The Ongoing Transformation

In Alaska, reindeer are much more real than the fantasy animals that pull Santa’s sleigh. Introduced to Alaska from Siberia by the US government in the 1890s, reindeer were part of a strategy to solve food shortages among the Native peoples after the gold rush. Today, reindeer provide food security and economic opportunities for the Alaskan Native community. Even more so than farming, reindeer herding requires a deep understanding of the needs of Indigenous communities and academic science—as well as how to navigate and influence local, state, and federal policies. On this episode, host Lisa Margonelli is joined by Jacqueline Hrabok and Bonnie Scheele of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s High Latitude Range Management program to learn more about the interplay of science, policy, and community in reindeer herding.  This is our final episode of 2024. We’ll be back in late January for an interview with opera singer and actress Renee Fleming and neurology professor Susan Magsamen on the intersection of music, art, and health. And we would love to explore more local science policy issues in our upcoming episodes! Write to us at podcast@issues.org about any policy developments happening near you.  Resources: Learn more about the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ High Latitude Range Management program.  Visit Bonnie Scheele’s reindeer farm at the Midnite Sun Reindeer Ranch website and Facebook page. 

The word "bureaucracy" conjures up images of red tape and long lines at the DMV, not cutting-edge innovation. But some of the most significant scientific and health innovations of the past century have actually come from scientist-bureaucrats at government research institutes.  On this episode, host Jason Lloyd is joined by Natalie Aviles, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia and author of An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the US National Cancer Institute. Aviles explains what the National Cancer Institute does and how the mission and culture of the agency have enabled its scientist-bureaucrats to conduct pioneering cancer research, such as the invention of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccine.  Resources: Check out Natalie Aviles’s book, An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the U.S. National Cancer Institute, to learn more about the NCI.  Read “How Federal Science Agencies Innovate in the Public Interest” at Issues.org to learn more about the development of the HPV vaccine and the importance of agency discretion. 

New York City is the perfect place to understand the importance of modern engineering, but the most valuable lessons won’t be found at the Empire State Building or in Central Park. To truly discover what makes modern life tick, you have to look at the unloved, uncelebrated elements of New York: its sewers, bridges, and elevators.  On this episode, host Lisa Margonelli talks to Guru Madhavan, the Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and senior director of programs at the National Academy of Engineering. Madhavan wrote about the history of this often-overlooked infrastructure in a trilogy of Issues essays about New York City’s history. He talks about how the invention of the elevator brake enabled the construction of skyscrapers and how the detailed “grind work” of maintenance keeps grand projects like the Bayonne Bridge functioning. He also highlights the public health and sanitation-centered vision of Egbert Viele—the nearly forgotten engineer who made New York City livable.  Resources:  Read Guru Madhavan’s New York Trilogy: “The Greatest Show on Earth” about the invention of the elevator brake. “The Grind Challenges” about the Bayonne Bridge and maintenance grind work.  “Living in Viele’s World” about the contrast between Egbert Viele’s and Frederick Law Olmsted’s competing visions of New York City. Learn more about the invisible work that undergirds modern life by checking out Madhavan’s latest book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World.  Read the 2019 article Madhavan cites about how engineering benefits society.  Lisa mentioned riding on a tugboat pushing a barge full of petroleum, but she misremembered!  The repairs were then occurring on the Goethals Bridge, not the Bayonne. Here’s the whole story of “A Dangerous Move” from the New York Times. 

The United States spends more on healthcare than any other high-income country, yet we have some of the worst population health outcomes. Our health care system is designed in such a way that racial and ethnic disparities are inevitable, and the differences are extreme: the life expectancy difference between white women and black men is over a decade. How can we fix the system to ensure health care equity for all?  A new National Academies report called Ending Unequal Treatment: Strategies to Achieve Equitable Health Care and Optimal Health for All tackles this question. Building on a 2003 report on racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, the new report finds that little progress has been made in closing those equity gaps over the past two decades. On this episode, host Sara Frueh talks to Georges Benjamin, cochair of the report committee and executive director of the American Public Health Association. They discuss how the health care system creates disparities and how we can fix them.  Resources:  Read the National Academies reports on health care inequality: Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care (2003), and Ending Unequal Treatment: Strategies to Achieve Equitable Health Care and Optimal Health for All (2024)

Check the end of any recent study, and there will be a list of study funders and disclosures about competing interests. It’s important to know about potential biases in research, but this kind of transparency was not always the norm. Understanding bias in research and helping policymakers use the most reliable evidence to guide their decisions is a science in itself. Lisa Bero, a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, has been at the forefront of understanding how corporate funding biases research and how to assess what scientific evidence is reliable. She talks to host Monya Baker about her investigations into the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, techniques industries use to shape evidence to favor their products, and the importance of independent research to inform policy.  Resources:  Read The Cigarette Papers to learn more about Lisa Bero and others’ investigations of the tobacco industry.  See this analysis of industry documents about insider knowledge of health effects of PFAS and related chemicals.  Visit the Cochrane Library to find more systematic reviews of clinical research.  Learn more about Adrian Traeger’s investigation of spinal cord stimulation research by reading Corporate Influences on Science and Health—the Case of Spinal Cord Stimulation. Read Lisa Bero’s summary of how industry forces suppress unfavorable research.  Lisa Bero and others are developing a tool to screen for signs of fraud in clinical research. Learn more about it in The Conversation. 

