Much has changed since then. Fewer than 10 percent of employed Americans now work in manufacturing. And Berger, unlikely as it might have seemed in 1968, has become one of the world's leading authorities on manufacturing in the United States. She has conducted extensive research on globalization and industrial activity, served as a key member of MIT research groups studying those subjects since the 1980s, and written influential texts such as the 2006 book How We Compete.

Indeed, Berger may be the best-known social scientist asserting that a renewal of American manufacturing is not just desirable but possible, if only we can learn more about how technological innovations fuel productivity. In Berger's view, although laboratory research continues to thrive in the United States, too often it remains untapped commercially. And she disagrees strongly with those who insist that U.S. manufacturing is in a state of irreversible decline and that labor costs will force many remaining factories and production jobs to move to developing countries.

"I don't buy the argument that manufacturing is a sunset activity destined to disappear in countries with high wages and well-educated populations," she says. "There is no inevitability about it. It is possible to do profitable manufacturing in the United States. This is not just a vestigial activity but a vibrant activity."

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"Science," the physicist Werner Heisenberg once wrote, "is rooted in conversations." As he saw it, scientists are rarely solitary thinkers but people who constantly talk: about ideas, findings, research techniques, and unresolved problems. Some of these conversations last for a few minutes or hours. But others continue for years or decades, shaping careers, disciplines, and even institutions.

Consider the nearly 60-year relationship between economists Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow that endured until Samuelson, who provided the mathematical framework for modern economics, died in 2009. When Solow, now an Institute Professor emeritus, arrived at MIT in 1950 as an assistant professor of statistics, he was given an office across the hall from the already famous Samuelson in Building 14, where the economics department was then located. "We began talking every day about economics and other things, so we were friends from some day in September 1950 until the day Paul died," Solow recalls.

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In 1951, soon after Samuelson met Solow, a polyglot Latvian war refugee named Morris Halle took an assistant professorship at MIT. Halle had fled the Nazis, moved to New York City, and fought in World War II for the United States, and he would soon complete a PhD in linguistics at Harvard. At MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE), where Halle performed acoustic analysis of Russian, he interviewed a job-seeking researcher named Carol Chomsky, who would later become a linguist at Harvard. She was hired, and soon Halle met her husband, Noam, also a linguist.

The first time Halle and Noam Chomsky spoke, "we immediately had a big argument about something, and later I thought he had some good points," Chomsky recalls. "Anyway, we very quickly became close friends."

Chomsky, Halle, and linguist Eric Lenneberg also became doubters of behaviorism, the idea that actions (including speech) are essentially socially conditioned. Soon, they "pretty much formulated a different approach to the study of language and the general questions of what became cognitive science," says Chomsky.

In 1955, another linguistics position opened up at MIT. With Halle's help, Chomsky got the job. By the late 1950s, Chomsky was revolutionizing linguistics with his idea of generative grammar, which holds that language is an innate human capacity and that all languages have organizational similarities. Chomsky focused on syntax, the principles governing the structure of language. Halle became a leader in phonology, the analysis of sound production. At one point the two shared an office, but mostly—like Samuelson and Solow—they inhabited offices next door to each other for decades, in their case inside MIT's spartan, now-vanished Building 20.

"Noam and Morris had offices that were the two most miserable holes in the whole place," recalls linguistics professor Donca Steriade, PhD '82. The modest circumstances amused Halle. As he recounts: "I would say to Noam, 'Where's your other office?'"

But Chomsky loved his surroundings. "Building 20 was a fantastic environment," he says. "It looked like it was going to fall apart. There were no amenities, the plumbing was visible, and the windows looked like they were going to fall out. But it was extremely interactive. At RLE in the 1950s there was a mixture of people who later became [part of] separate departments—biology and computer science—interacting informally all the time. You would walk down the corridor and meet people and have a discussion."

In 1968 Chomsky and Halle coauthored The Sound Pattern of English, which linked syntax and phonology to explain how the rules of grammar affect speech. For example, as Chomsky and Halle observe, we say "blackboard" with a falling inflection but "black board" with a rising inflection, to reflect their different syntactical structures (one is a noun, the other a noun phrase).

Today, Chomsky and Halle, who are Institute Professors emeritus, still have adjacent offices, now in MIT's Stata Center, which opened on the site of Building 20 in 2004. One other thing hasn't changed, says Chomsky: they continue to have "rational arguments."

