Review
Questions for Science and Public
Policy, Spring 2006. (These will evolve.)
1.
Explain the
2. If a U.C., Berkeley,
professor was the author of Intelligent Design, rather than fundamentalist
Christians, do you think the court would have been as comfortable dismissing it
as not science? (Base your answer on the
court’s reasoning.)
3. Do you agree that the
4. The
5. Compare the
7. Give some examples showing
that commentators have always feared we are always 5 years away from running
out of oil.
8. Explain the difference
in how economists and petroleum engineers think about the problem of oil
reserves. (Refer to question 7.) What information would lead you to
believe that economists' models are more accurate? What information would
lead you to believe that geology models provide an adequate basis for making
policy?
9. In the federal funding
of science, explain the difference between "authorization" and
"appropriations”?
10. To what extent does
federal science funding display "inertia" from year to year. Explain how dynamics within the science
community, Congress, and the federal bureaucracy foster this inertia.
11. In the federal funding
of science, explain the role of subcommittees of the congressional
appropriations committees, and explain the important change in how
subcommittees are comprised, leading to the entrenchment of special interests,
hence inertia in the funding of programs.
12. Describe the economic
and aesthetic cases for funding science. Does either argument make a firm
prediction about what US funding levels should be? Explain.
13.
Describe
three arguments in favor of allowing faculty to consult. Name three against.
14. Should tobacco companies
be allowed to buy laboratories for academic biologists if there are “no strings
attached?”
15. True or false: Patents
are politically favored over donating research to the public domain, whether or
not they make economic sense. (Explain.)
16. Explain how the Research
Corporation hoped to make money from U.C. Berkeley’s cyclotron research in the
1930s. Assuming that the federal government was unprepared to this program, would this have been a good outcome for society?
17.
Explain why the following are true or false:
a. The public sector gives
most of its R&D money to universities.
b. It is relatively rare
for the public sector to give money for R&D to profit firms.
c. The
18. Discuss the difficulties
in trying to apply “cost-benefit analysis” to public funding of science.
19. What are the two
arguments for why public goods should be publicly provided, and do they apply
to knowledge? If knowledge is a public good, and we agree that public goods
should be publicly provided, what does that imply for intellectual property as
an incentive mechanism?
20. Why does intellectual property
provide a weak efficiency test for whether an investment is efficient?
21 Discuss virtues of
intellectual property that are not shared by prizes.
22 Explain why accounting
costs for patented products (such as $0.8b for new pharmaceuticals) may not
accord with the economists’ definition of “cost.” Why might such accounting costs be misleading
as a basis for policy making about intellectual property rights?
23 Give three arguments that were advanced by proponents of the
Stem Cell Institute to make it seem like a good investment for
24 On
the Stem Cell Institute, is there a conflict between the goal of recovering the
$3b financial investment and the goal of getting cheap new therapies to
25 Use
the politics of the Stem Cell Institute to argue why it makes sense to fund
public goods (medical knowledge) at the federal level rather than at the state
level. In what sense could a system that
left such investments to the States generate a “race to the bottom?”
26 In
choosing the value of a prize or other reward for invention, discuss the
problems that could arise if the value were based on (i)
expected cost, (ii) expected social benefit.
Which are patents based on? Which
are grants based on?
27 In
the grants model, explain why doubling the budget does
not double the number of research ideas that get funded.
28 It is
not true in the American funding landscape that publicly funded knowledge goes
into the public domain and privately funded knowledge gets patented. Give a
better stylization of the connection between public funding and patenting. What is the underlying legislation?
29
Explain the commercialization model and the free-access model for how publicly
funded knowledge is disseminated.
30 Give
and criticize the rationale(s) for the Bayh-Dole Act
of 1980.
31
Explain the sense in which corporations leverage federal money for their own
profit by giving money to university research labs.
32
Explain the sense in which federal grant agencies leverage corporate money for
their own research objectives by giving money to university research labs.
33 Why
might federal agencies want to subsidize proprietary corporate research?
34 If
federal agencies want to subsidize corporate research, explain why it may be
more sensible to give the money to university labs as an intermediary rather
than directly to the corporations.
35
Approximately when did corporate research labs come into existence? What
technological factors made this inevitable or sensible? Were the Americans the innovators in this
arena?
36 Give
some examples of famous corporate labs that were funded because the corporation
was a monopoly, and mention some of their famous discoveries.
37 Under
what circumstances might the private pursuit of profit drive the development of
fuel cell technology.
When would it be desirable to have public funding?
38
Explain the Frye rule and the Daubert rule for
admissibility of scientific testimony.
39 How
did it happen that litigation over silicone breast implants could bankrupt
40
Explain from (a) a legal point of view (referring to the judicial wrangling)
and (b) a probability point of view why fingerprint matches might reasonably be
excluded as evidence. How did the court overcome the Daubert
objection?
41 In
the blue bus/ red bus example, calculate the posterior guilt-to-innocence odds
of a single blue-bus driver.
42 How
many “Collins couples” (credible matches) would there have to be in order that
the match between the accused and the eyewitness account should be accepted as
enough for conviction? More
particularly, explain how the posterior odds of guilt to innocence change with
the number of credible matches in
43
Explain how the Council on Tobacco Research used their sponsorship of research
to dilute the public perception and legal conclusion that tobacco is harmful,
without actually falsifying results.
44 (calculations will not be on the midterm)
In discussing the probative value of a fingerprint match, Faigman
suggests that if a very small proportion of citizens match the fingerprint, a
match should be considered good evidence.
