Value-laden science

Presidents who value science.

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 323 13 FEBRUARY 2009 843 COVER An image of Mare Moscoviense on the lunar farside, taken by the Terrain Camera aboard the SELENE (Kaguya) spacecraft on 17 January 2008. Crater frequency distributions derived from such images yield ages of about 2.5 billion years for several volcanic deposits in this mare, indicating that volcanism on the lunar farside lasted about ...

Science as a human value.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s comments on space exploration, told me that the ultimate goal of any medical researcher was “to touch the face of God”.1 When pushed for clarification, he asserted that science – neuroscience in particular – is a utopian pursuit (free from the foibles and fallacies that normally plague people), whose practitioners (i.e. scientists) must altruistically strive to ma...

Doctor, What Would You Do? An ANSWER for Patients Requesting Advice About Value-Laden Decisions.

This article presents a previously published framework, summarized in the mnemonic ANSWER (A, Active listening; N, Needs assessment; S, Self-awareness/reflection; W, Whose perspective?; E, Elicit values; R, Respond) for how to respond to the question, "Doctor, what would you do?" when considering medical decisions that are preference-sensitive, meaning there is limited or debatable evidence to ...

Laden and Islamist Terrorism

Public Value Mapping and Science Policy Evaluation

Here we present the framework of a new approach to assessing the capacity of research programs to achieve social goals. Research evaluation has made great strides in addressing questions of scientific and economic impacts. It has largely avoided, however, a more important challenge: assessing (prospectively or retrospectively) the impacts of a given research endeavor on the non-scientific, none...