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But what is the best way for federal funding agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to invest in science? Do comparatively small grants for individual researchers spark the most groundbreaking ideas, or does it take long-term awards for large teams? For that matter, should the goal be to shoot for occasional big breakthroughs or consistent, incremental advances in knowledge? Or is the whole process of scientific discovery and technological innovation too complex for any general rules to apply?

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Duflo, MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, specializes in finding unorthodox ways to help the world's poor. So she concocted an experiment with MIT-based collaborators Abhijit Banerjee and Rachel Glennerster, along with officials from Seva Mandir, a local nongovernmental organization. In some villages, they offered parents about two pounds of free lentils when they brought their children in for shots. Before long, families started streaming into these clinics. About four in 10 children got immunized where free lentils were available.

According to mainstream economic thinking, the success of the lentil giveaway made no sense. The shots were already free. The lentils, a cheap staple of the Indian diet, added little value. "The standard theory of human capital accumulation cannot explain why you go from a few percent to 38 percent," says Duflo. "The fact that there is huge responsiveness to such a small thing is contrary to theory."

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For about 150 years, we have known how species evolve. The emergence of life itself remains more obscure. But as Lane shows with clarity and vigor in “Life Ascending,” fascinating studies on the subject abound. A trained biochemist, Lane smoothly pulls in evidence from genetics, proteomics (the study of proteins), paleontology and geophysics to show how the critical components and mechanisms of complex life — from DNA and photosynthesis to sex and vision — could have developed. Because “a chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate,” he dismisses the “thermodynamically flat” primordial soup as a starting point for life and instead looks for ways hydrogen and oxygen can get together. Someday we may need a sequential illustration showing man standing upright after emerging from porous rocks in hydro­thermal vents — where suggestive research locates the first signs of complex molecules and DNA. This is not a comprehensive textbook, and the concluding chapters on consciousness and death lack the biochemical signature of the best sections. Still, Lane shows how thoroughly, if provisionally, we can reconstruct evolutionary developments. Reading the remote past, he argues, “is a science in its own right, one that can only enrich our understanding of life.”

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"Climate Change: Picturing the Science," a new book by Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, aims to alter that by providing a rich photographic record of a warming world. Some photos tell a self-evident record of geophysical change, like a shot of Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, where warming-induced drought has produced a dramatically lowered water line -- a yellow "bathtub ring" of once-submerged rock.

In other cases, knowing a little about our climate can affect the way we interpret these photos -- lending a more menacing air to seemingly benign images. An aerial shot of a massive Dutch sea barrier, with the city of Rotterdam lying just beyond, looks like an ode to Sisyphean futility. A gorgeous photo of sunlight striking a glacier in Peru's Quelccaya ice cap symbolically sums up a larger question: How long will such formations resist the effects of the sun?

To provide some of that knowledge, Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, wrote a few accompanying essays and solicited several others from colleagues. The book emphasizes the complexity of the climate change problem, noting the wide range of greenhouse gases that engender warming (not just carbon dioxide but also methane, aerosols and more), the many ways we release them, and the varied regional effects they produce. Climate change is not a one-dimensional problem with a simple solution, so we need to grasp the totality of the global climate system.

Salon spoke to Schmidt about our inability to grasp global warming, the nature of climate science, and our prospects for a cooler future.

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What was Geissler doing with this copy of the treatise that so brilliantly laid out the principles of evolution? Well, in the early 1920s, someone removed the volume from the library. About five years later, Geissler says, a relative of hers, a scholar in Providence, R.I., bought it at a sale. Several years ago, Geissler’s mother, sorting through old family belongings, gave the book to Geissler. “It was in a box in the attic,” she recalled in a recent interview. “If my mother hadn’t noticed, it would have been thrown in the trash.” Geissler and her husband decided to return the book: “Now everyone can see it.”

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It turns out the president cannot separate politics and science so easily. No sooner had Obama issued his order than conservative lawmakers in state legislatures began proposing new restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, ranging from criminal penalties to bans on state-level funding. In fact, Obama's decision has emboldened conservatives to increasingly link stem cell research to abortion. Far from conceding the issue, they are in it for the long haul.

But the stem cell battle is not just a high-profile clash of values. The dispute provides a sharp focus on how science may help reshape America. Several states have set aside billions of dollars to support stem cell research, and the new federal money Obama is promising will generally flow to those areas. That means states supporting stem cell research will experience an economic windfall while attracting highly educated technology workers who tend to vote Democratic. The more conservative states restricting stem cell research will attract fewer funds and fewer socially liberal voters. In short, a state's stem cell policy will influence electoral results and help determine whether a state turns red or blue.

