Reinvigorating America's Scientific Enterprise

I speak to you this morning as the President’s Science and Technology Advisor, who has been given three interconnected tasks in pursuit of a Golden Age of Innovation: to maintain American technological leadership; to ensure all Americans enjoy the fruit of transformative advances in science and technology; and, a mission I believe we all share, to revitalize America’s scientific enterprise.... To empower America’s researchers to achieve groundbreaking discoveries and to reinvigorate our national science enterprise, we must scrutinize our existing approach and recommit ourselves to best practices. The first step to restoring trust in America’s scientific establishment, and rebuilding a strong foundation for breakthrough discoveries, is a return to Gold Standard Science. Scientific progress advances in community and in the open, as findings are rigorously tested by others. Gold Standard Science is, therefore, first of all, reproducible and transparent. We cannot allow mistakes to persist unaddressed, poisoning the well of apparent knowledge for everyone else seeking to build on a given finding, as in the Alzheimer’s research case. To further enable this, researchers must proactively communicate errors and uncertainties. Only through this openness can each generation stand firmly on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.... At the heart of the practices that make up Gold Standard Science is a suspicion of blind consensus and a celebration of informed dissent. For the crisis of confidence in scientists stems from fear that political biases are displacing the vital search for truth. DEI initiatives, in particular, degrade our scientific enterprise. DEI represents an existential threat to the real diversity of thought that forms the foundation of the scientific community. Diversity of thought is essential to scientific inquiry, empowering us to challenge entrenched assumptions and offer novel approaches to solving complex problems.