He challenged peers who acted as “cheerleaders” for science, and influenced government science policy with a Washington-based newsletter. Daniel S. Greenberg, a writer and editor who broke ground in science journalism by reporting on the research enterprise not with reverence but with journalistic rigor, died on March 9 at his home in Washington. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Wanda Reif, who said he had been in ill health since sustaining a fall on Dec. 26. Mr. Greenberg, who spent most of his professional life in Washington, became a science journalist at a time when many practitioners seemed to view their job as advancing the cause of research — a consideration that many researchers expected.
As an author, newspaper reporter and magazine editor, and as the founding editor and publisher of Science & Government Report, a newsletter he ran for almost 30 years, Mr. Greenberg took a different view. From his vantage point in the capital, he tracked scientific rivalries and battles over the government’s science priorities, describing research not as a uniquely worthy activity but rather as one of many enterprises competing for federal largess. “He recognized that science, and the scientific endeavor broadly, was a political interest group like any other, and they behaved like any other, and he covered them like any other,” said Daniel Sarewitz, a congressional staffer in the science policy arena in the early 1990s and now director of the Washington-based Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University.
“He was not a toady or an advocate for the science community,” Dr. Sarewitz said. “He was a journalist covering science. ” Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1968, Robert K.
Merton, the eminent 20th-century sociologist of science, said Mr. Greenberg’s “perceptive” first book, “The Politics of Pure Science,” was one that “should be read by the President, legislators, scientists and the rest of us ordinary folk. ” The book explored the frequent incompatibility, if not outright conflict, between the institutional values and needs of government and those of science, encapsulating the tension by quoting President John F. Kennedy in 1963, when he said, “Scientists alone can establish the objectives of their research, but society, in extending support to science, must take into account its own needs.
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” The Economist magazine said Mr. Greenberg had “pretty well invented a new way to cover big science. ” He began earning this reputation in the 1960s, when he edited the news and commentary section of the journal Science, then as now one of the world’s leading science journals. “He had a tremendous impact on my thinking,” said Philip M.
Boffey, a former science editor of The New York Times and one of many journalists who worked for Mr. Greenberg. “I learned to look skeptically at the scientists themselves. ” Mr.
Greenberg built on this reputation when he founded Science & Government Report, or SGR, in 1971. Though the publication never had more than 2,000 subscribers, Ms. Reif said, it had an outsize influence on Capitol Hill. Dr.
Sarewitz said the newsletter was “a complete asset for those of us who did science policy. ” Apart from covering an array of serious topics and policy wrangles, Mr. Greenberg introduced his readers — first in Science, and later in SGR — to the fictional and satirical Dr.
“Grant Swinger, director of the Breakthrough Institute.”
In his inaugural interview in 1965, Dr. Swinger described some of the institute’s projects, including a plan to make commercial use of sonic booms and a particle accelerator that would run between the scientific citadels of Berkeley, Calif. , and Cambridge, Mass. — a route, he noted, that would take it through 12 states.
That meant, he said, “that 24 senators and about 100 congressmen could reasonably be expected to support it. ” Many found this kind of parody witty. For some in Washington, it was a bit too biting. Mr.
Greenberg sold SGR in 1997 to the publishers John Wiley & Sons, who published it for about five years, Ms. Reif said, before selling it to F&S Publications. It folded a few years later. As an author Mr.
Greenberg wrote about the intersection of science, politics and money in two other books, “Science, Money and Politics: Political Triumph and Moral Erosion” (2001) and “Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism” (2007). He wrote regularly for The Times, The New England Journal of Medicine and The London Review of Books, among other publications. Daniel Sheldon Greenberg was born in Brooklyn on May 5, 1931, the younger son of Max and Bertha (Rosenberg) Greenberg. His father was an accountant, his mother a homemaker.
Three years later, the family moved to the Bronx, where Mr. Greenberg grew up. His brother, Jack Greenberg, was the noted legal scholar and civil rights activist who succeeded Thurgood Marshall as head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He died in 2016.
Daniel Greenberg graduated from Columbia University in 1953 and entered the Navy. On leaving the service in 1955, he joined the newspaper The Journal-Every Evening in Wilmington, Del. (it ceased publication in 1960), before moving to The Washington Post, where he worked from 1957 to 1961, when he took up a fellowship in Congress. He later worked for Science until 1970.
His first marriage, to Polly Hoben, ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Reif, a lawyer whom he married in 1979, he is survived by four children from his first marriage — Julie, Miggie, Cathryn and Liza Greenberg — and a stepdaughter, Gwendolyn Bradley, and 18 grandchildren. Dr.
Sarewitz recalled Mr. Greenberg as “cranky, cantankerous, intimidating a bit,” and added, “I did not love being interviewed by him. ” But he said there were still far too many journalists who are “cheerleaders” for science. Mr.
Greenberg won praise from those inside the science establishment as well. At a party marking the sale of SGR in 1997, a medical researcher gave Mr. Greenberg a book along with a letter saying the gift was “a token of my respect and admiration for you in the extraordinary job that you have done. ” The letter was signed by Dr.
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