President Barack Obama made a confession Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.
“I am a science geek. I am a nerd,” he said in a speech before more than 700 people. “And I don’t make any apologies for it. It’s cool stuff.”
The assertion was widely applauded at an event that marked the capstone of the White House Frontiers Conference, held at CMU and the University of Pittsburgh. And Mr. Obama spent much of Thursday afternoon demonstrating his geek credentials — though before he flew back to the White House, he voiced concern that scientific progress also presented social challenges.
After arriving on Air Force One just after 1:15 p.m. Mr. Obama spent an hour viewing exhibits of cutting-edge technology at both universities, joined by Pitt chancellor Patrick Gallagher and CMU president Subra Suresh. He climbed into a simulator that allowed him to dock a shuttle at the International Space Station, and when docking was complete, proclaimed, “Your ride is here, baby!” He thudded the skin of a SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft, and called out, “It’s like a surfboard!” Minutes later he asked, “You almost want to get in and take off, don’t you?”
Mr. Obama even took a few minutes out of his visit for fun: Before flying back to Washington, he taped a skit with Stephen Colbert of “The Late Show,” slated to air Monday.
But Mr. Obama appeared most impressed by a system in which brain implants allow a person with nerve damage not just to manipulate a prosthetic arm but to feel sensations through it. The University of Pittsburgh unveiled the technology Thursday with a demonstration involving Nathan Copeland, who has been paralyzed since a 2004 car accident. Mr. Obama shook hands and laughingly executed a fist-bump with Mr. Copeland, afterward telling researchers, “I’m really proud of you.”
In his speech later in the day, Mr. Obama said Mr. Copeland “can move that arm, the same way you and I do: just by thinking about it. But that’s just the beginning. Nathan is also the first person in human history who can feel with his prosthetic fingers. ... He hasn’t been able to use his arms or legs for well over a decade, but now he can once again feel the touch of another person.”
But in the ensuing panel discussion with a mix of thinkers, Mr. Obama shared concerns that society wasn’t keeping up with such changes.
On the one hand, he said, the internet “is bringing us unprecedented knowledge.” But “everything on the internet looks like it might be true. And so in this political season we’ve seen — you just say stuff,” and the facts are always in dispute.
Technology, he added, could worsen working-class anxieties that have also shaped this year’s political climate. “If self-driving cars are going to be pervasive, a huge percentage of the American population makes its living, and oftentimes a pretty good living, driving,” he said. “So understandably, people are going to be concerned about what does this mean?”
Moderator Atul Gawande, a popular science writer and health researcher, echoed the concern that many scientific findings — like those involving topics such as nutrition or climate change — were the subject of “enormously fraught debates. It feels at this moment almost like we’re not just debating what it means to be a scientist, but what it means to be a citizen.”
And panelists stressed that the two roles were inextricably related: That just as culture needs scientific progress, science depends on cultural improvement.
“I fundamentally believe there is a 7-year-old sitting in in a classroom somewhere [who will] transform things,” said neuroengineer Kafui Dzirasa. “I would love to see an America in which whether that 7-year-old kid is sitting in a school in Detroit, or Baltimore or … in the Mississippi Delta, that they will also have the opportunity for their ideas to be nurtured.”
For his part, Mr. Obama at times sounded elegiac. He is, after all, in the final months of his term. “I only get two terms, which is fine,” he said at one point. “Because the presidency is a relay race. We run our leg, then we hand off the baton.”
But that didn’t stop him from taking a few pokes at the Republicans on his way out the door.
“It’s not just that they’re saying climate change is a hoax, or throwing a snowball on the Senate floor to prove that the climate’s not getting warmer. It’s that they are doing everything they can to gut funding for research and development.”
“When the Russians beat us into space, we didn’t deny that Sputnik was up there,” he added. “That wouldn’t have worked. We acknowledged the facts, and then we built a space program almost overnight and beat them to the moon. And we kept going. ... That’s where science will get you.”
Chris Potter: cpotter@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2533.
First Published: October 14, 2016, 4:07 a.m.
