PREFACE
When a conjecture inspires new hopes or creates new fears, action is indicated. There is an important asymmetry between hope, which leads to actions which test its basis, and fear, which by restricting options inhibits testing of its basis. As we know only too well, many of our hopes do not survive their tests. However fears accumulate untested. The inventory of untested fears has always made humanity disastrously vulnerable to thought control.
During the centuries while science was independent of politics, its greatest triumph was the reduction of that vulnerability and the realization of some of our dreams.
In all wars technological advances have played a significant role. In WW2 that role was much larger and scientists shared some of the credit for that victory. During and after that war science had enough prestige to explosively increase funding for research from millions to billions. In the half century since that explosion science has opened new horizons beyond previous human experience.
But today scientists are dependent on politicians to fund research. In this period we have seen a series of apocalyptic fears - nuclear war, cancer epidemics from the widespread use of DDT, mass starvation due to the population explosion, exhaustion of natural resources, global warming etc. Although these catastrophic predictions have not materialized, and the health, education and nutrition of mankind have continued to improve the end of this fear driven era is not yet in sight.
The question addressed here is--- Can dependent science carry on the proud tradition of dispelling fear which led to the optimism of the Enlightenment and to the modern world it inspired? Or will science’s uncertainties be concealed to serve politicians seeking power by converting mass ignorance into mass fear?
-------------------------
My introduction to the relation of Science to Politics began with an experience a half century ago in the beginning of the space age when I experienced the power of political interference in distorting our response to sputnik.
The Soviet Union had scored a great propaganda coop with Sputnik on 4 Oct. 1957. Before Sputnik, Pres. Eisenhower had prohibited launching a U.S. satellite using the military rockets we had available since the early 1950s. The Soviets however had not shared his aspiration to avoid the militarization of space. Nevertheless the U.S. was leaning toward responding to Sputnik with a space spectacular which could be persuasively labeled "civilian".
Before sputnik almost all US work in rocketry was done by the Department of Defense or its contractors. Labeling our space program "civilian" consisted of selecting a 40 yr. old aeronautical research agency, NACA, changing its name to NASA and transferring Werner von Braun and the German group who had, during WORLD WAR 2, developed the V2 rocket from US Army supervision to NASA. .
In the fall of 1960 the Air Force was still competing with NASA to acquire a larger role in the rapidly growing space program. As part of that competition Lt. Gen. Bernard A. Schriever, who had led the successful development of the US Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, created a committee led by a former Asst. Secretary of the Air Force, the late Trevor Gardiner, to aid the Air Force in advising the incoming President on a space program for the US. My appointment to the Gardiner committee began a decisive part of my education on the relationship between science and politics which I want to share with you.
Soviet Rockets were larger than US rockets and could launch larger payloads into orbit. The media came to believe that matching the Soviet's bigger boosters was the key to reestablishing US prestige. The Apollo mission, designed for this purpose, required the injection into earth orbit of rocket propellant and equipment weighing about 250,000 lb. The Atlas and Titan rockets which had been developed for the ICBM program could launch only a few thousand pounds. One obvious answer was to build a much bigger booster (e.g. the Saturn V). There was a great slogan trumpeted in the media that "the only thing we lacked was bigger boosters".
An alternative approach which, von Braun had described to the committee was to assemble payloads in earth orbit. The Atlas and Titan boosters which the Air Force then had coming off production lines in California and Maryland could in this way launch any load. By assembling payloads in earth orbit we could not only go to the moon but we could utilize America's tremendous production capabilities to outmatch any booster the Soviets could build. Further we estimated that earth orbital assembly (EOA) would be 10 times cheaper than the big booster approach. But EOA required that we depend on the successful development of the technologies of rendezvous and assembly in orbit. After much argument and after hearing many presentations the Gardiner committee (which was due to report by 15 Feb 1961) was still divided on which approach to recommend. I was convinced that EOA was the better strategy. Our unclassified report (Report of the Air Force Space Study Committee 20 March 1961) recommended that both approaches be pursued for the time being.
The next thing I heard was not from the Air Force but from the National Space Council which was headed by the Vice President Lyndon Johnson. The Space Council exercised the Presidents authority over all space matters. I was informed by telephone that our report had been classified TOP SECRET that only 25 copies would be printed, and that all of them would be stored in Lyndon Johnson's safe. Since our meetings and the information we used had been unclassified, I was flabbergasted. The report with was Top Secret until 1996 when it was released by a Freedom of Information Request still bearing the word unclassified on its title page.
I sought out those members of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) whom I knew. I persuaded many of them that suppression of the EOA option was an important mistake. A panel under Prof. Frank Long of Cornell was tasked with examining the matter. The panel held a meeting at which a NASA representative laid out the bigger booster plan. I then put forward evidence that EOA would be at least ten times cheaper. Long turned to the NASA representative and asked what was wrong with what I had said. His total reply was - "If you decide in favor of EOA it will be very embarrassing to us."
Some weeks later Jerome Wiesner, Pres. Kennedy's Science Advisor, asked me to discuss the matter with him. For about two hours we went over the arithmetic and he too was convinced that we were making a big mistake. Several years afterward he told me that during his tenure as Science Advisor nobody had caused him as much trouble as I did. He had taken the matter to Kennedy. The President told him that it was none of his business and that he should stay out of it.
The national policy would be to build the biggest booster, regardless of its cost. We would close down the production lines for Atlas and Titan, and the U.S. would not develop EOA until a few years later. The Apollo mission was successful and restored US prestige. However it was the most expensive mission the US had undertaken and the culture of disregard for costs would mean that for a long time space operations would be frustratingly expensive. The Saturn V booster developed for Apollo was simply discarded after the mission was completed. The expensive new start allowed the center of space activity to be set in Texas and the deep south, Lyndon Johnson's constituency. The inconvenience of the existing production lines in California and Maryland had been disposed of. However the key measure of technical progress - the cost of launching a pound into low earth orbit has not fallen as would be expected in a healthy young industry. It now costs at least twice as much in inflation adjusted dollars about $10.000 a pound, as it did in 1960.The suppression of scientific information for political purposes has delayed the start of what one day will be an important part of the world economy. As far as I know this consideration of Earth Orbital Assembly is not mentioned in historical accounts of NASA’s early years. It has been developed now for assembly of the Space Station.
