Suicide by Pseudoscience 

By Bruce Sterling Previous: <A HREF="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/view.html?pg=3">You'll Never Get Cable à la Carte</A> | Next: <A HREF="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/view.html?pg=5">
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VIEW|sterling
The Union of Concerned Scientists in a February report pointed out something 
the science press has known for years: The Bush administration has no respect 
for science. Ideologues prefer to make up the laws of nature as they go.
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<A HREF="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/view.html?pg=4">erling:</A> How political purges will kill American science 
Presidential science adviser John Marburger complained that the UCS's account 
sounded like a "conspiracy theory report." That's because it is one. As the 
report amply documents, the Bush administration has systematically manipulated 
scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury 
contamination, and a host of other issues. Even as Marburger addressed his 
critics, the administration purged two advocates of stem-cell research from the 
President's Council on Bioethics. 
When politicians dictate science, government becomes entangled in its own 
deceptions, and eventually the social order decays in a compost of lies. Society, 
having abandoned the scientific method, loses its empirical referent, and 
truth becomes relative. This is a serious affliction known as Lysenkoism.
Trofim Lysenko was Joseph Stalin's top stooge in Soviet agricultural science, 
a field that was mercilessly politicized by fanatics. His specialty was 
inventing nutty schemes - things like stimulating the evolution of trees by 
overcrowding them to get them to cooperate, as though they were communist minions. 
This totalitarian huckster spent his whole career promising exciting results and 
bringing about only disaster. But the party never judged itself on results, 
so he always got a free pass.
Politics without objective, honest measurement of results is a deadly short 
circuit. It means living a life of sterile claptrap, lacquering over failure 
after intellectual failure with thickening layers of partisan abuse. Charlatans 
like Lysenko can't clarify serious, grown-up problems that they themselves 
don't understand. 
State-sponsored pseudoscience always fails, but slowly, like a wheat field 
choked with weeds. (This is a particularly apt comparison, because Lysenko 
claimed that the weeds infesting Soviet wheat fields had evolved from the wheat 
itself.) It fails in predictable ways, and these are the very ways in which the 
Bush science policy is going to fail.
The rot begins to set in when honest local institutions, appalled by 
high-level misdeeds, denounce federal policy as corrupt and corrupting, just as the 
UCS has done. There will be much more of this: congressional investigations, 
high-minded committees. Government officials will temporize by getting scientists 
to "compromise" and "split the difference" between actual science and 
partisan jiggery-pokery. This will fail because science just isn't politics. You 
can't legislate that E=mc21¼2.
Before long, the damage will spread beyond our borders. International 
scientific bodies will treat American scientists as pariahs. This process has already 
begun in bioethics, meteorology, agriculture, nuclear science, and medicine, 
but doubts will spread to "American science" generally. (In Lysenko's heyday, 
when scientists abroad came across a halfway-decent Soviet scientist, they 
would charitably offer to publish his books offshore, then maybe help him defect 
to someplace where he could get serious work done.)
Meanwhile, gaps will open between research establishments in the US and other 
countries, much like the one that now yawns between American and Korean 
stem-cell producers. US science will come to have a stodgy, old-fashioned, 
commissar-style inability to think and act freely. Yankee initiative and ingenuity 
will bow to bulging pie-in-the-sky superprojects like unproven antimissile 
systems, hot-air broadband initiatives, and swashbuckling moon shots.
Eventually the whole vast bubble will burst of its own fairy-tale unreality. 
Few will be held accountable. The quackeries will be purged, forgotten, hushed 
up. Except, that is, for the lasting effect on the health, morale, and 
self-esteem of the American people.
Trofim Lysenko was a funny case. He had the authority to reduce a major 
scientific-research power to a dismal Burkina Faso with rockets; he left behind 
practically no scientific achievement or discovery. As a scientist, he was a 
nonentity, but his menace is universal. Wherever moral panic, hasty judgment, 
arrogance, fear, brutal partisan ignorance, slovenly standards of research, 
overcentralization of authority, conspiratorial policymaking, jingoism and 
xenophobia, and spin-centric travesties of disinformation can flourish, Lysenko's 
spirit will never die.
Email Bruce Sterling at [log in to unmask]

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