Last week, ScienceDebate 2008 held a conference at the University of Minnesota.  The conference was the result of a grass roots campaign hoping to engage Barack Obama and John McCain in a real debate on science and technology.  That conference never happened, although each candidate answered 14 questions posed by the ScienceDebate 2008 organizers. 

ScienceDebate 2008 interviewed many scientists, and posted videos in which the candidates were urged to participate in a live debate.  As I said, it never happened.  Here is an example of a video invitation, this one by Dr. Peter Agre, Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute, Bloomberg School of Public Health; Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2003. 

However, on October 20 – 21, the organizers held a national conference to explore some of the problems that the next president should be aware of.  Sessions were held on Innovation, Education, Health, News & Culture, Energy, and keynote speech by Peter Agre on the human side of science.

Your students might be interested in sharing this resource with your students. It will give them an idea of what a conference is like that brings together science educators, politicians, and scientists exploring and discussing science and technology, and what the next president might consider important in these realms.

I thought Dr. Agre’s keynote speech was interesting.  If you click on the image shown below, you can listen to Dr. Agre’s keynote speech: The Human Side of Science.