The New Direction of Science Under President Obama

During his April 27, 2009, address at the National Academy of Sciences’ annual meeting, President Barack Obama called for focused scientific research aimed to improve the daily lives of American citizens. Among the advances that Mr. Obama said he would love to see come to fruition are “solar cells as cheap as paint; green buildings that produce all the energy they consume; learning software as effective as a personal tutor; prosthetics so advanced that you could play the piano again; [and] an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge about ourselves and world the around us.”

Some of the loudest applause Mr. Obama received occurred when he said,

Next, we are restoring science to its rightful place. On March 9th, I signed an executive memorandum with a clear message: Under my administration, the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.

While the president refrained from commenting on any issues where people have used science’s ability to alter or destroy life as the justification for doing so, does Mr. Obama really believe that science is not influenced by the ideology of atheistic and evolution-only researchers? His decision to use federal funds to destroy human embryos for research made plain his scientific ideology, which is robustly supported by the scientific elite.

The closest science gets to operating free from ideological sanction is in the focused, experiment-based research and development that is doggedly fixed on producing the kinds of useful items the president appropriately detailed in his speech. Mr. Obama should redirect his influence to fully promote scientific achievement that really does foster good stewardship of this earth.