The Ongoing Transformation

Innovation lately feels synonymous with the digital entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley or the high-tech corridor of Route 128 outside Boston. But when Thomas Edison opened his first research lab in the 1870s, it was in Newark, New Jersey. A few years later, in nearby Menlo Park, he invented the light bulb. Now, Newark is working to build a new, inclusive tech innovation ecosystem that goes beyond this legacy.

Cannabis policy in the United States has been, in many ways, a giant experiment. The drug was recently reclassified by the Trump administration from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug, but remains federally illegal. On the state level, cannabis’s availability to patients and consumers has been determined by voters, not by scientists and regulators. Each state has a different approach to cannabis regulation and product safety, and as a result, a patient using medical cannabis in Florida might be exposed to different risks than a consumer in California, for example.

For as long as people have speculated about the development of artificial intelligence, they have debated its potential impacts on the labor market. Today, several years into widespread use of large language models, those questions are more urgent, but the answers are less clear. Is AI already taking jobs away? Could human beings flourish in a world in which they no longer have to perform economically valuable work?

On this episode, Massachusetts Institute of Technology labor economist David Autor joins host Sara Frueh to discuss the possible impacts of AI on the future of work, what that means on an economic and human level, and what policies may be able to shape AI in a way that works for humans.

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Artificial intelligence assistants such as Google’s Gemini have exploded in popularity, constantly offering to help summarize a document, craft an email response, or answer a question. AI chatbots take this even further. These chatbots—sometimes called AI companions—generate conversations with users, and because they “remember” interactions and modulate their responses, they can appear, at times, quite human. 

Our miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies. 

Our new miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters, and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies. On our first episode, host Malka Older talks to Steven Gonzalez, an anthropologist of technology who researches the human labor behind data centers. 

Gonzalez is also a speculative fiction writer under the byline E. G. Condé. He is one of the creators of Taínofuturism, which incorporates Indigenous Caribbean traditions to imagine futures from a radically different perspective. His novella, Sordidez, explores how survivors’ efforts to rebuild after a hurricane intersects with oppression and conflict in a future Caribbean. 

In this episode, Gonzalez compares these different types of disasters: the dramatic and immediate impacts of the hurricane, and the slower, steadier, and often overlooked disasters of environmental destruction, resource depletion, and exploitation of human labor associated with our internet infrastructure. 

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Why do disasters happen? How do we rebuild after a disaster? What lessons can we learn from them? Our new miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters, and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies. 

In this trailer episode, Lisa Margonelli introduces miniseries host Malka Older, an author, humanitarian aid worker, and disaster researcher. Older explains how she became involved in disaster work, and what disasters can teach us about society and our values. 

People know that their pets are unique individuals. Each dog has his or her own quirks, likes, and dislikes. But what about cormorants? Research reveals that wild animals are just as uniquely individual as our pets. Rats show empathy. Crows can hold grudges. Even termites have different personalities. What would it mean if society took animal intelligence and self-awareness seriously? 

Think tanks are a vital part of the policy ecosystem, but what do they do? In this installment of Science Policy IRL, host Jason Lloyd talks to Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute. He has been involved in science and technology policy for his whole career, previously practicing telecommunications law and serving as the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologist.

In this episode, Chilson discusses what it’s like to work at a policy think tank, the questions about artificial intelligence that motivate his work, and why he is optimistic about our technological future. 

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Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was once thought of as a condition that affects only children. The belief was that children would grow out of it, but research has shown that the condition often persists throughout life. In fact, ADHD is the second most prevalent psychiatric disorder in adults, but many misconceptions still exist about it. 

On this episode, host Sara Frueh is joined by David Goodman, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Adult Attention Deficit Disorder Center of Maryland. Goodman has treated adults with ADHD for over 40 years. Goodman explains how ADHD affects adults, the complexities in how it’s diagnosed and treated, and open questions for research in the field. 

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What happens in your brain when you hear your favorite song? 

In our Music and Health podcast miniseries, we’re exploring how music affects our minds, bodies, and communities. On this episode, host J. D. Talasek is joined by Sweta Adatia, a neurologist practicing in Dubai, and Fred Johnson, a community engagement specialist and artist in residence at both the National Academy of Sciences and the Straz Center for Performing Arts. They discuss their paths into combining music and science, how music impacts the brain, and how music can go beyond entertainment to create stronger, healthier communities. 

