Next Tuesday, America will elect the next president of the United States and new members of the 111th Congress. Perhaps more than ever scientific issues are at the forefront of the political battleground. The interaction of science and politics exists at all levels from the elementary classroom, to the university laboratory, to the halls of congress, to the oval office.

Cornell and its faculty have long made significant contributions to not only science but scientific policy as well. They have also seen their research affected by policy, and thus have a lot to say about this relationship — its past and present circumstances, and what the future may bring.

Energy Policy and Nuclear Energy

As America begins its quest to remove its dependence on fossil fuels, debate has reignited over how prominent the role of nuclear power should be in the nation’s energy future.

Prof. David Hammer, electrical and computer engineering, conducts research in plasma physics and nuclear fusion. He teaches a course introducing controlled fusion to upper level undergraduates and grad students. Hammer has been on the Cornell faculty since 1977 and has witnessed the evolution of nuclear science at Cornell.

From the window of his office in Rhodes Hall, Hammer can see the rooftop of the largely abandoned Ward Laboratory, which was built in the 1960s to house the college of Engineering’s research facility for nuclear sciences. It featured a working nuclear fission reactor. The Nuclear Science and Engineering program had five faculty members when the program was abandoned by the College of Engineering in 1995.“In the mid-1990s energy was not on people’s radar screens,” explained Hammer. “And nuclear energy in particular was certainly being de-emphasized by universities and the government.”

The decision to shut down the fission reactor on campus came in May 2001.

That year the vice provost for research told then-president Hunter Rawlings in a letter that “possession of the nuclear fuel is a liability to the University. The space occupied by the Ward Center is too valuable to justify the current use.” In response, the lab’s director, Prof. Kenan Unlu argued in the Cornell News that “the Ward Center is enthusiastically pursuing its mission and is admirably meeting its goals of providing research and analytical services to the university community.”

Above all, the University cited a lack of student participation in the program. Hammer acknowledged this absence, explaining that there was “a perception among students that there are no jobs — no reactors were being built, the ones in operation weren’t going to be relicensed, no one was designing reactors.”

The decision seemed to be a smart one shortly thereafter, when September 11, 2001 called into question the possibility of a terrorist attack on the reactor. Roadblocks soon went in around the building, which still contained radioactive waste.

Hammer explained that those in favor of shutting down the research reactor in the Ward Laboratory thought the building would immediately become useable space. Instead the University needed to wait roughly seven years as testing and decommissioning of the reactor ensued. By 2005, Hammer asserts, people realized what a valuable resource Cornell had lost.

Today Prof. Bin Cady is the only Cornell faculty member actively researching nuclear fission. Across the country, according to the Associated Press, nuclear engineering is experiencing a renaissance among undergraduates. The last nuclear reactor built in the U.S. was completed in 1994, but today several license applications for new nuclear plants exist.

Prof. Paul Chirik, chemistry, also identifies the coming energy crisis as one of the biggest issues in science today. Chirik has made a point to introduce the issue to his undergraduates, in courses as prominent as CHEM 207: General Chemistry. He says the burning of large amounts of coal is inevitable. “We’re going to burn it. I don’t care who’s president. The question is what price are we willing to pay for burning it?”

Chirik says the proper alternatives will include solar, wind and nuclear — the same three technologies Hammer chose to identify. “People are finally starting to see that nuclear power is a clean safe energy because it doesn’t burn as much carbon dioxide,” he said.

Most now agree that nuclear energy will play some role in reducing our dependence on foreign oil. The question remaining is just how big that role will be.

“Fission can play a role in weaning us off fossil fuels essentially immediately,” explained Hammer. He laments the public perception of the technology as unsafe, saying “Black lung disease kills a lot of coal miners. In the nuclear power industry, there have been a couple deaths [in the US], and none of them have been directly attributed to radiation.” He also points out cost misperceptions, saying that while the official prices of nuclear energy are higher than those of coal, per watt, they fail to include the cost of carbon dioxide. “The real cost of fission is controversial,” he said, but so too is the cost of fossil fuels. “What do you include? The War in Iraq? Mining Deaths?”

Fusion, the opposite nuclear reaction (putting particles together, as opposed to splitting them), may prove the ultimate in new energy sources, since scientists claim it produces fewer radioactive byproducts with much shorter decay rates.

Funding in Science

Prof. Jim Houck, astronomy, has worked at Cornell for over 40 years. Securing funding in a field known for big budget research has brought him into direct contact with Congress.

Houck pioneered the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) that would ultimately become the Spitzer Space Telescope Program, the infrared equivalent to the Hubble Space Telescope. Radiation from space comes in at all wavelengths, with visible light representing a small fraction of the possible spectrum. Infrared radiation is Spitzer’s domain, and the new data illuminates new astrophysical processes unobservable by optical scopes like Hubble.

Houck described the life of Spitzer beginning in 1974, a journey characterized by seismic shakeups in the United States space program including the Challenger tragedy and a failed unmanned mission to Mars. His project saw large fluctuations in its funding from $3 billion to $600 million currently.

