Science advice for presidents
Scientists have been advising presidents since World War I --- though it took a while before presidents understood how much they needed science. When President Woodrow Wilson was asked by the president of the American Chemical Society if the government needed their help, he reportedly said no thanks. He’d checked ... and the government had a chemist.
Wilson rethought this, fast. German armies used chlorine gas in 1915 and mustard gas shortly thereafter.
When the war ended in November 1918, the United States had tons of lewisite, an arsenic compound known as “dew of death” made by a team managed by future Harvard President James Bryant Conant, mostly at an old automobile plant in Willoughby, Ohio. When the war ended, tons of lewisite were shipped by train to Baltimore, put on a ship and dumped at sea.
The U.S. Chemical Warfare service was founded during that war, and lives on today as the Army Chemical Corps. Even though we have avoided chemical warfare for more than a century, we’ve done dumb things, like shipping tons of nerve agents across seven states in 1970.
We got lucky, but our leaders should have known that not consulting legitimate science advisers can lead to potentially lethal mistakes.
The Germans understood the value of science all too well. They lost World War I, but as the Nazis rose to power, it was soon evident that Germany had large intellectual, manufacturing and business resources devoted to the chemical sciences. The deadly nerve agents tabun and sarin were synthesized by Bayer in the mid-1930s and patented in both Germany and the United States.
Fortunately for humanity, they weren’t used.
American science, once again, was unprepared for war when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Vannevar Bush, a former dean of engineering at MIT, convinced President Franklin D.Roosevelt to create a National Defense Research Committee. Once America entered the war in 1941, we started the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which saw to it that hundreds of scientists worked on wartime projects --- most notably the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb.
Acting outside established channels, Bush and a few other scientists got the authority and money to develop new weapons, and helped win World War II. When the war ended, Bush argued vigorously for continued government support for science. By 1950, thanks to his efforts, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was organized.
Eventually, every president also appointed a science adviser. They were mostly physicists, and mostly there to supervise and build bombs. Biomedical advice was mainly left to the National Institutes of Health and a succession of surgeon generals, some of whom, like anti-smoking crusader C. Everett Koop, were memorable, and others not. Both the science adviser and surgeon general assumed greater or lesser importance depending on the president.
In President Donald Trump’s case, it took a couple of years for any science adviser to be appointed --- a meteorologist from Oklahoma.
We’ve paid a steep price for ignorance. Legitimate scientists in the Trump administration -- specifically Dr. Anthony Fauci -- were not allowed to be effective. The surgeon general was essentially silent. And we endured the worst pandemic in a century under an administration outwardly hostile to science. Many Americans died as a result.
President Joe Biden set about fixing things fast. He realized that success, for a leader, is determined by the quality of the persons to whom one listens. He announced he would elevate the post of science adviser to Cabinet level, and nominated the molecular biologist Eric Lander to be science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
For the first time in history, research in human diseases will have the same place at the table of power as do those who build weapons to protect us from wars as they were fought in the past.
Mr. Lander is director of the Broad Institute, a research center shared by Harvard and MIT. He also introduced the new cochairs of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Cal Tech biochemist and Nobel laureate Frances Arnold and MIT geophysicist Maria Zuber.
Mr. Biden also announced Francis Collins would remain director of the National Institute of Health. Dr. Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is staying in his job and is now liaison to the World Health Organization, which President Biden rejoined.
Mr. Biden has convinced an American “A-team” to lead the government’s efforts in science and health, and given them the power to develop new weapons to fight viruses, both COVID-19, and any new ones that will inevitably arise.
In terms of science advice, our nation has gone from darkness to light. Let’s hope the new team quickly works to find solutions that go beyond mere faith in vaccines. For while the new team has impressive credentials, what they don’t have is time.