Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune

Science & Politics

Good Politics is more important than Good Science

So coming out of World War II scientists were making a rhetorical argument that science should be
independent of politics. And they were doing that partly because they believe there to be an overlap
in the ideals of science and what was seen as the winning side of the war, the western democracies
that won the war. But partly because, as with any group, they wanted to protect their funding, they
wanted to have control of their funding. There was a lot of pushback from legislators, but it took five
years to produce what's now called the National Science Foundation. And much of that time was the
dispute over who would control the funding.

So part of that part of the reason for arguing that science and politics are distinct is so that you can
define things you don't like as being politics, and define things that you do like as science. So when
someone makes a claim that a particular study has chosen the wrong standards of what should be
counted as pollution, you can argue, ‘Oh those are only those were just political decisions’. The
decisions that I've made are pure science. Or when you see a study you like, you can say, ‘Yes, those
are good standards. Yes, I know, they're not the same ones that are used in the legislative system.
But I think they're better standards’. Instead of acknowledging the political context that might have
gone into setting those standards.

When people like what they're seeing, then they support it, and when they don't like what they're
seeing, they don't support it, if it conflicts with other values, then science is only one set of values.
Science likes to claim its value free, but it's not. It. It values knowledge over loyalty, over personal
commitment, it values knowledge over faith. And for many people, emotion and faith are key
drivers. It is as human for us to be emotional as it is for us to be rational.

(science historian and science communication researcher, Bruce Lewenstein)

In the end, there was a compromise, the NSF became sort of quasi-independent. Independent
scientists decide what is funded, but the President still appoints the board. Around the world,
similar compromises of varying degrees were made and organisations like that of the National
Science Foundation in the US sprung up, think about the research councils in the UK or the Council
of Scientific and Industrial Research in India. These agencies act as intermediaries – helping to direct
state funding. But the compromises they were founded upon and the fact the government is giving
them the money is a big stumbling block for independent science.

Science and politics benefit from the perception that science is objective, and separate. Because that
means that politicians can say, science agrees with me, this objective evidence, this objective
knowledge is on my side, right. And that's distance. And so therefore, I am more authoritative in my
decision for that reason. And you see that early on in the COVID crisis, for example, Boris Johnson
was often using that kind of language, right, so performs that sort of function. And by the same
token, science also benefits from appearing objective, because it appears authoritative.

They‘ll say, ‘we wanna fund the Human Genome Project or the Brain Initiative’, right. So there's that
level of kind of priority setting. Or you just have the structure of, for example, in the United States,
the National Institutes of Health has separate institutes. And so they're gonna fund in a particular
sort of way, projects that each of those institute's care about

Politics shapes science in a whole bunch of ways, right? It really affects everything in the lab, and we
don't necessarily think about it. So, for example, governments have funding priorities. And so,
whether it's the government doing the funding, or research councils, charities, universities,
companies, there's some sort of interests and so influence and power dynamic. And so you're going
to have politics.

(Shobita Parthasarathy, a researcher of science and policy at the University of Michigan)

To put it bluntly, money makes things messy. But it is important. In fact, funding is so important to
the every-day life of a scientists that I am going to dedicate the best part of this episode to it. The fact
is that if you want to get on in the world of science today in almost all cases you need funding but
with funding comes a lot of well, politics.

You know, right now, in the European Union, we're waiting for the relaunch of EU’s big set of
funding priorities, which will be called Horizon Europe, and will provide something like 94 billion
Euro of funding over seven years. And I was actually at a presentation last week, where someone
was previewing all of these new themes and missions and quite a lot of them are, like highly
political in nature. So making Europe competitive in, in technology, say, but there's also areas of
Europe that are that are underdeveloped. And there's a correlation between the development status
of these areas, and the resurgence of certain populist and nationalist political sentiments. And so
there's some attention that's paid to how funding from the EU might stimulate some innovation, and
some business in those areas to try to counter or neutralize some of those political sentiments.

(Michael Erard a funding strategist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands)

Like it or not many scientists seem to follow the old adage: if you can’t beat them, join them. If you
want the money, you have to play the game – in other words, you gave to get political. And you can
see that in their grants.

For quite a while, people did not use the words ‘climate change’. The phrase that was often
substituted was ‘geochemical cycling’ or ‘biogeochemical cycling’. That, you know, basically speaks
to all the things that happen related to climate change without that trigger word, getting anyone's
attention. And they started doing that, because one of our congress members started digging into
any grant that said climate change. So framing can sometimes be a way around studying politically
hot issues without showing that that's what you're doing. On the other hand, I've had some people I
worked with, discuss their potential idea with a program officer and literally get told, that's a great
idea. I cannot fund it in the current political climate.

(Peg AtKisson, she runs a consulting firm that helps scientists and institutions write grants for
funding in the US)

It would be naïve to think that the best funded labs are always the ones which do the “best
research”. Sometimes the most well-funded labs are simply the ones that know how to write the best
grants – the ones who know how to play politics.

But there are times where no amount of creative grant writing and savvy competitiveness can help –
situations in which avenues of research are just plain shut down – closed off by politics, and power,
beyond the reach of even the most wily of scientists.

Example: The Dicky Amendment

For more than 20 years, Congress has deterred federal funding for gun violence
research by including a provision known as the Dickey Amendment in annual
appropriations legislation. The provision prohibits the use of federal funds to advocate
or promote gun control.

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