At the moment, stem cell science mirrors November's electoral map. Twelve states allow the use of public money to fund stem cell research -- and Obama won them all in 2008. Four states have moved to either restrict stem cell research or limit public expenditures for it since Obama's announcement -- and they all voted for John McCain. But now that map could change.

In stem cell politics, key battlegrounds include Georgia, Texas and Arizona -- red states where Obama and the Democrats made inroads. These are places that have significant academic and scientific infrastructures but that Republicans control politically. Restrictions on science there could slow the kind of economic growth associated with Democratic support. At the same time, the GOP is putting its popularity at risk by curbing research that most voters support. The new regional political dynamic of the stem cell war is set.

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Climate change knows no geopolitical boundaries. Increasingly, neither does science. So it might seem that a multilateral approach, one that capitalizes on the increasingly international structure of science, would be the best way to combat the problem. After all, as more researchers from more countries tackle global warming, the greater our chances of developing much-needed technological breakthroughs.

Yet the best route to those innovations may not be globe-wide research and development. It may well be preferable to concentrate such efforts in two countries: the United States and China. Indeed, as President Barack Obama reaches his 100th day in office, a vocal group of scientists and policymakers are calling for an unprecedented bilateral clean-energy initiative between the countries.

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That's a question looming larger in American life as genetic testing becomes a mainstream activity. Time named direct-to-consumer DNA exams its Invention of the Year for 2008, following the emergence of companies like 23andMe and Navigenics, which report on your genetic risk of illnesses such as prostate cancer or Parkinson's. Academic medical research efforts like Harvard's Personal Genome Project aim to study the DNA of volunteers, hoping to find genetic links to diseases. So do healthcare providers: In December, California-based Kaiser Permanente announced plans to study the DNA of 400,000 members.

The promise of these tests includes drugs that may someday be tailored to treat your illnesses. The peril is that your personal data could circulate more widely than you expect. DNA provides a rich digital source of medical information, which has great scientific value and lends itself to data sharing. But DNA testing currently involves a lightly regulated tangle of private and nonprofit researchers. Once you take a DNA test, it ceases to be your property. Your genetic data could circulate among insurers and employers, or even data brokers and pharmaceutical companies hoping to profit from it.

"Information can be harmful, and the risks great for individuals," says Patrick Taylor, deputy general counsel at Children's Hospital in Boston, who has written about genetic privacy. Those risks include the loss of a job or insurance -- employers or insurers might not like your DNA profile -- and the disclosure of medical secrets or the creation of family traumas. And with DNA, Taylor notes, "Once it's out, it's out." You can change your credit card number, but you can't apply for a new genetic code.

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He has also written a perceptive book about science and its civic value, arriving as the White House renews its acquaintance with empiricism. Varmus recounts his laboratory career and tenure as director of the National Institutes of Health, then surveys topical issues like stem-cell research. One implication of this book is that far from disconnecting politics and science, we should find better ways of linking them.

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In the 1960s, British biologist William Hamilton offered an explanation in a theory now called kin selection. When animals, often insects, help siblings or other relatives survive, they are enhancing the odds that their shared family genes will be passed on. In other words, the genes, not the individual or social group, are what counts in evolution.

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You don't have to drill deep into our political discourse to find suspect stories about oil, with politicians peddling the flagrantly false notion that China is producing oil off the coast of Florida, while right-wing activist Jerome Corsi claims oil is not a fossil fuel but "a natural product the Earth generates constantly."

Such declarations serve a political purpose: to make oil drilling seem like an easy solution to our current energy crisis, to marginalize warnings that we are running short on oil, and to stymie efforts at conservation or developing alternatives to fossil fuels.

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That view of scientists might draw a few wry smiles around Kendall Square today. But it also represents a lingering 20th-century ideal: The scientist as a virtuous academic who pursues knowledge as an end in itself. In contrast to that ideal stands the wealth-seeking industrial scientist, a specialist who merely applies science to the problem of putting new products on the market.

That's the wrong way to think about the whole scientific enterprise, says Steven Shapin, the Franklin L. Ford professor of the history of science at Harvard. In an upcoming book, "The Scientific Life," to be published this fall by the University of Chicago Press, Shapin argues that our notion of the noble scientist untethered by monetary obligations is bad history.

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