Fungi are ubiquitous in nature—in fact, you’re likely breathing in fungal spores as you read this. Most fungi are harmless to healthy people. But changes in the global climate, in human settlement patterns, and even in our own body temperatures have made fungal pathogens an increasing health threat.

On this episode, host Jason Lloyd interviews Angel Desai, an infectious disease specialist and associate professor at the University of California Davis Medical Center. Desai and George R. Thompson III cowrote “Foiling the Growing Threat of Fungal Pathogens” in the Winter 2025 Issues. Desai discusses what fungal pathogens are, why they are becoming more dangerous, and how the public health community can respond. 

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More than half of US states have legalized cannabis for recreational or medical use. Regulations on cultivation, production, and marketing vary from state to state, and most of these policies were developed without a robust public health strategy. Because it is not federally legal, Washington has provided only limited guidance to states on how to control the variety of cannabis products on the market. What’s more, the dazzling arrays of gummies, vapes, and chocolates are available with much higher concentrations of THC (the psychoactive component of cannabis) than have been previously available.

A recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, Cannabis Policy Impacts Public Health and Health Equity, examines the connections between public health and marijuana legalization. 

On this episode, host Sara Frueh talks to Yasmin Hurd, vice-chair of the report committee, Ward-Coleman Chair of Translational Neuroscience, and director of the Addiction Institute at  Mount Sinai. They discuss the research on the complex landscape of modern cannabis products, what’s known about their public health impacts, and strategies policymakers could use to minimize harms. 

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“People always say, ‘Well, if I could only do one art form, what would it be?’ And I always say dance.” —Susan Magsamen 

In our podcast miniseries Music and Health, we’re exploring how music impacts our minds, bodies, and communities. In this installment, we’re learning about the power of dance. Host J. D. Talasek is joined by David Leventhal and ConstantinaTheofanopoulou. Both began their careers as dancers and use dance to inform their current work. Leventhal is a program director and one of the founding teachers of Dance for PD, a program that offers people with Parkinson’s disease research-backed dance classes. Theofanopoulou is a research assistant professor at Rockefeller University. Her research focuses on understanding the neuroscience of complex sensory motor behaviors. They discuss how dance is helping patients regain movement abilities, and what neuroscience research says about dance as a form of healing. 

Vaccines, oil spills, genetic engineering, and stem cells—anywhere there’s science, there’s also misinformation. It muddies our ability to make good decisions, ranging from far-reaching ones like creating policy to simple ones like what to buy at the grocery store. Misinformation also undermines trust in scientific institutions and across society. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine tasked an expert committee with addressing misinformation. Their report,Understanding and Addressing Misinformation About Science, is out now. 

On this episode, hostMonya Baker is joined byAsheley Landrum, one of the authors of the report and an associate professor at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Landrum’s research focuses on science, communication, and media psychology. She discusses what exactly science misinformation is, how to tackle it, and the unexpected places it can arise. 

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From lullabies to movie soundtracks to workout playlists, music has the capacity to change how we feel. But what is the evidence that music’s effects can transform physical health? On our new podcast miniseries, Music and Health, we’ll explore the power of music to heal our minds, bodies, and even communities. 

On the first episode of this series, host J. D. Talasek is joined by Renée Fleming and Susan Magsamen. Fleming is an opera soprano, actress, and long time advocate for the healing powers of the arts. She recently edited a book called Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. Magsamen founded the International Arts + Mind Lab, and created the NeuroArts Blueprint. They discuss health and arts research, current initiatives to use the arts to heal, and how this vital approach to care can be expanded. 

In Alaska, reindeer are much more real than the fantasy animals that pull Santa’s sleigh. Introduced to Alaska from Siberia by the US government in the 1890s, reindeer were part of a strategy to solve food shortages among the Native peoples after the gold rush. Today, reindeer provide food security and economic opportunities for the Alaskan Native community. Even more so than farming, reindeer herding requires a deep understanding of the needs of Indigenous communities and academic science—as well as how to navigate and influence local, state, and federal policies.

