cience is more than just a collection of results, or a table of dry figures in a book somewhere. It's also a thriving human enterprise, combining old-time exploration with a bit of pro-sports-style showmanship for the millions of TV viewers and Web/magazine/newspaper readers following along from home. And like agriculture or manufacturing, it's also a net cash producer for the groups that support it: You feed dollars and raw materials in one end, and lucrative new technologies spill out the other side.
But there is a kind of religious or philosophical aspect to science as well. More than anything, it's a search for fundamental principles to guide our way through the world, and indeed through time and space and the higher dimensions. Whether answering "small" questions like the fate of North America's Anasazi people, or big ones like the origin and ultimate fate of the universe, science owes its allegiance to the truth, rather than to the people or institutions who happen, at any given moment, to be paying the bills.
Thus, good science is often at odds with human nature. Science itself may be incorruptible, but the scientists who drive it are impatient, greedy, jealous, attention-starved human beings like you and me. Occasionally the public sees manifestations of this, as in 1989, when greed and the hunger for publicity paved the way for the cold fusion debacle (see "Cold Fusion Heats Up on the Net"), but the exploration of this particular human failing has traditionally been the job of SF.
The fictional corruption of science begins, or at least finds its strongest voice, in 1818, with the publications of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like many a tragic hero to follow, Victor F. is a man too obsessed with his personal discoveries to consider their moral and ethical implications. This archetype—the mad scientist thumbing his nose at God and society—carries all the way through the first half of the 20th century, with morality tales like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870), The Invisible Man (1897) and The Brain Snatchers (1936), which remind us there are things mankind may not really want to find out.
Later, the horrors of Nazi Germany and the constant nuclear threat of the Cold War revealed a new sort of scientific villain: the too-willing weaponsmith. Sometimes he's Dr. Strangelove, a megalomaniac and sociopath who lives for the clash of nations, but as often as not he's a middle-class guy (almost never a gal) who just wants to put food on the table and pursue interesting numbers on a big clunky gauge somewhere. But under the sway of a crazy general, this likable yutz always manages to produce a superweapon, which inevitably gets out of control, producing all manner of Atomic Kids and Amazing Colossal Men, giant ants and hideous mutated grasshoppers. Sometimes, as in Stephen King's The Stand (1978), the weapons murder billions and destroy civilization, or even, as in Ted Post's Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1969), destroy the Earth itself. That's some seriously bad science!
Science isn't what it used to be
In the 1980s and '90s, the warming and fading of the Cold War gave us time to contemplate the rising power of multinational corporations, and with them the corporate scientists of a dystopian cyberpunk world. In the stories of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Walter Jon Williams, these stock-optioned postdocs, egged on by men in gray flannel suits, are driven by pure profit motive to oppress and addict and sicken the world with their dollar-driven research. But I've just personally returned from the 156th American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, where a new sort of corruption is afoot, perhaps pointing the way to science fiction's next class of villain. The culprit? Political correctness.
AAAS is the largest annual science meeting in the world: six days in which 5,000 people attend up to 12 parallel tracks of programming, all of it hot new research from the brightest stars in every field. As most of you should know by now, I'm a science omnivore—I love it all—but this meeting is such an embarrassment of riches that I felt almost cheated. One finds oneself slipping out early from one talk to catch the tail end of another, thus getting a full dose of neither. There's astronomy and physics, archaeology and linguistics, nanotechnology and biosciences. I even ran into a few of my old college professors, and spent time just shooting the breeze.
One also overhears a lot of astonishing conversation in the hotel bar, where things are said like "In computer networks, anarchy is 75 percent as good as perfect knowledge. The implications for economists are compelling, to say the least. A dictator can do better than a free market, but he has to be omniscient, omnipotent and absolutely strict." There were built-in meal breaks in the programming, but even so, I occasionally had to step out of the lectures just to clear my head. By day five, I was struggling with burnout, and started walking out on lectures for no reason at all. I was tired of being interested, tired of absorbing new information, tired of talking with brilliant people. It was just too much, which of course means that AAAS was doing its job.
And yet, in the wake of it all, I find myself feeling irritated and vaguely co-opted. This has not been the pure science gathering I was led to expect. In the words of William Frucht, science editor for Perseus Books, "It's nothing like it used to be. The emphasis on pure science has been severely played down. Today it's a lot of 'Science and Society,' 'Science and Education,' 'Science and the Press.' Outreach at the expense of content."
