EP 936 How Important Are Scientists to Public Policy?

 If you think about it virtually all major public policy issues involve the application of science.  How do we deal with global warming?  What limits can we put on the development of nuclear capability from a rogue nation that we are able to drag to a bargaining table?  How do we get consensus on a strategy to blunt the next airborne virus which starts with human and animal contact continents away?  Yet it would seem that the lens through which scientists look at problem solving and that of politicians is worlds apart.  So how does scientific input affect the ultimate resolution of some of the world’s most vexing problems?  Nobel Laureate, Dr. Peter Agre, attempts to answer that question in his new book, “Can Scientists Succeed where Politicians Fail?”  It’s interesting when you consider how we must rely on scientists to help craft policies to ameliorate problems that resulted from their own acumen.  The limiting of the potential of nuclear weapons may be the best example, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb, realized early on.

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