Where is the best science advice in the United States? Observational evidence from the Philippines during the post-World War II Philippine pandemic
Nature asked science-policy specialists which country is the most good at incorporating science into government decisions. The question mystified many respondents. “Not aware of any,” wrote one. None have systems that are very nice, wrote another. Three people said it was very hard to say.
Whenever there was a scientific crisis at London’s 10 Downing Street in the mid-1960s, someone would bellow down the hall for Solly Zuckerman, the United Kingdom’s first government chief scientific adviser (GCSA). Zuckerman was appointed GCSA by prime minister Harold Wilson in 1964 after guiding the government on military planning during the Second World War.
In other countries, national academies of scholars have a more central role. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington DC are a key pillar of US science advice, along with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and its director, who advises the president. There are also myriad other ways that research informs branches of the US government.
The number-one lesson, Pielke says, was that “no one really got it right”. Number two was that the United States looked particularly bad. The obvious thing was when then-president Donald Trump said that science did not support the use of an anti-malaria drug called hydroxychloroquine. The scientist Anthony Fauci was an adviser to the White House coronaviruses task force.
But Pielke argues that by challenging government advice, Independent SAGE often “delegitimized SAGE, and in the process, science advice itself”, he says. People in Parliament got confused about the differences between the two SAGEs.
In the Philippines, less controversially, a pop-up shadow team of experts called OCTA Research became a leading source of science advice during the pandemic. The group was successful because it had a wide range of expertise, including physicians, economists and a media specialist, says Benjamin Vallejo Jr, an environmental scientist and OCTA member at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City. He says that politicians were communicated in a way that wouldn’t threaten their credibility.
In future, Pillay and Pielke agree, science advice needs a mechanism to incorporate a wider diversity of expertise. “If the shadow voices become significant enough or have enough influence, you invite them into the room,” Pielke says. More than 60% of survey respondents said that science advice fails to incorporate a diversity of people or viewpoints.
Another requirement is a repertoire of people skills: the ability to communicate complex ideas in succinct, everyday language; the capacity to build trusting relationships, so that politicians have faith in the information they receive and that their confidences will not be breached; being able to respectfully understand others’ views and priorities, however different. Mark Ferguson was Ireland’s chief science adviser between 2012 and 2022, he says it’s essential to convey the evidence in this way.
A growing number of institutions worldwide offer training to both scientists and knowledge brokers. One is the International Institute for Science Diplomacy and Sustainability in Kuala Lumpur, which was founded last year by Zakri Abdul Hamid, a former science adviser to Malaysia’s prime minister. The institute trains people to bridge science and international diplomacy, preparing them for United Nations climate meetings, for instance.
INGSA wants to do more, but it also offers training, says the scientist who is President of INGSA. Employers and funders should give incentives to researchers to do science training. Some 60% of survey respondents said that funders’ failure to do so was an impediment to science advice.
Evidence needs to be used to inform these efforts. A study in 2022 identified more than 1,900 initiatives worldwide aimed at promoting greater engagement between policymakers and researchers, from the collaborative production of policy briefs to networking events (K. Oliver et al. Evid. Policy 18, 691—713; 2022). Only 6 percent had been evaluated to see how well they worked.
Why aren’t Governments Using it? The Case of the Spade-Toothed Whale: Inquiry about the Science Behind the COVID-19 Meltdown
The first description of a new class of shapes — soft cells — that fill space with curved edges, nonflat faces, and few, if any, sharp corners will transform how we understand the real world, says mathematician Chaim Goodman-Strauss. 15 min read from Scientific American.
It is a bird, it is a plane, it is a bird with legs? Researchers have created a fixed-wing drone with lightweight legs to try to reproduce birds’ incredible variety of locomotion. The mechanical drumsticks have proven to be very versatile, since they are very similar to the real thing in how they walk, hop and leap into the air.
Meanwhile, a Republican-led US government committee — notable for its rancor and partisanship — bucked the opinions of many scientists and concluded that SARS-CoV-2 likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan. Democrats on the panel released their own report flatly contradicting many of their colleagues’ conclusions.
The analysis of samples from early 2020 seems to add to the theory that the Chinese market was the origin of the COVID-19 crisis. Genomic data from raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides) and greater hog badgers (Arctonyx collaris) found at the market seem to show signs of infection with SARS-CoV-2 or other closely related viruses. This supports the theory that animals were infected, which could have led to a ‘spillover’ event in which the virus infected people. But “it doesn’t substitute for finding the virus in an infected animal” in terms of solid proof, says virologist Stanley Perlman.
The spade-toothed whale is a species so rare that it has never been seen alive. Only six of the five-metre-long whale have been found, leaving researchers with a laundry list of questions. “There may be parasites completely new to science that just live in this whale,” says marine scientist Anton van Helden. “Who knows what we’ll discover?”
Venus’s lack of liquid water on its surface reveals a dry planet that never had such oceans on its face (or without liquid water)
Earth’s neighbour Venus has never had liquid water on its surface. A theory suggests that the rocky planet maintained a moderate climate for billions of years, allowing oceans of water to form. Researchers used the chemical composition of volcanic gases in Venus’s atmosphere to infer the water content of its interior — a barometer of whether it ever had such oceans. They found only a 6% water content in the gases, suggesting a very dry planet that has never had liquid water on its surface.
