From so simple a beginning…

In the 1950s, after much wrangling on issues related to national defense and other expedient matters, President Eisenhower set up the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), a group of distinguished scientists that was to provide non-partisan scientific advice to presidents. The president wanted a body of advisors in the White House who were answerable to no one, only to science itself. This body later included distinguished scientists such as Hans Bethe, Glenn Seaborg and George Kistiakowsky, all of whom were Manhattan Project veterans. They provided crucial and balanced advice to Eisenhower, JFK and Lyndon Johnson on important matters like missile defense and nuclear weapons. Hans Bethe for example was a key voice behind the very important Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that banned atmospheric and underwater nuclear testing. 

When Richard Nixon came to power, he dissolved PSAC under pressure from Congress that it was clouding judgment and imposing its opinions upon the president. This was one of the most regressive actions that a US president has taken in my opinion. With this action, Nixon essentially stonewalled any unbiased scientific advice that he could get from the nation’s top scientists. In their place came special-interest groups scientists and lobbyists. Now the scientists could never directly deliver their collective opinion on issues to the president without getting those opinions through White House personnel. Many of these personnel not only had scant background in science, but also were wedded to partisan pandering. They had the power to censor and manipulate scientific reports, and they did.

Since Nixon, unbiased scientific advice has become more and more unwelcome at the White House. In 1995, Congress dissolved the Office of Technology Assessment, the one remaining organization that could provide them with bipartisan advice on important scientific matters. This is especially ironic and ignominious considering the fact that only a handful of Congressmen have any significant background in science and are still routinely called upon to make prudent decisions on science policy. The administration of George Bush of course has carried this deliberate suppression and ignorance of scientific advice to great new levels. Bush’s appointee in the White House manipulated reports on climate change before presenting them to the public. When his shenanigans were discovered, he left the administration to become a lobbyist for an oil corporation. Directors of such crucial organizations as NASA, FDA and CDC (Centers for Disease Control) are also essentially Bush appointees. Scientists in these organizations have regularly complained about the suppression of sound scientific results by the administration. An employee of the FDA left because she thought that the FDA was pandering to religious groups and delaying the release of Plan B, a “morning after” contraceptive pill. Similarly employees in NASA were prohibited from talking to the press about climate change research. Bush’s appeasement of religious groups and his subsequent actions to ban stem-cell research is another bitter example of science suppression. As far as the deliberate stamping out of important scientific advice is concerned, this administration has set new records that may not be ever surpassed. 

But what is the price of all this suppression? Is it that the nation won’t see key rapid advances in stem-cell therapy leading to the potential saving of lives? Is is that the nation will have to bear the heavy costs of not curbing carbon emissions? Is it that the nation  will see whole-scale destruction of the environment perhaps beyond repair? It is of course all these things but it is something even more serious; the suppression of freedom itself.

Ever since the origins of science, scientific thinking and progress has gone hand in hand with skepticism, that quality which is the bedrock of all of science. But this quality is even more important in assessing politics, where politicians and the media are deliberately going to spin issues and build facades around key matters. Concomitant with this suppression of science by the government, we are seeing an even more pernicious phenomenon; an increasing lack of scientific knowledge and temper among the general public. And this will have devastating consequences that will become apparent all too late. Firstly, a citizenry ignorant of science will not be able to critically think about which issues need attention, and will fall for anything that the administration tells them is important. Secondly, it is the public’s dollars that fund science, and how will the public know which areas to let the government fund, if it does not know which areas should be funded in the first place? This attitude will, and it does, allow the administration to fund only those areas of science which are to their benefit, while a complicit public ignorant of science not only nods along but also lets its valuable tax dollars be diverted to these government-favored endeavors. A single example will suffice. Ever since 9/11, the administration has made bioterrorism a key research priority. Funding for bioterrorism research increased exponentially after 9/11. More importantly, the government did a very effective job in convincing the public through the media that the next great danger to their life is going to be from biological weapons. But the facts just don’t stand up to the rhetoric. Infectious and chronic diseases even after 9/11 pose a much greater harm to the health of the public than Ebola and anthrax. Antibiotic-resistant infections killed thousands last year. In spite of these simple facts, funding for basic microbiology research on infectious diseases has been choked and reduced, diverting all those funds toward preventing the next anthrax attack which has a much lesser possibility of happening than the next wave of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. Again, a public ignorant of science has been a sucker for the fear-mongering tactics of the administration, and has allowed it to spend their dollars on its whims. It’s quite clear that similar strategies can be adopted by the administration to fund any other selective research, while a fearful public looks on and agrees.

