Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 11 September 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1104
News
New boss for astronomy survey
Astrophysicist Roger Blandford chosen to lead critical review of astronomy research priorities.
The US National Academies has selected Roger Blandford as the chair of the next 'decadal survey' in astronomy, starting a two-year process that will produce a prioritized list of the big projects that astronomers want to embark on the next decade.
Blandford, an astrophysicist at Stanford University in California and director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, agreed to accept the position on Tuesday.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email redesign@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
Following the Whitford and Greenstein reports, the surveys have been chaired by people far from the technical issues involved in the selection of projects. Certainly they are thereby somewhat freed from bias, though the surveys undoubtedly represent the preferences of the large universities from which the chairs come. However there are concerns whether the modest loss of bias is not worth the lack of experience and loss of understanding of large projects, and the optimum, most cost effective way to make advances in both technology and science.
Unfortunately Roger Blandford's assignment is doomed to failure because science is not advanced with "a prioritized list of the big projects." As Michael Crichton noted in The Caltech Michelin Lecture on 17 January 2003, real science "requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world." Oliver K. Manuel, http://myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09 ; http://www.omatumr.com/