Abstract

Since the days of Senator William Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards, often given to laboratory projects he considered a waste of taxpayers' money, scientists and politicians have found themselves on opposite sides of a fundamental issue: how much control should government have over the research it pays for? The debate has become particularly bitter since last spring, when a Congressional committee investigating “scientific misconduct” enlisted Secret Service agents to examine the notebooks of Thereza Imanishi-Kari, a scientist who collaborated with David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate in medicine, on a paper describing immunology experiments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this essay, reprinted from The New York Times of 30 July 1989, Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard geology professor, gives his view of the issue. © The New York Times Company.

© 1989 Optical Society of America

A scientific way with words

Peter Wrobel
Appl. Opt. 28(21) 4502-4707 (1989)

With democracy in the dust, a cloud falls on science

David E. Sanger
Appl. Opt. 28(24) 5190-5190 (1989)

America’s answer to Japan’s MITI

Andrew Pollack
Appl. Opt. 28(10) 1742-1952 (1989)

Vast promise of a laser chip

Lawrence M. Fisher
Appl. Opt. 28(15) 3038-3219 (1989)

Applied Optics Of Optics and Opticists

Appl. Opt. 28(19) 4249-4249 (1989)