"Yours will be a future where human beings, as President Obama has said, have pushed farther into the universe, not just to visit but also to stay. To me, public diplomacy and cooperation in space go together like peanut butter and jelly," Bolden said. 

When I finally finished my Ph.D. program after 11 years of training for a research career in the biomedical sciences, I couldn’t help feeling that something was missing. I grew up convinced that science was the best tool we had to improve the world... Then I learned about science diplomacy.

Years of resource reductions and the centralized political control and manipulation of all scientific and public communications have deeply corroded Canadian democracy, governance and public administration. The capacity to practice science diplomacy- a critical tool in responding to the vexing range of challenges generated by the globalization age - has perhaps been foremost among the casualties.

The delegates recognized that there would be many hurdles to traverse for the military and scientists to fully harness the fruits of Arctic diplomacy. In particular, the distrust of China as a non-Arctic nation taking interest in the region needed to be moderated with a recognition of other global powers having presence in areas very distant from their own regional vicinity.

The arena for this convergence of two words- science and diplomacy- was displayed at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Washington symposium, where marine science, and the emergence of China’s ‘blue economy’ framed a new narrative in understanding the environmental stakes in the region’s escalating conflict. 

At U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s side when he negotiated a framework nuclear deal with Iranian diplomats this spring was physicist Ernest Moniz, U.S. secretary of energy. His presence spoke to the rise of “science diplomacy,” which can take the form of scientists helping diplomats, diplomats helping scientists, or scientific cooperation promoting diplomacy. The Iran case is the most vivid recent example of the first form.