TORINO, Italy — I am posting from the Euroscience Open Forum in Torino, Italy. Torino is a beautiful older city of about 1 million nestled along the Po River in northern Italy at the foot of the Alps. It was, for a brief spell in the late 1800s, the capital of Italy. It is full of grand palaces and manors hundreds of years old, but the building getting the most use this week is the huge old Fiat plant, now known as the Lingotto Conference Center, the venue for ESOF.

The reason I’m here is to talk about U.S. Science policy and world politics. I got here the other day, sans luggage, and had to go straight from the airport into a press conference, then out to dinner with my hosts, a bunch of science journalists from around Europe. After some amazing food and wine under the stars by violin and scooter engine, I chose to walk the four miles back to the hotel. 

As I did, I stumbled upon an outdoor exhibition of “green porn” in the old town square. Apparently this was part of the Science in the City program and had been billed as a movie about animals mating but turned out to be a bunch of old scientists on a stage talking about sexual and asexual reproduction. This may be the worst example of a scientist’s idea of how to sex up science to make it interesting to lay people.

Still there were about two hundred people sitting in chairs in the square, but I think it was a bit of a bait and switch. I can’t possibly guess what these Italians thought of when they heard “green porn” but for me it definitely wasn’t old scientists.

Science poised to transform lives
The larger issue of elevating science in the public dialog is a big part of why I’m here. In fact, I gave a presentation about it at Euroscience, headlining a panel on science debates. There have been several science debates in various European countries now, generally in the context of parliamentary or national elections, all patterned on a science debate I helped organize in 2008 between Barack Obama and John McCain. The other panelists in the latest session included Hajo Neubert, president of the European Union of Science Journalists’ Associations, as well as science debate organizers from Germany, Italy and the UK.

The idea behind ScienceDebate is simple. Most of the world’s major political issues revolve around science policy, from energy and climate change to ocean health, biodiversity loss, global economic competitiveness, and dozens of others. At the same time, the number of scientists around the world is expanding rapidly, all connected by the internet. This is causing an explosion of new knowledge that will utterly transform our lives over the coming few decades. Topics that are barely on the public radar now, like genomics, nanotechnology, and geoengineering have the potential to become the political lightening rods of tomorrow.

ESOF itself is only four years old, and already rivals the powerful American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in its breathtaking size and scope.

Lag in science reporting
At the same time, there is a crisis in science reporting. As budgets are slashed, editors and publishers, most of whom were English majors, wrongly assume the public shares their disinterest in science, and it’s one of the first things to go. MinnPost is one of the few outlets left in the United States that has a science section — at the very time when we need more reporting on these science issues, not less.

My presentation recounted the story of how we started Science Debate as a small group of six committed individuals. It eventually became the largest political initiative in the history of science, supported by most of the U.S. science enterprise and making nearly a billion media impressions. 

It was basically an effort to elevate science in America’s national dialog, something that had faded over the last two generations as scientists withdrew from public discourse, culminating in the Bush years, widely regarded by scientists as the most anti-science administration in U.S. history.

By 2008, the top five TV news anchors asked the then-candidates for president 2,975 questions in 171 separate interviews. Just six mentioned the words “global warming” or “climate change,” arguably the most important policy debate facing the country. To put that in perspective, three questions were about UFOs. Obviously, science needs to reengage with the public — but probably in a more sophisticated way than sexing it up and calling it “green porn.” The fact is that when science is made relevant to people, they are deeply interested.

In Europe, they take a different approach, seeking to elevate society in the dialog of science. What research should we be doing? Where should we be putting our resources?  The people should have a say. This is an idea that some scientists will likely find heretical, even dangerous.

But both approaches build on something nearly everyone agrees on: Science is always political. Any time we refine our knowledge, that has implications for our morals and ethics, forcing us to refine them too. And that means politics. In a century when science dominates every aspect of life and can give the power to save or destroy the planet, scientists need to be a more vocal part of the political discussion.

Shawn Lawrence Otto is co-founder and CEO of ScienceDebate2008.com. He wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated movie "House of Sand and Fog" and won the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's award for best science screenplay for "Hubble." He also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film "Dreams of a Dying Heart." He lives in Marine on St. Croix.