Science Progress, the science policy zine of the Center for American Progress, has just published a book that's a collection of some of the most important work from progressives on science policy--an "informed citizen’s essential guide to science policy from the premier progressive think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action." The book is entitled Science Next: Innovation for the Common Good, and it puts us in a long intellectual tradition:
Science as progressive...boasts philosophical and political skeins stretching much further back into the American historical experience. Francis Bacon’s utopian New Atlantis is often credited as being the first literary work to express the modern idea of progress in terms of advancing science and technology. It was a vision that was to have a profound effect on later seventeenth-century thinkers, including those who provided the intellectual justification for the American Revolution. For all the founders’ disagreements, they shared the conviction that the new nation’s promise was necessarily bound up with its innovative genius. Even those bitter rivals Jefferson and Hamilton were of one mind as they made their synergistic contributions to America’s identity as a nation dedicated to modernity: Jefferson through the patent statute and Hamilton by laying the foundations for history’s most successful capitalist economy, which together have so rewarded and nourished inventiveness. It is no coincidence that so many of the concepts at the very heart of how America has come to understand itself—ideas such as the frontier and the West—demand an experimental attitude in grappling with novel challenges. The optimistic “can do” spirit; the approval of bigness, boldness, and adventure; the lure of “the road”—all are associated with this sensibility and are at the heart of our veneration of this country’s great inventors, people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, and Bill Gates. We hold these truths of perseverance and perspicacity to be, if not self-evident, at least within our grasp.
The Obama administration has very pointedly placed itself in this tradition as well, and many of the folks at the Center for American Progress have been instrumental in articulating and influencing its science policy priorities. And now, the broad outlook is set down within two covers. You can order ScienceNext here on Amazon. The book contains an essay by yours truly on science communication and the public, as well as writings by many other authors--most centrally, Science Progress's editor Jonathan Moreno, a leading bioethicist, and Rick Weiss, recently of the Washington Post and Science Progress and now working for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. I encourage you to check it out.