(Three years later secrecy was again abused to manipulate facts to suit Johnson's political purposes and to secure the passage of the notorious Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This cleared the way for our disastrous Vietnam war)
The way the decision had been made was unacceptable to me.
My generation grew up with unbounded faith in progress.
The expansion of humanity's horizons by natural science was one great source of that faith.
A second great source was the dramatic extension of life expectancy and literacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries achieved by science applied in technology and medicine.
A third great source was the beginning of the liberation of mankind from slavery and from its successor - economically forced routine labor.
Faithful transmission to the public of information needed for the democratic control of technology is essential to the faith in progress. I had witnessed the suppression of scientific information by powerful people for political purposes. This abuse of authority, if sufficiently widespread, would destroy that faith. Since that experience, I have devoted a considerable fraction of my time to means for improving the ability of science, now dependent on journalists, politicians and financiers, to communicate what it knows, and especially what it does not know, to the public.
This BLOG records what I have learned.
Later chapters recount efforts to create an institution to reduce the power of politicians to influence purely scientific decisions – an extension of their authority beyond their competence - which was Blaise Pascal’s definition of tyranny.
Chapter 1 April 2, 2007
DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OF TECHNOLOGY
To explore what is meant by this title let’s consider three doctrines for the governance of science based technology.
1. Scientists should take moral responsibility for the impact of science on society. Thus they should act to advance those fields which they foresee will benefit humanity and act to discourage those fields which they foresee will do more harm than good.
This is not democratic control - this is control by a paternalistic elite.
2. A prime object of our educational system should be to achieve broad “scientific literacy” so that the voters can discriminate between conflicting assertions made by scientists. This is a disastrous delusion (Shamos 1995) which puts the masters of persuasive rhetoric in control. When scientists compete to recruit scientists to accept their views, the frank recognition of doubt and uncertainty is enforced by their adversaries. However, when opposed experts compete to recruit voters, frankness is not enforced and tragically the pretension to certainty wins. In my opinion the enforcement of frankness in communication between science and the voting public is essential to DCT. The enforcement of frankness is usually not a primary concern of the media which must compete to hold the public's attention.
While education must aspire to create a nation literate enough to understand scientific statements, it is not reasonable to expect voters to devote the time needed to decide scientific controversies.
3. Delegate to the scientific community the task of telling the public what science knows and what science does not know when that information is needed for making public policy. BUT
Limit that delegation to falsifiable statements openly achieved
It will be obvious to the reader that I favor this last alternative. This chapter recounts my efforts over fourty years to win support for a procedure to implement this limited delegation.
When there is controversy in the scientific community how does the public find the facts basic to policymaking?
To oversimplify somewhat let us characterize two modes of finding these facts as the "elitist" approach and the "checks & balances" approach. We have always lived with the elitist approach. If those who spoke in the name of science were perceived as sufficiently wise and saintly, their findings would be clearly seen as the best obtainable.
However when anyone can gain by attacking the wisdom or the saintliness of the scientific basis for a policy proposal, we must expect that alternate factual statements will become surrogates for value differences in political controversy. The alternate factual statements are designed to appeal to voters, who do not necessarily share the values of the proponents. Then, to a degree, the resolution of policy relevant scientific controversy occurs external to the scientific community.
Handler led a valiant effort of the Academy to implement the elitist approach. In addressing The National Academy Bicentennial Symposium (Science: A resource for Mankind, Proc. Nat Acad.Sci. 1976 pp. 12-24), he reported the results as follows:
"But establishing truth with respect to technical controversy relevant to matters of public policy, and to do so in full public view, has proved to be a surprisingly difficult challenge to the scientific community. To our simple code must be added one more canon: when describing technological risks to the non-scientific public, the scientist must be as honest, objective, and dispassionate as he knows he must be in the more conventional, time-honored self-policing scientific endeavor. This additional canon has not always been observed. Witness the chaos that has come with challenges to the use of nuclear power in several countries. Witness in this country the cacophony of charge and counter-charge concerning the safety of diverse food additives, pesticides and drugs. We have learned that the scientist-advocate, on either side of such a debate, is likely to be more advocate than scientist and this has unfavorably altered the public view of both the nature of the scientific endeavor and the personal attributes of scientists. In turn, that has given yet a greater sense of urgency to the public demand for assurance that the risks attendant upon the uses of technology be appraised and minimized. And what a huge task that is!"
At the risk of belaboring the obvious it may be useful to list some of the motivations of scientist-advocates to be "more advocate than scientist".
First there are economic motivations. Industrial scientists are frequently found defending the actions or the plans of their companies. The press is almost always careful to properly call attention to their self interest. However academic and government scientists are frequently quoted without calling attention to their self interest. Their careers are however frequently dependent on research support from federal agencies and the agency budgets can be powerfully influenced by media attention. Scientists can acquire lots of "brownie points" with their friends in the bureaucracy by attracting media attention around the time that the agency budgets are being "marked up" in the appropriate congressional committee.
But I believe that political and ideological motivations are more important for most scientist-advocates. The identification of liberals with environmentalism and with risk reduction which intensified during the sixties forced difficult choices on scientists. There are inevitable tensions between these newly prominent causes and adventurous technology. The tensions between those who seek security through strength and those who advocate arms control have been reduced but not eliminated by the end of the cold war. There are scientist-advocates on all sides of these controversies using their scientific prestige to advance their causes.