Evaluate this argument by writing down an expression for the probability
of guilt conditional on a match, and showing which “baseline” probabilities
enter your calculation. Do you agree with Faigman’s
criterion?
45. Suppose that an open source collaboration discovers a new drug idea and puts it in the public domain. Explain the benefits and drawbacks for the development and manufacturing of an eventual drug.
46. Many commentators believe that non-profit organizations can accelerate research by giving patent rights to private partners. Under what conditions is this true? Assuming that acceleration occurs, are such transactions an unambiguous gain for the developing world?
47. What is an "advanced purchase commitment" incentive for drug R&D? Explain the advantages and disadvantages of such incentives.
48. True or False: "Fifty years, government got its science advice from individual scientists. Today, it gets its advice from institutions. Science has become more influential in the process." Explain your answer.
49. Describe 3 methods that Congress uses to control agency behavior. Describe 3 methods that the president can use.
50. What loyalties does Prof. Townes believe White House science advisors owe the president? Explain the policy arguments for and against his view.
51. Compare Prof. Townes' view of the scientist/advisor with Frank von Hippel's. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each view?
52. Would a rational-but-immoral scientist ever falsify data? How plausible is a rational scientist model of the Korean stem cell scandal?
52.
Does the
53. The
“science” approach to the growing obesity problem has a different focus than
the “social science” approach. Explain these two approaches, referring to the Taubes article and the NBER working paper. Explain how the two approaches would lead to
different regulatory interventions.
54.
Argue why it is or is not a proper role of government to regulate food
consumption to control obesity. If your
argument depends on externalities, what are they? Or is obesity a purely private matter?
55. At a
fairly general level, explain the missions of the USDA, FTC and USDA, and how
they might relate to food policy, such as the regulation of supplements and the
promulgation of food advice (a food pyramid).
What are the defects of delegating the food-regulation issue to each of
these agencies? What is Nestle’s explanation for why the USDA opposed the food
pyramid?
56. Tort
liability is often a viable alternative to regulation. Give some examples of how we depend on tort
liability to rein in corporate misconduct.
Should fast food restaurants be held liable for making
people fat? for
making people sick? What is the difference? Referring back to our discussion of
evidence in court, give some reasons that tort liability might fail.
57.
Is obesity an overblown problem? Give some data, for example, comparing to the
social consequences of other social problems like tobacco use or alcoholism.
58.
Nuclear weapons have proliferated much more slowly than most experts thought in
1945. Is the same likely to be true of biological weapons? Explain
your answer.
59.
Agree or disagree: Acquiring WMD would do little to help most terrorist
organizations attain their goals and could even be counterproductive.
Explain your answer.
60.
Agree or disagree: The damage from a "Radiological"or
"Dirty Bomb" attack depends almost entirely on US politics.
Explain your answer.
61. To
what extent are controls on (a) basic research, and (b) sale
of "dual use" civilian technologies likely to slow the
proliferation of bioweapons? Which will be more
effective? Explain your answer.
62.
Agree or disagree: Greater transparency would have been an excellent way
to stop state-sponsored bioweapons R&D in the
mid-20th Century. It is a terrible strategy for stopping terrorist
R&D in the 21st Century. Explain your answer.
63.
Explain the HERP index in the Science paper
by Ames et al. Explain the importance of the dose/response relationship. What
do the authors mean by a linear relationship or a hockey-stick shaped
relationship? Where did you encounter
this relationship in the dioxin readings?
64.
Would you consider the HERP number .001 for chloroform in tap water to be “large”
or “small?” If it was wise to shut down
wells in
65. In
his letter response to Silbergeld of EDF,
66. In
his article about the politics and science of Agent Orange, Michael Gough takes
a different view of conflict of interest than we have previously taken. Explain his view, and explain how he uses the
report by the
67. True or false: "EPA bases its
dioxin regulations on experiments that measure the threshold for harm.
When the evidence changes, so do the regulations."
68. The
increasing availability of genetic information is transforming the insurance
industry. Insurance executives explain
that genetic information makes their business more efficient. Public policy analysts argue that it
undermines the very notion of insurance.
Explain this disagreement.
69.
Explain what “discrimination” means in insurance markets.
70.
Evaluate the policy proposal to prohibit insurance companies from using genetic
information. Do the effects of such a policy depend whether the customers have
this information? How?
71. Describe three reasons why current global warming predictions are uncertain.
72. Total CO2 emissions for the 21st Century need to be capped. In principle, society can (a) implement the required cuts immediately, (b) steadily introduce new reductions throughout the next century, or (c) concentrate steep cuts near the end. What factors need to be considered in choosing between these alternatives?
73. Are technologies that reduce CO2 emissions (e.g. wind) inherently preferable to technologies that promote carbon sequestration (e.g. genetic engineering)? Justify your answer. If such a preference does exist, are there circumstances in which society might nevertheless decide to invest in sequestration programs?
74. Some interpreters of The Precautionary Principle take the view that a technology should not be used until it has been proven harmless. Is this a reasonable viewpoint for products like vaccines that offer relatively small, incremental improvements? How does the argument change for large interventions (e.g. bioengineered carbon sequestration) related to global warming?
75.
76. Explain at least two methods for overcoming conflicts about facility siting, giving examples of where they might work or have worked. Explain how the issues are different for “micro” facilities like prisons and “macro” facilities like the Hanford DOE facility.