On this episode, host Lisa Margonelli is joined by Jacqueline Hrabok and Bonnie Scheele of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s High Latitude Range Management program to learn more about the interplay of science, policy, and community in reindeer herding. 

The word "bureaucracy" conjures up images of red tape and long lines at the DMV, not cutting-edge innovation. But some of the most significant scientific and health innovations of the past century have actually come from scientist-bureaucrats at government research institutes. 

On this episode, host Jason Lloyd is joined by Natalie Aviles, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia and author of An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the US National Cancer Institute. Aviles explains what the National Cancer Institute does and how the mission and culture of the agency have enabled its scientist-bureaucrats to conduct pioneering cancer research, such as the invention of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccine. 

New York City is the perfect place to understand the importance of modern engineering, but the most valuable lessons won’t be found at the Empire State Building or in Central Park. To truly discover what makes modern life tick, you have to look at the unloved, uncelebrated elements of New York: its sewers, bridges, and elevators. 

On this episode, host Lisa Margonelli talks to Guru Madhavan, the Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and senior director of programs at the National Academy of Engineering. Madhavan wrote about the history of this often-overlooked infrastructure in a trilogy of Issues essays about New York City’s history. He talks about how the invention of the elevator brake enabled the construction of skyscrapers and how the detailed “grind work” of maintenance keeps grand projects like the Bayonne Bridge functioning. He also highlights the public health and sanitation-centered vision of Egbert Viele—the nearly forgotten engineer who made New York City livable. 

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The United States spends more on healthcare than any other high-income country, yet we have some of the worst population health outcomes. Our health care system is designed in such a way that racial and ethnic disparities are inevitable, and the differences are extreme: the life expectancy difference between white women and black men is over a decade. How can we fix the system to ensure health care equity for all? 

A new National Academies report called Ending Unequal Treatment: Strategies to Achieve Equitable Health Care and Optimal Health for All tackles this question. Building on a 2003 report on racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, the new report finds that little progress has been made in closing those equity gaps over the past two decades.

On this episode, host Sara Frueh talks to Georges Benjamin, cochair of the report committee and executive director of the American Public Health Association. They discuss how the health care system creates disparities and how we can fix them. 

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Check the end of any recent study, and there will be a list of study funders and disclosures about competing interests. It’s important to know about potential biases in research, but this kind of transparency was not always the norm. Understanding bias in research and helping policymakers use the most reliable evidence to guide their decisions is a science in itself.

Lisa Bero, a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, has been at the forefront of understanding how corporate funding biases research and how to assess what scientific evidence is reliable. She talks to host Monya Baker about her investigations into the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, techniques industries use to shape evidence to favor their products, and the importance of independent research to inform policy. 

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Octopuses are famously smart: they can recognize individual humans, solve problems, and even keep gardens. They are also a popular food for humans: around 350,000 tons of octopus are caught worldwide each year, and demand is only growing. Some governments and start-ups have invested significant resources into domesticating octopus, and the world’s first octopus farm may soon open in Spain’s Canary Islands. 

In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The miniseries has explored how economics can be used to advance environmental justice, how solar-powered canoes can protect the Amazon from deforestation, and how refugees create communication networks to respond to climate change.

On the final episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU professor Melissa K. Nelson. Nelson shares her thoughts about the impacts of climate change on Native American communities, agriculture, and what can be learned from Indigenous sustainability practices. 

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In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. 

On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU assistant professor Faheem Hussain to learn about how Rohingya refugees are using social technologies and what they can teach the rest of the world about communicating in disasters. Hussain is a researcher whose trajectory was changed when he visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. There, he learned how the community uses an innovative combination of online and offline technologies to create networks to share information. 

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In our new miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long Hot Summer, we're working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate change. 

On this episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU associate professor David Manuel-Navarrete to talk about his Solar Canoes Against Deforestation project. Working closely with Ecuadoran engineers and the Kichwa and Waorani people, Manuel-Navarrette’s team has been helping to develop a solar-powered canoe that can bring renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure to the Amazon. The story of the canoe offers lessons about how to meaningfully work with communities to understand their needs and co-produce solutions. 

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This has been a record-breaking summer all over the world. Many cities have recorded their hottest days ever, and June 2024 was the hottest month on record worldwide. Mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change, including extreme heat and long summers, will require a lot of bold new ideas. 