The elitist approach has led to decision making on contested scientific facts
external to the scientific community. Thus the congress felt a need for an "independent" fact finding body and established the Office of Technology Assessment (disestablished by the 1994 Republican Congress). It was independent of the executive branch but without the safeguards necessary to protect its independence from political control. Similarly any political group (and its opposition) in need of "scientific" support in its efforts to influence public opinion has little difficulty in recruiting lists of names (e.g. Nobel Laureates) which will seem authoritative to its target audience. In the resulting media contest between competing authorities it is not possible to tell whether science or politics is speaking. We then lose both the power of science and the credibility of democratic process.
Our system for controlling technology was not designed - it evolved. The growth rate of our technology during that evolution was not as explosive as it is today. Fundamental to the fears and pessimism of our times is that our explosively growing science based technology cannot be controlled democratically by a system that evolved during slower growth. If we cannot control technology, many conclude that we must slow its advance to regain control. But if we slow our advance we will lose our leadership. Then leadership will pass on to those not dominated by the overblown fears which today handicap our society.
The preface described an abuse of political power which in my opinion distorted the space program intolerably. Over the course of a few years I came to the conclusion that democratic control of technology lacked an institution not involved in fundraising for science and dedicated to providing falsifiable statements of what science knows and especially what is not known when the facts are a matter of controversy and when that information is needed for making public policy. In February and March of 1967 the Senate Subcommittee on Government Research held and published a series of hearings called "Research in the Service of Man." My testimony at those hearings was republished as a “Proposal for an Institution for Scientific Judgment “in SCIENCE May 12 1967 Vol. 156 pg. 763-764.
The need for such an institution was also independtly recognized by others among them Allan Mazur of Syracuse University and Rush Simpson first director of the Consumer Products Safety Administration.
The SCIENCE article proposed the experimental development of an institution based on three guiding principles.
1. Separate the scientific from the political and moral components of a mixed decision. Make no value judgments for society.
2. Separation of judge and advocate. Advocates must be experts, judges must be unbiased. Do not propagate the myth of the unbiased expert.
3. The scientific judgments reached should be published. Openness should be the strength of the procedure.
Some years later when this proposal attracted some public attention the name "Science Court" (SC) was attached to this concept as the media's recognition of the fact that there are some parallels between the norms of scientific controversy and legal due process. The name has stuck and we will continue to use it. This somewhat inaccurate usage makes it important to point out that there are many salient differences e.g.:
1. Courts concern themselves with both finding facts and pronouncing verdicts i.e. expressing society's values. The SC would deal with falsifiable facts only and would not recommend actions or policies.
2. All science is tentative. Therefore any output from the SC would be offered as the state of knowledge at a time when that was needed for action. In controversial situations we would expect early obsolescence as new knowledge was generated.
3. Important differences between scientific and legal mores have been noted whenever these cultures interact. In the SC it is proposed that the mores of the scientific community be enforced. Ad hominem attacks are unacceptable in scientific debate.
4. Following Popper, nonfalsifiable statements are not part of science and do not share the credibility which scientific statements earn by surviving varied refutation attempts. Nonfalsifiable statements will not be part of SC results.
A FALSE START
I sought a meeting with Philip Handler (then President of the NAS) to explain the proposed institution to him. He understood immediately and I will never forget his response. He said,
“what you want is to have the hired guns shoot at each other instead of at the public”
He left me with the impression that he would like to try it out.
An opportunity came in June 1971 with the creation of the NAS Committee on Motor Vehicle Emissions. The Congress had passed the Clean Air Amendments of 1970 calling for considerable tightening of auto emission standards in coming years. That law stipulated that the EPA should contract with the NAS to determine whether the standards mandated for the 1975 model year were technologically feasible. The environmental movement was insisting on cleaner cars and the auto industry insisted that the mandated standards were not technologically feasible.
This was a "hot potato" for the Congress and they passed it on to the NAS. Handler proposed that the committee should deal with the problem by the procedure I had described and appointed me to the committee. The committee quickly discovered that while the auto industry would gladly furnish scientist-advocates supporting its position, competent opposition was hard to find. The congress had gotten their information from government scientists and had instructed us to find experts outside the government.
We found several university researchers who were expert in internal combustion engines and their emissions. Uniformly they told us that their research was supported by the auto industry and of course they could not oppose their sponsors in a public cross-examination procedure. They were prepared however to submit questions privately to the chairman (Ed Ginston, then CEO of Varian Inc.) There was nothing like a cross examination procedure.
The early committee reports were pessimistic about the technical feasibility of meeting the mandated standards. Then Honda came out with the "Civic" which, using a stratified charge engine, succeeded in meeting the mandated standards. This answered the US auto industry definitively.
With hindsight it was clearly a mistake to expect a new procedure to work the first time it was seriously tried. It became perfectly clear that the SC would require a development process which would probably result in important changes. This was of course clear initially and the SCIENCE article proposed only an “Experimental Institution.” However with the exciting prospect of making an immediate contribution to an important issue -
I failed to remember that this was a completely untried procedure.
THE FORD ADMINISTRATION OPPORTUNITY
Nixon had fired the President's Science Advisory Committee in 1972. Early in the Ford administration, science was invited back to the White House. I was nominated to join a group called the Presidential Advisory Group on Anticipated Advances in Science and Technology. When Simon Ramo (co-chairman) informed me of the nomination, I replied that I came with baggage, the SC. He responded that unless I refused the appointment, it didn’t matter what baggage I carried.
I accepted the appointment. Ramo and I persuaded the group that the SC should be studied. A Task Force under my chairmanship was appointed including 16
1 representatives of a great variety of national institutions ranging from the NAS to the AFL/CIO. An interim report was published in Science ( v 193 pg. 654 1976). The task force outlined a suggested procedure which is summarized below and which was strongly influenced by Donald Strauss, Director of Research for the American Arbitration Association, to maximize opportunities for arriving at a mediated statement of current knowledge.
