Today the notion of a “science debate” took another baby step toward becoming reality: Organizers announced that they had set a date (April 18), a place (the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), and invited the leading US presidential candidates John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Now we wait and see who says yes.

In the meantime, the drive for a science-themed debate has garnered an impressive list of supporters, from co-chairs Vern Ehlers and Rush Holt (the rarely-sighted species otherwise known as physicists in Congress) to organizations like the National Academies and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Even Phil Campbell, the editor-in-chief of Nature (and my boss’s boss), has signed on. As an editorial in the current issue of Nature puts it: “Such is the groundswell of support that their call is starting to feel like an idea whose time has come, and indeed it may prove to be so.”

But there is also some skepticism emerging. David Goldston, a Nature columnist, advances the notion here that the debate may end up backfiring against its organizers unless it’s clear from the start what they hope to accomplish. The column has gotten a bit of pickup in the blogosphere (though no response from the organizers as of yet) – see for instance Andy Revkin’s DotEarth and John Lynch’s Stranger Fruit.

Lynch in particular takes issue with the Nature editorial, which goes on to say that “the proposed debate can be seen as an attempt by various elite institutions to grab the microphone and set the agenda from the top down.”

What do you think? Is a science debate the way to raise the profile of science in an election where Iraq and the economy dominate? And what would you hope to gain from such a debate?