A couple of years ago, journalist Chris Mooney wrote “The Republican War on Science”, a laundry list of instances of systematic negligence and subversion by the Bush administration when it came to scientific matters. When Obama became President, those of us like Mooney heaved a sigh of relief, since the new President seemed to have a genuine appreciation for science and its funding and strove to “restore science to its rightful place”. Sadly, what we did not fully realize is that the War on Science is not really fought in the corridors of Washington but rather on the streets and churches of states all over the country. No Presidential mandate can quell the intensity with which the foot soldiers in these quarters fight the war.

The main goal of these foot soldiers is to seed doubts about the foundational nature of scientific facts in the minds of the gullible. They want to misrepresent the tentative nature of scientific understanding as equivalent to complete lack of understanding. They don’t understand or willfully neglect the simple fact that some things in science are more certain than others, and many things are so well-understood so as to be virtually certain. But by pitching the very nature of science as some kind of loose, tentative theorizing disguised as facts, these eager evangelists are destroying the very fabric of scientific inquiry and indeed, one of the essential bedrocks on which modern civilization is founded. To me their ultimate objective seems clear; convince people that most if not all of science and not just climate change and evolution consists of “just theories”. Once that basic groundwork has been established, they are free to play fast and loose with each and every aspect of science that bears on public policy, which in the modern world encompasses most important spheres of political and public activity.

The anti-science crowd is too clever to call for downright subversion of science and embrace of religious dogma. Consider Tim Moore, a politician from Kentucky who claims that his motivation is not religious but it is to oppose the “distortion of scientific knowledge”. Surely Moore is intelligent enough to understand the number of religious votes he would garner if his suggestions are implemented. Moore and others are too clever to directly call for an indictment of science. Hence they are resorting to the gradual mobilization of doubt. Start with eager young minds first. The relentless movement to include “intelligent” design in textbooks as a valid “alternative” to evolution is well-known. Now they are also calling for textbooks to teach “both sides” of climate change. The time will come when they would insist that every scientific topic with which they have an issue should be accompanied by its opposite in school textbooks, simply because scientists are engaging in healthy debate about that topic. Stem cells and alternative energy are two prominent issues that come to mind. Scientists are still not sure what kind of technologies would make solar and wind power a reality? Good! Make sure you include every bit of opposition to these technologies as part of your textbook lessons. Scientists are still trying to understand how exactly stem cells would make it possible to cure or contain life-threatening disorders? Fantastic! Make that a case for including every bit of opposition to stem cell research so that you could argue against it; the religious aspects could always be smuggled in later through the back door. Lively technical disagreements taking place in the pages of scientific journals would be held up as resounding evidence that the soul of science itself is an amorphous blob devoid of certain existence. This is nothing less than the rape and rabid hijacking of the normal scientific process to portray it as some kind of fundamental structural flaw in the whole enterprise.

If this kind of descent into ignorance is terrible for schools and students, it’s not at all helped by declining standards of science and math education in this country and by global competition in science and technology. What may be even more tragic is that such efforts, which started during the Reagan era but were much milder back then, would form such an ungodly and impenetrable meld of science, conservative politics and religion that it may well become impossible to ever separate the three. Sadly, one consistently finds mainly Republicans being opposed to climate change and the teaching of evolution. Those few Republicans who do support either or both of these are already keeping their mouths shut for fear of being alienated from the party. At the same time, evangelical Christians are convincing their brothers and sisters to add climate change to their list of enemies which long includes evolution. Since the Reagan era conservatism has already become synonymous with evangelical religion. Now they are also trying to make the two synonymous with anti-scientism. The effect of all this would be to downright intimidate any person with conservative sentiments who dares to have respect for the scientific process. It would also mean an exponential decline in members of the conservative coalition with any appreciation of science; after all, if evolution and climate change deniers are going to be the main recruits to the movement, the probability that these people will have any appreciation for the scientific method would already be very low to begin with.

Accompanying this active propaganda against science is a slick publicity campaign that pits scientific issues as not really being scientific but being political dogfights between liberals and conservatives, and declares science and especially academic science to be a political liberal enterprise. It extols the folksy, down to earth demeanor of grass roots politicians and encourages derision towards “elitist”, high-brow scientists educated at respectable schools along with the politicians of the Eastern Establishment who nurture them. The two-time election of George W Bush (ironically a failed member of the Eastern Establishment) demonstrated that many citizens of this country are indeed suckers for such stereotypes and are ready to fundamentally mistrust any educated intellectual or scientist. Whether we like it or not, conservatives have turned this confluence of mutually reinforcing strategies and stereotypes into a well-oiled PR machine that is set to pay its own way into hell.

Is there any silver lining at all to this precipitous slide into the Middle Ages? The article does talk about conservative Christians who seem to display a refreshing acceptance of both evolution and climate change. Their numbers are low, but their convictions seem strong. They think that earth and everything that it encompasses are God’s creations and need to be taken care of. Atheists may vehemently disagree with this interpretation, but as E O Wilson says in his book ”Creation”, at least they can leave aside differences and try to find common ground for this most important of causes. No matter how powerful and influential the leaders of the war against science seem, they critically depend on the citizenry to make their voice known. They speak because their constituencies listen. They prey and thrive on the nods of their audience. Educate the audience, and the tables turn; now it’s they who decide whether the magician on stage lives or dies.

We don’t know yet whether this citizenry can wake up to the wisdom of recognizing science as a value-neutral, apolitical, open-minded, independent and freedom-loving framework to improve their lives. But it is clear that to have any chance of rescuing this country from the divisive forces of ignorance which are gradually making their way from coast to coast, one must use every tactic at his or her disposal to drive home the importance of science and to try to reinforce its separation from politics and religion.

These days one regularly comes across opposite and polarized factions of “New Atheists” who are up in arms against “Accommodationists”. The former faction believes that only a highly vocal effort to weed out religion from the masses can turn enough people toward science, even if it permanently alienates the hardest of the fundamentalists. The latter faction believes that a more moderate approach will work better. Both factions believe that fundamentalists will largely remain unmoved.

