I'm not going to Boston this year for the AAAS meeting--Sheril will be my eyes and ears--but I didn't have to be there to hear about what Nobel laureate David Baltimore said during his president's address yesterday. He began by prominently highlighting ScienceDebate2008. Here is an excerpt from his remarks:
We have a Presidential election coming. Science and technology have played at best minor roles in the primary campaigns. Now that we have a limited candidate pool, it is time for our community to be heard. A debate on science has been proposed and some 15,000 people and many organisation have signed onto the proposal. We should write to the candidates and encourage them to participate. Their view of science, whether they want to hear its conclusions or want to hide from them, whether they want to have the thinking of our community represented in the White House or relegated to a distant office, whether they will support intensive investigation of alternative energy sources, whether they will liberate the biomedical community to fully investigate the power of stem cell technology, whether they will face the reality that abstinence is not the only way to protect people against HIV transmission, whether they will provide leadership or bury their head in the sand when tough choices must be made, whether they will leave a better country than the one they inherit, all of these are critical questions with which they should be faced. And there is one question they should be asked, which is of particular interest to me: will they support an increase in funding for NIH? It is criminal that at a time when the opportunities in biomedical research outstrip any other moment in history, there has been a 13 percent real decrease in the buying power of the health research budget between 2004 and the 2009 proposal. The President must believe himself immortal, or in the hands of God, to have presided over this decimation of one of the jewels of American science, a science jewel that has spawned the biotechnology industry, the one industry in which America is the unquestioned leader. How can we cede that lead to others by reducing support for the research that made it possible?
Meanwhile, yesterday the National Wildlife Federation, with a staggering 5 million members, endorsed SD08...
