Wednesday, April 17, 2002

Politicized science

Peter Huber has written a number of excellent books. One of them is Galileo's Revenge - Junk Science in the Courtroom. This is where I first heard of N-rays.

You haven't heard of N rays? That's a good thing, because there aren't any. We've known that for close to 100 years now, but they were a hot research topic once. Even then it did seem awfully funny that the only people who seemed able to detect them were French.

Then there's Trofim Lysenko. His theories of genetics dovetailed well with Marxist thought. Too bad they held back Russian genetic science for decades.

But we Americans wouldn't politicize science, would we? Unfortunately, yes we would...

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