The Task Force envisioned a series of experiments to test and develop the concept. Each experiment would start with an issue i.e. a value laden decision which would have to be based on scientific facts while those facts were still apparently controversial.
It was made clear that the applied rules of evidence would be the scientific rules of evidence and not the legal rules of evidence. Thus, ad hominem attacks would be ruled out. There will be no necessity to prove the expertise of a witness, since statements would be open to detailed challenge. We were unaware of any codification of the rules of scientific evidence, and intend to proceed at the outset on the simple statement that we would observe the rules that are traditional in the scientific community. On the other hand, we had a great deal to learn from the legal community on procedures. For example, we decided that the Science Court should not proceed unless representatives of both case managers are present. It would preserve the right of each case manager to cross-examine the positions taken by her adversary.
1 The task force was composed of three members of the Presidential Advisory Group: Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz, (chairman); Dr. Donald Kennedy, Stanford University, and Dr. Fred Seitz, Rockefeller University, -and the Honorable Betsy Anker-Johnson, U.S. Department of Commerce, Mr. David Beckler, National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Edward Burger, Georgetown University Medical Center; Mr. William Cavanaugh, American Society for Testing and Materials,; Dr. Russell C. Drew, National Science Foundation; (executive secretary); Mr. William Holt, U.S. Department of Commerce; Dr. Paul Horwitz, Congressional Fellow, U.S. Senate,; the Honorable Lawrence Kushner, Consumer Products Safety Commission,; Professor Allan Mazur, Syracuse University, ; Dr. Joel Primack, University of California, Santa Cruz ; Mr. Sheldon W. Samuels, AFI-CIO, ; the Honorable Richard 0. Simpson, Consumer Products Safety Commission; Mr. Donald Straus, American Arbitration Association, ; Mr. David Swankin, and Tumer; Dr. Myron Tribus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mr. James S. Turner, Swankin and Tumer.
The Task Force proposed the following procedure:
Initiation
1. The procedure will begin with agreements between the Science Court Administration (SCA), the host institution and the funding institution.
2. The first step will consist of contacts with regulatory agencies and others to search for a suitable issue. The first issue will be presumed to be bi-polar and will be presumed to be a value laden decision which must be made by the agency and in which the scientific facts are apparently in doubt.
3. An agreement with the regulatory agency to supply necessary legal powers for uncovering non-public information if necessary.
Organization
4. The SCA, equipped with an issue and funds, will seek Case Managers
(CMs), for each side of the issue. The work of the CMs will be funded by the SCA.
5. The SCA will issue procedures, suggested referees, and a panel of prospective judges.
6. The CMs will review these suggestions. The experiment will go forward only after both CMs agree on the referee. the judges and the procedures. A signed agreement to proceed will cormmit the SCA, the funding agency. the regulatory agency, the CMs, the judges, and the referee.
Suggested procedures
7. The CMs formulate a series of factual statements which they regard as most important to their cases. Such statements must be results or anticipated results of experiments or observations of nature. The statements should be ranked in order of importance assigned by the CM.
8. The judges examine each statement to determine that it is a relevant scientific fact.
9. The CMs then exchange statements. Each side is invited to accept or challenge each of their opponents statements.
10. The list of statements accepted by both sides will constitute the first output from the SC.
11. Challenged statements are first dealt with by a mediation procedure in which attempts are made to narrow the area of disagreement or to negotiate a revised statement of fact that both CMs can accept.
12. The mediated statements are added to the SC's output. Those statements which remain challenged are then subjected to an adversary procedure
13. CMs prepare substantiation papers on statements remaining challenged and transmit these to the judges and the opposing CMs starting with the first (most important) challenged statement.
14. The substantiation is cross-examined by opposing CMs and judges and contrary evidence is presented and cross-examined.
15. A second attempt to negotiate a mediated statement is made and if successful this statement is added to the Science Court's output.
16. If this is not successful the judges write their opinions on the contested statement of fact.
17. This procedure is repeated for each of the challenged statements.
18. The accepted statements plus the judges’ statements constitute the final output of the procedure.
Since important knowledge that is lacking will be pointed out, judgments of the science court will suggest areas where new research will be needed. In almost all cases the boundary between knowledge and ignorance will continuously shift, and revisions to take account of new knowledge may have to be made frequently when issues of great national importance are at stake. It bears repeating that the Science Court will stop at mediated or judged statements of the facts and will not make value-laden recommendations.”
THE COLLOQUIUM
It was also decided that the Task Force organize a Colloquium at which various proponents and opponents of the SC could be heard and questioned. The Colloquium was sponsored by The US Dept. of Commerce, The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and The National Science Foundation.
The colloquium was held at Leesburg, Va. on Sept. 19 - 21, 1976 and about 230 people attended. The proceedings (PB-261 305 Jan. 1977) are available from the National Technical Information Service.
The Scientists Institute for Public Information (SIPI) had vigorously and publicly opposed the development of a SC. Their chair, the eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead had agreed to discuss and criticize the Task Force position. Early in her presentation she asserted:
"We need a new institution. There isn't any doubt about that. The institutions we have are totally unsatisfactory. In many cases they are not only unsatisfactory, they involve a prostitution of the decision making process."
She and many others at the colloquium objected to the name "Science Court" preferring a name which did not misleadingly imply that there would be a verdict with winners and losers. However by this time the press had adopted that "catchy" name and it was not obvious how to change it.
Mead also forewarned of the necessity to safeguard the institution from early corruption. She had written that all social inventions are eventually corrupted. She insisted that people specially trained in scientific cross-examination would be needed and she made it clear that the development of a reliable procedure would be a major undertaking.