Octopuses are famously smart: they can recognize individual humans, solve problems, and even keep gardens. They are also a popular food for humans: around 350,000 tons of octopus are caught worldwide each year, and demand is only growing. Some governments and start-ups have invested significant resources into domesticating octopus, and the world’s first octopus farm may soon open in Spain’s Canary Islands.  But should octopus be farmed at all? That question is being debated in several pieces of legislation right now, including a bipartisan US Senate bill. For Jennifer Jacquet, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, the answer is a resounding no. For the last decade, she has worked to end octopus farming before it begins, as she wrote in Issues in 2019. On this episode, Jacquet discusses why octopuses are poor candidates for farming, the growing social movements around octopus protection, and why we need public conversations about new technologies before investments begin.  Resources: Read “The Case Against Octopus Farming,” Jennifer Jacquet’s Issues piece, co-authored with Becca Franks, Peter Godfrey-Smith, and Walter Sánchez-Suárez.  Learn more about US legislation to end octopus farming:  Washington HB 1153: the first state to pass an octopus farming ban.  California A.B. 3162: the second state to pass one.  The OCTOPUS ACT of 2024: a bipartisan US Senate bill currently up for debate.  Check out the Science letter authored by 100 scientists and experts calling for congressional support of the OCTOPUS Act.  Read this Guardian article to learn more about the potential octopus farm. Explore a recent survey of American attitudes towards animal issues, including octopus farming on page 18-19. 

In this installment of Science Policy IRL, host Jason Lloyd goes behind the scenes of the White House Fellowship program with Lav Varshney, associate professor of engineering, computer science, and neuroscience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Varshney served as a White House Fellow from 2022 to 2023, where he worked at the National Security Council with Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology. In this episode, Varshney describes the day-to-day experience of working at the White House, gaps in the innovation system that science policy can help fill, and how making artificial intelligence systems more transparent could define the future of AI applications. Resources:  Want to become a White House Fellow? Applications open November 1, 2024.  As a White House Fellow, Lav Varshney contributed to the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. Read Varshney’s contributions to Issues: a review of a biography of the information technology pioneer Claude Shannon and an assessment of how intellectual property rights can keep up with advances in artificial intelligence with coauthor Deepak Somaya.  Visit Kocree to try out AI music generation and Ensaras to learn more about using AI to monitor wastewater.  Visit the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research to learn more about Varshney’s work on making AI systems more transparent through information lattice learning.  

In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The miniseries has explored how economics can be used to advance environmental justice, how solar-powered canoes can protect the Amazon from deforestation, and how refugees create communication networks to respond to climate change. On the final episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU professor Melissa K. Nelson. Nelson shares her thoughts about the impacts of climate change on Native American communities, agriculture, and what can be learned from Indigenous sustainability practices.  Resources:  See more of Melissa K. Nelson’s work on her website.  Listen to the Cultural Conservancy’s Native Seed Pod, a podcast hosted by Nelson about Native foodways, ancestral seeds, and traditional ecological knowledge, and visit their Native Foodways page.  Visit the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and the Traditional Native American Farmers Association websites to learn more about Indigenous farming techniques. Learn more about indigenous practices and environmental sustainability by reading Traditional Ecological Knowledge Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Daniel Shilling. Check out the other episodes in our Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer mini-series!

In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change.  On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU assistant professor Faheem Hussain to learn about how Rohingya refugees are using social technologies and what they can teach the rest of the world about communicating in disasters. Hussain is a researcher whose trajectory was changed when he visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. There, he learned how the community uses an innovative combination of online and offline technologies to create networks to share information.  Resources: Infrastructuring Hope: Solidarity, Leadership, Negotiation, and ICT among the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh Gendered effects of climate change and health inequities among forcibly displaced populations: Displaced Rohingya women foster resilience through technology

In our new miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer, we're working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change.  On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU associate professor David Manuel-Navarrete to talk about his Solar Canoes Against Deforestation project. Working closely with Ecuadoran engineers and the Kichwa and Waorani people, Manuel-Navarrette’s team has been helping to develop a solar-powered canoe that can bring renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure to the Amazon. The story of the canoe offers lessons about how to meaningfully work with communities to understand their needs and co-produce solutions.  Resources:  Learn more about Solar Canoes Against Deforestation and watch this video to see the canoe in action.  Want to learn more about co-producing sustainable climate solutions? Check out some of Manuel-Navarrete’s recent publications. Embodying relationality through immersive sustainability solutions with Indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon.  Fostering horizontal knowledge co-production with Indigenous people by leveraging researchers' transdisciplinary intentions. Leveraging inner sustainability through cross-cultural learning: Evidence from a Quichua field school in Ecuador. Co-producing sustainable solutions in indigenous communities through scientific tourism.