Everything You’ve Ever Learned

“Staring into his little sphere, / contemplating a visible heaven—its movements— / he thought / there is a path / to map the boundaries of this planet.” An award-winning poet envisions a moment of discovery.

The annual air pollution crisis in Delhi has roots in the country’s famed Green Revolution and is an example of how rapidly rural agriculture is evolving, creating new and highly complex environmental issues in an increasingly industrialized India.

Given that animal research is ethically dubious and methodologically unsound, why do scientists continue to experiment on animals?

As concerns about global warming mount and international efforts to address it lag, should public policy be encouraging or inhibiting research on technologies to reflect sunlight away from the earth?

An obsession with economic growth is wrecking society and harming the planet. What if policymakers focused on improving the quality of citizens’ lives rather than on quantitative economic indicators?

R. Alta Charo gives a bioethicist’s perspective on vaccine mandates, the regulation of CRISPR gene-editing technology, and balancing society’s collective interests with personal liberties.

US policies for addressing climate migration focus on disaster response efforts and to a lesser extent on managed retreat, but none provide much support for the most at-risk populations.

In light of increased flooding and rising sea levels, a number of new, expensive, and publicly contentious managed-retreat projects are being discussed, planned, and implemented.

If we want to rebuild a shared public trust in expertise, we will need a more realistic and humane language to talk about scientific expertise and its place in our political life—an account of expertise that is worthy of the public’s trust.

The continuing misuse of scenarios in climate research has become pervasive and consequential—so much so that we view it as one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the twenty-first century thus far. We need a course correction.

To increase the speed and impact of knowledge creation, the United States must radically restructure research funding and resources away from big names—and toward our biggest questions.

After decades of operating with very little orchestration, and in a world where the United States was dominant in science and engineering capabilities, the US government needs to change the way it coordinates S&T policy with economic and regulatory actions and international agreements that affect innovation-based economic security.

Economic value can be captured from global sources and integrated locally—but it requires deliberate actions, appropriate for the new situation. Just as national security depends on allies and alliances, so too must science and technology policy. US economic security and prosperity requires creating strategic international collaborations.