U.S. scientists swept the Nobel prizes in science this year — in Medicine or Physiology, in Chemistry, and in Physics. I noted earlier that I suspected most Nobel winners this year would, again, be products of public schools. (I have not yet got biographies of each winner to confirm that.)
Beneath the successes at the top simmers a lot of pending gloom, however. P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula points to concerns among science educators about a huge gap between our top achievers and the rest of us. He cites an Associated Press story, and it in turn calls up the 2002 survey by the National Science Foundation that found woeful ignorance of basic science stuff among U.S. kids and adults.
Basic research and practical applications of science drove U.S. economic achievement through the end of the 19th century and through most of the 20th century. China and India far outpace the U.S. in producing new engineers today, however, and European research centers simply have greater scientific capacity in many areas, especially since the end of the plans for a U.S. superconducting supercollider particle accelerator, more than a decade ago.
Rhodes Scholar, former U.S. Senator, NBA and NCAA basketball all-star Bill Bradley once said that it’s easier to get to the number 1 position than it is to stay there. The ascendancy of the U.S. in science and engineering achievement occurred decades ago. Without serious, planned work to stay there, some other nation will take over the lead in each area of science, probably within the next 20 years — perhaps within the next decade.
I’ll try to find links, but my memory brings up a couple of studies that show that in 4th grade, U.S. kids are at the head of the pack in science achievement. By 8th grade, they start to fall behind the leaders. By 12th grade, U.S. kids are far behind almost all kids in other industrialized nations. Something we do wrong between 4th grade and 12th grade is sapping the competitive ability of the nation. We need to fix it.
Dr. Myers has some suggestions well worth considering.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
I found a blog in September where the blogger was gushing over reports that a single dose of a sleeping pill was causing many patients who had been in a long-term coma to wake up. Hallelujah!
I wrote a comment about the need for controlled studies before making any conclusions about such a thing, that maybe it wasn’t the sleeping pill, maybe it wasn’t such a dramatic result as claimed, …
The blogger was unimpressed, saying he believed the reports, and I should, too.
I think of someone like this when I read of poor science education. How many in the population understand how good science requires controlled experiments and reproducible results? I love the example of cold fusion in Utah for this. I remember reading just how gung ho Congress was to fund cold fusion research until the reports came in not only that the result was irreproducible, but just what the mistake had been. If Congress hadn’t been restrained by a few experts to wait for additional studies, it would have already spent huge sums of money on junk.
Newspapers are about the same, trumpeting any new study as a breakthrough or as negating some previous knowledge, when one study can’t do either. Sensationalism trumps good science all the time, in the short run.
It’s easy to look down on dummies who believe that humans and dinosaurs walked the Earth together, as in old movies, the Flintstones or creationist theme parks. It’s not just creationists, though. It’s politicians who see the FDA as an impediment to the pharmaceutical industry selling unnecessary products just as vitamin sellers can, and then turn around and use the FDA to protect young women from the mortal sin of using a morning after pill.
Whenever science becomes a tool for partisan politics, it’s going to be distorted, from global warming to medicine. Partisans don’t want to wait for controlled studies and reproducible results. That would limit their rhetoric. That’s not just one side that does that.
I don’t know what the biggest problem is for science education. Is it partisanship? Is it ignorance that science is not about words, but data and understanding what’s good data, not useless data? Is it sensationalism, which is not what science feels like when you get to advanced levels? Is it more exciting things or easier things that students can study? Is it this streak of American independence that no technocrat is going to tell us what to do?
I don’t know, but I don’t imagine there is some other result that will come from emphasizing the economics of this, as PZ Myers suggested. It is a widespread phenomenon in our culture to resist the scientific method, except for those of us who said nuts to everything else. Neither money nor rhetoric will change that. Maybe there will be a downswing in partisanship at some point that will help. Maybe when the climate really does change enough to be obvious, people will want to learn how science was right. In the meantime I have trouble teaching anyone that it takes controlled studies and reproducible results to make scientific conclusions. Many people prefer their intuition.
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