This coming presidential election will have an enormous effect upon the direction that this country takes towards meeting such challenges, or simply ignoring them in the hope that they go away.
The impact that a president can have upon scientific research has been dramatically demonstrated in the past eight years. We in the basic biomedical research business, usually carried out in colleges and universities across the country, have seen funding from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation move from one out of every four federal grants at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration to the current situation of less than one in 10.
This loss of funding has had dramatic effects upon the entry of new researchers into science, the retention of experienced scientists and the ability to create an appropriate environment for science and technology education.
Many citizens do not understand the role that basic science, usually funded by government sources, has upon the success of companies in the marketplace. The purpose of basic research is to understand how things work, to find order from a seeming chaotic series of data points. Companies then take that information and use it to design products for profitable gain.
Thus a basic science biologist with a $150,000 grant may discover that a protein is important in inflammation, but it is the drug company that uses that information to create a new class of pain relievers generating a $300 million revenue stream.
Basic science is an information pump that drives successful entrepreneurship. It is important to examine the records and policies of John McCain and Barack Obama to determine which is most committed to a renewal of this country's strong and proud basic science and technology legacy.
Neither McCain nor Obama is trained as a scientist so each relies upon a cadre of advisers to shape policies. Whom they choose as advisers is an interesting glimpse into the priorities of the candidates.
McCain's science and technology advisers include past governmental officials such as James Woolsey, James Schlesinger and Robert McFarlane and former CEOs of companies such as Meg Whitman of eBay and Carly Fiorina from Hewlett-Packard. Obama's advisers include past Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, current professors from leading institutions (such as Sharon Long from Stanford, Don Lamb from Chicago) and Henry Kelley from the Federation of American Scientists.
The real difference in the people on these two lists is that McCain's group consists of people who have experience managing the people who make scientific discoveries while Obama's group includes those people who actually do the work, who are in the trenches pushing their fields forward. Do you want to get answers from the engineer or from his pointy-headed boss?
The McCain campaign has been reluctant to answer questions from the scientific community. Neutral science advocacy voices such as Physics Today and Nature magazines have submitted questions to both candidates but only received replies from the Obama campaign.
The McCain camp sends out conflicting stances on global warming, embryonic stem-cell research and science teaching in the schools, and the opinions of the vice presidential nominee are many times at odds with McCain's. On many science and technology points, Sarah Palin is more like George W. Bush than McCain.
Obama and Joe Biden recognize the threat of global warming, they are in favor of embryonic stem-cell research, they support increased government funding for basic science and they support leaving the study of creationism in Sunday school, not eighth-grade biology.
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* JOHN H. WEIS is a biomedical researcher and educator at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
