This morning, Jodi and I had the pleasure of breakfast with our landlord and landlady, along with several of our neighbors. Everybody at the table had an industry or academic background: chemistry, computer engineering, physics, psychiatry, and language. At this eclectic gathering of minds, over coffee, waffles, and mimosa, a fairly common sentiment arose.
This sentiment was specified on frustrations with the current climate in the U.S. There were concerns about the promise of stem cell basic research for future medical applications, and frustration over the ethical quagmire this research has hit. There were concerns about global warming, and about the relative inactivity in our nation to cut back on the causes of human-induced warming. I expressed a private fear of mine: that while evolution gathers the most outrage from fundamentalists, what’s to prevent particle physics – a science which probes temperatures and thus times close to those at the beginning of time – from falling under the same loathesome yoke.
As I’ve commented before, the spirit of all this discussion was the feeling that, unlike the Clinton administration, the air was poisoned for academics in this country with the advent of our latest President. It’s not that Republicans fund science any more or less than Democrats in this day and age; the Clinton administration was just as unkind to basic scientific research in its budget proposals as the current Bush administration (Bush is merely perpetuating the downward spiral, a trend which he has the power to reverse at any moment if he truly valued the innovation in this country). The air is fouled with talk of faith informing policy (he never says that reason and evidence inform his policy, only faith), with a culture of life that values potential life over the living, and with a “fair and balanced” approach to truth which, instead of reaching conclusions, stretches the debate until the window of benefit for real action has passed.
There was no sense of conclusion at the end of our discussion. There was only a continued hope that we can bring the debate back to how to answer the great questions in science and away from whether it’s moral or ethical to even ask those questions in the first place.