To me the arguments between them mainly seem to be based on degree, since many from the latter also call themselves atheists. I have never understood why the approach needs to be either/or. It is clear that insiders from the religious establishment still stand the best chance of convincing their own flock. These promising young insiders are going to be persuaded only when they are repeatedly convinced and in turn convince others that yes, they can safely practice their faith and still believe in science as a candle in the dark. People come in all kinds of shades, and the best bet for us to convince them about the value of science is to pitch it to them at all levels, in all forms and guises, vocally and mildly, through every possible channel. Human society is a complex organism, and it needs a complex mix of ideas to cause fundamental changes. Just like in my field of computational chemistry, when you don’t know the composition of this mix, you simply try out all combinations.

It seems to be the least we can do to stop a straight downhill crash into dark ignorant oblivion.

The world of science knows the substance of his work: He opened up the mystery of the genetic code with the poly-U-polyphenylalanine experiment, then with the triplet binding assay with Phil Leder, and finally with the triplet termination assay with Tom Caskey. From UUU to all 64 triplets: the “periodic table” for molecular biology. But how many have read the poly-U paper—I mean, really read it? Marshall’s approach to science comes through, loud and clear. Every possible control is tested. Every method is described so that anyone else can reproduce it. Every piece of data, even imperfect data, is included in the tables and figures. The incorporation of phenylalanine into the product is more than a thousand-fold over background without the poly-U template, and the incorporation of this amino acid is selective for this homopolymer. How many of us would take the care to characterize the actual product to be sure it had the characteristics of polyphenylalanine? Marshall believed deeply in being meticulous and in being certain that one’s data were true, that the results were due to the variables one had manipulated and were not caused by some vagary that had not been thought of or controlled for. He believed that the methods in one’s paper should be so clearly described that any investigator trying to reproduce the results could do so on the very first attempt. Supplementary sections could never be a part of a Nirenberg paper…

Scolnick also ends with an admonition and a wise message that every member of the government should read.

Members of Congress—guardians of taxpayer dollars and decision-makers for NIH funding—often ask themselves whether the funding for science provided to NIH really matters to the health of the nation. We should tell them to think for a moment about the impact of the cracking of the genetic code. If it were not for Marshall Nirenberg’s work, there would be no recombinant DNA technology, which changed life science and medicine. The sequence of the human genome and the era of modern genomics could not have come into being. Protein therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune diseases, drugs for HIV, statins for atherosclerosis, and modern vaccines all ultimately owe their origin to the knowledge of the code. The genetic code is the periodic table for biological science…How can we honor Marshall Nirenberg’s memory? We can remember all the things he stood for: complete truth in science, meticulous attention to detail, passionate love for discovery, thorough training of students, deep values about how science should be carried out. Marshall will never be dead, because what he stood for in science is timeless—bridging generations of scientists, and bridging millennia

How easy is it to forget that the greatest applied scientific breakthroughs and the greatest fundamental discoveries in science have mainly come out of government-funded basic research? Those who forget this will only condemn their own grandchildren to paucity of knowledge and bereave them of that magical horizon of understanding that science reveals. It is up to all of us to ensure that Nirenberg and others live on through a commitment to such basic scientific research.

P.S. As an aside, I have always heard this scandalous story about Nirenberg’s Nobel co-recipient Khorana that he decided not to return to India because he was insulted by the fact that nobody came to pick him up at the airport. The story sounds eminently apocryphal, but it would be amusing to find the truth behind it if any. In any case, Khorana has continued to do important research on rhodopsins, key proteins involved in vision which are activated by photons of light.

So what could be the reason for this sudden onslaught of severe weather? That’s akin to asking what could be the reason for cancer suddenly emerging in someone’s body or for a particular drug demonstrating a slew of side-effects. The reasons are non-obvious, often non-intuitive, complex, multifactorial and extremely hard to determine. And that is also what one should say if asked to elucidate reasons for a particularly snowy winter.

But human beings don’t work that way. Immediately there sprung up a debate about whether global warming could be responsible for the increased snow. Engaging in the common and never-dying fallacy of equating weather with climate, climate change skeptics declared the cold to be a slap in the face of AGW proponents. On the other side, while most climate scientists are pointing out that single weather events have scant connection with global warming, some proponents are also saying that this is actually a good instance of the effects of global warming, that global warming does predict extreme weather events, that all this is simply part of the connected whole. More vapor in the air, El Nino and other events have been suggested as plausible candidates.

Now let’s step back a little and think about this from the educated layperson’s perspective. Less snow has been commonly predicted to be a consequence of global warming, but now the same explanation is being provided for lots of snow. The layman should be excused for being skeptical about a model that seems to equally explain diametrically opposite events. Of course, as we mentioned before, more or less snow neither “proves” nor “disproves” global warming. But to me this is yet another reminder of why I don’t say much about the topic these days; the whole damn thing has gotten so overly politicized that each side feels compelled to say something non-scientific just to make the other side shut up.

However, from a scientific perspective too this issue illustrates the pitfalls that natural science faces in the twenty first century. When I discussed this issue with my father who is an economics professor the other day, he said “Welcome to the social sciences”. Social scientists face such problems all the time. What happens when a model becomes so complex that it can explain virtually any observation you throw at it? (To begin with the model also become so complex that you stop truly understanding it; case in point- derivatives on Wall Street). Surely there seems to be a problem with a model that is invoked to explain both more precipitation and absence of precipitation. That would be akin to a molecular model that predicts the same reason for compounds with both high and low potencies against a protein target.

The hallmark of a judicious model is that it is not so spare as to be useless but also not so full of parameters and variables so as to fit almost any data point. A model that seems to explain everything (as sometimes seems to be the case with global warming) is a bad scientific model because in principle it’s hard to see how it could be falsified (Popper again). In addition, you should always ask how many data points are enough to build confidence in a model; statisticians have struggled for decades with this sampling problem, and there is no straightforward general answer. Sadly, it’s not climate scientists that have first raised such issues through their model-building. That dubious honor belongs to evolutionary biologists.

