News & Views item - July 2005

 

 

"Once we come up with a position, I don't want to hide it in the closet." -- Ralph Cicerone, New President of the US National Academy of Sciences. (July 29. 2005)

    The newly installed president of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), Ralph Cicerone, took over from Bruce Alberts just a month ago. This past week following appearances before two US Senate Committees, where he testified regarding the science of climate change, the atmospheric chemist gave interviews to both Nature and Science outlining what will be his approach to his presidency of the NAS.

 

According to Science, "To the first panel, he explained firmly why the National Academies had waded into a fight brewing between an influential House committee chair and scientists whose research has linked rising temperatures with human causes by volunteering to look into the questions that Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) had raised about Michael Mann's work (Science, 22 July, p. 545). In the second, he addressed a legislator's concerns about the economic costs of capping greenhouse gas emissions by ticking off seven ways in which efficient energy use would help average Americans."

 

Peter Raven the NAS member who chaired the committee that nominated Cicerone to be NAS president says that Cicerone's public relations and fundraising skills helped him to succeed Bruce Alberts.

    But he's also known for standing his ground. He told Science:

In my lifetime, I think I've seen a pretty pronounced slippage of the public's enthusiasm for and understanding for science. And I'm going to try to get a number of academy members together and some of our staff to look at our past efforts on communicating and see what we can do better. ...
    I'm [also] really worried about the U.S. science and technology base. ... We have a couple of groups working right now to assemble some measures of how we track our progress and our relative standing around the world. ... We'll be working this one with the National Academy of Engineering and with scientific and engineering society leaders, too.

Cicerone also emphasised, "In the physical sciences, I think there are many discoveries out there waiting to happen, largely because of our new capabilities in measurement. ... I think it was necessary to increase the portfolio for biological and health sciences, and I'm really glad we've done it. But the physical sciences have fallen too far behind."

 

In his interview with Nature he made the point, "Once we come up with a position, I don't want to hide it in the closet. I want it to be out there and useful and maybe a little bit aggressive."

 

How much influence Cicerone's particular research interests influenced the NAS nominating him as president is a moot point because as Nature points out "he is probably best known for his contribution to work in the mid-1970s showing that human activities could damage Earth's protective ozone layer. He also played a prominent role in the debate over banning the use of chlorofluorocarbons to ease ozone depletion."

 

And while he says, "Being an engineer and a scientist, I tend to think that the facts and the data should dominate everything," he admits that he'll "have to get used to the fact that a lot of people don't start that way."

 

But in fact he has had considerable practice in dealing with political masters. From 1998 until taking up his post as NAS president he was chancellor (comparable to Australian Vice-Chancellor) of the University of California, Irvine.