Religious groups too now have more power than ever in influencing politics and certain kinds of research. A public ignorant of science and skepticism will fall for the rhetoric that it is immoral to kill a month old embryo for its cells. Skepticism entails the balancing of facts and then taking decisions based on the evidence. In this particular case, the facts indicate that stem-cell research will possibly lead to the saving of millions of lives of those stricken with diseases like diabetes, stroke and Parkinson’s disease. Clearly we can understand that it may be a moral travesty not to fund stem-cell research in the light of these promising advances. But again, a manipulative administration that panders to religious groups has the power to stop funding for such crucial research, and a public not well-versed in the true promise of stem-cell research believes them, or at the very least is indifferent to their actions. There are countless other examples of how the public, ignorant of true scientific facts, lets the administration spend its hard-earned money in areas of research which are not key to the progress of the nation but rather to the government’s partisan goals, and I can state only a few. What about missile defense, where billions of taxpayers dollars are being spent on the pretext that it will lead to a defense against some potential future threat from Iranian or North Korean missiles? What about politicians pushing for funding into new nuclear weapons under the pretext that they are needed for selectively destroying targets while “minimizing” casualties? All the research connected with these activities serves nothing else except the administration’s political motives. It does nothing to advance research that is truly important to the public’s welfare and future; stem-cells, infectious and chronic diseases, alternative energy, vaccines. And it is not opposed by the public because they cannot think skeptically enough to separate the scientific wheat from the chaff of rhetoric.

As I have noted, in the end skepticism is key not just for scientific progress but for electing those in power. Those in power on the other hand are in varying extents always going to be against the spirit of science, because it enables people to think for themselves and make informed decisions through the inherent skepticism and open-mindedness of science. The essence of political power is to keep people fearful, subdued and unable to think for themselves. Much is rightly made these days about the suppression of individual freedoms, including airport profiling and wiretaps. Although not all of this is connected with scientific research, it is doubtless connected to a lack of skepticism in the public. Trust the administration’s rhetoric about Saddam Hussein having WMDs. Trust their rhetoric about putting numbers on the high probability of a terrorist attack on US soil in the next two years. Trust their rhetoric about how dangerous Iran has become. In each one of these cases, a balanced examination of the evidence and skeptical thought would have led many to be more distrustful of the government’s motives, and scientific thinking can surely inspire such analysis. Therefore political power is also going to be against inculcating skepticism and true scientific thinking among the general populace. Religion and its intimate alliance with politics will further and more absolutely discourage such skepticism because of its inherent insistence on faith. Science is not just about discoveries and betterment of life. It is first and foremost about trusting the evidence and not taking anything at face value. It is about accepting that the world is not what it seems to be, a lesson that has been constant throughout scientific history. Scientific education, through skepticism and honest debate, promises the kind of bottom-up revolutions that have marked the origins of the most free societies in world history. Skepticism can give great power to the common people. And the lack of honest debate and questioning has also led to untold enslavement and suffering in history.

The other day I was watching a Carl Sagan interview from the year when he died (1996). There was one statement the great scientist and science popularizer made which sent a shiver down my spine. He said, “The real value of science is in teaching skepticism. If people are not skeptical, then they will fall for any charlatan or religious leader who becomes president”. It was a remarkably accurate assessment of the future. If Sagan were alive today, he would be profoundly disturbed at the tactics of an administration who wants to suppress free thought and unbiased scientific facts. But he would be even more disturbed and in fact horrified at the lack of scientific understanding and skepticism among a public who lets the administration tell them what’s important and lets their money be used any way the administration wants because they cannot make honest assessments of what the real issues are. Concomitant with scientific ignorance, lack of skepticism and the confusion caused by them, will be servility and obedience to a manipulative government. In the end, the price we may pay for scientific ignorance would not just be a poor standard of living and stunted technological growth, but liberty and freedom themselves, and we are already seeing the beginnings of that.© Ashutosh Jogalekar