Evolutionary biology is notorious for advancing adaptationist explanations which can account for almost any observed trait. For instance, polar bears are white because they are supposed to camouflage well into their surroundings, but penguins are black because they need to camouflage themselves against predators underwater and absorb heat on land. Now why does the first explanation not apply to the second case and vice versa? Well, in case of evolutionary biology the short answer that is given is “trade offs”. Depending on the details of the problem (in this case the species, its body requirements, genetic makeup etc.), in the first case the ability to camouflage won out over the need to remain warm, and vice versa for the second one. But beyond a certain point it can be impossible to actually explain such trade offs since so much in evolution is a matter of contingency. And one can conveniently invoke trade-offs (Shazam!) as a magical whitewashing word for almost any trait. That’s hardly an actual explanation.

Nevertheless, such ingenious explanations have often been advocated by evolutionary biologists. In a classic article, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin shot down this relentless urge to wrap everything into an adaptionist program; their main point was that every trait is not the consequence of adaptation and natural selection and some traits can be simply carried along for the ride with others without possessing any evolutionary benefit. The main merit of the adaptationist explanations is their internal logic. However, internal logic by itself, no matter how tempting, does not make an explanation. In the absence of experimental data, such hypotheses about evolutionary adaptations are just that, good hypotheses waiting to be validated by good data. A professor of mine got so fed up with these ingenious evolutionary explanations for everything from homosexuality to sloths coming down from trees to bury their feces that he wrote a highly readable book about it. Again, it’s not that these ideas are bad, but in the absence of causal evidence they can only remain respectable armchair speculation. So how then do we come up with explanations?

Sadly, here’s when fields like evolution and climate change run into fundamental roadblocks of the kind faced by social scientists; the sheer complexity of the system thwarts attempts at clean experiments. The big problem with fields like psychology, sociology and economics is that it is often difficult or even impossible to perform controlled experiments. Admittedly the situation here is worse than climate science, since the data itself is variable and represents a moving target (was the state of mind of your experimental subjects the same on Monday as on Tuesday?). Consider the hundreds of pop science books on neuroscience claiming that things like fMRI scans can “explain” emotions like hate and jealousy, and even spiritual and religious experiences. Other problems notwithstanding, how on earth do we not know that at the very least, like the perpetual observed-induced reality in quantum mechanics, we do not influence what we want to observe? But even in the apparently more rigorous discipline of climate science, models are the result of data conducted under less than ideal non-isolated laboratory conditions from thousands of places over dozens of years. Who can guarantee that at least some of this data won’t even be contradictory, let alone that all of it would consistently be of the same standard? To be fair to climate scientists, they usually perform stringent checks on the validity of their models but no checks can help duplicate fine differences in experimental conditions spread over thousands of data points over long time frames.

Lest one think that only the “softer” sciences face these problems, witness the current debate about string theory. Skeptics say that about the only reason that the framework is so highly regarded is because it seems to be logically internally consistent, is mathematically elegant and seems to tantalizingly “feel right”. All these qualities can be respectable, but I suspect that the pioneers of modern science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century would not have been happy with this state of affairs. From what I have read, there seem to be no hard experimental tests that could provide strong support for string theory.

That then is the dilemma the natural sciences find themselves in in my opinion, a dilemma that the social sciences have faced for centuries. In fact one can argue that the dilemma has been caused by the social sciences finally intersecting with the natural science as their integrated whole has become more and more complex and is now tackling extremely convoluted territory like the brain, the climate, the universe, human behavior, the economy, evolution and the mechanisms of drug action and disease. With this kind of complexity, scientists have been resigned to pick between two quite unsastisfactory choices; either no explanation at all, or an “explanation” based on models, internal logical consistency, “aesthetics” and elegance (case in point- string theory) and ingenious sounding armchair explanations. In many cases the underlying systems are simply so dense that scientists are forced to perform extensive parametrization and model building. There is probably an equation somewhere relating excessive parametrization to risk of model failure.

Nonetheless, in the absence of controlled experiments, there is not much that science can lean on at this point. But in fact one can argue that science actually proceeds in this way, by tentatively accepting hypotheses. As long as it’s kept in mind that the hypotheses are only hypotheses, we can still have a wall to grasp as we grope around in the dark. If we start regarding the hypotheses as explanations and facts, we will leave the safety of that frail wall to grasp at imaginary will-o-wisps at our own peril.

There is at least one example of bad science revealed in the emails. It seems that one set of data from tree ring proxies did not show the expected rise in temperatures for a particular period and showed a decline. What was done was that just for that period, a different set of data from another method which did show the rise was grafted on to this piece of data. John Tierney of the NYT has the two graphs on his blog. Does this change the general conclusion? Probably not. Is this bad science and enough to justify a flurry of indignant questions in the minds of outsiders? Certainly so. Good science would have meant revealing all the pieces of data including those which showed a decline.

What is remarkable (or perhaps not remarkable at all) is the vociferous political- not scientific- reaction that has erupted in blogs all over the internet. I would point readers to my fellow blogger Derek Lowe’s succinct summary of the matter. While I am not as skeptical about climate change as he is, it is disconcerting to see how much political, personal and social baggage the whole issue is carrying. Whenever a scientific issue starts carrying so much non-scientific baggage, one can be assured that we are in trouble.

The comments on most blogs range across the spectrum. There are the outright deniers who claim that the emails “disprove global warming”; they don’t, and I can’t see how any set of personal exchanges could say almost anything definitive about a system as complex as the climate. Phrases like “hide the decline” and “trick” have been taken out of their technical context to indicate subversion and deception. And then there are the proponents who want to act like nothing has happened. I like George Monbiot’s take on it where he says that even if the science of climate change has certainly not come crashing down, the public image of climate change has been dealt a serious blow, and denying this would simply mean burying your head in the sand. After all, we are supposed to be the good guys, the ones who are supposed to honestly admit to our limitations and failings, and we are not doing this. What ramifications this will have for the important Copenhagen climate summit this month is uncertain.

