Several years ago, I wrote an essay on science and science education (Revisiting Science in Culture: Science as Story Telling and Story Revising), partly in response to a student who had heard/read some of my thoughts in class and wrote in 2003 ....

In the 27 January 2009 New York Times, columnist David Brooks writes
"I thought it worth devoting a column to institutional thinking because I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most. Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution."

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Barack Obama is a serious and committed pragmatist, in the best sense of that word, and I understand his inaugural commitment to "restore science to its rightful place" in exactly those terms. What's important about science is not its certainty about ways to act, but rather its willingness to aggressively acknowledge uncertainty, and so to hold to the fire any presumptions about how to act that derive from any source other than clearly defined and commonly accepted observations to date.