The day started out with another of a more science oriented panel, and took a slightly different perspective on the conferences theme of building bridges between communities. This session was jointly organized by AAAS’s math and biology divisions and looked at how mathematical modeling can be applied to different levels of biology. The first two speakers dealt with larger scales, the first to model the spread of HIV in Botswana to help determine the most effective way to introduce preventative anti-retroviral treatments to at-risk groups. The second speaker was looking at the spread of the H1N1 flu in Mexico, specifically how it is related to transportation networks. After this the panel switched to a much smaller focus, with Gerda de Vries describing her work figuring out how different ion channels can work together in neurons to result in rhythmic oscillations in electric potentials. This was a nice lead in the the last speaker I saw, Philip Holme, who looked at the physical processes in the brain that are involved in decision making. While there were still two other speakers after this, I left early to make it to another session that was also looking pretty appealing.

This was “Warriors against Claptrap: The New Generation of Civic Scientists” organized by Sense About Science. The panel was made up of Michael Hanlon, a science writer with the Daily Mail, Kiki Sanford, who writes the blog Bird’s Brain and is involved with the podcast “This Week in Science”, and a representative from the Voice of Young Science network, a branch of Sense About Science, Daniella Muallen. This network is meant to help young scientists confront examples of poor science that we encounter all the time because. Examples of their work can be seen on this section of their webpage. This group is mainly based in the United Kingdom, though apparently they’re interested spreading more internationally.

This was listed as a workshop, and as such after short introductory talks by each of the panelists, it was opened up to the audience for discussion about how as scientists can be effective at engaging people about these kinds of issues. The discussion seemed to mostly center around two ideas. First was the question of how much all the new resources that people have available to learn about science actually reach beyond the people who are already interested in the subject. On this subject I fall somewhere slightly on the optimistic side. While I think a lot of people tend to not pay a lot of attention to science, there’s also a lot of opportunity to engage with people once you can get their attention. The second idea that came up in the discussion was what kind of engagement is actually effective. The consensus seemed to be that it’s a mistake to approach people with an attitude of “we’re the experts so you should pay attention to what we’re talking about” and it’s more effective to try and help people develop the ability to critically evaluate ideas. Daniella pointed out that this was the approach that Voices of Young Scientists took with their reports. She mentioned that most of the people involved weren’t necessarily experts in the relevant fields, but are still in the position of being able to explain the scientific process that can be used to evaluate claims. This leads to the reports being presented as what kinds of simple questions lay people should be asking about the products they’re using. I think this panel led to a pretty interesting discussion, and seemed a good way to finish up the conference sessions.

After that I spent the rest of the day at our poster session, shown below. Overall the time spent at AAAS  was pretty informative and enjoyable. Hope you all appreciated the perspective.

The last symposium I want to discuss is called Consequences of Changes in Energy Return on Energy Invested. Dr. Charles Hall from State University of New York, started off the discussion with his definition of Energy Return on Energy Invested or EROI which is basically the energy delivered to society over the energy put into that activity  (or in general terms EROI = [Eout-Ein]/Ein). This concept has very important implications for comparing energy sources, whether they be renewable or fossil fuels. For obvious reasons you  need an EROI value of greater than one for net energy gain, and you likely need an EROI value of somewhere between 3 and 8 (that is for every 1 unit of energy used, 3 to 8 units of energy are produced) for it to be economically feasible as an energy source. One can imagine that oil has a significantly higher EROI value than solar or wind (at this time), because the amount of energy we get from fossil fuels versus the work it takes to drill for them is much greater than the amount of energy we get from solar or wind considering the materials needed to build the solar panels or wind mills. However as we hit peak oil and it becomes more expensive to drill for fossil fuels, these relative EROI should change, but will they change enough? Dr. Tad Patzek from the University of Texas-Austin, followed up by saying that conventional oil peaked in 2004, coal will peak in 2-5 years, natural gas will peak in 20-30 years. He clarified that there are plenty of fossil fuels in the world, but that these fossil fuels are like a huge bank account with a limited daily ATM withdrawal amount. The speed with which we can extract fossil fuels is the limiting factor here, and we are overdrawing everyday. Patzek predicts a very drastic change in our lifestyles will be required soon because of the energy crisis. Dr. Margaret Mann of the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado, spoke of the EROI for renewable energy sources. Her method included not only the energy input versus the energy output, but other implications including greenhouse gas emissions, land use, fossil fuel use, water distribution, mineral consumption, equipment, and transportation which takes into account the Life Cycle Analysis of every energy source. She describes this larger perspective as “energy service” not just energy. She argues (against Hall and Patzek) that renewables can provide more energy than they consume. There were, without a doubt, serious disagreements among the panelists (and strong sense of confusion within the audience), but at the end of the session the panelist all agreed to pair up with the person with which they disagreed the most and reconcile their opinions enough to write a scientific article about an EROI topic of choice as a team.  Pretty cool…