However, the very fact that we have to worry as much about the public image of climate science as the science itself plainly speaks to the degree of politicization of the issue. I think the liability of this entire matter has basically become infinite and I think scientists working in the field are facing an unprecedented dilemma which few scientists have ever faced. Here’s the problem; we are dealing with an extremely complex system and it is hardly surprising if the science of this system (which after all is only a hundred years or so old) keeps getting revised, reshuffled and reiterated even if the basics remain intact. That would be perfectly normal for a vast, multidisciplinary field like this. That is the way science works. One finds such revision and vigorous debate even in highly specific and recondite areas like the choice of atomic partial charges in the calculation of intermolecular energies. The climate is orders of magnitude more complicated. If the usual rules of scientific discourse were to be followed, making such debates and disagreements open would not be a problem.

But with an issue that is so exquisitely fraught with political and economic liabilities and where the stakes are so enormously high, I believe that the normal process of scientific debate, discourse and progress has broken down and is being bypassed. Scientists who would otherwise engage in lively debate and disagreements have become extremely loathe to make their doubts public. These scientists fear that they would essentially be condemned by both sides. The right wing extremists would seize upon any honest disclosure of debate as the kick that brings the entire edifice crumbling down. They would predictably try to discredit even reasonable conclusions drawn by climate change scientists. At the same time, left wing extremists would essentially disown such scientists and either declare them an anomaly or more predictably declare them to be political and corporate shills. A scientist who honestly voices his doubts would become a man without a country.

This is of course in addition to the ample scorn that establishment upholders like climate blogger Joe Romm would heap on them. Thus, if you are a scientist working in climate change today, it would be rather difficult for you to make even the normal process of science transparent. Plus, most scientists are genuinely scared that all the momentum they have built over the years would fizzle out if their right wing opponents pounce on their private doubts. Think about it. The Copenhagen summit is going to be held in a month. Scientists have faced enormous obstacles in convincing the public and governments about climate change. Your work has been crowned by grudging acknowledgement even by George W Bush and the Nobel Peace Prize for Al Gore. Would you be ready to throw away all this rightly hard-earned and hard-fought consensus for the sake of a few dissenting opinions? The simple laws of human nature dictate that you probably would not.

In my opinion, that is what seems to have happened with the scientists at the CRU. They have been so afraid of not only expressing their doubts (many of which as noted above would be valid given the science involved) but also entertaining other dissenting opinions that they have unfortunately picked the option of trying to silence open debate in a way that would be unacceptable in science in general. One can understand their motivation, but their actions still seem deplorable.

I think these emails point to a much more serious structural problem in the scientific enterprise of climate change. For good reasons and bad, whether to stand up to political hacks or ironically to defend good science, this enterprise has accumulated so much political baggage that it is now virtually impossible for it to compromise, to change, to maneuver even in the face of cogent reasons. The science of climate change has essentially bound itself into a straitjacket. My prediction is that important decisions about this science will in the future be mainly politically motivated. Public consensus not completely backed by good science will be the driving force for major decisions. The consequences of those decisions, just like the climate, are uncertain. We will have to wait and see.

But as usual, the casualty is ultimately science itself. What was good science and ineffective politics before is becoming effective politics and bad science. Whatever else happens, science never wins when it gets so overtly politicized. And hopefully about this there will be universal consensus.

The greatest strength of science is that it tries to avoid dogma. Theories, explanations, hypotheses, everything is tentative, true only as long as the next piece of data does not invalidate it. This is how science progresses, by constantly checking and cross checking its own assumptions. The heart of this engine of scientific progress is constant skepticism and questioning. This skepticism and questioning can often be exasperating. You can enthusiastically propound your latest brainwave only to be met with hard-nosed opposition, deflating your long harbored fervor for your pet idea. Sometimes scientists can be vicious in seminars, questioning and cross questioning you as if you were a defendant in a court.

But you learn to live with this frustration. That’s because in science, skepticism always means erring on the safer side. As long as skepticism does not descend into outright irrational cynicism, it is far better to be skeptical than to buy into a new idea. This is science’s own way to ensure immunity to crackpot notions that can lead it astray. One of the important lessons you learn in graduate school is to make peace with your skeptics, to take them seriously, to be respectful to them in debate. This attitude keeps the flow of ideas open, giving everyone a chance to voice their opinion.

Yet the mainstay of science is also an readiness to test audacious new concepts. Sadly, whenever a paradigm of science reaches something like universal consensus, the opposite can happen. New ideas and criticism are met with so much skepticism that it borders on hostility. Bold conjectures are shot down mercilessly sometimes even without considering their possible merits. The universal consensus separates scientists into a majority who provide a vocal and even threatening wall of obduracy against new ideas. From what I have seen in recent times, this unfortunately seems to have happened to the science of global warming.

First, a disclaimer. I have tried to keep abreast of the basic facts of climate change and have always been firmly in the “Aye” camp when it comes to global warming. There is no doubt that the climate is warming due to greenhouse gases, especially CO2, and that human activities are most probably responsible for the majority of that warming. There is also very little doubt that this rate of warming has been unprecedented into the distant past. It is also true that if kept unchecked, these developments will cause dangerous and unpredictable changes in the composition of our planet and its biosphere. Yet it does not stop there. Understanding and accepting the details about climate change is one thing, proposing practical solutions for mitigating it is a whole different ball game. This ball game involves more economics than science, since any such measures will have to be adopted on a very large scale that would significantly affect the livelihood of hundreds of millions. We need vigorous discussion on solutions to climate change from all quarters, and the question is far from settled.

But even from a scientific perspective, there are a lot of details about climate change that can still be open to healthy debate. Thus, one would think that any skepticism about certain details of climate change would be met with the same kind of lively, animated argument that is the mainstay of science. Sadly, that does not seem to be happening. Probably the most recent prominent example of this occurred when the New York Times magazine ran a profile of the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson. Dyson is a personal scientific hero of mine and I have read all of his books (except his recent very technical book on quantum mechanics). I had penned my own personal biography of him a little while back. Climate change is not one of Dyson’s main interests and has occupied very little of his writings, although more so recently. To me Dyson appears as a mildly interested climate change buff who has some opinions on some aspects of the science. He is by no means an expert on the subject, and he never claims to be one. However he has certain ideas, ideas which may be wrong, but which he thinks make sense (in his own words, “It is better to be wrong than to be vague”). For instance he is quite skeptical about computer models of climate change, a skepticism which I share based on my own experience with the uncertainty modeling even “simple” chemical systems. Dyson who is also well known as a “futurist” has proposed a very interesting possible solution to climate change; the breeding of special genetically engineered plants and trees with an increased capacity for capturing carbon. I think there is no reason why this possibility could not be looked into.

