The Ongoing Transformation

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:

Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattHourihan.

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 these connections—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 to learn more about James.

·  Extreme Ice Survey: James’s innovative, long-term photography project to give a visual voice to the planet’s changing ecosystems.

·  Read James’s new book, The Human Element: A Time Capsule from the Anthropocene

·  Watch James’s movies, The Human Element and Chasing Ice.

·  Read Katharine’s new book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World

·  Watch Katharine’s Global Weirding: Climate, Politics, and Religion videos on Youtube

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 20 million people—could play in creating an energy sector that is ecologically and economically sustainable.

Read Kartikeya Singh’s essay, Bureaucracies for the Better.

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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.

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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.

Read Shobita Parthasarathy’s 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.

Visit issues.org for more episodes, conversations and articles. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn! Comments? Questions? Tweet us or email us at [email protected].

The COVID vaccines are highly effective at preventing infection, serious illness, and even death from COVID, but many are hesitant to get vaccinated. 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?”

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Eyewitness testimony and forensic science are key forms of evidence used 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 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.

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

Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward

The James Webb Space Telescope’s revolutionary technology is expected to reveal secrets of every phase of cosmic history—from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies.  In this podcast, we talk with DC-based artist Tim Makepeace about his exhibition Reflections on a Tool of Observation: Artwork Inspired by the James Webb Space Telescope that celebrates the awe-inspiring technology while drawing attention to the fact that it is a human endeavor that reveals the nuts, bolts and wires of the instrument.  Tim is joined by art historian Anne Collins-Goodyear whose research exploring the relationship between art and technology provides thought provoking historical context.

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 works.

Follow Anne Collins-Goodyear’s current work at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Visit issues.org for more episodes, conversations and articles. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn! Comments? Questions? Tweet us or email us at [email protected].

It may surprise you to learn that the enormous dinosaur skeletons that wow museum visitors were not assembled by paleontologists. The specialized and critical task of removing fossilized bones from surrounding rock, and then reconstructing the fragments into a specimen that a scientist can research or a member of the public can view, is the work of fossil preparators. Many of these preparators are volunteers without scientific credentials, working long hours to assemble the fossils on which scientific knowledge of the prehistoric world is built. In this episode we speak with social scientist and University of Virginia professor Caitlin Donahue Wylie, who takes us inside the paleontology lab to uncover a complex world of status hierarchies, glue controversies, phones that don’t work—and, potentially, a way to open up the scientific enterprise to far more people.

Read Caitlin Donahue Wylie’s article, What Fossil Preparators Can Teach Us About More Inclusive Science.

Check out Caitlin Donahue Wylie’s book, Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes, which is available for open access.

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In the early days of the pandemic, communities began singing together over balconies, banging pans, and engaging in other forms of collective support, release, and creativity. Artists have also been creatively responding to this global event. In this episode, we explore how artists help us deal with a crisis such as COVID-19 by documenting, preserving, and helping us process our experiences. San Francisco artist James Gouldthorpe created a visual journal starting at the very onset of the pandemic to record its personal, societal, and historical impacts. We spoke with Gouldthorpe and Dominic Montagu, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.

See a selection of James Gouldthorpe’s artwork from the COVID Artifacts series on Issues.org.

Visit issues.org for more episodes, conversations and articles. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn! Comments? Questions? Tweet us or email us at [email protected].