Science and respect

Many readers responded to my May Editor's Note on the difficulty of encouraging engineering careers. They generally agreed with the factors I cited, ranging from lack of recognition (which I addressed last month) to the financial insecurity attendant to a technical career in the midst of an outsourcing rage and in the aftermath of the dot-com bust. Read some of these comments in my new blog column appearing at www.tmworld.com/blog.

In the May column, I also alluded to a political environment that promotes hostility to science that doesn't support an ideological agenda. One reader asked for examples, and I'm happy to point to other publications offering a ready supply.

An article in the June Scientific American ("Doubt Is Their Product," p. 96) provides several examples in which political pressure or industry lobbying attempted to undermine research. In one instance, a pharmaceutical company mounted a legal attack on a group of scientists who had concluded, in a study approved by drug manufacturers and the FDA, that one of the company's over-the-counter medicines contributed to strokes. The article quotes a one-time FDA head as saying that the "hassle and harassment" the scientists suffered would discourage further participation in such studies.

In another, high profile, example reported in the New York Times, a White House official and former petroleum industry lobbyist "edited" government scientists' reports on climate change to de-emphasize the relationship between greenhouse-gas emissions and global warming. (I put "edited" in quotes because his edits seem to be the addition of qualifying adverbs and adjectives—competent editors are trained to take out such words.)

There may be legitimate scientific debate about the extent of global warming, its causes, and what to do about it. Further, it's entirely appropriate that actions taken or not taken on global warming should result from the political process, with politicians and voters acting in light of the best scientific evidence placed before them. What should not be part of the political process is the establishment of that evidence.

We don't vote on the value of pi or on the configuration of the solar system. Most of us could probably get by quite nicely believing that pi equals three and that the earth is the center of the universe. But if our leaders encourage such self-deceit and suggest there is virtue in it, then it's not surprising that enterprising young people avoid the hard work—and attendant unpopularity—of determining what scientific truth really is.