Now if this were the entire story, all one would expect at most would be experts in climate change respectfully debating and refuting Dyson’s ideas strictly on a factual basis. But surprisingly, that’s not what you got after the Times profile. There were ad hominem attacks calling him a “crackpot”, “global warming denier”, “pompous twit” and “faker”. Now anyone who knows the first thing about Dyson would know that the man does not have a political agenda and he has always been, if anything, utterly honest about his views. Yet his opponents spared no pains in painting him with a broad denialist brush and even discrediting his other admirable work in physics to debunk his climate change views. What disturbed me immensely was not that they were attacking his facts- that is after all how science works and is perfectly reasonable- but they were attacking his character, his sanity and his general credibility. The respected climate blogger Joe Romm rained down on Dyson like a ton of bricks, and his criticism of Dyson was full of condescension and efforts to discredit Dyson’s other achievements. My problem was not with Romm’s expertise or his debunking of facts, but with his tone; note for instance how Romm calls Dyson a crackpot right in the title. One got the feeling that Romm wanted to portray Dyson as a senile old man who was off his rocker. Other bloggers too seized upon Romm-style condescension and dismissed Dyson as a crank. Since then Dyson has expressed regret over the way his views on global warming were overemphasized by the journalist who wrote the piece. But the fact is that it was this piece which made Freeman Dyson notorious as some great global warming contrarian, when the truth was much simpler. In a Charlie Rose interview, Dyson talked about how global warming occupies very little of his time, and his writings clearly demonstrate this. Yet his views on the topic were blown out of proportion. Sadly, such vociferous, almost violent reactions to even reasonable critics of climate change seems to be becoming commonplace. If this is how the science of global warming is looking like, then it’s not a very favourable outlook for the future .

If Dyson has been Exhibit A in the list of examples of zealous reactions to unbiased critics of climate change, then the recent book “Superfreakonomics” by economists Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (authors of the popular “Freakonomics”) would surely be Exhibit B. There is one chapter among six in their book about global warming. And yet almost every negative review on Amazon focuses on this chapter. The authors are bombarded with accusations of misrepresentation, political agendas and outright lies. Joe Romm again penned a rather propagandish and sensationalist sounding critique of the authors’ arguments. Others duly followed. In response the authors wrote a couple of posts on their New York Times blog to answer these critics. One of the posts was written by Nathan Myhrvold, previously Chief Technology officer of Microsoft and now the head of a Seattle-based think tank called Intellectual Ventures. Myhrvold is one of the prominent players in the book. Just note the calm, rational, response that he pens and compare it to one of Joe Romm’s posts filled with condescending personal epithets. If this is really a scientific debate, then Myhrvold surely seems to be behaving like the objective scientist in this case.

So are the statements made by Levitt and Dubner as explosive as Romm and others would make us believe? I promptly bought the book and read it, and read the chapter on climate change twice to make sure. The picture that emerged in front of me was quite different from the one that I had been exposed to until then. Firstly, the authors’ style is quite matter of fact and not sensationalist or contrarian sounding at all. Secondly, they never deny climate change anywhere. Thirdly, they make the very important general point that complex problems like climate change are not beyond easy, cheap solutions and that people sometimes don’t readily think of these; they cite hand washing to drastically reduce infections and seat belts to reduce fatal car crashes as two simple and cheap innovations that saved countless lives. But on to Chapter 5 on warming.

Now let me say upfront that at least some of Levitt and Dubner’s research is sloppy. They unnecessarily focus on the so-called “global cooling” events of the 70s, events that by no means refute global warming. They also seem to cherry pick the words of Ken Caldeira, a leading expert on climate change. But most of their chapter is devoted to possible cheap, easy solutions to climate change. To tell this story, they focus on Nathan Myhrvold and his team at Intellectual Ventures who have come up with two extremely innovative and interesting solutions to tackle the problem. The innovations are based on the injection of sulfate aerosols in the upper atmosphere. This rationale is based on a singular event, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Phillipines in 1990 which sent millions of tons of sulfates and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere and circulated them around the planet. Sulfate aerosols serve to reflect sunlight and tend to cause cooling. Remarkably, global temperatures fell by a slight amount for a few years after that. The phenomenon was carefully and exhaustively documented. It was a key contributor to the development of ideas which fall under the rubric of “geoengineering”. These ideas involve artificially modulating the atmosphere to offset the warming effects of CO2. Geoengineering is controversial and hotly debated, but it is supported by several very well known scientists, and nobody has come up with a good reason why it would not work. In the light of the seriousness of global warming, it deserves to be investigated. With this in mind, Myhrvold and his team came up with a rather crazy sounding idea; to send up a large hose connected to motors and helium balloons which would pump sulfates and sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Coupled with this they came up with an even crazier sounding idea; to thwart hurricanes by erecting large, balloon like structures on coastlines which would essentially suck the hot air out of the hurricanes. With their power source gone, the hurricanes would possibly quieten down.

Are these ideas audacious? Yes. Would they work? Maybe, and maybe not. Are they testable? Absolutely, at least on a prototypical, experimental basis. Throughout the history of science, science has never been fundamentally hostile to crazy ideas if they could be tested. Most importantly, the authors propose these ideas because the analysis indicates them to be much cheaper than long-term measures designed to reduce carbon emissions. Solutions to climate change need to be as cheap as they need to be scientifically viable.

