Now the LA Times has joined in on the science bashing bandwagon. First The Economist and now the LA Times. I’m shocked that Fox News hasn’t taken up this banner and begun to fire large caliber shells of their own. Their viewers are already primed for it.
I’ll be brief. The LA Times article makes the same mistake that The Economist article does. The conclusion of the article is simply false.
The demand for sexy results, combined with indifferent follow-up, means that billions of dollars in worldwide resources devoted to finding and developing remedies for the diseases that afflict us all is being thrown down a rathole. NIH and the rest of the scientific community are just now waking up to the realization that science has lost its way, and it may take years to get back on the right path.
Scientists may have lost their way, but science is still the only known method for actually learning anything about the natural world. The fact that some scientists don’t follow the proper procedures and that grants have become a defacto status symbol and that corporations are more interested in patenting the next big thing before they know if it actually works or not… is not science’s fault. It’s the fault of flawed humans.
If these journalists don’t start making that distinction, then we might as well give up on the US.
