President Joe Biden has named some top-flight scientists, including a Nobel Prize winner and Dr. Anthony Fauci, to his inner circle of policy advisers.
For the first time, the president’s chief science adviser will be in a Cabinet-level position. Biden has tapped pathbreaking human genome researcher Eric Lander for the job.
“Science will always be at the forefront of my administration,” Biden said as he announced the appointment of Landers and an impressive lineup of other experts on his team.
My sense is that those choices parallel the nation’s bipartisan desire to see science closer to the driver’s seat.
As the pandemic has proven well, the problems our nation and world face increasingly require a solid understanding of facts that have been rigorously tested and accepted by experts whose first loyalty is to truth.
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There are few institutions more trusted in our nation than the scientific community. It’s not surprising that Biden wants to give his policies the polish that comes from the can-do legacies of Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk and the other heroes of the scientific academy.
I reached out to Dr. Jeffrey Alderman to better understand the limits of science in shaping policy.
Alderman is associate professor of community medicine at the University of Tulsa’s Oxley College of Community Medicine and associate dean of medical education at TU. He’s a practicing physician who has studied the intersection of policy and medical science.
Alderman said he appreciates the new administration’s commitment to bring science into the room when important decisions are being made.
For that to succeed, he said, the scientific community will have to be true to its values and get better at explaining difficult choices to the public.
“With that elevation comes the responsibility to be able to explain better to a really nervous, anxious public what the strategy is and to do it in a way that is easy to relate to,” he said. “That’s a heavy lift, I think.”
Here’s the truth: Science doesn’t always know the complete answer to every problem. Sometimes the answers it knows will mean tough times for big segments of the population. Other times, the answers that appear to be right on Monday are proven wrong on Tuesday. You can see Alderman discussing some of those issues on a video attached to the online version of this column.
The processes of science are not always linear, and the results are sometimes nuanced, Alderman said.
“Sometimes what we believe to be true, hydroxychloroquine, for example, may turn out, after better scientific rigor, to be absolutely false,” he said. “We have to explain this to people who are tired and traumatized and sick and feeling mentally and economically depressed.”
Hydroxychloroquine is an antimalaria drug that was once touted by many, including President Donald Trump, as a possible treatment to COVID-19. Subsequent testing proved it ineffective. Oklahoma jumped too soon at the drug’s potential and ended up holding $2 million worth.
There is danger that the higher profile of science in the Biden administration will raise expectations unrealistically.
Such false narratives are the promise of alchemy: The idea that science perform miracles. Alderman said the real solutions of science are often less than clear-cut and rarely simple.
“There aren’t easy answers to hard questions,” he said.
While I was thinking about the uses and limits of science, I found an interesting website that illustrates how science really works, put together for classrooms by the University of California Museum of Paleontology.
“Science is powerful,” the illustration says. “It has generated the knowledge that allows us to call a friend halfway around the world with a cell phone, vaccinate a baby against polio, build a skyscraper, and drive a car.”
But, science does not make moral or aesthetic judgments, and it doesn’t tell us how to use the knowledge it creates.
In a democratic society, those are often the jobs of elected officials who have to balance a lot of other things, including economics and popular emotions, in their decision-making.
The Biden administration’s decision to bring science into the Cabinet room is clearly right. It injects a needed element of realism where it has been missing.
The real alchemy, however, is turning that realism into policy that the public understands and accepts, and that’s not necessarily something you find in a test tube.
