THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE

From: Dr. Jai Maharaj (usenet_at_mantra.com)
Date: 07/28/04 

Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 22:08:14 GMT

THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE

Forwarded message posted for discussion:

[ Subject: The Corruption of Science
[ From: Dan Clore <clore@columbia-center.org>
[ Date: 28 Jul 2004 01:04:50 -0500

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

ZNet

Science The Corruption (and Redemption) of Science

By David W. Orr
Conservation Biology July 27, 2004

A recent investigation into the use of science by the
Bush Administration alleges a systematic pattern of
suppressing or distorting scientific evidence across a
wide range of issues (Union of Concerned Scientists
2004). The authors of the report further charge that the
appointment of scientific advisors and members of
advisory panels now serves interests other than the
search for truth. Specifically, the report charges that
there is: -- a well-established pattern of suppression
and distortion of scientific findings by high-ranking
Bush Administration political appointees in many federal
agencies; -- a wide-ranging effort to manipulate the
government's scientific advisory system; -- and
censorship on topics deemed sensitive to the
administration's political "base."

Such manipulation of science, the authors say, is
"unprecedented." In short, "objective knowledge is being
distorted for political ends by the Bush Administration,
and misrepresented or even withheld from Congress and the
public at large."

To those paying attention, findings such as these will
come as no surprise. They fit a larger pattern that
ranges from the misuse of intelligence information to
justify the war in Iraq, to deception about the budget,
the economy, and the effects of tax cuts, to well the
list goes on, and in its length and scope it, too, is
unprecedented. Some may object that such information is
partisan and has no place in this journal and no bearing
on its mission of bringing authentic science to bear on
the problems of conservation. On the other hand, whatever
one's politics, the corruption of science and public
information for political ends ought to be deeply
offensive to scientists and citizens alike.

Allowed to continue it will, like Lysenkoism in the
Soviet Union, demoralize scientists, degrade the
reputation of science, and discredit the information
necessary to a free society. And, specifically for those
working in conservation biology, it means that research,
whatever its merit or import, will be discounted or
disregarded by federal agencies, the Congress, and the
White House.

As bad as the recent corruption of U.S. science by right-
wing ideologues for political purposes may be, there is a
deeper pattern of corruption described recently by
Manchester Guardian columnist George Monbiot (2004) . The
problems cited by Monbiot include the following:

-- 34% percent of the lead authors of articles in
scientific journals are compromised by their sources of
funding;

-- only 16% of scientific journals have a policy on
conflicts of interest, and only 0.5% of the papers
published have authors who disclose such conflicts;

-- British and U.S. scientists are putting their names to
papers they have not written, which are instead ghosted
by writers working for various companies; and

-- 87% of the scientists writing clinical guidelines have
financial ties to drug companies.

Monbiot, in short, charges that some branches of
university science are systematically corrupted by
corporate money. In recent decades there has been a
veritable flood of corporation funding to major
universities, and we may reasonably assume that the
corruption is roughly proportional to the volume of
funding, which is not, however, to say that all research
so funded is thereby corrupted.

Corruption comes in varying degrees. The Union of
Concerned Scientists and George Monbiot are concerned
about the effects of political zealotry, greed, and the
desire for renown on the accuracy of scientific
information. But there is a more subtle kind of
corruption by which commercial funding and private
ownership of knowledge cuts off the free flow of ideas in
science and deflects entire fields of knowledge. Some
branches of science simply would not have flourished
without the promise of great pecuniary reward both for
researchers and institutions able to patent the results.
And some fields, of considerable importance to the larger
human prospect, have languished because they offer no
such potential. As a result, textbooks, curricula,
research agendas, tenure decisions, and employment
opportunities come to reflect the pattern of grant and
gift money, not the freely chosen search for truth. There
is no conspiracy here of the sort described by the Union
of Concerned Scientists or George Monbiot. Instead, there
is the power of money to do what money has always done,
which is to get its way in this case by harnessing much
of science to the purposes of commerce and power and
thereby to determine the directions of entire fields of
knowledge.

Defenders of the system argue that the funds so acquired
by universities are necessary to make up the difference
between rising budgets and decreasing public support. But
poverty a relative thing is not a good argument for
compromising institutional integrity, the public trust,
or the search for truth. Others argue that the knowledge
gained in these fields, however funded, represents a
process akin to evolution in which only the hardy
survive. That leaves unexplained why we know so much
about some things, often trivial or even deleterious to
human well-being, and so little about other things, such
as the full extent of life on Earth, the biology of
conservation, women's health, chemical-free farming, or
the creation of livable cities.

