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Line in the Sand | Open Question

Line in the Sand | SCIENCE CENTER LAUNCHED AT ISRAELI-JORDANIAN BORDER

IN EARLY MARCH, DELEGATIONS from Cornell and Stanford, including presidents Jeffrey Lehman '77 and John Hennessy, traveled to a desolate 150- acre patch of land straddling the Israeli- Jordanian border. Here in the Arava desert, known as the Wadi Araba on the Jordanian side, they broke ground for the Bridging the Rift Center, a multi-milliondollar research facility intended to bring together American, Israeli, and Jordanian scientists to research the genetic code of all living things.

"This has the potential to be one of the biggest science projects of all time," says Ron Elber, an Israeli professor of computer science at Cornell and the center's director. "It could be bigger than putting a man on the moon." Politicians say the venture could also boost Israeli-Jordanian relations with the kind of cooperation they envisioned when the two countries signed a peace treaty a decade ago, and create an oasis of intellectual exchange in an otherwise politically volatile region. Ra'annan Gissin, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, calls the center a "major breakthrough" in grass-roots relations between Israel and Jordan,"and potentially, between Israel and the Arab world."

BTR takes its name from two sources: the physical separation caused by the Jordan Rift Valley that divides the two countries and the ideological discord between them. Inspiration for the center came in 2000 from Israeli businessman Mati Kochavi, who dreamed of a scientific endeavor to bring Jews and Arabs together. Kochavi, chairman of a holding company that invests in technology and energy companies, established the nonprofit in 2002 and has since raised "multi-millions" from private donors.

The three-part groundbreaking celebration in early March--Jordan's King Abdullah II and Israel's Sharon conducted separate ceremonies in Amman and Jerusalem to appease hard-liners in both countries--is a sign of how complex the start-up process has been. The project was kept secret until February, and even put on hold several times, out of fear that publicity about a joint Israeli-Jordanian initiative might create a backlash. Each country had to create new laws to allow the donation of land. "We are grateful that the governments of Israel and Jordan have taken the first steps to show how this collaboration can evolve," says Lehman.

In addition to cooperation from both governments, Kochavi wanted to involve top-tier U.S. schools, to help draw scientists from around the world and create a prestigious educational opportunity for Israelis and Jordanians. He was interested in agriculture; King Abdullah was keen on information technology. So Kochavi turned to Cornell and Stanford because of their strengths in these fields.

Then the brainstorming began: what would the center actually do? Koch-avi wanted a field with growth potential, and one that would attract important scientists and provide fodder for spin-off industries. Information technology wasn't just the king's preference--"it was something easy to place anywhere and has global implications," says Cornell plant sciences professor Steven Tanksley, whose expertise fit well with Kochavi's goals for the center. Then Tanksley suggested what was to become the facility's centerpiece, an idea he called the "Library of Life"--a computer databank of genetic information on everything from humans and animals to plants and microbes.

The center, say Cornell faculty, will surpass in importance GenBank, the database operated by the National Institutes of Health and part of an international collection of DNA information. That's because the Library of Life will not only record genetic codes but also incorporate digitized images and global positioning data to analyze how genes interact with and adapt to their environments and how species co-evolved, allowing scientists to make predictions at the genetic level.

Through BTR, scheduled to open in three to five years, Cornell and Stanford will offer doctoral degrees to Israelis, Jordanians, and others who will pursue coursework on the U.S. campuses and conduct their fieldwork at the center. Tanksley and other Cornell and Stanford experts in genetics, biology, ecology, and computer science will collaborate with Jordanian scientists from the University of Jordan in Amman, the University of King Hussein, and the University of Albalka; Israel is contributing scientists from Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Jordan's Ministry of Education and Ministry of Higher Education are also involved. The schools do not have formal affiliations with the center because, says Kochavi, "we wanted neutral U.S. universities" to be the key players. Plans call for the center to accommodate about 150 people initially and eventually up to 1,000.

Now the academic committee, led by Stanford biology professor Marc Feldman, is divvying up duties: Stanford researchers will likely collect data while Cornell scientists will identify sampling needs and develop computer modeling. Organizers hope that their research will eventually foster spin-off enterprises, creating tangible medical and economic benefits such as new treatments for genetic diseases.

The Arava site fifty miles south of the Dead Sea was chosen for its relative safety and quiet, far from Israeli-Palestinian clashes on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Additionally, says Feldman, the area is "perfect for researching what happens in extreme environments--places with high salinity and high temperatures." For Elber, the center's location has symbolic significance, too. "The Middle East is the place of the birth of civilization," he says. "Perhaps this could help the Middle East become the center of civilization again."

-- Tamar Morad

Open Question| HAS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION DISTORTED SCIENTIFIC FINDINGS?

on February 18, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a statement charging the Bush Administration with the systematic suppression and distortion of scientific findings in several areas, from mercury emissions to climate change, biomedical research, and nuclear weaponry. The statement and a thirty-eight-page background report, which made headlines in the New York Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the Boston Globe, were based on a year-long investigation of the public record, internal government reports, and interviews with current and former government officials. "There is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush Administration is unprecedented," wrote the sixty signators, among them twenty Nobel laureates and former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, and National Institutes of Health, who called for a response from the administration, Congress, and other scientists. "The public must also voice its concern about this issue to its elected representatives," they wrote, "letting them know that censorship and distortion of scientific knowledge is unacceptable in the federal government and must be halted."

UCS co-founder and Cornell physics professor emeritus Kurt Gottfried drafted parts of the report, and in the weeks after its release represented the organization in dozens of interviews.

