The Canon Read Free Page B

scientists! We need more engineers! Yet with each passing year, fewer and fewer American students opt to study science. As a National Science Board advisory panel warned Congress in 2004, "We have observed a troubling decline in the number of U.S. citizens who are training to become scientists and engineers," while the number of jobs requiring such training has soared. At this point, a third or more of the advanced science and engineering degrees earned each year in the United States are awarded to foreign students, as are more than half of the postdoctoral slots. And while there is nothing wrong with the international complexion that prevails in any scientific institution, foreign students often opt to take their expertise and credentials back to their grateful nation of origin. "These trends," the Science Board said, "threaten the economic welfare and security of our country."
    Who can blame Americans for shunning science when, for all the supposed market demand, research jobs remain so poorly paid? After their decade or more of higher education, postdoctoral fellows can expect to earn maybe $40,000; and even later in their careers, scientists often remain stubbornly in the stratum of the five-figure salary. David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and the former president of Caltech, who spent much of his early career at MIT, observed that the classic bakery for an upper-crust life, Phillips Academy prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, where his daughter was a student, has an excellent science program, one of the best. "But you never see Andover graduates at MIT," he said. "Academy alumni with quantitative skills go on to become stockbrokers. There are damned few patrician scientists."
    Beyond better pay, science needs more cachet. Science advocates insist that if science were seen as more glamorous, racier, and more avant-garde than it is today, it might attract more participants, more brilliant young minds and nimble young fingers willing to click pipettes for twenty hours at a stretch. "Things were different while I was growing up," said Andy Feinberg, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins University. "It was the time of
Sputnik,
the race into space, and everybody was caught up in science. They thought it was important. They thought it was exciting. They thought it was cool. Somehow we must reinvigorate that
spirit. The culture of discovery drives our country forward, and we can't afford to lose it."
    These are all important, exciting, spirited arguments for promoting greater scientific awareness. I'd love to see more young Americans become scientists, especially the girl who serves as the vessel of my DNA and as a deduction on my tax return. I'd also be happy to see voters make smarter and more educated choices in Novembers to come than they have in the past.
    And yet. As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and professor of physics at the University of Texas, points out, many issues of a supposedly scientific slant cannot be decided by science at all. "When it comes to something like the debate over an antiballistic missile defense system," he said, "I've been more bothered by the fact that our leaders seem to be the sort of people who don't read history rather than by the fact that they don't understand X-ray lasers." Can science really decide an issue like whether we should extract stem cells from a human blastocyst? All science can tell you about that blastocyst is, yep, it's human. It has human DNA in it. Science cannot tell you how much gravitas that blastocyst should be accorded. Science cannot settle the debate over the relative "right" of a blastocyst to its cellular integrity and uncertain future—deep freeze for possible implantation in a willing womb at some later date? or a swift bon voyage down the fertility clinic drainpipe?—versus the "right" of a patient with a harrowing condition like multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease to know that scientists have unfettered, federally financed access to stem cells