Now that the laptop is working again I can post the rest of the first day that I wrote up earlier as promised. I’ll also try to get a description of Sunday up as soon as I can,though it may be a day or two since I have a lot going on now that I’m back home.

After lunch I went to the session “Genome Analyses and Sequencing to Advance Drug Discovery and Treatment. ” As you might guess from the sort of unwieldy title, this was more of a set of typical science talks than many of the other session at AAAS, though still with a lot of potential impact on society. The first speaker was Richard Wilson from Washington University (the one in St Louis, not our home in Seattle) who discussed his work with cancer genetics and particularly his most recent work sequencing the genomes of cancer cells and comparing them to the non-cancer cells in the patient. This allows him to identify exactly which mutations are associated with the abnormal characteristics of cancer. It’s impressive how much the capability to do this kind of sequencing has grown, just in the time I’ve been in science. According to Wilson, the first cancer genome cost $1.6 million dollars. Now he is working on collecting a set of 50 different genomes of the same type of cancer to look for similarities, which currently is costing $0.2 million per genome, and he expects it to soon further to decrease to $0.05 million ($50,000). It won’t be too long before this kind of analysis can be used as part of ordinary diagnostics done on patients, just as some genetic tests are already becoming routine before prescribing treatments. Unfortunately a major gap that still needs to be bridged is determining what effect these mutations are having at a molecular level. That kind of knowledge will be key in finding new ways to apply this knowledge to new treatments. The third speaker dealt with similar areas, but with broader applications. This was Dan Roden from Vanderbilt who discussed his efforts to develop a database of genetic data that can be associated with a complete medical history – though all personal identifying information is discarded to protect privacy. The ethical issues associated with this probably could have made an interesting talk itself, though for today he focused mainly on the science potential or this resource, which is fascinating as well. I was particularly intrigued by the idea of it incorporating the so-called “phi-nome”. I’m not certain of the origin of the name, but I’m familiar with phi-analysis which is looking at the effects of a mutation on a protein’s physical stability, which seems somewhat related to the idea of the phi-nome. This is a set of various health issues that were given a numerical code, and using the database researchers could identify any that appear correlated with a genotype they may be interested in, even if such an association hasn’t been observed before. This seems like it could be incredibly useful in generating hypotheses. Lastly, I didn’t skip over the other speaker due to lack of interest in the subject, merely for the flow of the writing. This second speaker was Mary Relling from St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and she discussed the genetics that are associated with racial differences and cancer. She has identified several sets of changes known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that can be useful in predicting prognosis of some kinds of cancers. While certain sets of SNPs tend to be more prevalent among certain races than others, she has found them to actually be slightly better predictors than self-identified race, and this information can also be easily applied to people with mixed race backgrounds, unlike trying to predict outcomes based on self-identification of race. As was brought up in the questions, we seem to be entering a stage where a person’s genetic characteristics can be considered more important to health than racial characteristics, a similar sentiment that was expressed in Michael Specter’s section on this subject in Denialism.

