Should scientists participate in politics, or just seek to advise from the outside?

A recent exchange in Nature illuminates the contrast between two approaches for scientists’ communications with society: the engagement model and the deficit model.

Rees Kassen, a University of Ottawa biology professor active in Canadian technopolitics, published an 8 December commentary under a headline leveling a political imperative: ‘ If you want to win the game, you must join in .’ In effect, Kassen advocates the engagement model, in which scientists rely on two-way interactions, careful listening, and immersive participation.

Brett Favaro, a Simon Fraser University marine biology graduate student interested in Canadian technopolitics, answered Kassen with a 9 February letter headlined ‘ Policy-making: Scientists cannot compete as lobbyists .’ In effect, Favaro advocates the deficit model, in which scientists seek to defray citizens’ and politicians’ knowledge deficit with one-way instruction or lecturing.

Neither writer mentions either communication model. But Nature‘s editors blurb Kassen’s piece this way: ‘When governments ignore scientific advice, it is often because researchers do not engage with the political process.’ There’s that word engage.

Kassen asserts that ‘researchers must recognize that poor scientific decisions in politics do not necessarily result from a lack of understanding. They are, rather, a failure of scientists to communicate their message effectively in what is ultimately a political, not a scientific, arena.’ He wonders whether ‘scientists are simply not interested in engaging in the to and fro of politics.’ There’s that word engage again.

Kassen suggests, among other measures, that scientists should stand for election to public office. ‘Having more people on the inside of the political process who are, or have been, professional scientists,’ he writes, ‘should go a long way to increasing understanding among their political colleagues. It also builds trust in the scientific community for the political process.’

He adds that ‘scientists need to seek opportunities to engage with politicians directly.’ There’s that word again—and Kassen uses it one more time at the end of his summary conclusion:

Favaro not only will have none of what Kassen is selling, he hasn’t even heard what it is.

‘Suggestions that scientists should run for political office or campaign to promote their work are counterproductive and ultimately self-defeating,’ Favaro asserts. ‘When politicians ignore science, it is a failure of our system of governance rather than of individual scientists to act as lobbyists for their research.’

Campaign to promote their work? Act as lobbyists for their research? What Kassen actually advocates is scientists’ constructive general immersion in politics, where they can build trust and eventually bring a certain sensible, general science-mindedness to lawmaking and policy. That’s engagement.

But Favaro sees only a deficit of knowledge that he believes scientists must correct unilaterally. ‘Science needs a permanent pipeline into policy,’ he proclaims. What’s needed is a ‘mandate to make research results accessible and enable politicians and policy-makers to reach informed decisions.’ Scientists must ‘advise politicians in a useful and timely way.’ Sit down and listen up, politicians!

Favaro plainly considers scientists and science separate from—or maybe even above—society, politics, and politicians. ‘Scientists must be impartial arbiters of data, not political agents,’ he declares. They need ‘an apolitical route to policy formation.’

His outlook calls to mind Kassen’s observations that

* scientists ‘think too highly of their own view of the world and fail to appreciate the complex, multifarious nature of decision making’ and that

* to a politician, ‘science is an interest group like any other.’

And those observations, in turn, call to mind a 2004 remark from former congressman Sherwood Boehlert, then chairing the House Science Committee: ‘The argument that science funding is a long-term national investment does nothing to set scientists apart. All that sets [them] apart is that scientists are the only group that thinks they’re making a unique argument.’

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.