John Marburger ’62, former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, described the challenges of reconciling the often conflicting opinions of the scientific community and the general public at a lecture hosted by the American Whig-Cliosophic Society in Whig Hall on Thursday evening.
Marburger’s talk, titled “The Politics of Science Policy,” also focused on the limits of probabilistic risk assessments and the appropriate role of scientific evaluation of what he described as “hard science fiction.”
“There really is a difference between a prediction that you make in a lab and a forecast that you make based on nature and scientific information,” Marburger said. “For the latter, you have to look at a huge ecology that has lots of variables ... so when it comes to trying to figuring out what the cost-benefit of a policy is in regard to climate change, it is very difficult.”
Marburger described his time at the White House as particularly challenging in terms of creating a cohesive national policy with regard to research funding. With 12 individually operating subcommittees determining the allocation of public funds during his tenure and constant friction between the interests of most voters and researchers, he said, determining which causes deserved financial support was difficult.
“What fraction of the public needs to feel passionately about an issue before you are obligated to pay attention to it?” he asked the audience. “Is it 51 percent? ... Well, scientists are a lot less than 50 percent of the population.”
Marburger said that he learned a lot about the general public’s misunderstanding of probabilistic risk with regard to science during his tenure as president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1980 to 1994.
He cited seeing the importance of public perception with regard to science as the state of New York considered licensing a nuclear reaction in Long Island in 1983 as an especially memorable experience.
While the public generally supported scientific research funding according to polls, many people felt “threatened” by the consequences of living in a society with rapidly developing technology, he added.
Marburger also briefly spoke on the interplay of scientific funding on an international level. He said that the doubling of the funding of the National Institutes of Health from 1998 to 2003 was driven partly by aggressive support of science in China, among other countries.
However, he cited Chinese scientific policy for its lack of consistency on a national level.
“The Chinese have no idea what they’re doing with their policies,” he said. “It’s like a lot of things in China. They’re just exploding.”
Members of the roughly 25-member audience who were interviewed after the lecture said they particularly appreciated how it shed light on an aspect of scientific research that typically receives little attention among the general public.
“I thought it was interesting hearing about what occurs behind the scenes and about being a scientist in a world where people sometimes don’t understand everything about science,” said Dayton Martindale, a prospective member of the Class of 2015.
“I enjoyed hearing about a part of government that you don’t normally hear about,” Brendan Wright, another prospective undergraduate, said.
Marburger received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University in 1962 and a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford in 1967.
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