Michael Eisen, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cellular biology, is the anti-politician.

The Berkeley resident has two degrees from Harvard: a B.S. in math and a Ph.D. in biophysics. He worked as the radio play-by-play voice for a minor league baseball team in Tennessee. He developed software for the analysis of genetic data at Stanford. He’s a longtime advocate for “open science,” joining with Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus and others to co-found the Public Library of Science, a provocative public alternative to the constraints and expense of traditional journals.

And he studies flies — specifically, how flies develop from a tiny single-celled egg to a mature adult. He says they hold insights into what goes wrong in people as they age.

But he wants your vote, saying that America’s leadership needs a rigorous scientific voice that believes in real facts, not “alternative” ones. This past week he announced on Twitter that he’ll run as a Democrat for U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat in 2018. Feinstein, D-Calif., has not yet said whether she’s going to run for re-election.

The Bay Area News Group asked him why he planned on running:

BANG: In the lab, you’re unraveling the deepest mysteries of early life. Why leave all that for Washington, D.C.?

Eisen: There has been a growing sense of frustration among scientists about the way decisions are made in politics — in particular, the way science is integrated into decision-making. I mean “science” in the grand sense — the process of making observations, characterizing reality and then using that characterization to make judgments about the best course of action.

For a really long time, scientists have watched political processes erode — and have watched politicians openly deride science, dismissing the role that science plays in our everyday life. Scientists have been sitting here hoping that someone would come alone and defend those principals.

Politics, in my mind, should function similar to science. We should try to figure out what’s going on in the world and then debate the best way to do it, to make the world better. The best tools we have to characterize reality are the observational tools that science uses all the time.

Too much of politics has rejected that basic principal that scientists live and breathe all the time.

BANG: Why the U.S. Senate?

Eisen: There is a possibility of an open seat with an open primary. I thought: “This is a good opportunity.”

But I’m not trying to read the tea leaves. I want people to look at what I am doing as a model.

The real immediate motivation was watching a Senate hearing where they were discussing a scientific issue, like climate change. I thought: “It would be really nice to have scientists ask the questions of the Cabinet appointees, because the senators don’t seem to understand the issue and aren’t asking the right questions.”

BANG: You don’t have any political experience. Could that pose a challenge?

Eisen: I have zero. But I have been involved in political issues. I’ve spent 20 years trying to advocate for greater public access to science — lobbying people on Capitol Hill to try to push government scientists to make the results of their research available.

Often scientists are explicitly told not to get involved in politics. There is a sense that science should be apolitical. We do stuff and hand the work over to others and let them make decisions.

That is a mistake — science is, in many ways, very deeply political. What we should try to be is nonpartisan.

So many decisions that politicians make overlap with things that scientists think about every day.

I think it is kind of a crazy universe where so much of what we do is affected by science and technology — and so few scientists and tech industry experts are involved in politics.

BANG: Do you have a platform?

Eisen: My goal here is not a narrow defense of science. I am not about “Get more funding for science!” Rather, it is about a worldview — a way of approaching problem-solving and thinking about challenges. People do it every day in their real lives, but yet for some reason it has ceased to drive our political decision-making.

For instance: How can we best grow food that is good for us, and how should agriculture be structured? What kinds of immigrants integrate well and who is dangerous? There are answers to these questions, based on data and analysis.

I have a hypothesis: Having more scientists involved in politics and the public sphere would improve the way we make decisions, the way we characterize our world and how we figure out what we do about it.

I felt it was necessary to test that hypothesis.

BANG: What’s next?

Eisen: I have to figure out how to run a campaign. I’m a complete neophyte. So I’ve immersed myself in finance law and logistics, and connecting with people who can help. I literally have no idea how to do this.

I’m doing what scientists do: reading about it and asking the experts