She and many others at the colloquium warned that the results of a SC proceeding might become too authoritative. A procedure seen as authoritative might inhibit research which could challenge the SC’s statements. The Task Force had also been aware of the "authoritative" danger. The interim report stated: "We have no illusions that this process will arrive at the truth which is illusive and tends to change from year to year. But we do expect to describe the current state of technical knowledge ..." and later "In almost all cases the boundary between knowledge and ignorance will continuously shift, and revisions to take account of new knowledge may have to be made frequently when issues of great national importance are at stake."
Mead gave another important warning: "If you want to protect your invention, you have to establish it very sharply with safeguards. Who can practice it? - Protect it with licensing, chartering, all sorts of safeguards. You will probably have to patent the name, because otherwise you will get a lot of rival science courts right away who will advertise as better science courts than the one you have invented."
Russell Train, then Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, found merit in the idea of the SC. He offered the cooperation of his agency and responded to the Task Force request for issues which could be addressed by the experimental SC.
Haley Fromholz, Chairman of the American Bar Association Section on Science and Technology, offered the cooperation of that powerful organization. He informed the colloquium that they were “very interested in the SC” and that they stood ready to provide consultation.
James R. Killian Jr. who had been Pres. Eisenhower’s science advisor was not able to attend but he sent a letter which is published in the proceedings (pg. 285). He endorsed the idea of an experiment. He expressed doubts that facts and values can be separated in “some of the more important areas of controversy.” He warned that “the establishment of a permanent science court could tend to impugn the objectivity of the individual scientist”.
Then Secretary of Commerce, Elliot Richardson (pg. 208) approved the experiment and pointed out that the name “court” was not consistent with the announced purposes of the proposal. He suggested that we call it “something like a ‘Scientific and Technological Inquiry Board’”
THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
At a White House meeting of the Presidential Advisory Group, I reported on the Task Force conclusions, Handler agreed to the NAS hosting the first experiment and Guy Stever, then director of the National Science Foundation, agreed to fund the academy's effort. Quoting from the minutes of that meeting (Advances 12 Mar 1976 pg. 20):
“Dr. Ramo confirmed that his interest was in defining the advisability of an experiment and not necessarily to endorse a specific approach such as the Science Court. …”
“Dr. Handler said that if there was an experiment performed he would be pleased to have the National Academy act as a host for such an effort.[emphasis added} However, he also pointed out that seeking scientific truth has been an objective of the Academy for years. Dr. Handler mentioned a number of possible problems in conducting such an experiment. For example, in the case of the nuclear power study carried out by the Academy, the problem was to put together a committee since almost every knowledgeable authority had a rather strong view on one side or another of the issue. This could be a problem in the selection of judges for an issue with broad involvement by the scientific community. There also could be a problem if a case rnanager's ability to speak and present his case was particularly outstanding and therefore could sway the views of the judges in a manner that did not match the factual evidence presented. Therefore Dr. Handler suggested that an alternative method of conducting this experiment might be to do it in writing. This would permit the cases to be made without the interjection of particular personalities. Dr. Handler also stated that it would take a great deal of effort to put together a solid experiment and questioned if it was particularly difficult to identify issues appropriate to this technique whether there were enough of such issues to make this approach broadly applicable.
Dr. Kantrowitz endorsed the idea of carrying out the process using written materials”
However when, some months later, I telephoned to request permission to add the NAS to our list of sponsors for the colloquium, Handler made one of those extremely clear and frank statements which have always stuck in my memory. He said NAS would not join the list of sponsors of the colloquium because:
"If what you are proposing is right, then what we have been doing all these years is wrong."Reference (Shamos 1995).
Professor Morris Shamos (Prof. of Physics at NYU) has devoted a substantial part of his career to the achievement of broad scientific literacy. His conclusions are set forth in a recent book “The Myth of Scientific Literacy”.
CHAPTER 2. April 3, 2007
AFTER THE NAS POLICY REVERSAL
The phone conservation with Handler reported at the end of the previous chapter was my first indication that the academy had changed its position on the SC. Many conversations and correspondence with Handler over the years had been formative in my thinking. I regarded him as a wise friend. But I never was able to get any fuller explanation of the sudden shift in the NAS attitude toward the Science Court
My only information came from several of Handler’s public speeches and statements, from articles in NATURE, and from the General Accounting Office of the Congress.
In 1977 Handler sent me a paper he had written entitled “Of Questions and Committees” in which he wrote
“It has been suggested that formal adversarial procedures would be more suitable than the committee system for the examination and analysis of technical matters that are the subject of public controversy. But neither the hearing procedures of legislative bodies nor the formal procedures of administrative law judges, of hearing commissioners, or of the court system have been demonstrated to be as effective as a well-constructed committee for the analysis and resolution of complex matters.”
I would answer that the methodology of science is based on adversary procedures for the elimination of error (as was discussed in Chap. 2). The Task Force proposed that the traditions of the scientific community and not those of legal hearings were to govern the proceedings of the SC. Adversary processes.
On the other hand in his final Annual Report as President in June 1981 he wrote:
“ The personally held ideologies of scientists asked to make purely technical appraisals can color those appraisals, can give direction to which data are emphasized and which are played down.…..Combining technical analysis with advocacy has been a troublesome feature of our national life and we at least should eschew such behavior.”
Handler died at the end of 1981. I will always regret that I never had a serious conversation with him after the Academy reversed its position on the SC.
The proposal to experiment with SC procedures had attracted support from many mainstream scientists. Thus several weeks after NATURE reported on “the whisperings around Washington” the Committee of Scientific Society Presidents (consisting of the Presidents of 28 leading US scientific societies) issued the following statement
COMMITTEE OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY PRESIDENTS
DECEMBER 1,1976
THE COMMITTEE OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY PRESIDENTS ENDORSES THE PROPOSED EXPERIMENT TO DETERMINE THE VALUE OF THE CONCEPT OF A SCIENCE COURT.
