My good friend Pierre Sprey emailed me the attached article by Jonathan Latham along with his introduction. While this truly frightening critique applies to genetics, the politicization of science is a widespread phenomenon that is now undermining our contemporary culture. It can be seen many fields ranging from defense science to climate science. With Pierre's permission I am his forwarding introductory comment and as Latham very important essay to you.
—-[Begin Pierre's email]—-
I commend to you this excellent article, a most interesting example of negative marginal returns in science research:
The third and fourth paragraphs from the end are particularly telling:
“Not sufficiently understood by outsiders is the fact that most of science is essentially now a top-down project. There persists a romantic notion (retained by many scientists) that science is a process of free enquiry. In this view, the endless grant applications and the requests for applications are merely quality control measures, or irritants imposed by bureaucrats.
But free enquiry in science is all but extinct. In reality, only a tiny proportion of research in biology gets done outside of straightjackets imposed by funding agencies. Researchers design their projects around funding programs; universities organize their hiring around them, and every experiment is carefully designed to bolster the next grant application.
The consequences of this dynamic are that individual scientists have negligible power within the system; but more importantly it opens a route by which powerful political or commercial forces can surreptitiously set the science agenda from above.”
Needless to say, the article in toto is a reminder that the despicable Progressive penchant for eugenics–so fulsomely admired by Hitler and so eloquently excoriated by Alexander Cockburn–is once again flourishing among us.
Can it be a coincidence that this eugenic resurgence comes just when our ever-present native American fascist undercurrents are rising on a perigean spring tide of metasticizing secret surveillance, police aggrandizement, corporate kleptocracy, Judeo-Christian fanaticism and racist xenophobia?
Pierre Sprey
Science as Social Control: Political Paralysis and the Genetics Agenda
By Jonathan Latham, Independent Science News | News Analysis
Thursday, 01 August 2013 10:41
