Autumn 2007

UC Berkeley and the surrounding National Labs are some of the premier nanotechnology research institutions in the world. In addition, Berkeley is the first government entity to have regulated nanotechnology. The scope for debate between the promotion and regulation of this exciting new scientific development is huge. The day-long event organized for this Sunday will discuss the potential of nanotechnology for solar panels and the potential toxicity of nanoparticles. It is true that large-scale nanotechnology is still a few years away- but as future policy-makers shouldn't we try to keep ahead of the trends? If not now, are we more...

Public policy is a professional discipline, combining the spirit of academic inquiry with the enthusiasm of political activism. As the year comes to an end and we each disappear into exams, it is easy to forget why it is fun to be a student of public policy. As we launch this semester’s PolicyMatters – today in its fifth year! – I would like to highlight the efforts of some past and current colleagues to both push, develop and challenge their ideas in the classroom and then put them into practice. We are in an election year and several GSPP students...

I would like to bring to everyone's attention the just found and published diaries of Robert Hooke, a polymath contemporary with Sir Isaac Newton who, as a scientist in residence at the Royal Academy, kept a detailed record of their proceedings. The entire manuscript has been made freely available to the world by the Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust of the United Kingdom. The technology is amazing and is really worth trying out. It is hoped that analysis of this manuscript will provide rich information on some of the many scientific controversies of the time. The late 17th century...

Google Inc. is bankrolling a $30 million out-of-this-world prize to the first private company that can safely land a robotic rover on the moon and beam back a gigabyte of images and video to Earth, the Internet search leader said Thursday. Many interesting things come out of this new prize. A classmate commented "It will be interesting if they can get this done before NASA, and potentially for about 1/10th the price". 'They' are the now anonymous but very well funded inventors. But what counts as the price? I would include the cost of invention, in addition to the $30m....

The Nation has published an article by Professor David Kirp, of the Goldman School of Public Policy, on the Supreme Court's recent decision on race and school choice. For more background on this topic, read what The Washington Post has to say about it....

Craig Venter, the force behind the private effort to complete the Human Genome Project, is again pushing the boundaries of science in unexpected ways. He has filed for a patent for Synthia, a group of genes that he thinks are essential for life. He thinks that if these genes are left alone they will evolve into viable life. As reliable as Venter, the ETC Group of Canada is leading calls against the patent. A google search returns little more information than this. Maybe public reactions to science are becoming predictable. Maybe new actors are needed to lead these debates, or...

Nicole Farkouh, MPP candidate 2008 at the Goldman School, is working in Nepal all summer for The Advocacy Project. This non-profit organization campaigns for peace in Nepal, a country recovering from 10 years of civil conflict. A beautiful though terribly poor country, Nepal descended into violence as Maoist guerillas declared war on the monarchic government. The conflict has caused huge human suffering and postponed any real economic and social development, although some political development is finally occurring. Last year the rebels and government signed an agreement by which political reforms are being made and peace slowly returning to the country....

A recent Supreme Court ruling is generating some interesting and important discussion on the role of patents in innovation and economic growth. Some sectors see the ruling as "an attack on patents" that will hurt small business, devalue patents and retard innovation and growth, as described by Small Times. The Boston Globe on the other hand sees it as a victory for software companies, implying a certain loss to consumers. The ruling changes Supreme Court thinking on what makes an invention obvious. If an invention is obvious, then it should not be protected by a patent (check here for a...

A few months ago Berkeley and BP signed what may be the largest public-private research partnership ever. Over the next 10 years BP will provide $500 million to the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) which will conduct basic and applied research into the “problems of global energy production, particularly the development of next-generation, carbon-neutral transportation fuels”. As examples of industry penetrating into research are increasingly common, the effects this has on what research is funded and how the results are ‘distributed’ are increasingly being scrutinized. While science has never been as isolated from business as we have believed during much of...

The University of California is financed through taxes allotted to it by the Legislature in Sacramento. This money finances 10 very different campuses. Berkeley is the oldest, founded in 1866, and Merced the newest, opened in 2005. While the rationale or need for so many campuses is a contested and interesting issue, it is also interesting to reflect on how these differences may impact on the student experience. During a recent trip to UC Irvine I witnessed how profound the physical differences are. While Berkeley feels like ‘spontaneous order’ (to borrow Hayek’s phrase), Irvine is carefully planned. Berkeley is full...

The regulation of certain scientific and technological applications sometimes relies on building scenarios that range from ‘worst case’ to ‘best case’. Scenarios like this make it easier to make comparisons and balance costs and benefits of different kinds of regulation. At one point in the late 1990s and early 2000s the scenarios around genetically modified organisms (GMOs) seemed to range from apocalypse to utopia; from novels like Crichton’s Next to scientists’ convictions that GMOs would provide cures to intractable health conditions. While the controversy has died down, two events this week remind us that there continue to be risks of...

With Animal Liberation (1973), Peter Singer launched the animal rights movement. Twenty years later, a professor at Princeton and one of the most influential philosophers of our time, Singer continues to play the traditional intellectual in a flagrant, almost obtuse way. He does not miss an opportunity to unsettle our ‘self-evident’ truths and challenge our thought processes. In sum, his writings will not leave you indifferent and I highly recommend them. On January 26 Singer wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in favor of medical intervention to keep a severely mentally impaired 9-year old girl, Ashley, from...

On January 24th I had the opportunity to attend the Fred Friendly Seminar series Nano: the Power of Small. This was a panel debate on the what sorts of questions government needs to ask when evaluating the responsibilities a new company working with nanotechnology needs to assume. Each panelist played a role in the political process: Christine Daniel, Deputy City Manager of Fremont, was mayor, with two advisors, Andrew Maynard of the Woodrow Wilson Center and Clayton Teague, Director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office. Richard Denison, of Environmental Defense, was a city council member representing green groups and Kristen...

In a recent three part article, Charles Murray defends the idea that university and mandatory schooling are not for everyone, and that a gifted few should be selected on the basis of their IQ to attend school and university (read part 1, part 2, and part 3). Beyond the many caveats with which IQ should be treated -for good responses see here and here- as David Kirp points out in his article, this is as much about quality education as it is about the kind of society we want to live in.

In 1964 Phillip Converse wrote his ground breaking work, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics", in which he challenged the idea that most people have structured, coherent opinions on which they base their political decisions. Forty years later this topic still seems to be fascinating to some and scary to others: a recent book, "The Myth of the Rational Voter", by Bryan Caplan attempts to shed new light on the issue, while Arnold Kling worries about "Two Strategies for avoiding Truth". However, to what extent is it (or was it ever) reasonable to expect that the 'average citizen'...

On January 11th, the House of Representatives for the second time approved – it was first passed in 2006, and subsequently vetoed – a bill to allow federal support for research using stem cells extracted from leftover embryos that fertility clinics would otherwise discard, in an attempt to end a funding moratorium initiated in 2001 by the Bush administration. Stem cell research involves extracting stem cells from human embryos that are a few days old. The embryos are destroyed in the process, raising important ethical questions about the sanctity of human life and whether it is appropriate to use human...