Obama Campaign Reveals Science Advisors

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Barack Obama has established a small but well-regarded inner circle of science advisors that includes a vocal critic of creationism, a Nobel laureate who has championed open-access research, and another laureate who used his prize money to defend academic freedom against the war on terror. Though their influence on the policies of a prospective Obama administration are unknown, they've played a prominent role in establishing his science platform to date.

Obama announced his science platform earlier this month in response to questions posed by ScienceDebate2008, a nonpartisan political education group. In response to a Wired Science follow-up, the campaign identified five people who helped draft Obama's statement: Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health; Gilbert Ommen, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Peter Agre, a Nobel laureate and ardent critic of the Bush administration; NASA researcher Donald Lamb; and Stanford University plant biologist Sharon Long.

Republican candidate John McCain responded to the ScienceDebate2008 questions on Monday, but his campaign ignored multiple requests for the identity of its science advisors.

On paper, both candidates have outlined a generally strong approach to science. There are differences -- Obama emphasizes basic-research funding and proposes moderately more ambitious greenhouse-gas cuts, while McCain supports a new wave of nuclear power and would outlaw some embryonic stem cell research -- but they are generally small. And at this pre-presidential moment, neither platform may provide more than a hazy indication of what each man would do as president.

Non-binding campaign rhetoric may be less important than the advisors they assemble when you're trying to divine the realities of each candidate's presidency.

"Neither of the candidates is a scientist to start with," said Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a nonpartisan bioethics think tank. "We can presume that they're going to rely on experts in science and science policy. It is important to know who their advisors are."


In some ways, Obama's team is a mix of contrasting approaches: Lamb and Agre are both academics, while Omenn is a director of the biotechnology company Amgen and Long was a director at agricultural giant Monsanto. In other ways, their expertise is narrow: four of the five advisors come from the life sciences.

"There are a lot of excellent scientists in major fields that we're going to need research in," said Martin Apple, president of the Council of Science Society Presidents, a confederation of scientific societies whose membership spans more than one million scientists and teachers. "The inner circle would be much improved by increasing the range of disciplines."

Apple was confident that Obama would be able to assemble such a team. "He's certainly the kind of person who tends to build larger consultation groups," he said. "All of [the advisors] have networks of people who would be able to put high-quality appointments together."

The Team:

Haroldvarmus_2 Harold Varmus: President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He won a Nobel Prize in 1989 for breakthroughs in cancer genetics. Under Clinton, he directed the National Institutes of Health; the agency's budget doubled, but his legacy was tainted by his permitting NIH researchers to take excessive payments from pharmaceutical companies. A champion of open-access research, Varmus co-founded the Public Library of Science. He chairs the scientific board of Grand Challenges in Global Health, launched by the Gates Foundation and NIH to improve health in the developing world. Varmus was an advisor to the now-defunct Campaign to Defend the Constitution, launched to combat the political influence of the religious right. His political contributions and a list of industry ties are available.

Omenn_gilbert Gilbert Omenn: Professor of internal medicine, human genetics and public health at the University of Michigan. Former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; during his tenure he denounced anti-evolution education laws, and has been a vocal critic of creationism. “The logic that convinces us that evolution is a fact is the same logic we use to say smoking is hazardous to your health or we have serious energy policy issues because of global warming,” he told reporters this year. “I would worry that a president who didn’t believe in the evolution arguments wouldn’t believe in those other arguments either. This is a way of leading our country to ruin.” Omenn is a director of Amgen, a biotechnology company, and served in the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Carter. His campaign contributions and a list of industry ties are available.

3f85d2f30ef9a851 Peter Agre: Director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute. After winning a Nobel Prize in 2003 for discovering proteins that move water through cell membranes, he pledged to use the prize money to defend scientific freedom from the restrictions of the war on terror. He has been sharply critical of President Bush's climate change policies. "The Bush administration has been a disaster for the environment,"  he said in 2004. "If we wait until there's unequivocal proof that this is the cause of global climate change, it will be too late." Agre helped found Scientists and Engineers for America, a non-partisan science advocacy group. An advocate of increased government investment in science, he wants more scientists to run for public office. He has appeared twice on The Colbert Report.

