Overview

"How science ""gets done"" in today's world has profound political repercussions, since scientific knowledge, through its technical applications, has become an important source of both economic and military power. The increasing dependence of scientific research on funding from business and the military has made questions about the access to and control of scientific knowledge a central issue in today's politics of science. In The New Politics of Science, David Dickson points out that ""the scientific community has its own internal power structures, its elites, its hierarchies, its ideologies, its sanctioned norms of social behavior, and its dissenting groups. And the more that science, as a social practice, forms an integral part of the economic structures of the society in which it is imbedded, the more the boundaries and differences between the two dissolve. Groups inside the scientific community, for example, will use groups outside the community—and vice versa—to achieve their own political ends."" In this edition, Dickson has included a new preface commenting on the continuing and increasing influence of industrial and defense interests on American scientific research in the 1980s."

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American science policy has gone through three basic phases since WW II, according to Dickson, European correspondent for Science and former Washington correspondent for Nature. The first phase was one of independent control over science through the scientist-dominated National Science Foundation. The gradual increase in government support for science took off radically with the Kennedy administration's commitment to science, exemplified by Kennedy's science advisor, Jerome Welsher, The second phase began with the Johnson administration's shift in emphasis from basic research to applied science, as the scientific community was asked to come up with solutions to problems of poverty, crime, and health. This phase was marked by a degree of social control over science, with scientists skewing their research toward the desired pragmatic goals. The third phase, now under full swing, is marked by a resurgence in support of basic research - directed, this time, by the private sector in the interests of economic growth. Corporations and scientists have both benefited from the relaxation of social control. In universities, Dickson notes, traditional academic interests in autonomy and the free exchange of knowledge have been hedged by direct corporate support of basic research (the results of which are protected as trade secrets, a distinction once reserved for applied research or technology); in foreign policy, scientific knowledge has now taken its place as an instrument of punishment and reward, further restricting the dissemination of basic research. Another factor limiting public scrutiny has been the increasing scope of basic research funded by defense spending. A consortium of university administrators, defense bureaucrats, corporate executives, and scientists has thus come into being, forming a closed system impervious to democratic control. Dickson cites the recombinant DNA controversy as a case where a lack of scrutiny, at all levels of research, led to hard-and-fast positions of opposition or support based on little knowledge of what was going on. Dickson would like to see research guided by public concern for jobs, occupational health, communities, and other social values; unexpectedly, he cites the creationist movement as an example of a political effort to inject skepticism and ethical concerns into areas walled off by claims of scientific expertise. The argument is repetitive in its generalities; but there is a wealth of information here on science policy and its shapers. Dickson's effort is unique, most importantly, in its political approach to an anti-political subject. (Kirkus Reviews)

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David Dickson, former editor of New Scientist, has also served as European correspondent for Science and Washington Correspondent for Nature. He is the author of The Politics of Alternative Technology, and many articles appearing in The Economist, The Nation, Science for the People and Nature.

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