The final session of the first day was probably the most interesting up to that point. This was titled “Speaking Scientific Truth Power” and had representatives from the South African, Canadian and American national academies discuss the roles they all play in their respective countries. Despite the differences between these countries all three described dealing with similar kinds of challenges in interacting with their politicians and public and the need to accept that science is often just one of several factors that goes into policy decisions. That balance between competing interests can be difficult to deal with, but as Peter Nicholson from the Council of Canadian Academies put it “being right is not the same as being influential”, and it’s important for a scientist that wants to be influential to be able to address those other concerns. One interesting example of this came from Roseanne Diab from the Academy of Science of South Africa, who said their report on building cities to have low carbon emission was well received when it was framed in terms of development and poverty alleviation rather than as an environmental issue. The responsibility for the use of good science in forming policy isn’t entirely on the scientists though, and Richard Bisell from the American National Research Council also spent some time explaining the need for policy makers to be able to use science appropriately and be willing to both be patient enough for good science to be done and be willing to change policies in response to that science.

It was also interesting to hear Dr. Bisell specifically call for the need for the next generation of policy makers and scientists to have training in how to interact with each other.  As a leader of FOSEP I like to think this is an area we can contribute to.

For the morning session I attended “Brain on Trial” which was setup as a mock trial to show how scientific evidence is used in court.  I decided to leave names out of this description, since I don’t want to seem to be ascribing positions to people that may have been taken as part of the roles they needed to play for the mock trial. The case dealt with someone who had killed his neighbor after she broke up with him and was planning to move. The defense argued that an MRI could show that damage to the defendant’s part of the brain that is involved in high level thinking was significant enough to prevent him from being capable of the planning and intent needed to be guilty of first degree murder. The trial demonstrated two stages. The first stage dealt with the admissibility of evidence, requiring the defense to show that this evidence was relevant to the case and dealt with information that was generally accepted by the science community. Once this was accepted the actual evidence was presented.  The expert witness for the defense seemed to do be able to explain that the MRI was able to identify this kind of damage, and that such damage could result changes in behavior, with the famous example of Phineas Gage being described as analogous.  However the prosecution argued that while such effects are possible results, there wasn’t any evidence presented that this was the case in the particular defendant, much less that such an effect could be demonstrated at the time of the killing. This was supported by calling his own expert witness that testified how such similar damage may not always result in observable changes in behavior, just as behavioral changes may occur that are due to physical problems but may not show up on an MRI scan. The prosecution therefore argued that such images serve no value since they can’t inform one way or another what the defendant’s mental state was.

Once we got into the discussion it became clear that I wasn’t the only one that felt the question turned on what is considered reasonable doubt. Is it enough to simply demonstrate such an effect is possible, or should some link to the specific case be needed? Personally I eventually decided that without additional information presenting the MRI data didn’t add to the case. Possible false negatives and false positives made the defense’s argument seem no more powerful than saying intent isn’t possible because of the physical nature of our brains having an influence on actions.  A second significant factor was the fact that with the audience playing the role of the jury, there was a “high concentration of people with advanced education in Orange County” for today as one of the lawyers put it. In actual cases this information will need to be interpreted by people with much less knowledge about the issues and there is a danger of people being inappropriately convinced by scientific sounding arguments. At one point the prosecutor brought this concern up, and referred to studies saying that people would be much more willing to accept even wildly implausible claims simply by adding the words “neuroscience says” to the description.   

