Last Monday, John Holdren told a large audience at the annual AGU fall meeting that the administration’s much discussed–and long overdue–scientific integrity guidelines were basically ready. Holdren said he’d actually hoped to announce them at his talk, but “didn’t quite make it.”

Instead of that Monday, the guidelines were then released last Friday in the afternoon. My plane from San Fran to Chicago landed at about 6 pm central, and I arrived to find  lots of chatter about them on my email.

Why couldn’t they be released at AGU? Everybody knows that when you release something on the later end on Friday…well, you complete the sentence. (more…)

I just attended the president’s science adviser’s science and policy keynote here at AGU in San Francisco. So did several hundred other people.

Interestingly, some news was made–sort of. Holdren announced that with regard to the long awaited scientific integrity guidelines his office was tasked to produce in early 2009…guidelines he’s been criticized for not yet releasing….he’s almost there and they should be out this month.

To quote Holdren, producing the guidelines–to cover scientific integrity practices across agencies of the U.S. government–”has been a more challenging task than expected, it has taken much longer than it was supposed to.” Holdren continued by stating that he had hoped to announce the guidelines in his AGU talk but “didn’t quite make it–but we are very close.”

How close? Holdren’s powerpoint put up the date “12-10″ for their release–e.g., this month. I’m sure that will be a relief to many.

Besides this nugget, Holdren’s talk was basically a vast compendium of all of the things the administration is doing to promote science and its relation to policy. And it really is quite a set of accomplishments (the integrity guidelines problem notwithstanding). Listening to it all inspired me to write a longer post comparing Obama-Holdren with Bush-Marburger, so stand by for that.

For now I’ll leave you with what was arguably Holdren’s most striking quote about Obama and science: “No president has ever talked as much about science, technology, and innovation as this president has.” Or as Holdren closed his talk, the “lynchpin” to having science positively impact the country is “a committed president. And fortunately, we have one.”

I’ll have more on Holdren’s talk soon.

There was a pretty disturbing story in the Los Angeles Times recently about how much trouble some government scientists are having in the Obama administration–which has not formally issued its promised scientific integrity rules yet.

Now, organizations whose work I trust, like Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Union of Concerned Scientists, are going on record saying that there are some serious cases of science being suppressed or interfered with in various government agencies. I have not independently investigated any of the cases here, but you have got to take these kinds of charges seriously.

Let’s go through some claims from the Times article, to list and also to comment: (more…)

Foreign Policy magazine has a new “global thinkers” feature in which they’ve identified the 100 top global thinkers, and then found out what they’re reading.

At # 34 on the list come Obama’s science czars, John Holdren and Steven Chu–and guess what. Holdren recommends our book Unscientific America!

We’re honored and humbled that the top science policymaker in America has had a look at our work. Dr. Holdren, we really hope you liked it!