Don Lamb: A University of Chicago astrophysicist and expert in stellar evolution, Lamb helped found the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has been described as "the most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken," and recorded the most distant explosion ever. A Mission Scientist on NASA's High-Energy Transient Explorer, he has fought to maintain NASA's research budget. "Science at NASA is disappearing — fast," he told the New York Times in 2006. Lamb has also argued against the privatization of commercial space flight. ''Space exploration,'' he told the Times, ''particularly manned space exploration, is just too expensive and risky to attract private enterprise, especially venture capitalists."

Long_2 Sharon Long: Recently stepped down as dean of Stanford University's School of Humanities & Science to return to her research on the symbiosis of soil bacteria with alfalfa. Long resigned last year from the Board of Directors of Monsanto, an agricultural biotechnology corporation. A former MacArthur Fellow, Long is a member of the leadership council of the National Academy of Sciences. She has contributed to the campaigns of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Images: Chad Davis; Harvard University; University of Michigan; Johns Hopkins; Stanford University.

International Talk Like A Pirate Day, T'is today matey!

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Yarrr, ‘ello me hearties.  T'is September 19th once again and once again it be talk like a pirate day. Don’t yer forget it neither. If yer be forgettin how to talk like a pirate there be many many internets places that be explainin it for yer. Or perhaps yer be preferin’ just the Wikipedia article?

Jolly Roger

‘ere be a clip from the wikipedia article:

International Talk Like a Pirate Day (ITLAPD) is a parodic holiday invented in 1995 by John Baur (”Ol’ Chumbucket”) and Mark Summers (”Cap’n Slappy”), of the United States, who proclaimed September 19 each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like a pirate.[1] For example, an observer of this holiday would greet friends not with “Hello”, but with “Ahoy, me hearty!” The date was selected because it was the birthday of Summers’s ex-wife and consequently would be easy for him to remember.

There's No Arguing With Conservatives ... No, Seriously, Scientific Studies Prove It

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A new study out of Yale University confirms what argumentative liberals have long-known: Offering reality-based rebuttals to conservative lies only makes conservatives cling to those lies even harder. In essence, schooling conservatives makes them more stupid. From the Washington Post article on the study, which came out yesterday:

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might "argue back" against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research.


If you've ever gotten in an argument with your conservative friends (assuming you haven't offered each other a mutual Carville-Matalin-style political ceasefire to preserve the friendship), you've probably seen this "backfire effect" in action. The more you try to tell people that Sarah Palin is lying when she says she was against the Bridge to Nowhere, the more they believe she was telling the truth. The more you try to explain how similar McCain's policies are to Bush's, the more they maintain he's "the original maverick."

The typical mantra of the left is that we don't need to sink to the Republicans' level because we have the truth on our side. But if the other side is utterly immune to the truth -- and indeed, the truth only makes them dig deeper into their fantasy world in which the economy is fundamentally strong and the War in Iraq is a staggering success -- what's a leftie to do?

I ain't got the answers, ace, except to say this: When arguing with conservatives in front of on-the-fence independents, remember that you're not trying to convince the conservative to actually buy into silly notions like facts and reason. You're highlighting the differences between left and right for the outside observer. If the other guy insists on political views that belong only in Disney World's Fantasyland, other folks will realize what's happening.

But if there is no third party, do yourself a favor and save your breath. As the study demonstrates, you're only making matters worse. Consider that aforementioned ceasefire. It is football season, after all. There's plenty of other things to argue about.

John McCain vs John McCain

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Since it's always fun to listen to John McCain argue with John McCain, let's revisit McCain's two reactions to the Wall Street meltdown yesterday. First there was this:

And then, a couple of hours later:

Besides probably being the fastest flip-flop in political history, these two conflicting statements also provide some insight for undecided voters...they learned that that famous "straight talk" isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that John McCain is right...he really doesn't know too much about economics.