THE DoCTOR is in

John Marburger, iii, the president’s science advisor, weighs in on politics, climate and technology.

John Marburger, III, came to Washington, D.C. shortly after 9/11 to serve as science advisor to the president, and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Now, after six years, he holds the distinction of being the longest tenured—or as he puts it ”the longest surviving”—scientific expert to have worked for any U.S. president.
Before joining the White House, Marburger, a 67-year-old former physics professor with a special interest in laser research, headed the Brookhaven National Laboratory and was president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island.
“I think it’s a great job,” he says of his present position, ”because it is less political than many other jobs in the White House and because science is respected in general and has bi-partisan support in every quarter.”

HE: What is your biggest challenge right now?
JM: To try to create a coherent federal science program. There are lots of things that make it hard. First, there’s no one agency that funds science and scientific research. We have a National Science Foundation, but that has only a small fraction of the money available. The budget for the National Institutes of Health dwarfs everything else; it is by far the largest science agency. We have NASA, the Department of Energy, we have the National Geological Survey, NOA and a lot of the other agencies.

HE: Why does the National Institutes of Health [NIH] have the largest budget ?
JM: Health is an important issue. Health research is regarded as an important responsibility. And also, there are research opportunities in biomedicine, or medically oriented biology, that just soared after the discovery of DNA and the development of techniques to see inside the body and the brain. So we have [through NIH] a lot of opportunities to make discoveries that could help with healthcare.

HE: What are your highest priorities in advancing science and technology?
JM: Right now my highest priorities are to achieve a balanced science budget and to understand what areas need more funding, authority or whatever.

HE: What is your budget?
JM: Well, let me explain something. I am part of the staff of the White House, so I am an assistant to the president, not directly responsible for spending money, so I have no budget ... I don’t give grants or do any research. What I do is help the president in his job of managing all these agencies that I’ve mentioned already. Each one of them has a little piece of the science budget. (The total proposed budget for 2008 is $142.7 billion.)

HE: What’s ahead in technology?
JM: Nano-technology is one of the buzzwords of the future, and people continually ask me what it is. I used to love the word because it was exciting. Now I hate it because it refers to so many different things. It really refers to a capability—to actually be able to see the atomic structure of materials and things. A cell, a piece of glass, a fabric—we now have the ability to see with special microscopes and imaging techniques those materials one atom at a time. We can also change their atomic structure. So now we can put those atoms together in ways that don’t occur naturally in nature. Nano-technology enables us to make all kinds of new things.

HE: How will this affect the world economically?
JM: Since virtually everything is made of atoms, everything can be improved. Like synthetic fibers, which require a lot of chemical agents. If we had better ways of doing those chemical reactions, we might be able to reduce the effect on the environment and reduce the health- and side-effects to the workers, and have a cheaper product. Nano-technology could make a huge difference in the chemical industry; even climate change could be affected by new ways of extracting carbon dioxide from the exhaust gases of coal-fired power plants, which are terrible sources of CO2 and contribute to global warming. And there may well be ways of chemically separating out the CO2 and doing something with the chemical rather than letting it go up into the atmosphere.

HE: Where do you stand on global warming vis a vis the president’s policy?
JM: If I really disagreed, if I thought that there was something going on that actually contradicted what science tell us, it’s my responsibility to say “This isn’t right.” One of my responsibilities is on behalf of the president, to get the best scientific advice and make sure the policy-makers know about it in the White House, from the president on down. So, I construe my job as telling it like it is from a science point of view.

HE: What is climate change?
JM: The climate is changing, we’re producing too much CO2, it’s contributing to the warming of the atmosphere and leading to all sorts of effects, both good and bad. In the long run we know we have to stop producing so much CO2, mostly from fossil fuels.
It’s ultimately an energy problem because the human contributions to global change are created by the burning of fossil fuels which are taking carbon out of the ground where it’s been for millions of years and putting it up into the atmosphere, adding to what’s already there. It’s a greenhouse gas and it accumulates and stays in the atmosphere, so we have to produce less of it. Now the science part is easy; it’s what you do that’s hard. How are we going to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere when everybody depends on fossil fuels for energy?
The task of limiting or reducing the carbon production from energy use is really daunting, and that is the hard problem. From the beginning I haven’t had any problem with the science of climate change.

HE: Meaning you agree?
JM: Sure, yes. The debate or the controversy over the science of climate change, I think, is largely a media-created phenomenon, maybe politics and media, because they like a controversy and the public debate about climate change is highly polarizing [and] full of vitriolic and emotions.
It’s over-simplified on both sides. People feel like we have to do something right away—you can’t really do it, you have to have a strategy that brings in all of the energy producers around the world.

HE: Is that possible?
JM: I don’t know, but most people think you have to try, and I believe that the scientific evidence that we’re producing too much CO2 is ultimately going to convince everybody that they have to change their ways. Just to use energy efficiently, buy a Prius, turn off your lights and turn down your thermostat—that’s not enough. You really have to get at the huge power plants and the huge transportation industry and have a combination of policy measures and incentives on the one hand, and technology alternatives on the other.

HE: What really intrigues you about the future?
JM: I’m a physicist, and the frontiers of physics are fascinating to me. The idea that complicated things can be made out of simple ones. There’s a mystery there ... I think that’s what excites young people about science and nature, and we have to keep that alive to make sure we keep getting scientists in the future.