THE NATION'S LEGISLATIVE AND REGULATORY BODIES FACE A LARGE AND INCREASING NUMBER OF CRUCIAL POLICY DECISIONS WHICH MUST BE BASED ON SOME ASSESSMENT OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE OR FACT. OUR EXISTING INSTITUTIONS ARE OFTEN INEFFECTIVE IN DELINEATING SUCH ISSUES. THE SCIENCE COURT, BY WHATEVER NAME IT MIGHT ULTIMATELY BE KNOWN, OFFERS A POTENTIAL MECHANISM THROUGH WHICH THE STATUS OF KNOWLEDGE OR LACK OF KNOWLEDGE ON A CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE COULD BE CLARIFIED IN OPEN FORUM AS AN INPUT TO THE POLICY-MAKING PROCESS.
WE RECOGNIZE THAT MOVING AHEAD WITH THE EXPERIMENT IS FRAUGHT WITH DIFFICULTY AND UNCERTAINTY. THE EXPERIMENT MAY GIVE INCOMPLETE OR MISLEADING ANSWERS TO SUCH QUESTIONS AS WHETHER OR NOT AN EFFECTIVE SET OF RULES CAN BE DEVISED TO GUIDE THE ADVERSARY PROCEEDING; OR WHETHER SUITABLE PARTICIPANTS CAN BE RECRUITED; OR WHETHER SIGNIFICANT CONCLUSIONS CAN BE REACHED WHICH ARE CREDIBLY OBJECTIVE.
ON THE OTHER HAND, A SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENT WOULD PROVIDE A BASIS FOR PLANNING A PERMANENT INSTITUTION WITH POTENTIAL BENEFITS TO SOCIETY FULLY JUSTIFYING THAT RISK. THE RISK WILL BE MINIMIZED IF THE EXPERIMENT CAN GO AHEAD WITH THE THOUGHTFUL BACKING OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY.
WE URGE THAT SUPPORT.
SIGNED: ERNEST R. GILMONT
Except as otherwise noted, the views expressed are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent the official position of their respective organizations.
NATURE
There was some information available from the NATURE report on the Colloquium. (v 263 Oct 7, 1976 pg. 455). They reported
“….. the whisperings around Washington in that small circle called the science policy community (not to be confused with the working scientists) is to give Kantrowitz his day and let the whole idea collapse under its own unworkable pretensions.”
In the next issue of NATURE (Oct 14 pg. 537) the editors took a position against the SC. In an editorial entitled “More than facts, judgments”. Speaking of “those involved in public policy” they said:
“But they still expect the scientist to go beyond the solid ground of his facts.
“It is difficult to see that a science court has anything new to offer if it steers clear of this territory - indeed the exercise could be positively dangerous in that others less qualified, may be tempted to draw their own conclusions from such handily accumulated and uninterpreted facts.”
I interpret NATURE’S position as a statement that they are afraid of “others less qualified” making value judgments for society which the SC would avoid. I do not see how their position is consistent with democratic control of technology. This position will be discussed in the next chapter.
THE GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE OF THE U.S. CONGRESS
On Sept. 21 1979 the Comptroller General of the U.S. issued a report (CED 79-115) to the Congress entitled “Improving The Scientific And Technical Information Available to The Environmental Protection Agency In Its Decision Making Process”.
After declaring that “The most important factor [plaguing EPA’s operations] is the inconclusive scientific evidence on which it must often base decisions “They made three recommendations, the second of which was:
“The National Science Foundation should request proposals to develop and test the science court concept.”
The GAO reported (pg. 50) that NSF had rejected proposals to develop the SC from various public institutions and from the Administrative Conference of the US.
On pg. 54 and 55 they record various opinions they sought on the SC. They report:
“An [unnamed] NAS official … believed that a science court procedure is not needed to make determinations of scientific fact. The disputes in these scientific and technical issues that need to be resolved center around values, but the science court would not address value questions.”
This is close to the point that the NATURE editors made. Apparently that unnamed official also believed that scientists should make value judgments for society.
AN INCIDENT AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
In Sept 1976 J.D. Nyhart a Professor and Dr. Thomas F. Jones, Vice President, Research at MIT informed me of a draft proposal they had prepared for NSF asking for some $80,000. for a planning grant to be used to finance a colloquium on the SC, to commission 10 papers on the subject by writers from the colloquium, and to conduct a 1 week review of their results.
The next thing I heard was from Provost, Walter Rosenblith, who said he was assembling a committee of Department Heads to see if this was “a suitable activity for MIT”. This committee met one Saturday Morning with Nyhardt, Jones and me. We had discussed the SC reasonably for about 1and1/2 hours when the Provost joined the meeting. He listened to the discussion silently for about five minutes and without any attempt to find the committee’s opinion - he made a decision - the development of the SC was not a suitable activity for MIT.
This was the most arbitrary violation of Academic Freedom I have ever witnessed. It exhibited again the power of what NATURE had described as “the whisperings around Washington.”
UNIVERSITY BASED DEVELOPMENT OF SC PROCEDURES
The whispering campaign had stopped the NSF which was the obvious agency to support the experimental institution from funding that effort. But the need for improved procedures to assess what science knows and especially what science doesn’t know was then and is now widely appreciated. The lack of developed procedures did not stop several attempts to use the Task Force procedures as if they had already been developed and debugged just as it had not stopped me in 1971 from engaging in the premature attempt in the motor vehicle emissions case.
In spite of the rebuffs at the NSF and at MIT, these efforts have been more welcome on some University campuses. Scientific Adversary Experiments (SAE) i.e. experiments intended to begin the development have been conducted at U.C. Berkeley (on Love Canal) and at Dartmouth (on the Strategic Defense Initiative) are more fully described in Ref. 5. The most striking result in both cases was that:
When the Scientist-Advocates are restricted to falsifiable facts - and are in the presence of their expert opponents, almost all of their apparent disagreements disappear.
