American Scientist

We are always looking for ways to improve American Scientist, so recently we sent out a reader survey to get your input. A lot of you generously took the time to respond: Thank you for being involved with shaping the magazine. (If you missed the survey and still want to send us your comments, you’re always welcome to do so using the “contact us” form on our website. We promise we read them.)

About a third of survey respondents opted to leave a comment, and of those, about 15 percent (or about 5 percent of the total respondents) were requests that the magazine not discuss anything “political,” a category which some respondents defined to include anything relating to diversity or gender. (It’s worth noting that a number of readers also requested more coverage of those same topics.)

To clarify, neither American Scientist nor Sigma Xi has endorsed any political candidates; you can find a statement to that effect on the society’s website. At the same time, Sigma Xi’s Executive Director and CEO, Jamie Vernon, reiterates in that statement that scientific research plays a critical role “in the formulation of reliable and equitable policies to address technical, social, and economic problems.” Science guides policy, and policy guides the operation of scientific research.

Politics has been intertwined with countless topics covered in American Scientist over the decades, and not just complex global issues such as climate change, nuclear power, or water pollution. There are political considerations at work in decisions about how to minimize space debris or whether a long-span bridge is built. Is Facebook violating your right to privacy if it sells your personal data? Even in this issue, authors look at carbon sinks ("First Person: Ariana Sutton-Grier"), wildfires ("Pulling the Plug on Climate Change Wildfires"), and pandemic responses ("A Pandemic of Confusion", "Uncertain Times", and "The Evolutionary Potential of Pathogens"). Scientists and engineers contribute data that are used to inform policy in all of these areas, no matter who is running the government. Political leaders have to weigh the cost of action or the cost of inaction.

Science historian Adam Shapiro of the University of London wrote in our pages in 2017 that “it may be true that gravitational waves don’t really care who won the last election, but the ability to discover these ripples in the fabric of reality is inseparable from the social, economic, and political circumstances within which scientists work.” He noted that the question of who is allowed to be part of the scientific community and have access to its resources has a long, highly political history.

Daniel Sarewitz of Arizona State University made a related point in his 2006 American Scientist column. He wrote that “opposing scientific views become a proxy for the conflicting values that underlie the conflict.” Different fields of science often produce multiple views of the same topic, each of which could be valid from a particular disciplinary angle. Sarewitz used the example of genetically modified organisms in agriculture: Some plant geneticists look at how modified plants can reduce malnutrition, whereas some ecologists study the risk of transgenes to ecosystems. Both views are based in scientific research, but they could be used to support competing political ideologies.

American Scientist has always tackled complex topics that inspire multiple points of view, in an effort to provide our readers with broad perspectives on the scholarship that can inform their own opinions. Nearly all scientists and engineers value strong support for scientific research so that subsequent generations are able to contribute to our knowledge and improve the human condition. But even that support—how much of it, given by whom, given to whom—is rooted in policy and politics.

I’ll leave you with a quote from the late Lynn Margulis, the renowned biologist, who wrote this in our pages in 2005: “Skepticism, particularly toward arrogant authorities, and disclosure of their distortions, omissions and half-truths, is mandatory for the health of science and growth of its knowledge. To challenge unstated assumptions, to resist arguments from authority, to detect and reject institutionalized bias, all are intrinsic to the scientific enterprise.” —Fenella Saunders (@FenellaSaunders)