Keen On

A Nobel laureate on why we should sometimes trust scientists, and not politicians, to fix the futurePeter Agre won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003, but he’s not interested in playing God. Or even know-it-all. “When Nobel Prize winners start predicting what the stock market would do, or who’s going to win the World Series, they may be beyond their specialty,” he says. Yet in his new book, Can Scientists Succeed Where Politicians Fail?, Agre claims that scientists have succeeded in defusing international crises where politicians have failed. He uses the 2015 Iran nuclear accord as an example, arguing that it only happened because two MIT-trained physicists spoke the same scientific language and brought presents for each other’s grandchildren. Then Trump canceled it. Now, with RFK Jr. running American health policy and the CDC “decimated,” he fears for catastrophe. Peter Agre may not quite be God. But he’s about as close as we will get in our polarized and paranoid world. * Science diplomacy works when pol