JB Say What?

I’m writing this from the massive convention center in Washington, DC where I am allegedly attending the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting. For those of you who don’t know, this is a very large meeting that generally has over 35,000 attendees. While it can be overwhelming at times, it can, if managed correctly, turn out to be a relatively small meeting. Because it is the meeting, it is a good chance that most of one’s colleagues and collaborators will be attending, and so it is a great to place to plan future endeavors as well as relive past indiscretions. DC is a great place for a conference, with good food and other distractions if the crush of science gets too intense.

Washington, DC is also, I’ve been told, the seat of our government. As such, it is as good an opportunity as any to talk about the upcoming transition in the executive branch. I have been reading pretty intensely over the past couple of weeks about the Obama and McCain campaigns–what went right and what went wrong. For those of you who haven’t overdosed on this stuff, I would strongly recommend the special Newsweek issue entitled “44″ and a number of articles in last week’s New Yorker, including this, this, and this.

What is clear from these articles is how dramatically the candidates personalities influenced the campaign. The successful campaign of Obama (dubbed “No Drama Obama”) clearly reflected Obama’s even temperment—not allowing himself or the campaign to get too high or too low. In contrast, the McCain campaign was impulsive, and lacked a coherent message and strategy.

What was even more encouraging, however, were some descriptions of Obama’s management style. In meetings with his campaign staff, he would solicit the advice from everyone in the room–if a participant hadn’t talked much during the meeting, Obama would seek his/her opinion directly. What struck me as particularly encouraging was that, by all accounts, he would never tip his hat as to his own thoughts on the topics being discussed. The purpose of this was to make sure that the advice he was getting was not colored by his staffers natural inclination to try to make the boss happy by telling him what they thought he wanted to hear. When the meeting concludes, he weighs the unvarnished opinions that were offered, and then makes his decision.

This is a particularly refreshing departure from the leadership currently ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave (when not spending >800 days on vacation). What it also demonstrates is, dare I say it, an empirical approach—a relatively dispassionate assessment of the facts as best as can be determined, and the subsequent generation of a thesis based on these facts.

Along these lines, it was quite interesting to read this morning that Obama admires the approach of FDR during his first 100 days in office, whereby FDR would try a number of different programs to help ease the US out of the depression. Those that worked, he stuck with, those that didn’t were axed. This is, of course, exactly what a good scientist would do. You generate hypotheses, test the hypotheses, and then let the data tell you whether your hypothesis was correct or not.

The bottom line for me appears to be that Obama clearly respects the scientific method. My wife has always said that kids are born scientists—curious about the world and how it works—and only begin to lose interest, if they do, when they go to school and get their curiosity bored out of them. Clearly, our current president lost his interest in “fact based ideology” quite a while ago. As a working scientist, I am more than a little hopeful that Obama will be more sympathetic to the important role the scientific and technological research will play in the keeping the US competitive in the coming decades. A good first start would be to immediately rescind the ban on stem cell research in the US. A second move would be to devote a large amount of R&D dollars and tax incentives toward the development of green technologies. Finally, he should restore the cuts to the NIH budget and work toward bringing future budgets more in line to where they have been in past.

I surely recognize that science isn’t the be all and end all, and that not all problems are amenable to the scientific method. But it is nonetheless true that ignoring pesky facts, silencing voices that disagree with your own, and limiting exploration of new knowledge has clearly hurt our country. There is every reason to hope that this will change in mid-Janaury, and the sooner the better.

Posted by Glenn on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 10:36 pm.