For the afternoon I went to “Science Literacy: How to Train Teachers, Engage Students and Maximize learning” which I was pleasantly surprised to see was organized by Mike Klymkowsky who is a professor in the department where I got my undergrad degree, the Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology department of the CU-Boulder. This was a really interesting session that covered a huge range of issues, which I think I might come back and address again when I have more time, though for today I’ll leave at a brief summary of the speakers. Dr. Klymkowsky started things off with an introduction describing the importance of ensuring the quality of science educators. As he put it, for people that stay in research there’s opportunity to fix problems we acquired as undergrads, once teachers graduate they’re pretty much independent and can “wreak havoc right away.” He was followed by Eugenie Scott from the NCSE whom Kate already mentioned. Today she spoke about how teachers should approach subjects where “teaching the controversy” isn’t a buzz word to justify bringing in non-scientific issues, but where actual controversy exists and can be useful in developing thinking skills. The third speaker was Erin Furtak, also from CU, who spoke about her research in how approaching how teaching culture can be modified to improve skills, particularly focusing on using “professional communities” where teachers can discuss their techniques to address student’s misconceptions on major concepts.

Following Dr. Furtak discussing how improvements can be made from the field, Martin Stordieck presented the work the National Research Council (a divison of the National Academies) is doing to review its recommendations for science standards. Interestingly their draft recommendations will be released publicly in late spring or early summer for feedback before the final report is published in the fall. This work can be followed at their website

This was followed by the presentation of Jo Ellen Roseman on her study of what material textbooks are cover and the relationship to students’ knowledge. Apparently the number of books that covered at particular topic and students’ ability to answer question on that topic even years later and following additional coursework in the subject very highly correlated. She argued that this demonstrates the need for quality textbooks,  since even with other factors, the material that makes it into the books is the generally the ceiling for what the students will be exposed to.

For more of an education policy overview the panel included Jim Gates who , in addition to being an university professor, also serves on both the Maryland State Board of Education and the Presidents’ Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

The final speaker was Melanie Cooper, a chemistry professor from Clemson University whose work focuses on education, and whose talk was titled “Intro Courses: The Root of All Evil. ” This discussed how the nature of these large classes leads to many students not actually learning much from them, and instead reinforces their existing misconceptions. Since many educators don’t take more advanced science courses, this is the level they can only teach these subjects at a more superficial level and standards are written with these ideas in mind. That results in students having many misconceptions which get reinforced when they end up in intro college courses, and so the cycle continues.  It was an interesting perspective, though she while she said she’s working to find ways to break this cycle, not much of that aspect seemed to get into the talk, beyond the need to have standards and assessments that more accurately reflect the needs of a good science education.

Edwin Rubin of Carnegie Mellon gave us the skinny on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). The reasons he gave for investing in CCS were three-fold: 1) achieving climate change mitigation goals will require very large reductions; 2) coal and natural gas powerplants provide 40% of CO2 and 70% of US energy and CCS is the only way to reduce the carbon emissions of these energy sources that we so heavily rely upon: 3) mitigation strategies that do not include CCS are too expensive. (On a side note, most of the CO2 captured from power plants these days is sold and used to carbonate soda!) Among other things the hurdles of CCS were addressed briefly including the costs of CCS (which Rubin describes as more expensive, but also more efficient than other options), the lack of a regulatory framework, legal uncertainties (including subsurface property rights), public opinion, risks and liability after a site is closed. To address some of these issues, Obama assigned a CCS Interagency Task Force. Rubin finished by saying that CCS will not be employed or developed without market and policy incentives to drive it. Next, Richard Sears of MIT and formerly of Shell spoke about the role of natural gas as a stepping stone solution. Bottom line, there’s plenty of natural gas to go around. The issue is not running out of natural gas, but the consequences of releasing CO2 by burning it. Although natural gas is less carbon intensive than coal it is still a carbon based energy source, which brings me to the next speaker, Nathan Lewis of Cal Tech. Our global target must be to get to zero emissions. Lewis says that considering the consequences, this is the only serious goal we can set, everything else is not even close to sufficient. I hate to reduce his talk to a few sentences, because there was a lot there, but his main points were that every renewable energy source we currently have is not sufficient or efficient enough to get the job done. (You can google his website at Cal Tech to get the details.) He said that nuclear fission, crystalline Si solar panels, and solar thermal technologies were good stepping stones to a zero emission world, but could not take us all the way (mostly due to the inability to scale up). Lewis’ hopes for the future lie in more direct use of the energy of the sun, a goal of his own research, but he admits that the technology is not even close to development. Once, again, I say oi. Depressing. Margaret Taylor of UC Berkeley used past examples of cap and trade systems (either for regional CO2, or other pollutants like SO2) to test the feasibility of a larger-scale cap and trade program in the US. She asked if the programs were successful, and if they fueled innovation in technologies (measured by patent numbers) to reduce CO2 emissions. It turns out that both of these issues are very tightly influenced by the price of the “allowances” set by the market and by the ability to “bank” one’s allowances to be used in the future. It seems like cap and trade is stuck between a rock and a hard place—it’s not politically feasible to create a cap and trade program if it costs too much for emitters, but if it costs too little, there’s not enough pressure or incentive to not emit. Allowance prices need to be flexible over the life of the cap and trade program to be effective. Despite these challenges, Taylor describes cap and trade as politically feasible and (I think) she thinks it has a place as part of the solution if it is implemented properly. I don’t have the mental energy to describe the next two talks, but one was about fusion energy, the other about geoengineering. It’s too late to properly open those cans of worms…

