American science policy has gone through three basic phases since
WW II, according to Dickson, European correspondent for Science and
former Washington correspondent for Nature. The first phase was one
of independent control over science through the scientist-dominated
National Science Foundation. The gradual increase in government
support for science took off radically with the Kennedy
administration's commitment to science, exemplified by Kennedy's
science advisor, Jerome Welsher, The second phase began with the
Johnson administration's shift in emphasis from basic research to
applied science, as the scientific community was asked to come up
with solutions to problems of poverty, crime, and health. This
phase was marked by a degree of social control over science, with
scientists skewing their research toward the desired pragmatic
goals. The third phase, now under full swing, is marked by a
resurgence in support of basic research - directed, this time, by
the private sector in the interests of economic growth.
Corporations and scientists have both benefited from the relaxation
of social control. In universities, Dickson notes, traditional
academic interests in autonomy and the free exchange of knowledge
have been hedged by direct corporate support of basic research (the
results of which are protected as trade secrets, a distinction once
reserved for applied research or technology); in foreign policy,
scientific knowledge has now taken its place as an instrument of
punishment and reward, further restricting the dissemination of
basic research. Another factor limiting public scrutiny has been
the increasing scope of basic research funded by defense spending.
A consortium of university administrators, defense bureaucrats,
corporate executives, and scientists has thus come into being,
forming a closed system impervious to democratic control. Dickson
cites the recombinant DNA controversy as a case where a lack of
scrutiny, at all levels of research, led to hard-and-fast positions
of opposition or support based on little knowledge of what was
going on. Dickson would like to see research guided by public
concern for jobs, occupational health, communities, and other
social values; unexpectedly, he cites the creationist movement as
an example of a political effort to inject skepticism and ethical
concerns into areas walled off by claims of scientific expertise.
The argument is repetitive in its generalities; but there is a
wealth of information here on science policy and its shapers.
Dickson's effort is unique, most importantly, in its political
approach to an anti-political subject. (Kirkus Reviews)
How science gets done in today's world has profound political
repercussions, since scientific knowledge, through its technical
applications, has become an important source of both economic and
military power. The increasing dependence of scientific research on
funding from business and the military has made questions about the
access to and control of scientific knowledge a central issue in
today's politics of science.
In The New Politics of Science, David Dickson points out that the
scientific community has its own internal power structures, its
elites, its hierarchies, its ideologies, its sanctioned norms of
social behavior, and its dissenting groups. And the more that
science, as a social practice, forms an integral part of the
economic structures of the society in which it is imbedded, the
more the boundaries and differences between the two dissolve.
Groups inside the scientific community, for example, will use
groups outside the community--and vice versa--to achieve their own
political ends. In this edition, Dickson has included a new preface
commenting on the continuing and increasing influence of industrial
and defense interests on American scientific research in the
1980s.
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