Science's Editor in Chief Optimistically Sees the US President-Elect as an Experimentalist. (December 5, 2008)

Bruce Alberts, Science's editor-in-chief  is looking on the bright side of the deflation of the US and world financial bubble in this week's editorial because it is "providing a rare opportunity for a rethinking of priorities everywhere... the new sense of reality could be beneficial, by stimulating much broader recognition of the centrality of science and engineering for successful modern societies."

He goes on to focus on "a belief that increased fundamental knowledge about the natural world will lead to human progress... The astonishingly productive process by which new knowledge is built [e.g.] combining old knowledge in unpredictable ways... A second valuable attitude is a focus on long-term consequences. The understandings of the natural world derived from science often allow us to predict the future... [and] a third valuable characteristic of most scientists and engineers is an emphasis on discovering what works without reference to ideology."

Then Professor Albert's gets to his tag line: "When queried about how he would approach the world's economic crisis, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama responded (on 16 November 2008 on CBS's 60 Minutes): '… I hope my team can … experiment in order to get people working again … I think if you talk to the average person right now that they would say, "… we do expect that if something doesn't work that they're going to try something else until they find something that does." And, you know, that's the kind of common-sense approach that I want to take when I take office.' A very promising start to a hopeful new era."

Some years ago this year's Nobel Laureate in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times that after George W Bush and his Neocons got through messing up the world the grown ups would have to take charge and clean up the disaster.

We shall see whether or not Mr Obama and his team will prove to be that cohort of "adults"; if not, the world has a problem.