Yesterday’s post on the High Quality Research Act (HQRA) managed to strike a small nerve, so it’s worth pointing out how others have run with the idea in directions I hadn’t imagined. For which I’m grateful. It’s an excellent counter to the political back-and-forth that’s been going on between Representative Smith’s office and the scientific community.
J. Britt Holbrook responded to the Dan Sarewitz column about the proposed bill by discussing its impacts on freedom. In case you find that a little odd, Holbrook is a philosopher. For what it’s worth, I’m on the same page with Holbrook on how the bill will or won’t help demonstrate that funded research supports the national interests. Short version – if expert review is being done as it’s supposed to, then the added layer of review by the National Science Foundation Director would be redundant. (Whether the review is being done as it should – checking both intellectual merit and broader impacts – is a reasonable question that isn’t being engaged in the current contretemps over the bill.)
Sharon over at A New Century of Forest Planning picked up on a different part of the certification requirements in the bill. She’s concerned about duplicative research, and believes that review panels are not as well informed as they could be about similar research in the field. We are engaged in a dialogue over duplicative research in the comments, please come join us.
And finally, I want to draw a parallel between the tensions over the High Quality Research Act and recent remarks by the new Government Chief Scientific Adviser in the U.K., Sir Mark Walport. I picked up on those comments in a recent column by Alice Bell in The Guardian (who is very much worth reading). She mentions criticism of Walport’s remarks that a prime function of his role in government was to “ensure science translates into economic growth.” It’s included as part of a larger argument to not accept science policy expertise in government uncritically. I mention it hear to note that regardless of whether or not Walport is correct, Representative Smith likely believes that his role is to help ensure that science translates into economic growth. And I think people will have a harder time making that argument against an elected political representative than against an appointed scientific adviser.
I’ll close with one of Alice’s better quotes from the column. “[I]f you don’t recognise how routinely political science is, you just get played by those who do.” The tussles around this bill suggest that at least some of the players involved risk learning this the hard way.
