Toxic Mix?

Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the contentious relationship between the White House and the scientific community from the FDR administration to the Obama administration. Toxic Mix?: A Handbook of Science and Politics takes a topic very much in the center of public debate in the last decade and places it in a revealing historical context. It follows the often contentious relationship of science and politics from the FDR era to the current Obama administration, highlighting the many highly charged moments when the two were in conflict. Toxic Mix? ranges across the major areas of scientific inquiry with public policy implications, including atomic energy, space science, public health, stem cells, sexual reproduction, environmental science, global warming, and evolution, to examine important events where political imperatives and scientific research were at odds. In addition, the book looks at another important area where politics and science are at cross purposes; immigration—as many of our most accomplished degree earners are foreign born and are unable to stay and work in the United States. A final chapter analyzes the attempts by the early Obama administration to build public policy that embraces science rather than manipulates it.