Investments in climate science come with an expectation of social benefit. Science policy--decision processes through which individuals and organizations support, manage, and evaluate research--plays an important role in determining those outcomes. Yet the details of how climate science policy actually works have received very little attention amid academic and policy-focused…
Investments in climate science come with an expectation of social benefit. Science policy--decision processes through which individuals and organizations support, manage, and evaluate research--plays an important role in determining those outcomes. Yet the details of how climate science policy actually works have received very little attention amid academic and policy-focused discussions of climate science. This dissertation examines climate science policy with particular attention to how it supports "public values" that justify research investments. It is widely recognized funding for climate science in the US has advanced knowledge considerably in recent decades but failed to produce useful information for decision makers. In Chapter 2, I use a methodological approach known as Public Value Mapping (PVM) to investigate this failure of the science policy system. My results show that science funding institutions have been ineffective at guiding climate science toward desired outcomes because of problematic, but common assumptions about the links between science and societal benefit. The remaining chapters look more closely at the implications of these tacit assumptions, which are held by individuals, and embedded in the organizations that implement climate science policy. Chapter 3 examines the notion that prediction is essential to climate science. Wide acceptance of the "prediction imperative" limits the scope of climate science policy. Chapter 4 examines the interplay of values and assumptions in two recently established organizations in Australia, each supporting research on climate change adaptation. In Chapter 5 I document a widespread assumption in the climate science literature that agreement among multiple models should bolster confidence in their results. This can only be correct if the models are independent of one another. Climate scientists have not demonstrated this to be true, nor have they offered a plausible framework for doing so. This dissertation adds an important dimension to our understanding of how climate science knowledge is produced, while offering constructive and practical recommendations to science policy decision makers working in government programs that fund climate science. Insight from these chapters suggests that an explicit and reflexive focus on values in science policy can be helpful to organizations pursuing science policy innovation.
Leonard Hayflick studied the processes by which cells age during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States. In 1961 at the Wistar Institute in the US, Hayflick researched a phenomenon later called the Hayflick Limit, or the claim that normal human cells can only divide forty to sixty…
Leonard Hayflick studied the processes by which cells age during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States. In 1961 at the Wistar Institute in the US, Hayflick researched a phenomenon later called the Hayflick Limit, or the claim that normal human cells can only divide forty to sixty times before they cannot divide any further. Researchers later found that the cause of the Hayflick Limit is the shortening of telomeres, or portions of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that slowly degrade as cells replicate. Hayflick used his research on normal embryonic cells to develop a vaccine for polio, and from HayflickÕs published directions, scientists developed vaccines for rubella, rabies, adenovirus, measles, chickenpox and shingles.
Although best known for his work with the fruit fly, for which he earned a Nobel Prize and the title "The Father of Genetics," Thomas Hunt Morgan's contributions to biology reach far beyond genetics. His research explored questions in embryology, regeneration, evolution, and heredity, using a variety of approaches.
