Science Under Obama

My post-election Science Progress column--written after I woke up super early and felt the effect of all the champagne--is now up. You can guess the gist, so I'll just give you the punch line and you can follow the link for details:

Despite many challenges ahead, it's clearly a new day for science in Washington, and there are strong grounds for feeling optimistic. For scientists who so struggled under George W. Bush, there's a very real sense that the clouds are parting. Now, we await a still-clearer signal of how president Obama will govern science--his pick of a presidential science adviser, which should come soon, and will tell us a great deal. In the meantime, however, we can note that in his victory speech last night, Obama did not leave out science; rather, he gave it a central role in defining the course the nation has taken over the past half century: "A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination."

Let the tradition finally resume.

Full column here.