I hope to write about the other symposium I attended today called Learning Science In Informal Environments another day.

Andy and I also attended the plenary lecture by Eric Lander, accomplished geneticist and Co-Chair of PCAST (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) who spoke about Science and Technology in the First Year of the New Administration.  He spoke of Obama’s activities to support science in the past year and “restore science to its rightful place.”

I started things off with the panel titled Scientific Approaches to Teaching Science in K-16 Education, which was pretty interesting. The first speaker was Kevin Dunbar from the University of Toronto, who was described as an educational neuroscience. His talk focused on his work using the techniques of cognitive psychology to study how people can integrate changes to their conceptions in response to education. One particular interesting finding that was presented was brain scans taken of either people with little or no experience with chemistry and experts while viewing images describing how water undergoes changes from liquid to gas states. The novices primarily activated perceptual and visual regions of the brains, while the experts were relying on memory from the language-based parts of the brain. The second speaker was David Klahr, whose talk he titled “Evidence Trumps Belief” and dealt with the benefits of direct teaching versus more open-ended inquiry based approaches. He showed a figure with learning on the y-axis and amount of direct instruction on the x-axis, with the plot having an inverted U-shape. His argument was that determining where a student was on this curve is important in knowing how to approach instruction. His demonstrated this with his experiences looking at different ways of teaching elementary students how to design an experiment with controlled variables, where he found many benefited as well if not more from direct instruction by teachers rather than more independent learning. This was especially true when he repeated the study at an urban school with low math and science testing scores, where the instruction was needed to overcome existing deficits in knowledge. This experience also fit in with some of Dr. Dunbar’s presentation that dealt with his work redesigning interactive museum exhibits such as are common at the Pacific Science Center, where he found people needed to either already have a conceptual framework to apply to the activity or be given prompting with what they should learn from the exhibit. The final speaker of the panel was Diane Halperin who is working on developing a video game to teach critical thinking skills and basic science literacy, known as Operation ARIES. The concept is the player is a government agent trying to stop an alien plot to destroy our society through the spread of faulty reasoning and arguments based on pseudoscience (a completely unrealistic idea right?). One of the interesting ideas of the game is it is built around the use of a “trialogue” between the player, and two computer characters, one acting as an instructor and the other as a fellow student. Depending on the player’s already present skills, they can be equal to the other student, help their fellow student learn material, or view it less interactively and learn from the responses of the other student. The second unique aspect I found was it relies on the player to ask good questions to lead to correct information, which is probably a needed skill that isn’t generally taught in our educational system.

