science 2008-2009: 16: Obama

President George W. Bush was frequently criticised for his policies affecting science. The values of the conservative Christian right had guided Bush’s 2001 decision to stop federal funding of research on new embryonic stem cell lines. Since then the United States had been overtaken by countries that were more permissive in this specific biomedical field: Singapore, the United Kingdom, Israel, China and Australia.  Bush’s administration was accused of conducting a ‘war on science’, with allegations of interference and the re-writing of evidence (Mooney 2005), and of a ‘failure to deal with the risks of nuclear proliferation’, walking away, for example, from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

‘Many researchers, of all political stripes, are deeply troubled by what they regard as the dysfunctional relationship between science and the outgoing Bush administration’, noted a Nature editorial in January 2008. The Democrat candidate, Barack Obama, was comfortable supporting investment in science and unambiguously backing the teaching of evolution by natural selection. The Republican ticket, John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin, was split with the two representing wildly different constituencies. Palin’s comments during the campaign – hedging her views on whether climate change is being caused by humans, strongly opposing embryonic stem-cell research, promising to cut funding, as she said in debate, for “fruit fly research in Paris, France. Can you believe that?” – threatened to overshadow McCain’s stance.  

However, a science debate, pushed for by a campaign given coverage by Science and Nature, never materialised. Science, in the end, was not a crucial issue for the 2008 election.

On winning the election, president-elect Obama began appointing key officials. In December, the post of secratary of the Department of Energy, with a seat at the cabinet, was given to a scientist, the physicist Steven Chu, who was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Nobel prize winner. In January 2009, Obama appointed his science adviser. John Holdren’s career was varied, in all the right places: a physicist, with experience as an engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, fusion research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, anti-nuclear proliferation work with the Pugwash organisation, and now a Harvard environmental policy expert in charge of the Woods Hole Research Center. Other Obama picks included Harold Varmus, who had directed the National Institutes of Health, and Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project.

Early in his presidency, in March 2009, Barack Obama used an executive order to overturn Bush’s restrictions on federally funded stem-cell research, ‘issued a memo directing [John Holdren] to ensure scientific integrity in government decision-making’, and budgeted for big increases in science funding.