaps more important is the context in which artwork is being framed—particularly by the state. I think most of us tend to associate propaganda with political outcomes.

One artist who we might immediately say has nothing to do with propaganda is the artist Jackson Pollock. I mean, here he is doing drip paintings that are totally non-objective. And yet even Jackson Pollock arguably gets pulled into the arena of propaganda during the Cold War, in the form of art exhibitions that are being organized by MoMA and other institutions, but with the support of the State Department. It’s a very subtle and nuanced question, what we mean by propaganda, but if an image is held up as being emblematic of a particular set of values for the sake of putting forward a political message, we might say that that image is being used for propagandistic purposes.

However, I think it’s really important to separate that from what individual artists are trying to achieve. Now, there may be artists whose goal it is to forward certain political objectives, and maybe they cheerfully engage in work that might be understood to be “propagandistic.” But I think that the very best art that has come out of the observation of the adventures this country and others have had in the realm of space exploration has been that art that on in its own right, has sought to break boundaries, has sought to reorient the way in which we see and understand the world. And I certainly see those values very much present in Tim’s work. I think what we never know about art, and I feel like this is why it’s so important that we sponsor its creation to the very utmost of our ability, is we never know how art, which conveys a genuinely creative vision—and I do think that, unlike propaganda, art understands the relationship of the mundane to the marvelous. I think things that are created specifically as propaganda often are only boosterism; they don’t necessarily also embrace the mundane that must also be a part of our existence.

That’s one of the reasons that I love, Tim, the fact that you very explicitly think about those the relationship of those two types of human experiences that we have. But ultimately, I think that the reason it matters so much to protect and incubate and nurture artistic expression is precisely because in the fine arts, in these creative moments, we see individuals who are seeking, ideally, to bring together ideas out of particles that may not previously have been fused. And ultimately, it’s that spark of the imagination, when it is transmitted to a viewer, to a reader, to a listener, that I think in turn, stimulates and elicits more creative responses. And ultimately, it is the creative imagination that allows us to see things in a new way. It is the creative imagination that opens up new realms of exploration. It’s the creative imagination that solves problems. And at the end of the day, I think what really differentiates art from any attempt at propaganda is, I think, even if art is functioning in a propagandistic culture, art becomes an illustration.

Whereas I think when art is functioning in its creative universe, it is demonstrating both the struggle and the glory of trying to forge a particular vision. Artists don’t make their images automatically. They are hard-won hard-wrought products that bring together inspiration with blood, sweat, and tears. And I think that that sense of passion that has brought somebody forward to create something truly marvelous and worthy of our attention—it’s that sense of that creative inspiration which is transmitted, and it’s transmitted across generations.

That’s why we still care about what Leonardo and Michelangelo were doing. That’s why we’re so interested in even the mathematics of Pythagoras. We may have moved beyond it, in some ways, but we’re still standing on the inspiration that was behind those achievements. So there’s not an expiration date on art. And actually, maybe in some ways, that distinguishes it from technology, which is a tool that is developed to solve a particular problem at a particular moment in time. Art is always going to transmit ideas across generations and continue to have that power to inspire, even if—and in fact, maybe we would say because—artists are so plugged in to the questions of their own era.

Talasek: Tim and Anne, I want to thank you so much for this conversation. And to everyone listening, thank you for joining us for another episode of The Ongoing Transformation. To see more of Tim’s work, visit his site at www.tmakepeace.com, and find out more about his exhibit at the National Academy of Sciences by visiting www.cpnas.org. You can follow Anne’s current work at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art by going to the college website, www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum. Check out our show notes for these links and much more. Thanks for joining us.

Codeswitch

A Visionary Agenda—in Quilts, Mars, and Pound Cake

Artists and poets have unique ways to communicate salient truths about the human experience. In “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” poet Nikki Giovanni conjures imagery that, on the surface, seems whimsical—space travel to Mars accompanied by the songs of Billie Holiday and slices of lemon pound cake. Yet her vivid language reminds us that we can learn from the past to imagine how we might construct our shared destiny on this planet, and on others. In one sense, her aim is practical: space exploration (and indeed all exploration) benefits from diverse perspectives. But on a metaphorical level, Giovanni expansively connects the past experiences of Black Americans to the future, which is “ours to take.” In the telling, she creates entirely new narratives of what interplanetary inclusivity could mean.

As with Giovanni’s poem, the artist Sanford Biggers revisits an American tradition of quilting and storytelling to create an imaginative bridge between the past and the future. In his work, the lives of Black Americans are an evolving and complex story with shifting meanings. Inspired by the idea that quilts may have provided coded information to African Americans navigating the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, Biggers adds new layers of information and meaning to the antique quilts. His work suggests that lessons learned through one of the darkest moments in American history can be reimagined, and, as in Giovanni’s poem, layered into a visionary agenda that embraces innovation and joy.

Over the last two decades, Biggers has been developing a singular body of work informed by African American history and traditions. Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch, the first survey of the artist’s quilt-based works, features nearly 50 pieces that seamlessly weave together references to contemporary art, urban culture, sacred geometry, the body, and American symbolism. The exhibition’s title refers both to the artist’s quilt series, known as the Codex series, and to the idea of code-switching, or shifting from one linguistic code to another depending on social situation.

Codeswitch is on display at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles from July 28, 2021, through January 23, 2022.

Text by J. D. Talasek

Images of works by Sanford Biggers courtesy of the California African American Museum.