So let’s get this straight; the authors are not denying global warming and in fact in their own words, they are proposing a possible solution that could be cheap and relatively simple. And they are proposing this solution only to temporarily act as a gag on global warming, so that long-term measures could then be researched at relative leisure. In fact they are not even claiming that such a scheme would work, only that it deserves research attention. Exactly what part of this argument screams “global warming denial”? One would imagine that opponents of these ideas would pen objective, rational objections based on hard data and facts. And yet almost none of the vociferous critics of Levitt and Dubner seem to have engaged in such an exercise (except a few). Most exercises seem to be of the “Oh my God! Levitt and Dubner are global warming deniers!!” kind. Science simply does not progress in this manner. All we need to do here is to debate the merit of a particular set of ideas. Sure, they could turn out to be bad ideas, but we will never know until we test them. The late Nobel laureate Linus Pauling said it best; “If you want to have a good idea, first have lots of ideas, then throw the bad ones away”. Especially a problem as big as climate change needs ideas flying in from all quarters, some conservative, some radical. And as the authors indicate, cheap and simple ideas ought to be especially welcome. Yet the reception to Superfreakonomics to me looked like the authors were being castigated and resented for having ideas. The last thing scientific progress needs is a vocal majority that thwarts ideas from others and encourages them to shut up.

Freeman Dyson once said that global warming sometimes looks like a province of “the secular religion of environmentalism” and sadly there seems to be some truth to this statement. It is definitely the wrong kind of religion. As I mentioned before, almost any paradigm that reaches almost universal consensus runs the risk of getting forged into a religion. At such a point it is even more important to respect critics and give them a voice. Otherwise, going by the almost violent reaction against both Dyson and the authors of Superfreakonomics, I fear that global warming science will descend to the status of biological studies of race. Any research that has to do with race is so politically sensitive and fraught with liabilities and racist overtones that even reasonable scientists who feel that there is actually something beneficial to be gained from the study of race (and there certainly is; nobody would deny that certain diseases are more common to certain ethnic minorities) feel extremely afraid to speak up, let alone apply for funding.

We cannot let such a thing happen with the extremely important issue of climate change. Scientific progress itself would be in a very sad state if critics of climate change with no axe to grind are so vilified and resented that they feel inclined to shut up. Such a situation would trample the very core principles of science underfoot.

Venki Ramakrishnan has done it. He, Ada Yonath and Tom Steitz have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry for 2009 for their pioneering studies on the structure of the ribosome. The prize was predicted by many for many years and I myself have listed these names in my lists for a couple of years now; in fact I remember talking with a friend about Yonath and Ramakrishnan getting it as early as 2002. Ramakrishnan thus joins the ranks of Raman, Khorana and Chandrasekhar as the latest Indian science Nobel Laureate. Will his achievement inspire more students in India to study science? We sure hope so.

The importance of the work has been obvious for many years since the ribosome is one of the most central components of the machinery of life in all organisms. Every school student is taught about its function in acting as the giant player that holds the multicomponent assembly of translation- the process in which the code of letters in RNA is read to produce proteins- together. The ribosome is also an important target for antibiotics like tetracycline. The ribosome comes as close to being an assembly line for manufacturing proteins as something possibly can. It’s undoubtedly a highly well-deserved accolade. The prize comes close on the heels of the 2006 prize awarded to Roger Kornberg for his studies of transcription, the process preceding translation in which DNA is copied into RNA.

Venkatraman or “Venki” Ramakrishnan as he is known has resided for many years at the Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology, a hotbed of discovery which has produced many Nobel Prize winners including Watson and Crick, Perutz, Kendrew, Walker and Sanger (the only person to win the chemistry Nobel twice). Ramakrishnan who holds US citizenship received his undergraduate training in physics in India at Baroda and then worked in Ohio, San Diego and New Haven (Yale). After long stints at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Utah he finally took up a position at the MRC. His conversion from physics in biology follows in the august footsteps of several physicists like Francis Crick and Walter Gilbert who made major contributions to molecular biology.

Will Ramakrishnan’s example inspire an Indian scientist who has worked in India to win the prize soon? We don’t know. The last and only time a bona fide Indian scientist won a science Nobel was Raman in 1930.

The solution of the ribosome structure by x-ray crystallography is a classic example of work that has a very high chance of getting a prize because of its fundamental importance. X-ray crystallography is a field which has been honored many times and as I mentioned before, if there’s any field where you really stand a good chance of winning a Nobel Prize, it’s x-ray crystallography on some important protein or biomolecule. In the past x-ray crystallography on hemoglobin, potassium ion channels, photosynthetic proteins, the “motor” that generates ATP and most recently, the machinery of genetic transcription, have all been honored by the Nobel Prize. It’s also the classic example of a field where the risks are as high as the rewards, since you may easily spend two decades or more working on a structure and in the end fail to solve it or worse, be scooped.

However, when this meticulous effort pays off the fruits are sweet indeed. In this case the three researchers have been working on the project for years and their knowledge has built up not overnight but incrementally through a series of meticulous and exhaustive experiments reported in top journals like Nature and Science. It’s an achievement that reflects as much stamina and the ability to overcome frustration as it does intelligence.

It’s a prize that is deserved in every way.

Update: As usual the chemistry blog world seems to be be divided over the prize with many despondently wishing that a more “pure” chemistry prize should have been awarded. However this prize is undoubtedly being awarded primarily for chemistry.

Firstly, as some commentators have pointed out, crystallography was only the most important aspect of the ribosome work. There were a lot of important chemical manipulations that had to be carried out in order to shed light on its structure and function.

Secondly, as Roger Kornberg pointed out in his interview (when similar concerns were voiced), the prize is being awarded for the determination of an essentially chemical structure, in principle no different from the myriad structures of natural and unnatural compounds that have been the domain of classical organic chemistry for decades.

Thirdly, the ribosome can be thought of as an enzyme that forms peptide bonds. To this end the structure resolution engaged knowing the precise locations of catalytic groups that are responsible for the all-important peptide bond formation reaction. Finding out the locations of these groups is no different from determining the catalytic parts of a more conventional enzyme.

Thus, the prize quite squarely falls in the domain of chemistry. It’s naturally chemistry as applied to a key biological problem, but I don’t doubt that the years ahead will see prizes given to chemistry as applied to the construction of organic molecules (palladium catalysis) or chemistry as applied to the synthesis of energy efficient materials (perhaps solar cells).

I understand that having a chemistry prize awarded in one’s own area of research is especially thrilling, but as a modified JFK quote would say, first and foremost “Wir sind Chemiker”. We are all chemists, irrespective of our sub-disciplines, and we should be all pleased that an application of our science has been awarded, an application that only underscores the vast and remarkably diverse purview of the discipline.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn (UCSF), Carol Greider (Johns Hopkins) and Jack Szostak (Harvard) for their discovery of the enzyme telomerase and its role in human health and disease.

