Posts by David H. Guston

In the midst of the full-frontal politics that now passes for the nominating conventions of the two major political parties in the United States comes a modest opportunity for sober reflection by the candidates on some crucial but oft-neglected issues – policies dealing with science and technology. The opportunity comes courtesy of a group called ScienceDebate, which in 2008 and now in 2012 succeeded in eliciting from the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates their responses to a set of questions broadly constructed around science and technology policy. CSPO co-director David Guston gives his thoughts on the answers of the two candidates.

A friend of mine in Singapore believes my work on anticipatory governance of emerging technologies barely cloaks an ingrained hostility to science.  Science is science, she thinks and, like Max Weber argues in “Science as a vocation,” democracy doesn’t have much place in it – unless it is perhaps through do-it-yourself approaches like garage synthetic biology.

Sam, not quite three and a half, was stomping through the street-side puddles of an Arizona spring.  In a playful mood, too, I called out the warning, “Watch out for puddle gators!”

Two years ago, I sent out an e-mail to the CSPO community about my dismay at finding in my one-year-old’s “First Word” book at the time that the word “tractor” is, apparently, an incredibly important word despite the fact that < 2% of the US population still lives on a farm.

Answer:  Leonard Cohen, adulterers in Aceh, and Malcolm Casadaban. 

Question:  Who by fire?  Who by stoning?  Who by plague?

I'm sitting in an airplane at 38,000 feet and young children are crying from rows in front and in back of me. If the Exodus was this loud, I might have stayed in Egypt. What would it have been like to be part of that mass, that throng of people? And their animals? And their camels?