No doubt we’ll be discussing the SOTU in days to come, but for now on a different subject, Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment organized a congressional briefing last week on what science is and is not, according to a story in the New York Times today.

So now, when scientific questions pervade legislation on issues like climate change and stem cell research, there is growing concern that Congressional misunderstanding can produce misguided policy. To fight such misunderstanding, Mr. Boehlert and others sponsored the Jan. 23 briefing, organized by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard. Capitol Hill has briefings by the dozen every year in which industry, academic and activist groups address diverse topics related to science. Some criticize these briefings as little more than showboating. But Mr. Boehlert, like many others, thinks they are “absolutely” useful. And the briefing was unusual in that its subject was not avian flu, the budget for NASA or any other relatively narrow issue, but rather “how science works.”

Harvard’s Sheila Jasanoff, a widely read and respected scholar of science studies, took a less positive view of the session, one that I largely share:

Not everyone thought defining science was even possible, in such a short session. “It makes me extremely tired that they are going to do this again,” said Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who has written widely on how science policy is made. “There is no easily graspable definition.”

Some interesting quotes from the New York Times article:

The worth of any scientific finding, Dr. [Donald] Kennedy [editor of Science] told the crowd, is not the prominence of the researchers responsible, the prestige of their institutions or the authority of their funding agencies, but whether other researchers achieve the same results. Dr. Kennedy did not refer explicitly to a scandal that is roiling science, and Science — the discovery that highly praised cloning experiments in South Korea survived the magazine’s peer review process to win publication, only to be declared fraudulent. But he said: “Peer review is not a process that guarantees truth. If it were, no one would ever repeat experiments.” Replication, he said, “is the ultimate test of truth in science.”

I am sure this will be seized upon by the opponents still beating that dead horse involved in the “hockey stick” debate, with one side claiming that other studies have found the same results as the controversial earlier study and the other side claiming that study has yet to be fully replicated. Both sides are probably right.

The following excerpt caused me to raise an eyebrow and is pretty telling about science in politics:

Dr. [Harvey V.] Fineberg [president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences] spoke of the way scientific knowledge was turned into information useful to society, a process that he said the National Academy encouraged through its regular production of reports on topics as diverse as national security and arsenic in drinking water. The academy’s reports are influential, he said, because of its reputation for integrity, because of its avoidance of conflict of interest, because researchers who produce its findings are volunteers and because “nothing is kept back.”

Now if an official from just about any other organization such as tobacco companies, big oil, environmental groups, etc. stated that their group had no conflicts of interest, it would pass the laugh test. For some reason, scientists get a free pass, even in the face of ample evidence to the contrary, which we’ve documented here in abundance.

If Congress wants to learn about how science works, it should of course talk to scientists, but it should also talk to people whose expertise lies in how science works. When might we see a congressional briefing starring Shelia Jasanoff?