Is America scientifically illiterate?

— -- Science enjoys the best and the worst of times today, celebrated as the secret sauce behind economic growth, but embattled in high-profile areas such as climate change, stem cells and evolution.

"Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been before," said President Obama, in April at the National Academy of Sciences.

At the same time, Obama noted, federal funding of physics and related sciences has fallen by nearly half since the 1980's, U.S. schools trail in math and science versus Japan, England, South Korea and others. "And we have watched as scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas," he said.

In Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (Basic Books, $24), Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum size up the paradox of American science and offer their solution to its ills. Leaving aside hand-wringing over public ignorance of scientific fun facts (only half of people in a National Science Foundation survey knew the Earth circles the sun once every year, for example), the two authors point to the "most important" kind of scientific illiteracy, "citizen's awareness of the importance of science to politics, policy, and our collective future."

What the country needs, they believe, are the kinds of communicators who can make science comprehensible and popular at the same time.

The book focuses on the late Carl Sagan, whose 1992 rejection from membership in the National Academy of Sciences, they write, "made clear (scientists) view of popularizers in their ranks, and of public outreach generally." They argue that the science establishment needs a new career path for science communicators (folks like Kirshenbaum, a marine scientist at Duke, who previously interned in the office of Sen. Bill Nelson, D- Fla., and who once worked as a disc jockey.)