New ways to fund science
As research funding dwindles in the United States and abroad, scientists need to rethink their methods for supporting the most promising projects — and how they communicate the meaningful results of that work to the public, according to Nobel Prize–winning geneticist Paul Nurse. A British biologist whose work on how genes control cell division earned him the prize in 2001, Nurse drew a packed hall of Harvard scientists Feb. 6 to “Making Science Work,” this semester’s Science and Democracy Lecture organized by the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and moderated by Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at HKS. The event was co-sponsored by the Harvard University Center for the Environment, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Harvard Graduate School of Design. In a sometimes controversial, often optimistic lecture, Nurse laid out his thoughts on how research should be funded and on...