This prize was highly predictable because the trio’s discovery is of obvious and fundamental importance to an understanding of living systems. DNA replication is a very high fidelity event where new nucleotides are added to the new DNA helix being synthesized with an error rate of only 1 in 10*9. Highly efficient repair enzymes act on damaged or wrongly structured DNA strands and repair them with impressive accuracy. And yet the process has some intrinsic problems. One of the most important problems concerns the shortening of one of the two newly synthesized strands of the double helix during every successive duplication. This is an inherent result of the manner in which the two strands are synthesized.

This shortening leads to shortened ends of chromosomes, termed telomeres. As our cells divide in every generation, there is progressive shortening of the chromosomal ends. Ultimately the chromosomal ends become too short for the chromosomes to remain functional and the cell puts into the motion the machinery of apoptosis or cell death which eliminates cells with these chromosomes. The three recipients of this year’s prize discovered an enzyme called telomerase that actually prevents the shortening of chromosomes by adding new nucleotides to the ends. Greider was actually Blackburn’s PhD. student at Berkeley when they did the pioneering work (not every PhD. student can claim that his or her PhD. thesis was recognized by a Nobel Prize). The group not only discovered the enzyme but actually demonstrated through a series of comprehensive experiments that mutant cells and mice lacking the enzymes had shortened life spans and other fatal defects, indicating the key role of the enzyme in preventing cell death. At the same time, they and other scientists also crucially discovered that certain kinds of cancers, brain tumors for instance, had high levels of telomerase. This high level meant that cancer cells repaired their chromosomes more efficiently than normal cells, thus accounting for their increased activities and life spans and their ability to outcompete normal cells for survival (As usual, what’s beneficial for normal cells unfortunately turns out to be even more beneficial for cancer cells; this need to address similar processes in both cells is part of what makes cancer such a hard disease to treat)

The work thus is a fine example of both pure and applied research. Most of the work’s implications lie in an increased understanding of the fundamental biochemical machinery governing living cells. However, with the observation that cancer cells express higher levels of telomerase the work also opens up possible chemotherapy that could target increased levels of telomerase in such cells using drugs. Conversely, boosting the level of the enzyme in normal cells could possibly contribute toward slowing down aging.

The prize has been awarded for work that was done about twenty years ago. This is quite typical of the Nobel Prize. Since then Jack Szostak has turned his focus on to other exciting and unrelated research involving the origins of life. In this field too he has done pioneering work involving for instance, the synthesis of membranes that could mimic the proto-cells formed on the early earth. Blackburn also became famous in 2004 for a different reason; she was bumped off President Bush’s bioethics council for her opposition to a ban on stem cell research. Given the Bush administration’s consistent manipulation and suppression of cogent scientific data, Blackburn actually wore her rejection as a proud label. Catherine Brady has recently written a fine biography of Blackburn.

Curiously we seem to have largely bluffed then about the yield, and now the debate seems to have been ignited again with a statement by P. Santhanam of the DAE who accepts that our purported thermonuclear might have fizzled out. Surprisingly, at the same time there seem to be statements from individuals as august as A P J Abdul Kalam who contends that the tests provided the “designed yield”.

Interestingly, Santhanam does not seem to offer any perspective about what the yield actually was. However, calculations and measurements done at the time seem to leave little doubt that the design fizzled out. It’s worth reviewing this analysis.

There seem to be three dominant sources which converge on a consensus that India’s purported thermonuclear test failed to work.

The first source is the Federation of Atomic Scientists, whose analysis indicated a yield of between 12-25 kT

The second source is nuclear specialist Robert Norris who analyzed data from sixty-two seismic stations and concluded a yield of 12 kT

The third source is the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment who compared the signals from the 1998 test to the 1974 ‘Smiling Buddha’ test. Comparing signal strength they arrived at a rather accurate estimate of 16 kT for the total yield.

Using an average estimate of 16 kT, we can apportion the energy between the three devices that India tested. Shakti 1 was supposed to be the thermonuclear. The second device (Shakti 2) was supposed to be a weaponization of the 1974 experiment and therefore we can be quite confident that we got the yield right and as announced- about 12 kT. Shakti 3 whose purpose was to generate interesting data released a relatively negligible 0.2 kT.

Simple subtraction leaves about 4kT for the ‘thermonuclear’ Shakti 2.

Now of course at the time, the Indian government talked about a yield of 45kT from Shakti 2. The design was supposed to be a classic Teller-Ulam kind of design in which a primary fission trigger ignites a secondary fusion package. However most experts now think that what happened was that the primary only partially detonated and delivered the 4kT, and with such a small yield the secondary simply failed to ignite. As painful as it sounds, this means that the device did not work at all as intended and was an embarrassing failure. Even the error estimates don’t leave too much room to wriggle.

However, what repurcussions this has for India’s nuclear deterrence is a different matter. I agree with some others that we should not have bluffed at the time. After all no country (except probably China) has really gotten it right the first time. Also, deterrence does not depend on the mere existence of hydrogen bombs but depends on a complex system of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. It’s worth recalling that many rather wise people in the US were pushing the development of better fission bombs when the whole debate about hydrogen bombs was going on in the late 40s.

Some have also argued that it’s better to have big thermonuclear weapons rather than ’small’ fission weapons so that countries won’t actually feel tempted to use the small bombs with their smaller yields. But this argument crucially rests on quantitative aspects. A Hiroshima style bomb with a yield of 20 kT is as good as a 1 megaton hydrogen bomb when employed strategically in sufficient quantities. Hydrogen bombs are certainly not essential for deterrence; in fact what’s really essential is an efficient triumvirate of delivery systems (submarines + bombers + missiles). That is what India should focus on instead of getting too hung up over hydrogen bombs and bigger bangs.

Note: The analysis is of course not my own. Apart from the websites I have referred to the excellent and authoritative The Nuclear Express by Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman, both of whom are veteran nuclear weapons specalists.