This summer, we’re highlighting some of those ideas in a mini podcast series, Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer. Over four mini-episodes, we’ll explore how faculty members at ASU’s Global Futures Lab are working with communities to develop cool techniques and technologies for dealing with climate change. 

In the first mini-episode, host Kimberly Quach is joined by ASU assistant professor Danae Hernandez-Cortes. Danae shares how economics can be used to advance environmental justice and how policies can affect communities who are most harmed by climate change. 

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Since 1973, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellowship (STPF) has brought thousands of scientists and engineers into the policy world. The fellowship is a very popular pathway into science policy, and AAAS fellows have featured in several episodes of our Science Policy IRL series. 

In this episode, we talk with the STPF fellowship director, Rashada Alexander. After completing a chemistry PhD and postdoc, she applied for an STPF fellowship that placed her inside the National Institutes of Health, where she worked for 10 years. 

Alexander talks to us about how her fellowship experience helped her look up from the lab bench and find meaning in her life. In particular, she found ways to build relationships, learn how to read a room, and navigate organizational structures—skills that are not always valued in scientific labs. She explains why scientists and engineers should apply for this transformational experience. 

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Most people are familiar with DNA, but its cousin, RNA, has become widely known only recently. In 2020, of course, RNA was in the news all the time: the COVID-19 virus is made of RNA, as are the vaccines to combat it. Technologies based on RNA could lead to innovations in biology, medicine, agriculture, and beyond, but researchers have only scratched the surface of understanding what RNA is capable of. 

A new report from the National Academies, Charting a Future for Sequencing RNA and Its Modifications: A New Era for Biology and Medicine, proposes an ambitious road map for coordinated projects to understand RNA. This large-scale effort is inspired by what was achieved for DNA two decades ago by the Human Genome Project. 

On this episode, host Monya Baker is joined by Lydia Contreras, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, and one of the authors of the report. Contreras talks about what RNA is, the challenges and potential of this effort, and what lessons could be learned from previous efforts with the Human Genome Project. 

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On this installment of Science Policy IRL, Lisa Margonelli goes behind the scenes of Congressional policymaking with Brent Blevins. Blevins is a senior congressional staffer and staff director of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, which is part of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Space, Science, and Technology. 

Blevins talks about his unusual path into science policy (he didn’t study science, and he wasn’t a AAAS fellow!) and what staffers in the House and Senate do in the science policy world. He also talks about the incredible experience of getting to set policy for things like sending humans to Mars while also having a staff job that can end with any two-year election cycle.

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In this installment of Science Policy IRL, Kei Koizumi takes us inside the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP. As the principal deputy director for policy at OSTP, Koizumi occupies an unusual position at the very heart of science policy in the United States. OSTP provides science and technology advice to the president and executive office, works with federal agencies and legislators to create S&T policy, and helps strengthen and advance American science and technology. Koizumi talks to Issues editor Lisa Margonelli about what he does at OSTP, how he got there, and the exciting developments in S&T policy that get him out of bed every day. 

When tackling the problem of misinformation, people often think first of content and its accuracy. But countering misinformation by fact-checking every erroneous or misleading claim traps organizations in an endless game of whack-a-mole. A more effective approach may be to start by considering connections and communities. That is particularly important for public health, where different people are vulnerable in different ways. 

In this installment of Science Policy IRL, we explore another sector of science policy: private industry. Amanda Arnold is the vice president of governmental affairs and policy at Valneva, a private vaccine development company, where she works on policy for creating, manufacturing, and distributing vaccines that address unmet medical needs, such as for Lyme and Zika. 

Arnold has worked in the science policy realm for over twenty years, first as a policy staffer for a US senator, then as a legislative liaison for the National Institutes of Health, and as a senior policy advisor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Arnold talks to editor Megan Nicholson about the role industry plays in the science policy enterprise and what she has learned about the US innovation ecosystem from working across sectors. 

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Douglas Duncan is an astronomer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. He is also an eclipse fanatic. Since 1970, he has been to 11 total solar eclipses. When April 8, 2024, comes around, he’ll experience his twelfth with his 600 best friends as he leads a three-day eclipse viewing extravaganza in Texas. “It looks like the end of the world,” he says, and a total eclipse can be a source of intense fascination. He uses the emotional experience of the eclipse as a gateway to learning more about science. 

