Like most kid of the space age, I grew up watching Johnny Quest. It turns out that these remarkably simple, yet still intriguing Cold War cartoons are available on XBox. Two bucks an episode. They come replete with the secret labs and the basic premise of Big Science, that is, of a government either benevolent or malevolent funding huge laboratories where mad scientists may design and build to their hearts content. Of course the imprint was left on me. If I didn't have to send my kids to college, I'd be building a Batcave myself.
I've recently heard tell that social conservatives have been the enemy of science. I think the charge is overblown. But I'm quite sure that the era of Big Science is behind us. I am completely ignorant of the elaborate sorts of ass kissing one must do in supplication to those agencies who follow White House policy and dole out grants to brainy minions in white lab coats. Yet I am sympathetic to the plight of those minions who think themselves independent minds in service of the frontiers of knowledge. I am rather amused at the indignant complaints of scientists who fight political battles and see them parallel to magisters in the courts of kings, and other sorts of lobbyists.
I say so in the context of the sort of irony that being a geopolitical neoconservative puts me in. I am convinced that the great benefits of science to drive technology are expressed most fully in the benefits available to upper classes of America, and that efforts to push science are ultimately efforts aimed at stuff rich people can buy. Outside of that, how much of the output of the sort of science our government might fund goes to improve the quality of life in worlds other than the First World? Not bloody much I'd think.
There's already a cure for malaria, it's called using DDT to kill mosquitoes. There's already a cure for starvation. It's called agriculture. All of these things are known and yet it is the political systems of other countries that retard the use of technologies and science we have already mastered. So what is the moral point of increasing the state of the art of the most bleeding edge of science in these spoiled United States? Whatever it might be it is marginal in that respect. Thus the complaints of people denied grants to discover things which improve the efficacy of what is only valuable in utopian society falls on my, not deaf, but amused ears.
What science do we really need to know, and how seriously should we take the complaints of those 'geniuses' who ain't clever enough to fund their own? My money, by the way, is on Craig Venter.
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