http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/...8/index_np.html

Salon.com

Let's have a presidential debate on science

Can any of the candidates lead America back to the head of the class in science and technology?

By Shawn Lawrence Otto


In the past few weeks, marine biologists working in Papua, New Guinea, spoke about the need to ban fishing in certain parts of the ocean hard hit by rising temperatures. Meanwhile, in the American Midwest, stem cell pioneer James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison announced what may be a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery: how to turn ordinary skin cells into stem cells.

These two events -- separated by some 10,000 miles -- are nonetheless intimately related. Both highlight the single most constant theme of life in the past decades: how science and technology are changing our world and have become inseparable from politics.