Monday, June 25

Is science free to research? Are there dissents in science?

Science is about truth and with the help of the imagery of laboratories where serious people try experiments with colorful liquids, the glamour of equations that are impossible to understand, the seemingly speed of technological progress some people don't doubt. The mainstream media also helps promoting science as the unquestionable truth.
However receiving money to conduct a research and having a hypotheses accepted as a theory is not that simple.
These paragraphs help us understand what happens.


The New Thought Police – Suppressing Dissent in Science

by Mae-Wan Ho and Jonathan Mathews
Entire article: here.

Excerpts:

"Science has seldom lived up to its ideal as an open, disinterested enquiry into nature, as any scientist who has ever tried to publish genuinely new ideas or findings in the ‘peer-reviewed’ scientific journals will know too well. Nobel Laureate Hans Krebs’ discovery of the metabolic cycle that would eventually bear his name was rejected from the journal Nature. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, another Nobel prize-winning biochemist, never got funded for work on the relevance of quantum physics to living organisms, which is crucial for understanding living organisms and why cell phones may be harmful, for example.

In the course of liberating itself from the Church, the scientific establishment has inherited many of the trappings of fundamentalist religion. There can be but One True Science, and everything else tends to be treated as nonsense or heresy. Within the past 50 years, the suppression of dissent has plumbed new depths, as the scientific establishment is increasingly getting into bed with big business. At first, it was mostly physics and chemistry, now it is pre-eminently biology.

And as corporations are growing bigger and more powerful, so the suppression of scientific dissent is becoming more sophisticated, insidious and extensive. As the scientific and the political mainstream have both come to identify with corporate aims, so their established power structures are brought to bear on squashing scientific dissent and engineering consensus. Witness the seamless way in which the corporations, the state and the scientific establishment are co-ordinating their efforts to force feed the world with GM crops, known to be unsafe and unsustainable, and to offer no proven benefits whatsoever either to farmers or consumers."

Source: psrast org