According to Houck, it became obvious very early in the process that he and his colleagues were going to have difficulties “selling” Spitzer. As the person closest to Washington, Houck did the “pushing” as he described it, securing spots on committees at NASA, and visiting various offices on Capitol Hill.

“They sort of got to know me,” he said. “Though I couldn’t say for sure if they tried to run away when I showed up.

“I remember one day when the science person in one of the offices came out and looked at me and said, ‘Jim, it’s never gonna fly.’ That day I’d taken an engineering model of one of the instruments and I just put it down on the table and I said, ‘This is what we’re building, we know how to do it, it’s been taken to Palomar and we know it will work.’ At the end of the conversation, he said, ‘I’ll see if I can find a little money.’ And that was a pleasant interaction. Many others were less so.

“It’s the way you have to do things,” he continued. “We’re asking people to spend a large amount of money on a project they fundamentally don’t understand very clearly.”

Though resigned to the realities of a dependent relationship between science and politics, Houck expressed optimism that the public’s continued interest in what’s happening in “space” will prevent the importance of science from being diminished significantly by growing financial constraints.

When asked about the potential of either presidential candidate restoring the kind of “bigger picture” scientific inquiry that is a foundation of astronomy, Prof. Jim Bell, astronomy, expressed a less than optimistic view.

“I certainly hope so,” Bell said. Yet, he added that funding is a “zero-sum game” in which “something’s going to have to get cut.” He pointed out that the actual amount spent on the space program is actually very small – about .5 percent of the budget, which he equated to “a month and a half in Iraq.”

Science and National Security

Prof. Judith Reppy, peace studies and science and technology studies, stands at the juncture between science and politics. The Peace Studies Program at Cornell, according to its website, is an interdisciplinary program devoted to research and teaching on problems of war and peace, arms control and disarmament, and instances of collective violence. Science and Technology Studies draws on faculty and courses in history, philosophy, sociology and politics of science and technology.

Reppy has been involved in both programs since 1972 after earning her PhD in economics. The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies describes her as an “expert in military technology, industrial policy and economics of innovation.” She is also a member on the Council of Foreign Relations.

“My particular research interest has been military technology and arms control,” Reppy said. She deals with issues like “how we can maintain an open market system as much as possible while Americans export modern technologies that might have military application.”

“Essentially the process is very dysfunctional with a lot of bureaucracy,” Reppy explained. “It is an example of failed policy.”

Reppy said the current question is whether or not the enormous increase in funding after 9/11 for bio defense is creating new sectors of the military industrial complex and of biotechnology.

“My short answer is, not yet,” she said.

She noted that Cornell’s position as a land grant university enables it to look in two directions­ — large projects that are national labs and look to the federal government for funding, and then a range of smaller projects associated with the land grant and extension work funded by the state. Reppy predicts tight budgets in the near future on both levels as a result of our troubled economy.

Freedom of information also concerns Reppy, who noted that science’s desire for an open market of ideas often clashes with national security.

“If you talk to a foreign national, even if it is a student in your lab, a person without a green card or U.S. citizen about a certain range of technologies, it is considered a deemed export. There are restrictions on certain fields of knowledge.”

“There’s a constant tension communicated by the University, saying we’re open institutions, and the government saying we’re going to control,” she said. Reppy acknowleged the existence of an officer at Cornell who tracks the flow of such sensitive information.

Leadership and Criticism

Prof. Kurt Gottfried, physics, has been involved at the intersection of scientists and politics since the late ’60s. Gottfried, a professor emeritus, co-founded the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in 1969 while visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). According to its founding document, the organization was created as a collaboration between students and faculty at MIT to “initiate a critical and continuing examination of governmental policy in areas where science and technology are of actual or potential significance” and to shift emphasis from military research towards “the solution of pressing environmental and social problems.”

The group grew into a nationwide collection of active scientists and citizens. Gottfried’s involvement in the organization intensified in the 1980s when he became an outspoken critic of the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile defense program dubbed “Star Wars” by the mass media. Gottfried explained that he felt the program only served to heighten tensions and increase militarization.

Through the years, Gottfried also spoke out regarding nuclear arms control, alongside fellow Cornell physicist Hans Bethe, a leading theorist in the Manhattan project.

“I worked a lot with him on public policy matters. He was very interested in nuclear arms control,” he explained.

Gottfried is now chair of the UCS, which attracted media attention in August by placing billboards in the airports of Minneapolis and Denver that read “When only one nuclear bomb could destroy a city,” like Minneapolis or Denver, “we don’t need 6,000.” The cities would soon be home to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, but Northwest Airlines removed the ads before the conventions would take place.

Nevertheless Gottfried no longer recognizes nuclear proliferation as the world’s leading scientific issue.

“I think that climate change is in the long run a more serious challenge and a more difficult one to deal with. In the end, climate change is because of what you and I do,” he explained. “You could imagine all the world leaders getting together and abolishing nuclear weapons, but they can’t stop climate change.” That job, he said, is ours. Like Hammer’s take on the energy crisis, Gottfried believes science alone cannot solve this problem: conservation is also key.

