Science and Politics

In recent years, there has been growing concern that science has become increasingly political. In other words, scientists and others claim that the political system has engaged (and some even say interfered) with the directions and practices of science like never before. Science and politics, however, have been intertwined for well over a century. This entry explores how the political environment shapes scientific research, and conversely, how science and scientists operate in the political environment. The entry closes with a discussion of recent shifts in this relationship and, in particular, the new players who have emerged to problematize the role of science as the guiding ideology of modern times.

In the United States, the government has funded research and therefore directed scientific agendas in significant ways since the 19th century. Perhaps the clearest example of this was during World War II, when the military invested large amounts of money into scientific research to develop the atomic bomb. Since that war, the U.S. government has gotten more deeply involved in funding scientific research and continued to direct priorities in a variety of fields. One common way in which governments shape scientific priorities is by funding specific initiatives, such as the effort to put a man on the moon in the 1960s and the war on cancer in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the U.S. Congress chose to fund the Human Genome Project, an effort to map and sequence the human genome, while, at almost the same time, deciding not to fund the Superconducting Super Collider. This choice had important implications for the relative fortunes of biomedical and high-energy physics research in the United States. By the end of the 20th century, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the government agency primarily responsible for funding biomedical research, had grown considerably, while funding for physics research had declined.

Government funding shapes not only the amount of scientific attention paid to a particular topic but also the location and research questions chosen. The process of funding the Human Genome Project required extensive negotiation between Congress, the NIH, and the Department of Energy (DOE) about how research would be conducted and how and where the money would be distributed. Many members of Congress refused to support the project if the DOE laboratories in their jurisdictions, which had been involved in radiation research during the cold war, were not included. This is, of course, not surprising, because they wanted to maintain the jobs and prestige that came with federally funded research centers. Ultimately, the project's orientation toward technical accomplishment (that is, the mapping and sequencing of the genome) rather than biomedicine (that is, [Page 682]linking genes to diseases) reflects the role of DOE-sponsored federal laboratories, which had expertise in molecular biology from their history of analyzing the effects of radiation at the cellular and molecular levels.