A guest post from science and medical writer Stephen Dougherty.

New approaches are helping scientists deal with uncertainty in fields as diverse as climate change, genetics and global health, according to panelists who spoke on Monday at a Harvard/MIT forum.

The Science, Technology, and Policy Crossroads Consortium — an initiative out of MIT, Harvard, and other area schools — hosted the event, entitled “Layers of Uncertainty.” The panel discussion focused on how notions of uncertainty inform science, technology, and policy.

Dr. Ali Kahn of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began his keynote address with the familiar adage: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” Dr. Kahn, who is the director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness & Response, shared his approach for dealing with the serious uncertainties in public health. His 20 years at the federal disease monitoring agency taught him to rely on risk assessment and management. Dr. Khan also said he helped champion new data gathering tools that have also been critical to these efforts.

“Some of the best stuff going on out there is actually happening right here in Boston,” he said, citing Boston-based global health website HealthMap as a key innovation.

Stressing the importance of information sharing among public health groups, he argued that this website — which maps disease outbreaks worldwide — could have led to earlier identification in the 1999 West Nile Virus Outbreak. On the issue of climate change and public health, Dr. Kahn reinforced the importance of action in the face of inevitable uncertainties, “doing nothing is a decision and has costs,” a message that echoed throughout the talk.

Harvard biologist Jon Beckwith raised concerns over direct-to-consumer genetic testing. The emerging technology can be problematic because consumers may not fully understand uncertainties about genetic information.

Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard Science and Technology Studies Professor, focused on the problem of unknown unknowns.

“It’s almost a certainty that to have uncertainty you have to have data first,” she said, highlighting social issues in science and technology that are understudied or not studied at all. One way to deal with this problem is to look at science and technology through the lens of the social sciences and the humanities including ethics, she said.

MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow Eli Kintisch discussed uncertainty and climate science. “I think of climate change as actually pretty certain, we know the planet is warming up…the uncertainty when it comes to climate change is the magnitude.” His mission at MIT, he explained, is to expand his science reporting through new media tools and partnerships with science communicators outside of academia. The idea is to reach those who don’t read science stories he said.