“It’s a combination of politics and science. In the long run, I’m optimistic we can meet the challenge, but I’m not overly optimistic,” Gottfried said. “I mean, we’ve wasted the past eight years.”

In 2004, Gottfried lead the UCS in two studies illustrating the Bush Administration’s systematic manipulation and censoring of scientific findings.

“The 2004 scientific integrity statement was not on any specific policy but rather on how the government was conducting itself,” he said. In the realms of global warming, the Environmental Protection Agency, endangered species, NASA, and other agencies the administration “manipulated and distorted scientific information.”

“There’s always been some manipulation of economic or scientific information to fit the agenda, but the extent of it in recent years is completely unprecedented in its intensity and its breadth,” he said.

“Republicans have often been very good to science, seeing that technology is the way of the future,” Reppy said. “In the last eight years, that view has lessened, with much greater controls on scientific knowledge, much greater willingness to overrule scientific findings with political ones — the denial of global warming essentially went in the face of what all the scientists were saying.”

Reordering National Priorities

Prof. Drew Noden, biomedical sciences, conducts research in basic biomedical mechanisms that underlie health and disease. He says his field of research will ultimately aid in curing diseases related to age, such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes.

“From the biomedical sciences point of view we have to recognize that we are within a likelihood of making substantial inroads into debilitating and degenerative diseases, whether palliative, puritive or preventative.”

With the accelerating pace of biomedical research and computational methods, there’s a feeling among researchers that rapid breakthroughs in medicine will soon ensue.

Yet, Noden added “the funding levels for science have not in the last three or four years have not kept pace with the cost of doing science.”

Do scientists think national priorities should be different?

“I am not sure that the fact I earn a living as a scientist gives me any insights into that, I think at a national level the issue of, though this is a politically loaded term, affordable health care coverage, including emphasis on wellness, that’s a huge challenge for our society,” Noden said. “That’s not an issue of science but management.”

Healthcare, Noden says, is the most important issue today. “Breakthroughs [in biomedics] have to be made available to those that need them, not those who are affluent enough to be able to afford them.

Chirik believes greater emphasis on science is needed. “Whenever you have a president talking about science, it’s a good thing because it gets people informed.”

Gottfried is optimistic that whoever is elected next Tuesday, science will be better received by the next administration. Of particular note, he says, is the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. “I have to say I’ve been struck by the fact that Obama mentions science quite frequently in his stump speeches.”

Reppy agreed. As for which candidate will be better for science, Reppy noted an article in a science magazine that compared the way in which the two candidates have looked for science advice during the campaign. She said that Republican presidential nominee John McCain had several people in a room, and an operative was quoted saying McCain needs science advice the way Tiger Woods needs a golf course, whereas Obama had 80 people, and six different committees.

“Whichever candidate is elected, it will be somewhat better, but I think if Obama is elected, it will be substantially better,” she added. “He has really annunciated in more detail how he will support science.”

Gottfried also mentioned the difference between how the two campaigns have incorporated scientific advice. He noted that McCain, in all areas of his campaign, has a “lean” group of advisors, whereas Obama has a very large group of advisors.

Energy policy, many interviewed agree, is a crucial problem facing the next president. Chirik believes the future President of the United States, either Obama or McCain, will play an influential role in the future energy policy of the entire world.

Bell has noted a lack of focus in dealing with the energy crisis. He talked specifically about a question that came up in one of the debates in which the moderator asked if the candidates would prefer a Manhattan Project style endeavor to solve the energy crisis, or if they had more faith in leaving it up to “1000 garages” across the country. Bell believes we need to “just pick a path — clearly we’re capable if we make it a priority ...The methodology itself might be less important.”

The Future of Scientific Inquiry

With a host of pressing issues facing the next president even as financial unrest threatens research funding, what is the future of scientific inquiry in fields with no obvious short-term benefits?

Particle physics, astronomy, cosmology and elements of NASA often find themselves in the cross hairs of government budgets.

“We no longer do high energy physics experimental research in this country. The Cornell group now works at CERN,” said Gottfried. “Our investment in this has really become minimal, which is not prudent.”

“I think the really big driver for science in the near future is the economic situation,” Houck said. “You can think of using a space program as being a way of regenerating the economy, you can also say its something we’re just going to have to sit on the shelf until better times come.”

“I think if we start looking at the short term benefits from these things, we’d be making a mistake,” said Gottfried. “Basic research has spinoffs with benefits that are difficult to anticipate.” He pointed out the internet as a prime example, which was actually developed for communication among scientific collaborators at CERN, an elementary particle physics laboratory in Geneva.

“I think if we were in a situation where we were trying to save mankind because of some scourge, than obviously science of the astronomical type is probably not the right thing to be doing,” said Houck. “It’s important in the sense that it gives people something some way of understanding how we got here, that’s a very powerful question. It’s hard to drain the swamp when you’re being chased by the alligators. Draining the swamp is pure science, in the case of cosmology. But we have some pretty ferocious alligators right now.”

— Chris Bentley and A. D. Muscente contributed reporting.