This was a surprise to the advocates themselves. I was left with the feeling that, if the proper conditions are created, Te factual disputes which now seem so prominent could be greatly reduced.
The development of SC Procedures to a point of general utility is a substantial undertaking. It will be necessary to develop procedures which are not only acceptable to all parties but exhaustive enough to lead to a statement of current knowledge adequate for the needs of policy makers. Time and resources required for such a comprehensive statement would be comparable with or larger than those needed for current committee procedures. In the SAE reported in Ref. 5, time and resource limitations prevented any attempt at full statements of current knowledge.
As Mead warned at the Colloquium it will also be necessary to develop the profession of scientist-advocate with a cadre of people skilled in the use of the SC procedure to exhibit the facts which support their point of view. Note that while a high level of competence will be required, the wisdom and saintliness required is less than for elite procedures since credibility is partly supplied by the credibility of open procedure.
It must be recognized that these procedures have an important limitation - secrets can not be dealt with in open procedures. When authorities support opposing interpretations of secret information we are forced to depend on the saintliness and the wisdom of the authorities.
POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS vs. PRESIDENTIAL ADVISORS
In the fall of 1976 the SC attracted some media attention. It was possible (Ford and Carter 1976) to obtain endorsements from both the Ford and the Carter election Campaigns. When after the election I sought a meeting with Frank Press (Pres. Carter’s science advisor), he met with me but refused to even consider following through on the campaign pledge.
In 1980 the Reagan campaign (Reagan 1980) said in answer to a question from Physics Today “What mechanisms do you plan to use to get scientific advice as president?”
“In addition I will explore the feasibility of a ‘Science Court to help arrange public discussions of scientific issues. This will help guide the public, the Congress and the executive branch. The purpose would be public exposure not decision making. “
After the election the same thing happened. Advisors to presidents are not about to aid in developing a procedure intended to limit their flexibility to state the scientific facts as political considerations might dictate.
THE CONSENSUS PROCEEDINGS AT THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH
At a symposium in September 1978, I had a brief chance meeting with Donald S. Fredrickson who was then Director of NIH. He told me with obvious pleasure that NIH had started to try out the idea of the Science Court. The purpose was to aid in carrying over the results of medical research to medical practice, to assess the readiness of research results for wide application. The Consensus procedures that resulted have provided much information on communication between Science and the public.
Somewhat earlier I had heard from Dr. John C. Bailar then of the National Cancer Institute. Bailar, the managing editor of the National Cancer Journal, had been conducting a campaign to reduce the use of x-ray examination for screening asymptomatic women under 50 for breast cancer. He reported that some of the medical organizations, who profited from screening millions of women, had refused to consider the possibility that this procedure was doing more harm than good. He let it be known that he intended to pursue a Science Court procedure to bring out the facts in this matter and he reported "that the very possibility of a science court may have a beneficial effect on the resolution of technical disagreement."
Fredrickson’s backing and Bailar’s initiative in the breast cancer screening issue has led to the development of "consensus" procedures in the U.S. (N.I.H.) (2). Some one hundred of these procedures have been conducted since September 1977 and they provide the best opportunity I know of to develop superior procedures for communication between science and society. Procedures based on the U.S. model are regularly conducted in many of the countries of Western Europe. In 1980 I was asked to organize a symposium on the SC. I asked Bailar if he would report on his experience with and compare the consensus procedures with the SC.
According to Bailar: (1)
"As noted, the consensus meetings do not generally include the element of direct confrontation in a form resembling cross examination in a court of law. Instead, various views are presented directly to a panel of experienced generalists from an appropriate spectrum of disciplines. Panel members may ask questions of speakers, but cross examination by interested parties has been allocated in only one case, where it was apparently productive (personal communication, Dr. John Kalberer). I think that such direct confrontation should be tried on a wider basis. Certainly in the controversy over mammography, the defenders of broad, indiscriminate screening never responded to some of the scientific questions in any satisfactory way, either before or during the consensus meeting. They relied, rather, on political and emotional arguments that did have some legitimacy and to which critics tried to respond. However, the absence of direct question-and-answer confrontation by persons who held strong and opposing views deprived the panel of an opportunity to explore some of the issues in proper depth. Although I am satisfied with the outcome in this case, the transcript of the proceedings does not give a complete picture of either position."
The consensus procedures do not generally deal only with scientific fact but also recommend medical practices. These decisions of course involve value judgments as well as scientific facts. Bailar comments;
“Finally, there is the question of separating an assessment of facts from the uses of that assessment, i.e., the development of societal decisions. Since problems of the sort I am discussing involve values as much as science, and since scientists are, as a whole, neither trained for nor responsible for the development and application of value judgments, we should generally preserve the distinction.
This is contrary to common procedures in governments, where experts are asked to produce both ’findings and recommendations,’ as if one flows easily and unambiguously from the other. It seems that most written comment about the role of scientists in the development of societal decisions has warned against the automatic linkage between assessments of scientific facts and the integration of facts with values, but there has been little recent change in practice in this regard”
From the start in Sept 1977 the NIH discarded the burden of inaccurate legal terminology. Instead of calling the procedure a SC they called it a Consensus Proceeding, Instead of the advocates (CM’s) NIH appointed “speakers” to present the evidence. The judges were replaced by a Panel charged with producing “Consensus Statements”. Instead of a Science Court Administration, the procedures were administered by an Office of Medical Applications of Research. This terminology helped to make the procedure much more palatable. The Consensus Procedures are more like a scientific meeting where evidence is aired but conclusions are not required.
Fredrickson’s achievement was to create a process which was viable because it was not seen as challenging by the Washington Science Policy Community.
In 1993 Prof. Thomas G. Field, editor of the Journal RISK - Issues in Health and Safety decided to devote the Spring Issue to a Symposium entitled “Twenty Five year Retrospective on the Science Court.”
