Informed Policy Requires Informed Policy-makers
Authors: Theodore Friedmann
Journal: Molecular Therapy (2006)

Making and implementing wise public policy is difficult. Lawmakers and policymakers struggle with conflicting legitimate, and sometimes not so legitimate expectations and demands from rival constituencies. As difficult as the process is under the best of circumstances and with the noblest of intentions of most policy-makers—especially in areas of science and technology—it becomes an exercise in futility if the required knowledge does not exist, if policy-makers chose not to base policy decisions on knowledge and facts, or if they have inadequate access to knowledge. The solution to the first problem is for the society to support more vigorous research and knowledge acquisition. The second problem is corrected by selection of different policy-makers, as in elections. The third is for interested constituencies to ensure that they build and fill information conduits to feed relevant knowledge to those charged with making public policy. In the recent past, the United States benefited from the existence of a number of important mechanisms to provide technical information to policy-makers. These included communications with professional scientific societies, their aggregate public voice such as that through the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the on again-off again existence of a national bioethics enterprise and of course, the services mounted by lawmakers who solicit advice from expert groups. Chief among these was the now defunct Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a body created by the US Congress that provided nonpartisan advice to lawmakers on many areas of emerging science and technology. It is not possible to document effectively the extent to which many OTA reports contributed to enlightened policy decisions and lawmaking—reports are heeded or ignored for many reasons. However, it is reasonable to assume that lawmakers who availed themselves of these valuable background sources would have been better prepared for their duty to serve the interests of the public. In 1995, the OTA died an untimely, fiscal and ideological death, leaving in its wake a less effective set of mechanisms to shepherd policy-makers. Difficult societal questions that could have benefited from careful and fact-based public attention—such as stem cell biology, man-made climate change, the scientifically nonsensical “discussion” of intelligent design, the care of the terminally ill in our society—have all since received sloppy public policy attention. Our society needs a renewed commitment to fact-based public policy development. That renewal should include a strengthened effort by scientific bodies and societies to establish more effective contacts with policy-makers, not just to press their narrow self-serving interests, but also to create a climate in which policy-makers come to be more informed about technical and scientific developments. OTA may be dead, but our country obviously needs an OTA-like function to ensure that policy-makers have information made available to them in ways that fill the very significant gaps in the important but clearly inadequate roles that our professional societies are currently playing. The ASGT has committed to forging a closer and collegial interaction with policy-makers to provide information on the advances in our field. We incorporated a congressional liaison session on Capitol Hill during the recent 9th Annual Meeting, and we plan to continue an informational exchange with political leadership. The Society hopes that many of our companion scientific societies and patient advocacy groups will also increase their effort to educate, and yes—influence—our policy leaders in matters stemming from our expertise in science and technology. Our leaders need us more than ever and it would be very encouraging to hear an admission from them that they require and even heed accurate and factual scientific input when they design and implement national public policy. Call it what you will, but bring back an OTA-like function into our public policy life. Facts should not be unwelcome in the public discourse of science and technology.