New AAAS chief’s appointment stirs debate about the boundary between science and politics
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8097
Will physicist and former congressman Rush Holt, the new head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), be seen as a politician representing Democrats?
Daniel Sarewitz has made that question into an issue in one of his occasional columns at Nature. Joe Romm, a blogging physicist and former Clinton-era Energy Department official, has spotlighted it by rebutting Sarewitz in a letter to the editor . Romm sees Nature’s own editorial positions as crucial and Holt’s appointment as constructively, in fact crucially, reflecting them.
AAAS packed a lot into the headline of its 18 November announcement : “Retiring U.S. Congressman Rush D. Holt, Ph.D., a scientist and teacher, to lead AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society—publisher of the Science family of journals.” The Democrat had represented a central New Jersey district since 1999. At some length, AAAS emphasized the academic and scientific parts of his background as well as his substantial technopolitical experience, including his tenure as assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The announcement emphasized the harmony between “core AAAS activities” and Holt’s many “efforts to advance science, promote public engagement with science and technology, and ensure that accurate scientific information informs policy decisions.”
Almost immediately in a Climate Progress blog posting , Romm called the appointment “an excellent choice to help the AAAS increase the influence of science in general and climate science in particular on policymaking.” Romm holds an MIT physics PhD and once served as acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy. His Climate Progress bio blurb invokes New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s and others’ high-visibility praise for his blog, which is published by the liberal Center for American Progress.
Sarewitz, based in Washington, DC, codirects Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes. His 2 December column criticized the appointment of Democrat Holt as an AAAS “political statement” answering the statement voters had just issued in early November by turning the Congress Republican. He pointed to “today’s poisonous partisan atmosphere,” charged that AAAS is linking “itself explicitly to the partisan fray,” and mentioned Romm’s blog posting as typical of “commentators on the Democratic side.” Sarewitz’s closing requires quoting:
The political situation surrounding US science and politics is not clear-cut. The more the AAAS, and so the science community, is seen to line up behind one party, the less claim it will have to special status in informing difficult political and social decisions. Public regard for scientists remains particularly high, and for politicians, particularly low. Blurring the boundaries between these groups is not likely to redound to the benefit of politicians, but to the detriment of scientists.
Romm’s brief rebuttal letter acknowledges that the appointment is political, but asserts that “it is not partisan.” He invokes two Nature editorials. The one from March 2010 ended by urging scientists to “continue to inform policy-makers about the underlying science and the potential consequences of policy decisions” and, in a phrase Romm’s letter quoted, to make “sure they are not bested in the court of public opinion.” The editorial had begun with this thumbnail summary: “The integrity of climate research has taken a very public battering in recent months. Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”
Street fight? Romm’s letter ends by praising Holt as “a scientist who understands the fight that we are in . . . and is well placed to defend it from attacks by Congress.” (Wait: Defend the fight itself, or defend scientists’ consensus in the fight? Never mind; Romm’s point seems clear.) He alludes to the March 2011 Nature editorial “Into ignorance.” It contained this observation: “It is hard to escape the conclusion that the US Congress has entered the intellectual wilderness, a sad state of affairs in a country that has led the world in many scientific arenas for so long.” That’s the context, as seen by Romm, for ending the letter by calling Holt “an inspired choice.”
---
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.