[Mb-civic] Preserving enthusiasm for science - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Preserving enthusiasm for science

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  March 25, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

I HAD the pleasure this week of serving on a board of review that 
approved 17-year-old Travis LeSaffre of Melrose as an Eagle Scout in the 
Boston Minuteman Council. For his Eagle leadership project, he and his 
Troop 635 searched last spring for vernal pools for Melrose's 
conservation commission. In the Northeast, vernal pools are small bodies 
of water that collect water during the moist fall and winter, burst to 
life in the spring, then dry out during the summer.

''A vernal pool is very important because the obligate species which 
live in them, primarily for breeding, return generation after generation 
to the same pool, traveling as much as a mile or as little as a hundred 
feet," LeSaffre wrote in his project workbook. ''If the pool is 
destroyed, by either being filled in or paved over or built on top of, 
the obligate species will not move to another marshland. All life -- 
frogs, salamanders, fairy shrimp, caddis flies -- which breed, live, or 
depend on the pool will die and lose their link to the food chain. Once 
these sites are found, documented, and protected, the species that rely 
on them will be safe."

Obligate species? Join the crowd if you suddenly feel as dumb as we did 
on the board. Once we lifted our jaws back up from the floor, we 
blubbered over this young man. Yesterday, I mentioned LeSaffre's project 
to MIT President Susan Hockfield. Her response was, ''It brings tears to 
my eyes."

The curiosity of LeSaffre is precisely what concerns Hockfield these 
days. President Bush is of late touting a new initiative for K-12 math 
and science. But scientists are distraught over Bush's profound 
disregard for science on global warming and a host of other 
environmental protection issues and deep proposed cuts in research and 
student loans.

Citing NASA cuts, Richard Anthes, president of the University 
Corporation for Atmospheric Research and co-chair of a National Academy 
of Sciences committee on earth observation from space, said our system 
of environmental satellites ''is at risk of collapse." Joan Vernikos, 
former director of NASA's life sciences division, said this month that 
NASA research cuts are a ''terrible blow for US science. Right now, the 
US has leadership in space life science. It is not going to have that 
leadership."

Nobel laureate and Princeton physics professor Joseph Taylor this month 
said on Capitol Hill that budget cuts will drive future astronomers to 
other fields or out of science altogether and ''other bright people will 
decide not to enter." Last week, Granger Morgan, the chairman of the 
Environmental Protection Agency's science advisory board, said on the 
hill, ''We all want environmental decision-making to be based on sound 
science. However, our nation is not investing adequately in producing 
that sound science."

Mentioning slated cuts for a doctoral fellowship program, Morgan asked, 
''Where will the next generation of US environmental scientists come from?"

Hockfield, presiding over the world's beacon for science research, is 
equally concerned. She said that the atmosphere where undergraduates and 
graduate students see their professors ''tearing their hair out for 
funding" is ''dispiriting at best and inhibiting of their careers and 
dreams at worst." She said that in the current absence of a White House 
that champions sound science that America is in the midst of a crisis 
with ''a public that cannot discriminate good science from bad science."

LeSaffre and Troop 635 were frustrated early in their search, finding no 
vernal pools in their first attempts. Then, acting on tips from hikers 
and neighbors and searching for telltale frogs and salamanders near 
ponds, in woods, and on a golf course, they eventually found four 
suspected sites. LeSaffre said that the hardest part was getting his 
fellow Scouts to take the search seriously. They did not think it would 
be fun. Once they started seeing the critters, the excitement began to 
build.

Hockfield wonders how long we can keep that excitement if we keep 
cutting the funding for science. She said the national drive for 
scientific learning she felt as a girl growing up in the shadow of 
Sputnik now resides in places like China. She said that she felt a 
hunger for learning and a physical energy in the streets ''that you 
don't feel here." That is why she said she had a tear in her eye over 
LeSaffre. A teenager who obligates himself to finding obligate species 
is a teen bursting with the energy to fuel tomorrow's science.

''It is marvelous to see that kind of passion," Hockfield said. ''We 
have to fertilize those passions."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/25/preserving_enthusiasm_for_science/
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