Nice interview with Nina Fedoroff published the other day – she’s the science advisor to the Secretary of State. She makes some interesting points about how science can be used as an effective tool in international relations.

An excerpt:

Q. WHY CAN SCIENCE CREATE COOPERATION IN PLACES WHERE EVERYTHING ELSE FAILS?

A. Because science is more collaborative than other types of endeavors. It aspires to more democratic principles than many political systems because we have an external reference.

People can have different theories, but we form an experiment to test it. It’s the evidence that matters. So in science, we can have differences of opinion, but we can’t have two sets of facts.

There is an in-built process that says, “You and I may have different religions, different politics, but we can talk about science across chasms.”