How did UCS get started?
I was at MIT as a visiting professor in 1968-69; this was the time of the Tet offensive. The faculty were really focused on national policy. And the nuclear arms race was mounting rapidly at that point, so we formed UCS and had a very big teach-in at MIT. That melted away pretty quickly. Then in the early Seventies,Henry Kendall, who had been my roommate as a graduate student and went on to win a Nobel prize in physics, was asked to look into safety issues connected with a nuclear power plant that was being built in Massachusetts. Henry found that there were some serious problems.He used the name of UCS and formed a volunteer group at MIT to look into this. It turned out that the problems Henry had discovered were well-known to the Atomic Energy Commission but kept quiet. That ended up actually causing the creation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which exists to this day. That was the origin of UCS. It branched out in the Eighties, especially into missile defense during the Reagan period with Star Wars. And then in the late Eighties, we went into climate change. Now we have offices in Cambridge, Washington, D.C., and Berkeley and a staff of eighty.

How can you maintain scientific objectivity while engaged in such activism?
Our critique of missile defense, the Star Wars program, was based on technical assessments.We always try to have really top-flight people involved. In the case of missile defense , we had Cornell physicist Hans Bethe, who had worked on the program since people thought of it back in the mid-Fifties. The Johnson Administration, a Democratic administration, decided to deploy a missile defense that Hans knew wasn't going to work. So he went public with his opposition.

We're working with objective analysis in a situation that involves politics. Missile defense is an especially clean example because people are proposing things that don't quite defy the laws of physics but can come damn close. Or genetically modified food--the question of whether these crops can leave the place where they're growing and that you'll be eating pharmaceuticals you don't need; that's a fairly technical issue. When you get to something like nuclear proliferation, it's more of a mix of technology and policy.

Are today's young professors as involved as you were?
Yes. But the number has always been very small. Cornell has actually been more into this than most universities. I think that's because there are role models here, Hans Bethe being the preeminent one. He wasn't just a great physicist; he was a public servant, head of the theory division during the Manhattan Project, and a highlevel consultant to the government. He took his responsibilities to the citizens of this country very seriously. Now, for the younger folks like me, we were all students of people who had worked for the Manhattan Project. I got my PhD a decade after Hiroshima. So we felt a real responsibility for dealing with the nuclear issue.

During the Eighties, when we had a lot of activity at Cornell because of both Star Wars and the nuclear buildup during the Reagan Administration, we held some teach-ins and activities here, organized by UCS in Cambridge, and they were run by several of our graduate students. Physicists Lisbeth Gronlund, PhD '89, David Wright, PhD '83, and Ed Lyman, PhD '92, and plant pathologist Jane Rissler, PhD '77, all work at UCS.

What responsibility do scientists have to monitor how their work is represented?
There are different ways scientists are misrepresented. We're talking here about politicians misrepresenting that work for political purposes--not because they didn't understand it, but because they think presenting it in a distorted way serves their political purposes. Of course, they're not representing any individual scientist's work. If we're talking about something like climate change, we're talking about the work of thousands of people over many years. So you can't say, "Dr. X has been misrepresented." But as a community, we do have a responsibility. Science is a double-edged sword. Long ago when nuclear weapons were the only weapons of mass destruction, people would say, "How can you work in nuclear physics? Look what's happening!" And I used to say, "It's unfortunate what's happening. If you go to medical school, you might eventually develop some biological weapons. Should we stop doing medicine?".

What should politicians do?
Science cannot be the only factor in making political decisions. The scientific community may give you very good advice, but you just can't afford to act on it. Or the president doesn't have the political support to pass the legislation. What is essential is that the decisions be made on the basis of valid science. And that when the government is advocating a policy, selling it to people--either to Congress or the public--it do so without misrepresenting the science.

How can scientists help?
Scientists have a responsibility to public education. In this society, we lead an unusually privileged life. I can say what I want; I've got tenure. If no one ever exercises the freedom to speak, it becomes meaningless. Somebody who works for the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control does not have that privilege, can't speak out; he could lose his job. The academic community has a particular responsibility, because of its freedom to speak out. That's certainly the value behind the creation of UCS.

Some critics saw the release of your report, just as the 2004 presidential race heated up, as evidence of partisanship.
Well, the timing was accidental. People think that we're much smarter than we are. Our agriculture people had a report on the contamination of GM seeds with natural seeds in this country. It had very good coverage also, not in the front pages, but in the business section because it involves agribusiness. The report on the Bush Administration was rather late in coming out.We'd hoped to put it out in January--we didn't want to interfere with the seed report. I think the science report got so much play because it came after David Kay's statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The credibility of the administration had become a hot issue.

How do you evaluate the global warming debate?
The scientific assessment of climate change has become progressively more certain, but it's not anything like the accuracy with which you can deal with missile defense. It depends not only on the climate; it depends on what we do, what we project the temperature for 2050 will be, and how we will behave as human beings. It's very complicated. The administration tends to play the uncertainties in one direction. Uncertainties are not one-sided. There are not Republican uncertainties and Democratic uncertainties. In this case, we assert that the administration has quite systematically misrepresented the situation. Polls are showing that the number of people who believe that global warming is happening has gone down quite a bit since Bush went into office.

Is that the fault of the media or the administration?
Both. It is the responsibility of any administration to speak truthfully, period, and not to engage in this sort of game. And the media have a responsibility to cover issues that are of great long-term importance but may not be spectacular at the moment. The media also have a responsibility to question statements by politicians that may be incorrect. Media tend to present information from both sides equally, even when one side has been more completely documented. That has happened consistently with climate change.

-- Sharon Tregaskis

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