Politics and science; is science being corrupted? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, February 06, 2010, 20:28 @ dhw

All the recent scandals highlight the fact that the sheer scale of human culture makes us dependent to a potentially disastrous degree on so-called experts. We have no choice. Politicians can take us to war on false (or falsified) information, bankers can take us to ruin through incompetence and greed, and scientists can wreck people’s lives through personal, political or industrial agendas. Most of these disasters are built on our trust in their expertise.

The problem in current science arises from the fact that governments give a massive amount of science grants, compared to grants from charitable foundations. The government grants are very often connected to political agendas. This is a reverse from years ago when I was doing cardiac research. Further, then there was no peer review; editors of journals decided what would be included in a given issue.Now, pharmaceutical companies give grants to help them find new products. What the new system has done is create a requirement that an author state there is no conflict of interest, because the current system can easily creates conflict of interest.. What current peer review does is give a small group of people the chance to indulge in conspiracy. And it sure looks like it has permeated science in several areas and certainly has happened in climate science. From the WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=Eric%20Felten&mod=DNH_S