NUMBERS
The scientifically illiterate and the politically clueless
Illustration: Bodara
of research policy experts believe that politicians have an insufficient understanding of how science actually works. This was the result of a global survey undertaken by Nature magazine. But 73 percent of those surveyed also found that researchers fail to understand how politics works. “It’s a constant tension between the scientifically illiterate and the politically clueless”, says Paul Dufour, a policy specialist at the University of Ottawa in Canada, in one of the survey’s qualitative interviews.
