Science for Sale
Gilman, William
Science for Sale The Politics of Pure Science, by Daniel S. Greenberg. New American Library. 303 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by William Gilman Consider the so-called average American. Science baffles...
...Increasingly, this paymaster wants to call the tune—megabucks for mega-wonders (President Johnson every set up a timetable for "breakthroughs...
...It does have many failings...
...But he limits himself to the political, financial aspects of basic research...
...He goes on to show that this has brought them increasing importance and affluence at the cost of their purity, politically speaking...
...Three chapters of the book's twelve are expended on two examples of "pure" science, Mohole and MURA...
...Universities and other "non-profits" fight each other, for it, and so do industry's practical missile-makers, spaceship-builders, computer-miniaturizers...
...But as our sciences become an increasingly vast establishment, frustration replaces communication...
...Unlike Holifield or Finney, Greenberg works for a pillar of the Establishment...
...The reader is left to paraphrase poet Sou they: "What they fought each other for I could not make out, but 'twas a famous fiasco...
...but, unless already informed, he cannot supply gaps in context...
...Hence the major brawl is for a bigger slice of money pie...
...His book discloses that he has been helped by a pair of fellowships...
...For instance, Greenberg retells the story of two brawls: the Mohole project to drill deep below the earth's crust, and Midwest Universities Research Association's (MURA) multi-university campaign to secure a giant atom-smasher for Wisconsin...
...But Representative Chet Holifield demonstrates that, thanks to home study, a former haberdasher can intrude effectively into something so esoteric as nuclear science...
...and layman John W. Finney demonstrates in The New York Times that a layman journalist can combine the science with the politics...
...Greenberg still recommends that science play it cool: "I don't believe that a general fumigation is in order...
...And when it is translated for him, more trouble...
...But the words lack context...
...Even the otherwise intelligent layman is an illiterate when confronted by scientific lingo...
...Theoretical physicists participated in practical Hiroshima, and DNA biologists now work toward something more personally portentous than anything Aldous Huxley or George Orwell pictured—namely, some men prescribing what genes other men shall have...
...Instead of lunching, Fountain persisted, and other committees also began challenging the scientific community...
...In sum, grantsmen and political manipulators speak louder than the competent, even inspired, workers who want science to clean its own house before the public's respresentatives do so...
...Focusing on the natural scientists who work in those fields of basic research loosely called pure science, he describes' the scientists' growing involvement since World War II with the Federal Government, their chief financial sponsor...
...But a reader would also want to know that AAAS gives its individual members no vote, leans heavily on advertising sold by Science—and received grants from the Government's National Science Foundation the same year that physicist Alan Waterman was president-elect of AAAS, director of NSF, and signed a top-level Government report that urged better controls over conflict-of-interest situations...
...But why should anybody want to drill so deep, or build the world's biggest smasher...
...But how in the world can the reader, unless he digs elsewhere, compare "pure" with "applied" (practical) science...
...The latter have already shown res-tiveness...
...To be sure, Greenberg hasn't actually worked in such fields...
...There is more to it than that...
...Rebel scientists assail the extent to which "grantsmanship" infests and corrupts science, as in the medical research field, where those who receive huge grants also judge who shall receive them...
...It has intramural fights...
...Daniel S. Greenberg, a Washington journalist and Johns Hopkins University research fellow in the history of science, does write about science, politics, and money...
...We are asked to scorn "pure" (basic) science...
...Looking deeper, we find that the science establishment is not a solid monolith...
...But in 1959, a House committee headed by Representative L. H. Fountain, North Carolina Democrat, with political economist D. C. Goldberg as his chief aide, began digging into the soaring budgets of the National Institutes of Health...
...Greenberg sloughs off grantsmanship as "ethically neutral...
...Hiroshima was explained away as saving American lives, and Japanese ones too...
...For many years Congress was a vigilant duenna over only the AEC...
...Entering one of them, Greenberg has written a tract...
...To begin with, we are now given politics without science...
...as surely as most of the nation's research bill is now paid by the Federal Government...
...The plain fact is that the distinction between basic and applied science, never sharp, is now an outdated cliche: as surely as both kinds are done by universities, by such Government agencies as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Atomic Energy Com-mission(AEC), by industry's Bell Telephone Laboratories...
...he is news editor of the weekly magazine, Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
...Typically he is given lasers, artificial hearts, and other marvels...
...Meanwhile, Greenberg's book overlooks Sloan-Kettering's immoral experiments on humans, and science shies from restricting its freedom with a code of ethics...
...Science baffles him: "It's too complicated for me...
...Genetic researchers already spread the message that their object is to prevent congenital disease...
...A reader may be patient with this hasty author, may tolerate the parade of footnotes and the uniquely inadequate index...
...But—context again—a tract avoids the full picture...
...The probe led to Greenberg's memorable suggestion in Science that Fountain and NIH director James A. Shannon could settle their differences at lunch...
...But The Politics of Pure Science does not tell enough...
...The marvels occur in a fairyland that has no corpulent economics, no ambitious scientist-politicians...
...He manages to express himself about Big Business, Big Labor, Big Pentagon, and the like when these get out of bounds...
...Sidestepped is the applied science of a continuing buddy system that President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex...
...And for reviewing the manuscript he curtseys to Dael Wolfle, the political power who is executive secretary of AAAS...
...But let us focus on the gaps in political context...
...This can make a subtle difference...
Vol. 32 • May 1968 • No. 5