What's more, on closer inspection, the environment here is not quite so egalitarian; there are clear winners and losers, reflecting changing patterns in public funding, away from the harder sciences like mathematics and physics, which have given us many of the technological marvels we rely on today. The programming is not only heavy with social sciences and even mushier social dialogues, but also heavily skewed toward life sciences and bioethics, and bitter lamentations on climate change and shrinking biodiversity. (See "Global Warming, Hurrah!" and "Cryptozoology and the Aliens of Earth".)
In fact, fewer than half the attendees these days are working scientists. Some of the highest-profile speakers at AAAS are members of Congress, or representatives from the State Department and the United Nations. The remainder of the crowd includes teachers and students, hobbyists, job seekers in the weak economy and hundreds upon hundreds of pampered journalists, who are buttered up with corporate receptions, canned press briefings and lots of free food and drink at every turn. It's hard to complain, since I was one of the beneficiaries, but I do think attempts to manipulate the press should be less obvious.
More serious is what one might call the Salvation Army tactic of free drinks and dinner for all, press and scientists and general public alike, at the cost of sitting captive to a fiery speech. And the speeches are all political; incoming director H. Bloom (a physician) wants AAAS to issue specific policy recommendations for fixing the American health-care system. A splinter group called Science and Human Rights is seriously concerned with the treatment of dissident scientists (specifically, social scientists), while the Association of Women in Science worries about the oppression of women in general and female scientists in particular. As a result, both organizations are focused on the Middle East and Africa, where both sorts of problems are endemic.
The perils of partisan thinking
Everywhere I turn, there is someone expecting me to be outraged, someone explaining to me that publicly funded science is inherently partisan and carries with it a solemn responsibility. Not to get the right answer, you understand, or to uncover interesting new questions, but to make the world a better place. The world could certainly stand to be a better place, but this is not a scientific observation, and in fact the term "better" is so subjective that it presents serious dangers of its own. Better in whose opinion?
The archetypal scientist—withdrawn and apolitical, agnostic and perhaps a bit myopic on matters human—is apparently one of the species threatened by encroachment and habitat destruction. They are here in their thousands, calling merrily from the treetops by day and probably mating discreetly by night, but you can hear the bulldozers all around. It isn't adapt-or-die time yet in the forest of the pure sciences, but the day of reckoning does not seem far off.
Unfortunately, science requires a certain degree of insulation. Yes, it can be held hostage to personal ambition, to corporate greed, to Cold War militarism. That's bad. But this new threat is perhaps more insidious, because it has at its heart an earnest, burning desire to do good. But remember how Smokey the Bear's fire suppression programs trashed America's forests with unnatural (and highly flammable) tangles of deadfall and undergrowth? An ill-planned good deed can distort the self-regulation of natural systems, making things worse rather than better.
In exactly the same way, this creeping political correctness—this desire to throw the weight and credibility of science behind unscientific goals—threatens to undermine not only scientific objectivity, but also the neutral, incorruptible image with which science guarantees its continued funding and material support. No matter how scrupulously honest, the new wave's partisan researcher, the scientist-as-lobbyist, can't help but attract suspicion. What data might he or she be excluding, in order to arrive at this or that specific policy recommendation? What prejudices are brought to the table, and what axes are being ground? Inevitably, the administration will change, the political winds will shift, and whole fields of science will find themselves in the proverbial doghouse, blamed directly for the policy failures of the past.
Is this really what we want?
Like global warming or the hideous growth of mutant insects, these changes may be inexorable. They may even be, in some long-term backhanded way, a positive developmental stage. Every profession needs its code of ethics, and we'd all sleep better if the supergerm scientists of the world hung up their microscopes and focused on pretty flowers instead. But health care policy and Mideast turmoil have no place in a science meeting, and their intrusion really does mark an attempt to corrupt science at its very foundations.
The latest breed of villain—in science fiction and in life—may not be the mad scientist or megalomaniac general, the weaponsmith or the corporate suit, but something stranger and subtler and ultimately more damaging: the worm-tongued, media-savvy Political Scientist, for whom truth is not a goal, but a disposable tool to serve some nebulous, easily manipulated conception of the greater good. And if this goes on, there will inevitably be clashes and even open warfare between opposing camps, with science itself as the primary victim.
It's a quiet fate as doomsday scenarios go; we don't melt or drown or get digested in the belly of some enormous mutant creature. But if that just makes the danger harder to see, then in the end we're better off with Godzilla, who at least gets us all working together.
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short fiction has graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired and other major publications, and his novel-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, Amazon "Best of Y2K" The Collapsium and most recently, The Wellstone.
