Science Matters

This May, the Institute’s Heath, Medicine and Society Program launched a new initiative, Science & Society, to address critical gaps in the public’s trust in and understanding of scientific advances. Science & Society will focus on a number of scientific disciplines—including the biomedical sciences, the natural sciences, data science, and technology—and will explore how these fields intersect with American and global societies and how they can improve the human condition for all. Aaron Mertz, a biophysicist who worked previously as a researcher at Rockefeller University, serves as director. The program kicked off with a book talk featuring Michael Lubell, the Mark W. Zemansky Professor of Physics at the City College of New York and author of Navigating the Maze: How Science and Technology Policies Shape America and the World. “The post–World War II era was an American era,” Lubell, who will chair the program’s advisory board, said at the talk. “That’s no longer true. We as a nation have lost sight of what we have accomplished and, even more important, how much there is still left to be done—and if we don’t somebody else will.”

aspeninstitute.org/science