Concurrent to that session was a longer symposium on “Ensuring the Transparency and Integrity of Scientific Research.” I missed the first speaker and part of the second, but really liked what I saw of that second speaker Sheila Jasanoff.  The theme I got from her talk was how the ideals of a functioning democratic society and scientific thought tend to coincide to a large extent, and conflict between scientists and the public generally results when these similarities are overtaken by differences such as over-specialization versus a desire for “hyper-democratization” where all people want to have input. A goal for scientists should be to instill a sense of stewardship and “civic science” that can include both specialists and non-specialists. The final speaker was Francisco Ayala, who spoke about his contribution to a booklet was titled “On Being a Scientist.” This was meant targeted to students beginning their training as scientists and served to provide guidelines about the role of scientists in society and their ethical responsibilities. Since this seemed to be focusing on material that I might read later, I decided to leave early to attend the panel on “Scientific Rationality and Policy-Making: Making their Marriage Work”.

I somewhat regretted doing that however, since this ended up being less interesting than I hoped. The first speaker, Robert Solow focused on the difficulties in evaluating the effects of specific policies. I didn’t find too much new in what he said. The second speaker was David Ulph, who spoke about how science can act to promote economic growth, as well as the challenges from competing goals that may make such growth less desirable. One interesting idea presented was the benefits of having separate incentives for basic research funded publicly and applied research relying on patents and profit incentives is becoming more complicated by moves to releasing products under open-source models while universities are developing the use of intellectual property.

Well that was just the morning sessions, I think I’ll leave it at that for here for now, but expect another post later with the afternoon sessions dealing with personalized medicine and the role of organizations like the National Academy of Science in policy-making.

The first symposium I attended was titled Communicating on the State and Local Level: How Can Scientists Support Policy Makers? Eugenie Scott, Director of the National Center for Science Education spoke on Communication, Policy, and Evolution. She told of her personal story battling with the Arkansas school board in the 80’s and what scientists can learn from that experience. (To break the suspense up front, the school board decided to not allow the teaching of creationism.) In this case, some of the best allies for the scientists were local clergy who did not like the idea that teachers would give one explanation for creationism Monday through Friday that pastors would have to modify on Sunday. She emphasized the frustration that scientists feel when their fact based statements are countered (with equal weight) by non-fact based opinions on creationism. Scott reminded scientists that they have one vote, just like everyone else, but that even though scientists do not have power, they do have influence. Science is necessary but not sufficient to win cases such as these. A more integrated approach is necessary that includes understanding the values of the people affected by the ruling. Stephen Schneider, professor at Stanford and author of “Science as a Contact Sport” spoke next on Communication, Policy, and Climate Change. He addressed the best way for scientists to communicate with the media and with the public directly. Among other issues, Schneider spoke of advocacy and the risks involved for a scientist when wearing an advocacy hat, popularizing science, understanding your own biases, and using analogies to convey risk to non-science audiences. “Know thy audience, know thyself, and know thy stuff” are his three commandments to communication. The first does not need explanation, but it is often overlooked by scientists. By the second, he was referring to a scientist’s strong or weak points while being interviewed. If you are not good at sound bites, then be sure that the interview you have agreed to is more in depth, or get some practice before proceeding. The third commandment, know thy stuff, ended Schneider’s session as he said, “Watch out for what you say, they might hear you.” Be able to back up your words with science.

