Science, it was said, should be isolated from politics, from ideology, from dogma, from religion.
Sounds good if all one means is that the current administration will treat science with more respect than many people believe its predecessor did. Sounds good if all one means by politics is partisan maneuvering or by ideology, dogma and religion, some form of blind belief unwilling to engage alternative viewpoints.
But these words frequently function as weapons. One person’s ideology can be someone else's political philosophy or even morality. One person's dogma can be someone else's self-evident truths. And politics is the way that people decide how they will live together, by what moral standards and to what ends.
Historians, sociologists and scientists themselves have generated a small library of books demonstrating how much of science has been driven and shaped by politics and ideology — and economics, too — all the while imagining that it was value-free, “just the facts,” as Sergeant Friday (from the old Dragnet TV show) and perhaps Obama would say.
Science has certainly developed safeguards to isolate its work from distorting influences. The danger is that those safeguards, like antibodies run amok, can also isolate it from morality.
Two days after Obama's announcement, the New York Times ran three science-related articles. One was about stem cell researchers worried that any new federal financing might prove insufficient. It also ran an article about a prolific medical researcher who admitted fabricating research that just happened to support the products of the pharmaceutical company underwriting the research. Both were reminders of how much science is affected by big money.
And the paper ran a page 1 article about European nations' debating whether surgical or chemical castration is an effective, humane and legitimate treatment to rehabilitate violent sex offenders. No one can read that article and imagine that this is simply a scientific question, to be resolved by medical scientists on their own terms, rather than one that is profoundly moral and political.
Is that any less true when it comes to not only human embryonic stem cell research but also a host of other ethically fraught, knotty scientific questions now challenging Americans?
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