Postscript: Political Science
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years of research I've found this to be untrue yet no cause for comfort.
I've occasionally seen our species' nobler impulses among them, but I've
also found that scientists as a group are at least as subject to human
failings as people in other walks of life.
It has been like this throughout the history of science. Many, perhaps
even most, of its practitioners have been greedy, power-hungry, pres-
tige-seeking, dogmatic, pompous asses, not above political chicanery
and outright lying, cheating, and stealing. Examples abound right from
the start. Sir Francis Bacon, who in 1620 formulated the experimental
method on which all technical progress since then has been founded, not
only forgot to mention his considerable debt to William Gilbert but
apparently plagiarized some of his predecessor's work while publicly be-
littling it. In a similar way Emil Du Bois-Reymond based his own elec-
trical theory of the nerve impulse on Carlo Matteucci's work, then tried
to ridicule his mentor and take full credit.
Many a genius has been destroyed by people of lesser talent defending
the status quo. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician who practiced
in Vienna during the mid-nineteenth century, demanded that his hospi-
tal colleagues and subordinates wash their hands, especially when mov-
ing from autopsies and sick wards to the charity childbirth ward he
directed. When the incidence of puerperal fever and resultant death de-
clined dramatically to well below that of the rich women's childbirth
ward, proving the importance of cleanliness even before Pasteur, Sem-
melweis was fired and vilified. His livelihood gone, he committed sui-
cide soon afterward.
The principal figure who for decades upheld the creed that dedifferen-
tiation was impossible was Paul Weiss, who dominated biology saying
the things his peers wanted to hear. Weiss was wrong, but along the
way he managed to cut short a number of careers.
For many years the American Medical Association scorned the idea of
vitamin-deficiency diseases and called the EEG electronic quackery. Even
today that august body contends that nutrition is basically irrelevant
to health. As the late-eighteenth-century Italian experimenter Abbe
Alberto Fortis observed in a letter chiding Spallanzani for his closed-
minded stance on dowsing, ".
.. derision will never help in the devel-
opment of true knowledge."
In the past, these character flaws couldn't wholly prevent the recogni-
tion of scientific truths. Both sides of a controversy would fight with
equal vehemence, and the one with better evidence would usually win
sooner or later. In the last four decades, however, changes in the struc-
ture of scientific institutions have produced a situation so heavily