Scientists could offer advice to lawmakers’ solutions to a range of issues. Spain is set to get an official science advisory panel that will gather evidence on a range of technical and social issues for its lawmakers. On 3 December, the parliament’s lower house, the congress, designated €200,000 (US$227,000) of its draft 2019 budget to creating an office of science and technology, inspired by similar bodies abroad. The decision follows a November meeting between parliamentarians and Science in the Parliament (Ciencia en el Parlamento), a grassroots association of scientists and others with an interest in science, based in Madrid, that has campaigned for such a body. “Ciencia en el Parlamento was born in late 2017 on Twitter, when a bunch of scientists were talking about reproducing in Spain what already existed in other countries,” says one of Ciencia’s founders, Andreu Climent, a bioengineer at Hospital Gregorio Marañón in Madrid. International models The Ciencia group then visited and researched existing science advisory offices in other nations. Many of them were based on the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) — the UK parliament’s in-house source of scientific advice — and Ciencia decided to use this office as a […]
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