On this episode, Lisa Margonelli talks to Duncan about how he has used this sense of experiential wonder, particularly in planetariums, as a way to invite the public into the joy of science. In previous generations, planetariums were seen as “old fashioned” and isolated from the work of modern astronomers. But Duncan pioneered a career track that combined public teaching at a planetarium with a faculty position at the University of Colorado. Now many planetariums have become places where academic astronomers can share their knowledge with the public. 

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The Science Policy IRL series pulls back the curtain on who does what in science policy and how they shaped their career path. In previous episodes we’ve looked at the cosmology of science policy through the eyes of people who work at federal agencies and the National Academies, but this time we are exploring think tanks. 

Walter Valdivia describes how a chance encounter while he was getting a PhD in public policy at Arizona State University led him into science policy. Since then he’s worked at think tanks including Brookings and the Mercatus Center and is now at the Science and Technology Policy Institute, which does research for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this episode, we’ll talk to Walter about what think tanks do in the policy world and how policy sometimes creates inherent paradoxes. 

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At the age of 19, Monique Verdin picked up a camera and began documenting the lives of her relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Little did she know that she would spend the next two decades investigating and capturing the profound ways that climate, the fossil fuel industry, and the shifting waters of the Gulf of Mexico would transform the landscape that was once a refuge for her Houma ancestors.

A lawyer and bioethicist by training, Alta Charo has decades of experience in helping to formulate and inform science policy on new and emerging technologies, including stem cells, cloning, CRISPR, and chimeras. The Warren P. Knowles Professor Emerita of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she served on President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, was a member of President Obama’s transition team, was an advisor for the Food and Drug Administration, and served on more than a dozen study committees for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

In the fourth episode of our Science Policy IRL series, Alta joins Issues contributing editor Molly Galvin to explore how science policy can and does impact people’s lives in real and profound ways. She also describes what it’s like to be one of the only non-scientists at the science policy table, how helping a close friend who died of ALS continues to inspire her work, and why science policy can help us become techno optimists. 

Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore? Let us know by emailing us at podcast@issues.org, or by tagging us on social media with the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL.

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NASA’s Artemis project aims to establish a long-term human presence on the moon—and then put astronauts on Mars. So in addition to designing rockets and spacesuits, NASA is also exploring the ethical and societal implications of living in space. In the third episode of our Science Policy IRL series, Zach Pirtle, who got his undergraduate degrees in engineering and philosophy at Arizona State University, explains how he came to work in the agency’s Office of Technology Policy and Strategy, where he recently organized a seminar on space ethics. He also works as a program executive within the Science Mission Directorate working on commercial lunar payload services. Zach joins Issues editor-in-chief Lisa Margonelli to talk about how he almost accidentally found his way to a perfect career, and how agencies engage hands-on in science policy as they figure out how to implement legislation.

By day, Erica Fuchs is a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. However, for the past year she’s also been running a pilot project—the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment—to give the federal government the ability to anticipate problems in supply chains and respond to them. 

The trip from germ of a policy idea to pilot project in the National Science Foundation’s new Technology Implementation and Partnerships directorate has been a wild ride. And it all started when she developed her thoughts on the need for a national technology strategy into a 2021 Issues essay. Two years later, the network she called for, coordinating dozens of academics, industry, and government contributors to uniquely understand how different supply chains work, was a real, NSF-funded pilot project. In this episode of The Ongoing Transformation, Erica talks with Lisa Margonelli about how she took her idea from a white paper to the White House, and the bipartisan political support that was necessary to bring it to fruition.

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Early in his career, Apurva Dave was an oceanographer; now he works at the cutting edge of climate policy at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. As the director of the Academies’ Climate Security Roundtable, he convenes cross-disciplinary dialogues on “emerging, abrupt, and understudied risks” at the nexus of climate change and national security.  In this second episode in our Science Policy IRL series, Apurva joins senior editor Megan Nicholson to talk about his nonlinear path to this role, and how his hesitancy to specialize has helped him think about the complexities of interconnectedness in science and policy.