Nine governance choices pertaining to science

Science has played an influential role for at least the past 70 years in helping us to frame public policy in many areas of concern. But in recent years science itself has become an area of concern. This is partly because scientific theories can be difficult to understand, and partly because the evidence for evaluating them is rarely as definitive as we might hope. But it is also because scientific inquiry has increasingly come under the influence of a variety of factors that many people regard as non-scientific. Our society today is straddling several different ideas about what science is and what its primary goals should be-and the time has come to begin a public discussion to explore the different concerns that people might have about science and the different governance possibilities for addressing them. This editorial presents the main results of two panels that met on a monthly basis in Washington, DC from August 2005 through March 2007 to explore their concerns about science and to develop conceptual governance possibilities for public policy pertaining to it. The eight possibilities described below are not intended to be planks in a consistent policy platform for science. It would, indeed, be impossible to consistently adopt them all at once. But each possibility reflects serious concerns about science, and each of them merits further public discussion.