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It may be 25 years old, but the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has yet to establish a strong identity in Washington. That was one recurrent theme at a conference held on 1 May to celebrate the OSTP's anniversary.

John Porter says scientists need to be heard. Credit: MIT

John Porter, a science advocate and former Illinois congressman, told the meeting that most members of Congress “would be unlikely to have ever heard of the Office of Science and Technology Policy or to know the initials OSTP. They would probably recognize that the president has a science adviser, but few would be able to identify him or her.”

Held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the meeting attracted seven former presidential science advisers, including 91-year-old William Golden, who served as the first real science adviser to Harry Truman just after the Second World War. The position persisted in various forms before it was institutionalized in the 1976 law that established the OSTP as a permanent office, the director of which also serves as the president's science adviser.

Porter said that the low visibility of the OSTP placed an even stronger onus on scientists to step forward and make themselves heard in policy debates. MIT president Charles Vest agreed, calling for a new generation of “citizen scientists to explain what we do and why it is important”. Changes in education are needed to prepare scientists for this additional role, he said.

Some of the meeting's organizers had hoped that the new administration of President George W. Bush would appoint a science adviser in time for the event, but it did not. Porter noted that Bush has already made decisions on matters such as the Kyoto Protocol and missile defence without input from a presidential science adviser or from the OSTP.

The lack of a science adviser at this stage of the administration is not unprecedented, meeting attendees were told, but it still concerned some of the speakers. Golden said it mattered “because science and technology runs through the fabric of so many issues on both domestic and foreign fronts. Functioning without a science adviser,” he said, “is like playing baseball without a full team.”