There is a third and deeper source of corruption beyond
the power of ideology and money: the failure of
scientific skepticism among scientists themselves. Robert
Sinsheimer, in a remarkable article published in Daedalus
in 1978, asked, "Could there be knowledge, the possession
of which, at a given time and stage of social
development, would be inimical to human welfare and even
fatal to the further accumulation of knowledge?" His
answer was affirmative. His point was simply that the
right of free inquiry should not be used to trump larger
values, including those of freedom, public safety,
environmental quality, and even human survival. There is,
he asserted, scientific knowledge that we could not
control and which could, one way or another, jeopardize
human survival. Twenty-three years later, Bill Joy said
much the same thing, calling for a moratorium on research
into devices capable of self-replication and inherently
beyond human control. Both were widely ignored or
dismissed as alarmist. But if the essence of science is
skepticism, then the lack of skepticism about science
itself and the wider context in which it is conducted is
unscientific. Although neither Sinsheimer nor Joy offered
easy answers, a scientific response would have resulted
in a wide debate about the larger implications of
scientific inquiry and its relation to human welfare.

The corruption of science did not begin with right-wing
ideologues in the Bush Administration, or with corporate
funding, or even with the failure of scientists to think
about science skeptically. The roots of the problem go
far back to Francis Bacon's (1627) proposal to join
science and government and to his aim of harnessing
science to the goal of "effecting all things possible."
That union and its attendant possibilities lay dormant
until World War II and the systematic use and misuse of
science and scientists by Allied and Axis governments
alike. German science was corrupted to the ends of murder
and militarization. But science in Allied countries can
claim no innocence. Witness the legacy of the Manhattan
Project: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, a half-century arms race,
radioactive landscapes, and systematic government
secrecy. Bacon could not have foreseen the extent and
scope of the scientific revolution or the possibilities
for governments to corrupt knowledge by applying it to
the development of horrendous weapons and the
surveillance and manipulation of its own citizens.

An even starker picture emerges in the science that used
citizens as guinea pigs for research reminiscent of Nazi
science: the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment between 1932
and 1972; experiments carried out between 1950 and 1969
in which the government tested drugs, chemical,
biological, and radioactive materials on unsuspecting
U.S. citizens; and the deliberate contamination of 8000
square miles around Hanford, Washington, to assess the
effects of dispersed plutonium (Cornwell 2003). And there
has been a century or more of persistent corporate
secrecy about the health and ecological effects of
pollution and any number of products and industrial
processes. We learn of such things, to the extent that we
learn of them at all, long afterward and mostly by some
accidental breach in the wall of secrecy.

Looking ahead, the advance of science will increase the
temptations for secrecy and the further misuse of
knowledge.

Progress in many fields is creating ethical dilemmas for
which we are intellectually, morally, and institutionally
ill equipped, as Robert Sinsheimer feared. And the
advance of knowledge in some fields will multiply
possibilities for terrorists of all sorts, including
those acting in the name of our government while
increasing the possibilities of human errors of great
consequence. The Bush Administration's "war on terror" is
creating new pressures to militarize science and industry
under a dense shroud of secrecy. The Pentagon already
controls roughly half the annual $75 billion federal
research and development budget, a fraction that will
certainly increase under the claim of national security
and the drive to militarize space and thereby further
extend U.S. hegemony.

Science is the most powerful and problematic of human
endeavors. In the past, we have focused mostly on its
power and promise, not on its perils. And in the golden
age of science, from Galileo to the onset of Nazi
science, this was understandable, perhaps justifiable.
But we live now in changed circumstances foreseen in Mary
Shelley's Dr.

Frankenstein or Herman Melville's Ahab in Moby *** .

Science has grown in power and scope without a
commensurate refinement in our collective judgment about
its proper uses or limits, hence with little improvement
in our capacity to foresee and forestall knowledge
deleterious to humankind and even to science. But we
ought now to reckon seriously with the responsible
acquisition and use of knowledge for reasons Shelley
portrayed and because of our capacity for collective
obsessions of the sort Melville described. Doing so would
require us to think more deeply about science and to
question the relationships between science and democracy,
law, and accountability. To this end I offer the
following observations.

First, the relationship between knowledge and ignorance
is not zero sum. The faith in the power of reason that we
inherited from the Enlightenment carries with it an
increasing burden of irony. The fact is that the advance
of science, conducted in the faith that reason would
render cause and effect transparent and the world more
controllable, has in fact created a vastly complicated
world of things, materials, systems, ecological effects,
and feedback loops at different scales and time horizons
in which cause and effect are becoming harder to discern
and the possibilities of control (at least on a large
scale) ever more remote. Every scientific discovery
expands the domain of knowledge but also expands the
interface of the known with the unknown, which is to say
it generates yet more questions, some of which we will
fail to ask or to ask in time to avoid serious problems
(e.g., the effects of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone
layer).

Second, science is neutral only at the level of methods
and not at the higher level at which problems are
selected and fields defined. That higher level is
determined by values, politics, funding, and what Thomas
Kuhn once described as paradigms agreed-upon methods of
research, problems, and frameworks which in turn are
products of culture, psychology, and political power.

Third, from the public's view, the actual practice of
science is increasingly remote and esoteric, yet its
effects are increasingly pervasive and intrusive. Its
relation to the public resembles in some ways the
relation of theology delivered by the Papacy in Latin to
the illiterate masses of the Middle Ages.

