Illustration by Alice Cho
You really have to feel for physicist John Marburger, President Bush's long-serving and controversial science adviser. Not only was Marburger appointed very late in 2001—seemingly as an afterthought—but when he finally got the job, it came with a diminished title. Unlike his most recent predecessors, Marburger was not named "Assistant to the President" on science matters. Furthermore, many of Bush's most contested science policy decisions, on issues like embryonic stem cell research and climate change, had been announced before Marburger achieved his official Senate confirmation. As a result, the physicist often found himself defending administration stances even though he hadn't been at the table when some of them were set.
The top democratic presidential contender, Hillary Clinton, has officially pledged to right the wrongs against Marburger—or at least, against his office. If elected, Hillary says, her science adviser will be named early, get the "Assistant to the President" title back, and report directly to her. That's great for the science adviser post—and once again, terrible for Marburger. He may wind up being book-ended in history by advisers who had much more power and influence than he himself possessed.
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Irrespective of Marburger's feelings, though, we should welcome a national dialogue about how to restore the stature of his post—which, as the University of California-Merced science historian Gregg Herken put it to me in a recent phone conversation, has reached "a kind of nadir" under the Bush administration. But if we're going to contemplate changes to the presidential science adviser's office, they should come not merely in response to the Marburger experience, but also in reaction to how American science and culture alike have changed in recent decades. While it would be easy for any president to name a less embattled adviser than Marburger, what's tougher is recognizing precisely what kind of adviser—and what kind of advice—that president most needs today.
While its origins stretch back to the World War II effort, science advising did not become an official part of the US leadership package until the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. The crisis following the Soviet launch of Sputnik led Eisenhower to pull scientists to his breast and set up a formal advisory capacity. As MIT president James Killian, the first science adviser, described his role in an influential 1957 memo, it would be to keep the president informed about science and, more specifically, about the government's scientific research apparatus—particularly with respect to military matters. But the science adviser would also brief the executive on "future trends or developments in the area [of] science and technology," work with the National Science Foundation on funding scientific research, and generally seek to maintain "good and close relations with the US scientific and engineering community."
At the outset, the science adviser post enjoyed a high status. The Vietnam War, however, drove a wedge between scientific academia and policymaking elites. In 1973, President Nixon fired his science advisers outright over disagreements about the viability of the Supersonic Transport program and other matters. More controversies erupted during the Reagan administration, when adviser George Keyworth came under intense criticism from scientists after staunchly supporting Reagan's "Star Wars" space-based missile defense initiative. (Marburger's defenses of George W. Bush on subjects like creationism and climate science strongly evokes the Keyworth experience.)
In the context of today's White House, the science adviser post can be thought of as somewhat parallel to—but, at present, considerably less influential than—that of the national security adviser. After all, just think how many more Americans recognize the name "Condi Rice" than the name "Jack Marburger." Indeed, even today, one could argue that the science advising position has failed to come out of the shadow of military policy and stand on its own.