… to come to the aid of their country. Here is a supremely depressing chart from Businessweek showing the professional backgrounds of the members of Congress

The largest groups in both the House and the Senate are lawyers (yellow) followed by business people (green). On the other extreme there is 1 lone engineer in the Senate and even worse only 2 engineers in the House. There are no scientists in the Senate and 2 in the House.

This is a huge problem at a time when many of the issues we confront have their origin (and likely also their solution) in technology and science. I don’t have a chart on the judiciary but we face a similar challenge there. Now I don’t mean to suggest that lawyers and business people can’t learn about technology and science if they wanted to – but the approach to many issues suggests that they aren’t taking the time to do so.

The most recent doozy comes from the judiciary where the appeals court for the Federal Circuit has just declared APIs copyrightable. This was an appeal by Oracle against the decision by Judge Alsup, who took the time to learn how to code, finding that APIs are a system or method of operation which is explicitly not copyrightable. Unfortunately the next place this decision can be appealed to is the Supreme Court, which seems to have no grounding whatsoever in science or engineering.

So what are we to do? We need more candidates with an engineering or science background. That will take time. In the meantime, we need engineers and scientists to speak out on the issues and to contact their existing representatives to help educate them.