It is one thing to be a deist, namely someone who believes in the kind of abstract God embodied in the laws of nature who could have set the universe in motion and then let it run its course without interfering, but quite another to be a proper theist, a person who believes in the kind of material God that most people who believe in God invoke, one who helps out or doles out punishment in daily life and personal matters. Collins seems to be more of a theist. And therefore his appointment to the NIH again raises a question which has fomented reams of arguments, and sometimes almost violent argument, on blogs and in books. The central question is; can a scientist truly be religious? Since this question immediately gets you into a morass of conflicting views and definitions, I will simply state my one line answer to the question in this specific context; from an empirical standpoint of course you can be religious and a scientist, as demonstrated by the existence of many religious scientists like Collins. But from a philosophical standpoint, you then have to accept that there is some very strange compartmentalization in your mind that allows you to essentially sustain two opposite and clearly conflicting paradigms simultaneously, one paradigm in which faith without evidence is positively eschewed and another in which faith without evidence is positively extolled. As an aside, it is a fascinating scientific question how such compartmentalization can occur.

Collins has come under fire from, among others, one of my favorite writers Sam Harris, whose controversial book The End of Faith made a compelling case against religious faith. In a piece in the New York Times, Harris criticizes Collin’s views, best enumerated in his book, which essentially proclaim that God must exist since some things are beyond the scope of science. Both Harris and me find this kind of reasoning remarkably simple-minded. How does someone know that things that are beyond the scope of science today would always be so? For instance Collins quips that God must have adjusted the values of the so-called fundamental constants of nature (such as Planck’s constant, the speed of light etc.), since life seems to depend on an incredibly precise balance in their values. But how do we know that science is never going to provide an answer for their origin? If “God” is simply a place card for “we don’t know” then it sounds fine, but Collins seems to actually imply some kind of interventionist God here.

More importantly, does such a belief in God mean that we should automatically stay away from certain things and not apply critical questioning to them because they have been declared by religions to be supernatural by definition? Even Collins will admit that pushing any question under the rug by default by declaring that it is beyond the purview of science is completely antithetical to rational inquiry.

Harris is particularly concerned about Collins’s enunciations about neuroscientific research. The last few decades have provided spectacular and remarkable insights into attributes that were for many years considered almost mystical, things like human emotions, love and the nature of faith itself. But in recent years, science is gradually opening a window into these attributes, answering questions like; What happens when someone is praying? How does the brain look when it is experiencing intense emotion? Studies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are making significant headway into answering such questions and detecting common patterns of neuronal activity that are at play. Collins essentially says that there is something special about faith and human emotions and that God injected these qualities into human beings at some point in our evolution. Would Collins then have us not explore the scientific basis of such human attributes by assuming that they are beyond scientific inquiry? These questions worry Harris and some others like evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, and they worry me. Some of Collins’s statements from a set of slides that are cited by Harris and Coyne really sound preposterous.

Is it dangerous to have a bona fide Christian heading the most important biomedical research agency in the country, and one of the most significant of its kind in the world? In spite of the above concerns I would say not per se. I would say that Collins should be given the benefit of doubt. After all, there does not seem to be a shred of evidence that his religious leanings have affected his capacity for objective scientific judgement. The NIH is a scientific organization and Collins’s leadership of it should be judged purely based on his handling of the science. We should not care as much about what he says as about what he does. In the absence of evidence that his religious views are affecting his ability to allocate funding for specific kinds of research, he should be closely watched but not condemned.

At the same time, I share Harris, Coyne and others’ sense of unease for a totally different reason; Collins’s appointment might unfortunately have the disastrous side effect of enabling creationists and proponents of intelligent design to clamor and push their agenda for turning science and religion into convenient bedfellows. Creationists might make Collins’s appointment a case for asserting that not only is religion compatible with science but it’s even necessary, as purportedly exemplified in the highest echelons of science policy and research. Collin’s appointment may sadly make it easier for the creationists to weasel their way into sensible scientific debate. For this reason the appointment may cause problems, and we will have to make sure that Collins is constantly watched and criticized wherever appropriate. The price of scientific freedom, it seems, is indeed eternal vigilance.

©Ashutosh Jogalekar

That this would be possible in 5 to 10 years is what Craig Venter says. Coming from a lesser man this would seem like wishful speculation, but Venter is the man who single-handedly raced the government to “shotgun” sequencing the human genome and he has a knack of turning dreams into reality. If there’s one word to describe Venter it’s “big”. Even after the human genome the man has not rested on his laurels. Over the last few years he has trawled the seven seas in his boat, gathering marine water samples everywhere and analyzing them for interesting bacteria and unusual DNA sequences. Genetically engineering these bugs could give us organisms that could mop up CO2, that would produce biofuels. Recently Venter has teamed up with Exxon (who could imagine!) for investigating genetically engineered algae that would produce hydrocarbons for transportation fuel.

Venter aims to have a unique genomic sequencing facility where he can sequence the genome of almost any organism one can think of. The computational and sequencing power in this facility is incredible and it seems to get bigger and more efficient every day. Here he shows the facility and has a conversation about it with Richard Dawkins. Venter says that mammalian genes are no longer very interesting because they don’t show that much variation compared to some other genomes such as insect and bacterial genomes. Right now Venter has a room full of sequencers and behind a secret curtain he already has a large sequencer that would replace this entire room. The rate at which the technology is growing is breathtaking. This is a one of a kind tour and the entire video is worth watching. When Dawkins asks Venter if he is trying to “play God”, Venter quips that he “does not play mythological characters”…

I would very strongly recommend Venter’s autobiography. His journey from a careless, unfocused, fun-loving teenager who, shaped by harrowing experiences as a medic in Vietnam brought pin point focus to his career is amazing. Venter has been called reckless, audacious, arrogant, egoistic, curt and apathetic, and to be honest all these qualities shine forth on many pages of his book (however he appears pretty modest and engaging in most of his interviews including the one above). He has managed to alienate many people who he worked with (as someone quipped, he will never win a rightly deserved Nobel prize because of his personality traits). But it doesn’t matter; he is a born entrepreneur and he is nothing but brilliant and ambitious, an intrepid risk taker. He is one of those people who will bulldoze his way through problems and not care what other people think. Nobody has accomplished what he has.