There is something so deliciously wonderful and improbable that Steven Chu has been tapped to be Secretary of Energy in the United States. It’s not simply that as a scientist, I feel that science works admirably as a meritocracy and thus a Nobel prize winner ought to run the Department of Energy, but that it bodes so well for the direction of science as a social enterprise.

Science is, in the end, a function of society, and it should not be otherwise. Real money is allocated from the earnings of workers to fund this enterprise and anyone who’s followed the history of science will surely realize how much it has grown over the last century. Whilst not quite as vast as the military-industrial complex, the scientific enterprise makes up a large chunk of the public sphere. Many professional scientists can trace the cash of their hard-earned salaries to either the Department of Energy, the Depeartment of Health, and the Department of Defense.

What is funny is that a lot of young scientists, postdocs and grad students, don’t realize this. I’ve had colleagues who’ve said to me, with completely straight faces, that they despise politics; that’s it’s stupid and a waste of time, even though it was the political will of visionary politicians in the past that funded the vast expansion of the sciences over the last 60 years. Think the GI Bill, or the Manhattan Project. Even further back, Abraham Lincoln created the National Academy of Sciences with an eye for innovating military technologies.

Of course, what the body politic giveth, the body politic can taketh away. When threatened with the loss of their livelihood, these very same scientists scream blue bloody murder as if they were entitled to the opportunities that were created for them by hard working politicians and politically-aware scientists of the past such as the great Vannevar Bush. For these scientists, the painstaking work of creating political consensus and vision for the scientific project seems like mere posturing.

It might feel like science has been a political football to be kicked around by barely scientific-literate leaders of the past few years (oh you know who I’m talking about). The problem is that scientists have not sold the political story of the role of science well. Face it, not all scientific questions are worth solving, and part of the education of a professional scientist is to judge the merits of other scientists’ questions that need to be generously funded in order to be answered. These are difficult questions, and those that we have assigned to answer these questions, pace peer-review committees, are particularly to be feared, especially by up-and-coming junior faculty. But simply defending the entire project of science because it is valuable in itself is nothing short of sloppy thinking.

And hence we come to the political choice of the Secretary of Energy. This is one of the most powerful offices in the United States. It is a position that involves the running amongst other things, the power grid, nuclear power plants, and the blood supply of American industry. It is at one and the same time, a massive political, economic, engineering and scientific undertaking. It is childish to say that it is only a scientific problem because it is not.

But mark this: that the scientific element of this position has been elevated above all other considerations by Barack Obama reflects a fundamental realignment of priorities. Obama has already stated clearly that energy, global warming and American national security are inextricably linked. The person tapped to solve the energy problem will play a significant role in determining the national security of the State. That the person thought to be able to find the optimal solution to energy is a scientist means that the United States has once again deemed science to be a pillar in the future prosperity of American society. In essence, this means that scientists have been given the task of innovating ourselves out of this global warming crisis. All other considerations drop away. And that is the vision all scientists ought to yoke their modus operandi on.