Tina Swanson, Director, Science Center, San Francisco

Science is an emergent process.  Now, before your eyes glaze over with this wonky jargon, this just means is that science, as a body of knowledge and as a method for figuring out things, is always growing.  It continuously builds on a foundation of existing knowledge, advances in technology and the free flow of questions, ideas, critiques and new data.  Science can—and does—answer questions and provide actionable information for how we manage our health, our environment, and even our businesses.  But science is never done—it’s just the best way we have to figure out how to do things better.  Therefore, to ignore or dismiss relevant new information produced by science applied to a specific question is, in effect, to reject progress.

More than ten years ago, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was directed by Congress in the federal BEACH Act of 2000 (and subsequently prodded by a lawsuit from NRDC) to study the impacts to human health from swimming at polluted beaches and to use their results to develop new regulatory standards for allowable levels of disease-causing bacteria.  These standards (along with state standards) are used by local officials ...

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