This is already getting too long, but I want to say a bit about the next symposium I attended, A Wobbly Three-Legged Stool: Science, Politics, and the Public, organized by Lewis Branscomb of UCSD. In this symposium the panelists addressed the triangle relationship between these three parties, as a new model replacing the old model which was more linear (lacking the relationship between scientists and the public). Daniel Yankelovich of Public Agenda shared the results of his research on public perception of science policy issues. He says that scientists make three erroneous assumptions: 1) the public makes up its mind once it possesses the relevant facts and information 2) the message the scientists give is the same message the public receives and 3) messages are transmitted in real time. The first is wrong for several reasons. One reason is that facts are secondary to a sense of inclusion—or “what does this information mean to me”? The second assumption is wrong for many reasons including inattention, the difficulty of interpreting probabilities, sources of noise, and cognitive dissonance with previously held beliefs/thoughts. The third assumption is erroneous because it takes time to absorb new information—sometimes a long time. Jean Johnson also of the Public Agenda followed up with what scientists can do better to communicate their messages with respect to energy and climate change. 1) Talk about climate change and the energy crisis TOGETHER. They are intertwined, but this relationship is not communicated well enough. 2) Spend less focus on the facts, and instead focus on the CHOICES. (She gave an analogy to scientists talking of climate change to a scenario in which your doctor tells you that you have cancer. The doctor then proceeds to tell you why he/she thinks you have cancer, the confidence with which he/she knows you have cancer, the biological process of cancer, and then walks away before telling you your treatment options.) 3) Don’t ignore ECONOMICS. People need to know what a solution will cost, and what it will cost if nothing is done. Neal Lane, former science advisor to Clinton, head of NSF, and now professor at Rice University, finished the symposium by reminding us of his Citizen Scientist proposal. We need scientists to be able to tell anyone “this science is important to you because…” He emphasized that this conversation needs to be two ways (scientists can learn a lot from non-scientists), and that a change in graduate and post-doctorate education to include public engagement is necessary for such changes.

There is much that I’m leaving out, but I think this is a good start for discussion among FOSEP members. How can we all be better citizen scientists and create 2-way dialogue with the public?

We’ll also be presenting a poster describing how we organize different types of events and how people might go about setting up a FOSEP-like group in other places. This will also be an opportunity for us to meet some of the people from FOSEP Colorado which has recently been formed with the help of one of our former leaders, Melanie Roberts.

We’ll be writing updates whenever we get a chance so you all can have an idea of what’s happening out here too.

I was particularly interested reading about his take on synthetic biology. This field seems to have lots of potential benefits, while also having potential to be very controversial and is not well known by the general public. This chapter seemed a good introduction to learn about what kind of research is being done in this area. Parts of this chapter were also used in Specter’s article in the New Yorker last year.

Another section that brought up interesting discussions was the chapter on genetically engineered and organic food. This led to us deciding to read a book on these topics referenced by Specter, Tomorrow’s Table by the husband and wife Dr. Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak. Ronald is a plant geneticist working on developing rice strains that can be resistant to disease and flooding, while Adamchak is an organic farmer, and the book discusses how their work can complement each other. If you want to join us March 7th this book should provide fodder for more interesting conversations.

First, a recent post on the blog of the internationally renowned journal Science indicates the rise of China in scientific productivity.  For instance, China ranks second only to the US in number of journal publications.  Also, China is increasing its investment in science education and research.  Additionally, for many scientific indicators, “the slope of the line is accelerating rather than decelerating.”

Secondly, American education is mediocre, at best.  In a 2006 study of  several different countries and economic areas conducted by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), US students consistently ranked “below average” for proficiency in math and science.  The US ranked 18th in science and 24th in math out of 30 (OECD) countries.  In math, the US was not only outperformed by Japan and Germany, but it was also (embarrassingly) outperformed by former communist countries such as Hungary, Poland, and Czech Republic.  When economic areas (such as Taipei or Hong Kong) were included, the US fared even worse.  (The 56-page executive summary can be found here.)

Finally, it should be pointed out that countries that outperformed the US in education often spent less money on it.  For instance, as a percentage of GDP, the US (5.7%) outspent Poland (5.6%), Hungary (5.5%), Germany (4.6%), and Japan (3.6%).

What does it all mean?  It’s pretty straightforward:  With US students falling behind much of the westernized world in math and science proficiency, it is only a matter of time before China will overtake us as the global leader in science and technology.  However, this could probably be prevented if we fix our decidedly mediocre K-12 education system. Reforming the quality of our education is the key to the solution.  Throwing more money at the problem is certainly not.

Alex B. Berezow is a microbiology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington.