Monday, January 20, 2014

Franklin's List: Helping Scientists Become Politicians

GEN has an excellent and timely article on an emerging political group, Franklin's List, that's helping scientists get involved in politics in the United States, by directly helping them become politicians.  Though the group is new, they already acknowledge several obstacles that need to be paid attention to. The largest once are human issues and have little to do with a need for money:
One key roadblock those recruits, and Franklin’s List, will need to surmount is cultural: Until lately, investigators and other STEM professionals have balked at going into politics. [Shane] Trimmer (Franklin's List Executive Director) says that’s starting to change following years of flat or reduced spending on NIH. ... “They’re seeing how the decisions made in Congress by politicians are directly affecting their ability to do research. Now they’re seeing that if they do not get more involved, then these things will just keep on happening,” he added.
It's almost as if that imaginary world of scientists cloistered in their labs ignoring reality is real, and represents a major liability to the research enterprise.  You just can't get tenure and skive off from the rest of the world to do research until your retirement at the age of 79.

The whole idea of scientists forming a lobby group reminds me of a conversation I had with another trainee long ago at a Stem Cell Network conference.  He was a postdoc and I was a PhD student, and he took the position that that scientists, being paid to manage government funds, couldn't use those same government funds to lobby the government for more money.

I argued that that wasn't true; once grant money was paid to people (researchers, technicians, students, etc.), they could do whatever they wanted.  That included spending it on professional bodies that, like those for teachers and physicians, spend a lot of time and energy on negotiating better terms for their members.  Why scientists aren't very good at doing this puzzles me to this day.

But Franklin's List seems like it can partly fill this need for a scientific lobby group, at least in the United States.  Interestingly, it looks like it'll focus on gathering scientists at local levels to try and grow out candidates for higher political levels.  Kind of like running farm teams.
“The STEM candidates we’ll be searching for who have been in the lab or in academic circles, their idea was always to be in academia as a biologist or a physicist. They don’t have the network that somebody might have who has been a businessperson or an attorney in the community and might always have, in the back of their mind, thought about politics as an option,” Trimmer said. “It will be much easier for them to work their way up and to build that grassroots support.”
The GEN article is worth the few minutes to read, and it definitely portrays Franklin's List as a movement to watch.