The Ongoing Transformation
Bhavya Lal, a leader in space policy, shares the unexpected trajectory of her career. She discusses how policy and governance became her passion, how she went from writing reports to leading programs at NASA, and the big questions that drive her work.
Urgent Care
A traumatic brain injury gave Robert Cook-Deegan a crash course in a medical research system tangled in technological dilemma and political paradox, a dysfunctional insurance bureaucracy, and the healing powers of superglue.
Motion Capture
Redesigning motion capture systems to be more representative of real human bodies and movements could make them fairer and more useful for applications including law enforcement and medical diagnostics.
The Ongoing Transformation
AI chatbots generate conversations with users and can appear, at times, quite human. J. B. Branch discusses who is using chatbots, what the companies behind these AIs are doing, and how they might be regulated.
Real Numbers
As America’s science enterprise is challenged to be more competitive with fewer resources, recognizing and supporting the research capacity of non-R1s offers a path toward a more dynamic innovation landscape.
Book Review
Anatomy has long been recognized as a field at the crossroads of politics, medicine, crime, taboo, professionalism, modesty, racism, sexism, and much else. A new book goes beyond these issues in exploring anatomy’s past, asking if early anatomical illustration could have been a space for the exploration of homoerotic desire, hidden in plain sight.
Responding to War
Brigitte van der Sande has spent 25 years studying how war is represented in art—research that brought her to many active conflict zones. She discusses how art humanizes the victims of war and spurs action, and how humor and imagination can be forces for resistance.
Digital Data
Understanding Uncertainty
Despite calls to fund reproducibility studies, resources would be better spent on developing tools that enable efficient collection and sharing of experimental protocol details and metadata to enable study comparisons.
Science Education
Twenty years ago, a landmark court case held that intelligent design cannot be taught in science classrooms. What lessons does it offer for conflicts in education?
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Vol. XLII, No. 1, Fall 2025
A remarkable treatment for subdural hematomas involves, essentially, using superglue to repair the brain. The superglue procedure inspires the question of whether there exist analogous policy tools that could help fix systems that suffer from a lack of coordination: the health care bureaucracy, state and federal cannabis regulation, biosecurity, or artificial intelligence.
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Subscribe to the Print EditionIn response to essays published in Issues, our readers weigh in on critical topics in policy related to science, technology, and society.
Fall 2025
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Following the mass extinction of most species, the animals that fill a zoo in a future Arctic metropolis are lab-made—with one exception: an aging lion. When the lion escapes in the middle of the city’s Christmas festivities, a complex hunt ensues.
An expert in environmental philosophy and wildlife recovery responds to Margrét Helgadóttir’s “A Lion Roars in Longyearbyen.”
Response
The AI boom means more demands on data centers—and running a data center requires complex technical infrastructure, vast environmental resources, and experienced human talent. In E. G. Condé’s story, a labyrinthine data center is in the middle of a massive outage. When the corporation that owns the center fails to diagnose the problem provoking the outage with its fancy technical systems, it’s forced to turn to human intuition to sniff out a more fundamental dilemma.
The energy demands of data centers—accelerated by artificial intelligence—are steering us toward disaster. Could biology help bring us back from the brink?
Response
If there were an app that estimated the risk of every decision, would you use it? B. Pladek’s short story “Yellow” explores how data changes the way we think about risk—and what happens when that data is manipulated.
If a medical treatment for a life-threatening disease had a 60% chance of success, but another treatment with a 50% success rate had a lower risk of bankrupting your family, which would you choose? What if the success rates were 95 and 90%? Would you change your answer?
Response
If the public funds science and gives it autonomy to govern itself, then benefits such as economic growth, innovation, and national security will follow. This unwritten social contract was long thought to underpin policymakers’ relationship to the scientific enterprise, but recent events suggest those days are over.
Why has the idea of an implicit social contract between society and science had a hold on scientists’ imaginations for so long? And what does it mean now that the relationship has frayed?
American research universities have unleashed an age of massive technical innovation—but they’ve failed to innovate their own designs to meet the changing needs of society.
Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson spent five decades in public service, during which she ushered through landmark science and technology legislation and helped to advance opportunities for all Americans.
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