At Fredrickson’s suggestion, I invited Prof. Itzhak Jacoby who was director of the NIH Consensus Development Program from April 1984 through July 1987 to contribute. His article was entitled “Consensus Development at NIH: What Went Wrong”. He wrote pg. 133:
“Shortly after the Science Court first received national attention, then-director of the National institutes of Health (NIH) Dr. Donald F. Fredrickson conceived of a program of consensus development with it as a model. Since then, the NIH program has sponsored more than 100 consensus development conferences to clarify issues involving application of medical technology to clinical practice. Having outlived the Science Court and other similar efforts, the NIH program represents the most visible federally-mediated medical technology assessment activity in existence. Its principles and procedures have been studied and emulated within the U.S. and by many other countries that support consensus development programs. Nevertheless, weaknesses in the NIH program can be traced to early decisions not to adopt certain aspects of the original Science Court concept.
First, the NIH program has chosen not to use adversary procedures, particularly cross examination of expert witnesses, that could have assured a more orderly and thorough airing of the facts on both sides of the argument and produced stronger conclusions. Second, the NIH is both the sponsor and the recipient of the results of the consensus process, violating the Science Court's principle not to accept funding from an agency that is party to a policy dispute. This principle was to assure that considerations of the acceptability of the ruling to that agency would not contaminate the deliberations that is, the participants should feel that there are “no strings attached." Third in contrast to the primary aim of the Science Court model, the consensus process rarely debates a pending governmental policy decision in collaboration with another agency, even though doing so would help ensure the significance and timeliness of the results. NIH conferences instead focus on producing recommendations to guide decision making by practitioners, not external policy-makers, even though the, guidance is often transformed de facto into policy by its application to reimbursement decisions. It is therefore somewhat ironic that the NIH selects topics and participants for its conferences without the broad participation of the very parties it aims to serve, contrary to what the Science Court architects prescribed The NIH consensus development process therefore suffers from an insularity that raises questions about possible bias in its judgments and damages the effectiveness of its consensus program”
Jacoby also found that occasionally things went well. He wrote pg. 137:
“The atypical, and controversial, 1983 conference on Liver Transplantation exemplifies the use of this process to arrive at a policy decision through debate on the evidence. The conference was stimulated by Medicare’s need for guidance on coverage, assuring the timeliness of the assessment. The evidence was carefully analyzed and presented to the panelists well before the conference was held. Both sides of the argument were well represented, and the debate was focused. The conference attracted intense political and public attention. Medicare’s decision to provide coverage for liver transplantation, which followed soon after the consensus statement was issued, can be linked directly to the recommendations of the conference. This felicitous joining of need and response has unfortunately been the exception.”
By 1997 the mammography screening question has been addressed in consensus proceedings for the third time. The result was attacked by the sponsor of the proceeding, the Director of the National Cancer Institute because the panel did NOT offer a recommendation but stopped at a statement of the facts. SCIENCE on Feb. 21 1997 pg. 1056-9 carried a story entitled “The Breast Screening Brawl’ which describes widespread dissatisfaction with the Consensus Proceeding.
It is clear that the NIH consensus proceedings are still evolving their own version of due process.
A SUMMARY OF MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE SCIENCE COURT
The scientific community has its traditions, which provide a kind of due process. In Handler’s words ”the more conventional, time-honored, self-policing, scientific endeavor." What is needed is to extend these procedures to provide information basic to policy making in a way that the policy-maker the scientist, and the average citizen, will find credible enough to deny political gain to anyone attempting to make factual controversy a surrogate for debates over values.
The Science Court contrasts with elitist approaches in the same way that a "government of laws" contrasts with a "government of men". It need hardly be stated that the success of any such institution would depend on the wisdom and the saintliness of its members. The hope is that the power of open procedure would be more persuasive than decisions by any elite.
Apart from the problem posed by secrecy, the other problems, the development of procedures and of the cadre of scientist-advocates, seem tractable in the sense that given adequate political support or adequate private resources, a process of experiment and the elimination of error could continuously improve the procedures to the point that externalizing scientific controversy would be counterproductive. But it remains a "huge task". Now the public must be persuaded to accept a statement of scientific facts as sufficiently credible so that the political debate will be concentrated on values. With success alternate statements of facts would at last be perceived as attempts to divert political discussion into areas where the public could more easily be fooled.
Then science based technology can be democratically controlled.
Then a better control system will allow us to regain the confidence in progress which was our hallmark when we advanced to leadership of the world’s technology.
Then science’s great challenge- the epidemic of fears which came with science’s loss of financial independence may be met.
REFERENCES
1. Interview, EPRI Journal, April 1980, p. 33
2. Handler, P. "Science and Hope" in Science: A
Resource for Humankind, Proceedings of the Nat. Ac. of Sci.
Bicentennial Symposium (Wash. D.C. 1976), pp. 12-24.
3. Kantrowitz, A "Proposal for an Institution for
Scientific Judgment", Science 156 (May 12, 1967), pp. 763-4
See also "The Science Court Experiment: An Interim Report,"
SCIENCE. 193 (August 20, 1976): pp. 653-656." Proceedings of
the Colloquium on the Science Court. Available from The National
Technical Information Service PB-261 305
4. Ford and Carter statements are reproduced in
CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS Oct. 18, 1976 p.28 and Reagan's
endorsement in PHYSICS TODAY (October 1980): p. 50.
5. Roger Masters and Arthur Kantrowitz Scientific
Adversary Procedures: The SDI Experiments at Dartmouth.
in Technology and Politics, Ed. by Michael Kraft and
Norman Vig ;Duke University Press.
Ford and Carter statements are reproduced in CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS Oct. 18, 1976 p.28 and Reagan's endorsement in PHYSICS TODAY (October 1980): p. 50.
