Hispanic Enterprise - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 28) Q &A THE DOCTOR IS IN JOHN MARBURGER, III, THE PRESIDENT’S SCIENCE ADVISOR, WEIGHS IN ON POLITICS, CLIMATE AND TECHNOLOGY. By Sandra McElwaine ohn 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 28 J 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. 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: 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’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. Nanotechnology enables us to make all kinds of new things. 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 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 December/January 2008 HISPANIC ENTERPRISE
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