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Election 2020: The Stakes for Science
Scientific American’s editor in chief sets up this week’s series of podcasts about how this election could affect science, technology and medicine.
Image of the Americas at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership satellite in April and October 2012.
Election Day is November 3rd. In this week before the election, we’re rolling out a special series of short podcasts in which we’ll look at how the election could affect some major areas of science. To set up what you’ll hear the rest of the week, I spoke to Scientific American’s editor in chief Laura Helmuth.
“There’s a lot to talk about. The election is almost upon us; people are voting already. And some of the biggest issues that will be decided by this election have to do with science and health and the environment and our future energy structure and climate change. And it’s an urgent time to talk about these subjects.”
And we’re not endorsing your candidate in this case. We are just laying out the terms of what the stakes are for these scientific areas in this election.
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“Absolutely. I mean, there are a lot of reasons to vote for one candidate or, for some people, the other. But really, if you’re interested in scientific subjects, there will be a lot of different directions the country will go in—one direction or the other—depending on this election. And we just want to lay out what the stakes are.”
And what do we say to the inevitable audience member who just doesn’t want to hear about politics when they come to a science venue?
“That is a good question. And I think all of us right now, especially when there’s so much politics in the air, it’s really refreshing to come somewhere and to think about black holes or the age of the universe or how dinosaurs evolved. And we will continue to be talking about those things. If politics settles down, we’ll be doing probably more of those than we have in the past few years. But at this moment, the future of the research enterprise is really on the line. And we just think it’s important for people to know how dramatically one administration or another can influence the way that scientific collaboration happens, the way science is communicated, what the priorities are for what should be studied and how.”
—Steve Mirsky
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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