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Anti-aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Politicization is a word that gets thrown around a lot, by both sides. But the pretense of a "science without metaphysics" that tried to succeed after the French Revolution never really was an honest ploy. So a Historian looks at partisan science, past and future. At The Conversation [theconversation.com].

Last year one of my students in a history of science class commented that “no one knows which doctors to trust because they are politicizing the pandemic, just like politicians are.” The interactions between science and politics are now so complex, so numerous and often so opaque that, as my student noted, it’s not clear anymore whom to trust.

People often assume that the objectivity of science requires it to be isolated from governmental politics. However, scientists have always gotten involved in politics as advisers and through shaping public opinion. And science itself – how scientists are funded and how they choose their research priorities – is a political affair.

The coronavirus pandemic showed both the benefits and risks of this relationship – from the controversies surrounding hydroxychloroquine to the efforts of Operation Warp Speed allowing researchers to develop vaccines in less than a year.

In this context, it is understandable that many people began to doubt whether they should trust science at all. As a historian of science, I know that the question is not whether science and politics ought to be involved – they are already. Rather, it is important for people to understand how this relationship can produce either good or bad outcomes for scientific progress and society.

Good, or bad? What does the author have in mind?

Geopolitical objectives drive a large part of scientific research. For example, the Apollo space program from 1961 to 1972 was driven more by the competition between superpowers in the Cold War than by science. In this case, government’s funding contributed to scientific progress.

In contrast, in the early days of the Soviet Union, the government’s involvement in biology had a stifling effect on science. Trofim Lysenko was a biologist under Stalin who denounced modern genetics. As he became head of top scientific institutions, his opponents were arrested or executed. Lysenkoism – despite being dead wrong – became the accepted orthodoxy in the academies and universities of communist Europe until the mid-1960s.

As the Lysenko story demonstrates, when political powers decide the questions that scientists should work on – and, more importantly, what kind of answers science should find – it can harm both scientific progress and society.

Ah, the Russian connection! Trumpism = Lysenko! Spelled almost like Lysol: coincidence?

Original Submission