Sweeping US health-care and climate-change reforms, should they become law, will bear the fingerprints of physicists and engineers, thanks in part to an annual fellowship that places scientists in congressional offices or on committees. “If there’s ever been a year that you want to be a health-care staffer, it’s this one,” says biomedical engineer Robert Saunders, who was hired by Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) in September. Saunders had spent a year on Holt’s staff as a congressional fellow sponsored by the Optical Society of America (OSA) and SPIE. Saunders, who helped develop amendments to the House’s health-care bill, says the fellowship “is one of the few ways that a bench scientist working in the lab can jump right in to working on the hill.”
Some 187 scientists—most of them PhDs—started their 12-month terms in Congress and the executive branch this summer as fellows of a program managed by the American...