Fourth, in matters of knowledge, motive counts. The
difference between research carried out in the spirit of,
say, Barbara McClintock's "feeling for the organism" and
that motivated by commercially driven curiosity is not
trivial. One may lead to reverence, the other more likely
to the clever manipulation of nature or even to
sacrilege.

Finally, the unintended ecological, social, and economic
consequences of the advance of science increasingly set
the rights of free inquiry against those of the public
and future generations to safety, health, security, well-
being, dignity, and to a full and unmutilated humanity.
Much as Sinsheimer feared, the results of unfettered
inquiry may lead to increasingly consequential and
irreversible results.

It would be foolish, I think, to assume otherwise.

>From this perspective, what can be done to redeem the
potential of science for human betterment as once
envisioned in the Enlightenment? One response is to
insist on "principled vigilance" by scientists. British
historian John Cornwell (2003:462), for example,
describes the "good scientist" in these terms: He (or
she) "does not place dangerous knowledge or techniques
into the hands of the untrustworthy attempts to publicize
by any means possible the social and environmental
consequences of potentially dangerous knowledge [and]
rejects the use of people as instruments." At the same
time he notes forces that work at cross-purposes, such as
"The Faustian bargains [that] lurk within routine grant
applications, the pressure to publish for the sake of
tenure and the department's budget, the treatment of
knowledge and discovery as a commodity that can be owned,
bought, and sold."

There can be no good argument against the importance of
sound judgment and robust ethical sensitivity exercised
by individual scientists. Although necessary, however,
such qualities are insufficient given the limits of human
nature and individual perception and the magnitude of the
problem.

A second response is to improve science education in
schools and colleges in order to create a scientifically
literate public. Seldom do such admonitions go beyond
proposing more basic science in the curriculum to the
larger goal of equipping the public to think rationally
and skeptically about the directions of science itself or
the uses to which it is put. The result is often a kind
of gee-whiz level of knowledge aimed to create broad but
uncritical support for big science and a deeper state of
public torpor without empowering people to ask serious
questions. In matters of education, scientific literacy
ought to be regarded as a means of equipping the public
with the capacity to think critically about science
itself.

A third, and related, response requires creating
mechanisms that enable a scientifically literate public
to participate in setting priorities for publicly funded
research and development. Would a discerning public, for
instance, agree to pay for the science necessary to
militarize space or that necessary to pursue adventures
on the planet Mars, or even the Human Genome Project? To
pose such questions highlights the fact that we presently
have few good mechanisms by which to connect civic life
and public debate with choices about research goals. This
disconnection can only undermine democracy and eventually
public support for science itself.

The counterargument that the public can never know enough
to make good choices about complex scientific issues is
both self-serving and dubious in light of the many
examples from our own and European experience in which
the public has participated constructively in making
choices about the directions of science and its
application (Sclove 1995:197-328). The problem is not
public stupidity, lack of interest, or even the
difficulty of the problem, so much as a failure of the
political imagination required to forge innovative
democratic institutions for changed circumstances.

This leads to a fourth response. There is a widening gulf
between what is deemed "cutting edge" science and real
human needs. We know enough to say with assurance that
the intersection of climate change, biotic
impoverishment, ecosystem decline, and poverty are
sweeping us toward what is at best a highly undesirable
future. We know, too, that the escalating dynamic among a
fossil fuel-driven U.S.

economic hegemony, terrorism, and militarization is
diverting attention and critical resources from the
effort to deal with the causes of our problems. We also
know enough to say that the powers of science accordingly
ought to be redirected with all deliberate speed from the
trivial and even dangerous toward the knowledge necessary
to

 - make a rapid transition from fossil fuels to solar
energy;

 - provide healthcare for everyone on Earth;

 - establish sustainable agriculture systems;

 - build low-cost, high-performance shelter;

 - restore degraded ecosystems;

 - preserve species and ecologies; and

 - develop economies that work with, not against, natural
systems.

The original promise of science was to harness the power
of reason and knowledge to the improvement of the human
condition and to progress broadly defined. That noble
vision has been whittled down to fit ignoble ends and,
worse, corrupted to purposes that undermine human dignity
and the human prospect. The redemption of science is
nothing less than the effort to reclaim a human future
directed by a more rational rationality, a more
scientific science, and a vision that we are indeed
capable of rising above illusion, ill will, and greed.

DAVID W. ORR Environmental Studies, Oberlin College,
Oberlin, OH 44074, U.S.A., email david. orr@oberlin. edu

Literature Cited

 - Cornwell, J. 2003. Hitler's scientists. Viking, New
York.

 - Monbiot, G. 2004. The corporate stooges who nobble
serious science. Manchester Guardian 24 February
(available from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1154585,00.html
(accessed May 2004).

 - Sclove, R., 1995. Democracy and technology. Guilford
Press, New York.

 - Sinsheimer, R. 1978. The presumptions of science.

Daedalus 107 (2):23-36. -- Union of Concerned Scientists
(UCS). 2004. Scientific integrity in policymaking. UCS,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 - Dan Clore

Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
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End of forwarded message from Dan Clore <clore@columbia-center.org>

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     "And a man's foes shall be they of his own
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 - Matthew 10:34-36.

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