The Ongoing Transformation Issues in Science and Technology

When tackling the problem of misinformation, people often think first of content and its accuracy. But countering misinformation by fact-checking every erroneous or misleading claim traps organizations in an endless game of whack-a-mole. A more effective approach may be to start by considering connections and communities. That is particularly important for public health, where different people are vulnerable in different ways. 

On this episode, Issues editor Monya Baker talks with global health professionals Tina Purnat and Elisabeth Wilhelm about how public health workers, civil society organizations, and others can understand and meet communities’ information needs. Purnat led the World Health Organization’s team that strategized responses to misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic. She is also a coeditor of the book Managing Infodemics in the 21st Century. Wilhelm has worked in health communications at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, and USAID. 

Resources 


Visit Tina Purnat and Elisabeth Wilhelm’s websites to learn more about their work and find health misinformation resources. 


Check out Community Stories Guide to explore how public health professionals can use stories to understand communities’ information needs and combat misinformation. 


How is an infodemic manager like a unicorn? Visit the WHO Infodemic Manager Training website to find training resources created by Purnat and Wilhelm, and learn about the skills needed to become an infodemiologist.

In this installment of Science Policy IRL, we explore another sector of science policy: private industry. Amanda Arnold is the vice president of governmental affairs and policy at Valneva, a private vaccine development company, where she works on policy for creating, manufacturing, and distributing vaccines that address unmet medical needs, such as for Lyme and Zika. 

Arnold has worked in the science policy realm for over twenty years, first as a policy staffer for a US senator, then as a legislative liaison for the National Institutes of Health, and as a senior policy advisor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Arnold talks to editor Megan Nicholson about the role industry plays in the science policy enterprise and what she has learned about the US innovation ecosystem from working across sectors. 

Resources: 

Read Amanda Arnold’s Issues article, “Rules for Operating at Warp Speed,” to learn about how the government can work to rapidly respond to future crises. 

Check out Ensuring an Effective Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise and the Strategic National Stockpile reports to learn more about the issues Amanda thinks about in vaccine development policy. 

Want to learn more about convergence? Check out these reports: 

(1) The Convergence of Engineering and the Life Sciences (2013)

(2) Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Beyond (2014) 

(3) Fostering the Culture of Convergence in Research (2019)

Douglas Duncan is an astronomer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. He is also an eclipse fanatic. Since 1970, he has been to 11 total solar eclipses. When April 8, 2024, comes around, he’ll experience his twelfth with his 600 best friends as he leads a three-day eclipse viewing extravaganza in Texas. “It looks like the end of the world,” he says, and a total eclipse can be a source of intense fascination. He uses the emotional experience of the eclipse as a gateway to learning more about science. 

On this episode, Lisa Margonelli talks to Duncan about how he has used this sense of experiential wonder, particularly in planetariums, as a way to invite the public into the joy of science. In previous generations, planetariums were seen as “old fashioned” and isolated from the work of modern astronomers. But Duncan pioneered a career track that combined public teaching at a planetarium with a faculty position at the University of Colorado. Now many planetariums have become places where academic astronomers can share their knowledge with the public. 

Resources: 

Visit Doug Duncan’s website to learn more about his work. 

Read about his work at NASA. 

Want to photograph the solar eclipse? Duncan has made an app for that called Solar Snap. 

Learn more about using eclipses to engage the public. 

See the itinerary for Duncan’s “Totality Over Texas” trip, which will be attended by 600 people. The trip offers three days of eclipse-related activities. 

The Science Policy IRL series pulls back the curtain on who does what in science policy and how they shaped their career path. In previous episodes we’ve looked at the cosmology of science policy through the eyes of people who work at federal agencies and the National Academies, but this time we are exploring think tanks. 

Walter Valdivia describes how a chance encounter while he was getting a PhD in public policy at Arizona State University led him into science policy. Since then he’s worked at think tanks including Brookings and the Mercatus Center and is now at the Science and Technology Policy Institute, which does research for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this episode, we’ll talk to Walter about what think tanks do in the policy world and how policy sometimes creates inherent paradoxes. 

Resources: 

Visit the Institute for Defense Analysis’ Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) to learn more about Walter’s current work. 

Check out the book, Between Politics and Science by David Guston, to see what inspired Walter’s career in science policy. Here is the first chapter.

Visit the Center for Nanotechnology in Society’s website. 

Read Walter and David Guston’s paper, “Responsible innovation: A primer for policymakers.”

Read “Is Patent Protection Industrial Policy?” to learn more about policy paradoxes. 

Check out The Honest Broker by Roger Pielke, Jr. to learn more about the role of impartial expertise. 

Interested in learning more about Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs)? Read this primer.

At the age of 19, Monique Verdin picked up a camera and began documenting the lives of her relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Little did she know that she would spend the next two decades investigating and capturing the profound ways that climate, the fossil fuel industry, and the shifting waters of the Gulf of Mexico would transform the landscape that was once a refuge for her Houma ancestors.

Based in Louisiana, Verdin is an artist, storyteller, videographer, and photographer, as well as a community builder and activist. She is also the director of the Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange, a project that seeks to create a community record of the coastal cultures and native ecology of southeast Louisiana. Her work, which was featured in the Winter print edition of Issues, seeks to understand home and belonging after displacement and migration. Her stories are laced with environmental concerns, the shifting roles of corporate entities, and natural and human-made disasters. Verdin’s art practice creates space and gives voice to Indigenous and marginalized communities in the South while building bridges with science communities.

On this episode, Verdin joins host JD Talasek to talk about using art and science to understand a Gulf that is being reshaped by climate, industry, and more.

Resources:


Monique Verdin’s website 


Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange


United Houma Nation


Issues: In the Heart of the Yakni Chitto

A lawyer and bioethicist by training, Alta Charo has decades of experience in helping to formulate and inform science policy on new and emerging technologies, including stem cells, cloning, CRISPR, and chimeras. The Warren P. Knowles Professor Emerita of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she served on President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, was a member of President Obama’s transition team, was an advisor for the Food and Drug Administration, and served on more than a dozen study committees for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

In the fourth episode of our Science Policy IRL series, Alta joins Issues contributing editor Molly Galvin to explore how science policy can and does impact people’s lives in real and profound ways. She also describes what it’s like to be one of the only non-scientists at the science policy table, how helping a close friend who died of ALS continues to inspire her work, and why science policy can help us become techno optimists. 

Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore? Let us know by emailing us at podcast@issues.org, or by tagging us on social media with the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL.

Resources:

National Academies Collection on Stem Cell Research

Institute of Medicine. 2005. Review of the HIVNET 012 Perinatal HIV Prevention Study

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and National Academy of Medicine. 2023. Toward Equitable Innovation in Health and Medicine: A Framework

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance

The Issues Interview: Alta Charo



Previous episodes of Science Policy IRL

Zach Pirtle Explores Ethics for Mars Landings



Apurva Dave Builds Connections Between National Security and Climate



Quinn Spadola Develops Nanotechnology With Soft Power