Abstract
The University of Chicago Press, 2001
530 pages; $35.00
The word “scientist” is of relatively recent origin—it was coined by William Whewell at the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1833.
The word failed to catch on for more than half a century. Lord Kelvin thought it “un-English,” and T. H. Huxley lamented that it was “about as pleasing a word as ‘electrocution.’” What did catch on, however, was how the association viewed the practice of science. It was to be above religion, above personal economic gain, and unquestionably, above politics.
Whewell and other leading members of the group found that detaching science from party politics was a great advantage; it made it easier for the association to lobby for government funding. They embarked on long-term, international research projects that relied almost exclusively on government assistance—the Admiralty, in particular, had the technical and financial resources, the people, and the international connections that made big science possible in the nineteenth century.
Daniel S. Greenberg, a veteran journalist with more than 40 years of experience reporting on science policy, describes the relationship between science and politics in its modern context in the United States, tracing how it has evolved from the beginning of the Cold War to the turn of the new century.
Other professionals—physicians, lawyers, and teachers—long ago entered electoral politics, but scientists for the most part have stuck to their nineteenth-century detachment. To compensate for the lack of direct access to politics, they simply developed sharper and slyer tools to assure their future access to government money. Science, Money, and Politics is a gripping, sometimes amusing, and often provocative tour de force discussion of the ultimate consequences of their success.
Greenberg uses archival research, candid interviews with presidential advisers, personal contacts, and an engaging writing style to weave an intriguing tale of the “magical thinking and voodoo misperceptions” that surround modern science. He begins by discussing the myths that scientists purposely perpetuate in their myopic quest for funding. These range from false alarms of foreign scientific superiority to manufactured Ph.D. shortages, “scare tactics” and “artful contrivances,” all with one thing in common: They work.
Perhaps the most prevalent and seductive myth concerns the “financial crisis” in research. Claims that funding is in decline are pervasive; the media gullibly swallow the story, and the public unwittingly treats it as fact. Thus, Greenberg relates that a senior research physicist at Yale University felt confident telling readers of the New York Times that Congress “has cut the budget for basic research every year since the 1970s, and especially in the 1990s.” A cursory glance at budget documents would have demonstrated how far such rhetoric strayed from reality.
“An awkward fact for science,” notes Greenberg, “is that during and after the Cold War, and to this day, public and private money for science has been provided in immense and, overall, steeply rising quantities.” And just as the dollars from the federal government and private industry keep rising, so too do the scientists' cries of neglect. To be fair, Green-berg does acknowledge that the number of scientists seeking funding is also rising, and that the insatiability of the scientific frontier assures a feeling of deprivation and economic hardship. Even so, scientists' “claims of neglect are so far fetched as to invite wonder about motivation and trustworthiness on other matters.”
As scientists have successfully used extravagant claims to keep the money pouring in, science itself has paid a tremendous price. In the quest for money, argues Greenberg, scientists have lost the “dispassionate objectivity traditionally associated with the conduct of scientific research.” He relates an amusing yet striking example from MIT: A student could not complete an assignment for a course because in doing so he would have violated a non-disclosure agreement he signed with a company owned by an MIT faculty member. The instructor who assigned the homework worked for a competing company, and was in turn accused of corporate espionage.
Greenberg suggests that similar transgressions are ubiquitous. Certainly, in the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and academic scientists, such behavior is only the tip of a dangerous iceberg. Lying beneath the surface are other, “pandemic disorders”—misrepresen-tation and inflation of data, restrictions on publication, and severe conflicts of interests between scientists, industries, universities, and professional journals.
Meanwhile, “the press serves as a chorus of worshipful approval.” Front-page stories trumpet medical advances, as the author points out, but when those advances sour, retractions appear on the back page.
More alarming than the industry-induced ethical erosion of science is the overall political silence of the scientific community. In this sense, Science, Money, and Politics is especially pertinent for readers of the Bulletin. The atomic bomb caused the last great mobilization of scientists to speak out on a social issue. Since then, warns Greenberg, “the retreat of scientists from social and political concerns has been a creeping, continuous process.” They have retreated into a “scientific ghetto.”
Just as the waterfall of cascading scientific money did not dry up with the end of the Cold War, neither have the social dilemmas facing modern science and society. With the ongoing threat of nuclear proliferation, chemical and biological weapons, environmental hazards, and the considerable ethical concerns raised by genetic engineering, science's inward-looking perspective is all the more regrettable.
There are problems with the book: Greenberg frequently conflates “science” and “medicine.” And he is not always careful about numbers, sometimes using figures for research and development that include both government and industry funds, and other times citing only federal money, which now dominates only basic research. It is often difficult to discern the practical meaning of the data he presents. Admittedly, the ethical erosion of science is particularly acute in biotechnology and related areas, where patents follow quickly from discovery. But Greenberg is apt to generalize from this area to all of science.
The shortfalls of the text, however, pale in comparison to the overall significance of the author's conclusions. Industry, not government, is now the dominant source of money for research and development: “Money has become the motivating force, often to the neglect and abuse of traditional, and desirable, values of science.”
Now that the singular goal of science policy for the past half century— the pursuit of more money—has been won, Greenberg suggests that scientists need to step into “the unruly world of politics.” His specific suggestions are certain to ruffle some feathers, but they are the feathers of an ossified nineteenth-century model, and they need ruffling. Among them: Washington could use more officeholding scientists, and government research in the physical sciences should be removed from “the chronically dysfunctional Department of Energy” and placed instead in a newly formed independent agency, or made a part of the “well-run” National Science Foundation.
Greenberg shows just how outdated William Whewell's definition of the scientist as someone divorced from politics seems in the modern U.S. context. In a well-researched and highly informative narrative, he speaks to scientists, the press, and everyone interested (and worried) about the social responsibility of the modern day scientist. •