Separate State and Science by Sheldon Richman

[Stephane Budge]

I don’t reach much fiction these days, but one novel I
intend to read is State of Fear, Michael Crichton’s
story of how environmentalists use allegedly manmade
catastrophic global warming to control the population.
Anyone who has the power to cause such hysteria
among the Kyoto Protocol set must be doing something
right. (Bjørn Lomborg is another.) I have Crichton’s
book in hand, but my schedule doesn’t permit me to
dive in quite yet. However, I was informed that at the
back of the book there is an appendix with this grabber
of a title: “Why Politicized Science Is
Dangerous.”This is a topic dear to my
heart, so I read it.

Science, let us stipulate at the outset,
has been of inestimable value to the
human race. Because of science we live
longer and healthier lives (to the dismay
of the Social Security bureaucrats);
we have devices that make life
easier, more pleasant, and more fun:
think of our reliable automobiles, small
computers, PDAs, cell phones, portable DVD players,
and iPods (the latest thing I can’t live without); we have
inexpensive ways to keep in touch with distant loved
ones. All of us quickly take for granted revolutionary
inventions that would have astounded our grandparents
and in some cases even our parents.

But science, like anything else, can be twisted into
something inimical to human welfare. I see two threats.
One comes from scientism.This is the use of the procedures
of the physical sciences in the study of human
action, especially economics. When human beings are
looked on as objects rather than persons, trouble brews.
Properly conceived, science gives us life-serving control
over our physical environment. Improperly conceived, it
emboldens social engineers to control us. Beware those
who view the economy as a machine. Statistical aggregates
and simultaneous equations conceal flesh-andblood
individuals with preferences, values, and aspirations.
Social engineering would meet with more skepticism
if this were kept in mind.

The other threat is the subject of Crichton’s appendix:
the politicization of science, or the union of scientific
research and state. By now, of course, government
has tainted much of science, especially medicine and climatology.
There is no neutral government funding of
research. Every benefit is a tether. Each grant creates a
desire for future grants, which means the findings had
better not offend the grant-making
agency, which always has an agenda.
Crichton, who has anthropology
and medical degrees from Harvard,
begins his brief essay by looking back
at two notorious cases of politicized
science: eugenics and Lysenkoism. In
both cases a preconceived “public policy”
objective drove and therefore corrupted
the “science.” What occurred
had the appearance of science (unless
one looked carefully), but in fact bore no relation to
actual scientific activity. Essential terms weren’t even
defined, so most of what was said was meaningless, except
for its power to further the objective.

As Crichton points out, in the early twentieth century
eugenics was presented as a scientific answer to a purported
crisis—the enfeebling of the human race: “The
best human beings were not breeding as rapidly as the
inferior ones—the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degenerates,
the unfit, and the ‘feeble minded.’ ” What was the
answer? In the United States, it was compulsory sterilization;
in Germany, it included extermination by gas.Yet
eugenics was the vogue among “progressives.” Prestigious
foundations—Carnegie, Rockefeller—poured
money into it. Prominent figures were eager to associate
themselves with the movement, including Theodore
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill,
Alexander Graham Bell, Luther Burbank, Leland Stanford,
H. G.Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Margaret
Sanger (founder of what became known as Planned Parenthood).
The first president of the American Eugenics
Society was the well-known Yale University economist
Irving Fisher. As Crichton notes, after the Nazis gave
eugenics a bad name, biographers neglected to mention
their subjects’ former enthusiasm for the cause.

Regarding the scientific status of eugenics, Crichton
writes, “But in retrospect, three points stand out. First
. . . there was no scientific basis for eugenics. In fact,
nobody at the time knew what a gene really was. The
movement was able to proceed because it employed
vague terms never rigorously defined. . . . Second, the
eugenics movement was really a social program masquerading
as a scientific one.What drove it was concern
about immigration and racism and undesirable people
moving into one’s neighborhood or country. . . .Third,
and most distressing, the scientific establishment in both
the United States and Germany did not mount any sustained
protest. Quite the contrary. In Germany scientists
quickly fell into line with the program.”

In the second case, the Russian peasant T. D.
Lysenko’s claim that he had discovered how to make
crops grow better by treating seeds and thereby altering
offspring seeds had no scientific foundation whatsoever,
but it fit with the anti-genetic prejudices of Josef Stalin.
“Lysenko was portrayed as a genius, and he milked his
celebrity for all it was worth,” Crichton writes. He eventually
joined the Supreme Soviet.“By then, Lysenko and
his theories dominated Russian biology. The result was
famines that killed millions, and purges than sent hundreds
of dissenting Soviet scientists to the gulags or the
firing squads.”
Politicized science ruins and destroys lives.

The Banning of DDT

In a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco
in 2003, Crichton provided another lesson in
the lethality of politicized science: the ban of the insecticide
DDT. In the early 1960s Rachel Carson’s book
Silent Spring set off a movement to rid the world of the
insecticide. As a result, the long and promising effort to
defeat the scourge of mosquito-carried malaria in the
developing world was reversed and the deadly disease
made a tragic comeback.

In his brief discussion of this episode, Crichton
pulled no punches:

I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did
not cause birds to die and should never have been
banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it
knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway.
I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the
deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children,
whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous,
technologically advanced western society that
promoted the new cause of environmentalism by
pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably
harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one
of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century
history of America.We knew better, and we did
it anyway, and we let people around the world die
and didn’t give a damn.

Crichton’s speech covers much more than this, and I
commend it highly. (It is online at the PERC website,
www.perc.org/publications/articles/Crichtonspeech.php.)
In the State of Fear appendix, Crichton emphasizes
that he is not claiming that the global-warming scare is
exactly like the fear-mongering about the supposed
threat to the human gene pool.“But the similarities are
not superficial,” he writes. “And I do claim that open
and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is
being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken
strong editorial positions on the side of global warming,
which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under
the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands
clearly that they will be wise to mute their
expression.”

That kind of atmosphere is the death knell of genuine
science and the benefits it is capable of producing.
The lives and liberty of everyone are in jeopardy.“[T]he
intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination,
with a bad history,” Crichton concludes. “We must
remember the history, and be certain that what we present
to the world as knowledge is disinterested and
honest.”