Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion , Daniel S.Greenberg U. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001. $35.00 (530 pp.). ISBN 0-226-30634-8

Since the subtitle of Daniel S. Greenberg’s Science, Money, and Politics neatly offers a harsh diagnosis, let’s go to some of his proposed cures:

  • Scientists should plunge into elective politics, to pry themselves out of their “scientific ghetto.”

  • NSF should enlarge political and popular support for science and narrow the “two-cultures gap” by becoming the National Science, Engineering, and Humanities Foundation, “with perhaps a non-scientist as its head.”

  • The physical sciences should be moved out of the “chronically dysfunctional” Department of Energy, perhaps into an “independent agency or the well-run” NSF.

The immediate basis for these “modest prescriptions” is a marshalling of facts, data, and reporting knitted into persuasive argument. The author has spent his professional life examining and writing on the scientific enterprise for many publications, including what was for many years his own newsletter — Science and Government Report. He also wrote a widely read, widely irritating (even, on occasion, to me), and widely influential book, The Politics of Pure Science (New American Library, 1968) that dealt with science policy from 1940 to the mid-1960s. (A disclosure is called for here: Until retirement, I was executive director for many years of the National Research Council Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications. Greenberg comments critically on the work of the NRC, of its parent, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and of a study I directed, (published in 1995, entitled Allocating Federal Funds for Science and Technology.)

Science, Money, and Politics is an unsparing critique of what, in Greenberg’s view, is the sometimes naive and on occasion mendacious behavior of the scientific enterprise since Politics. The critique is administered in his trademark style, akin to Calvin Trillin without the humor. Here he is, for example, on blaming the end of the Superconducting Supercollider on the public’s ignorance of science and of high-energy physics in particular: “The project arrived in Congress wrapped in wishful thinking, deception, and half-truths. After the realities were exposed, the SSC withered away. That an elevation in public understanding of science might have saved the venture is doubtful.” Wider efforts in pursuit of the public understanding of science are derided as science’s “voodoo conviction” that public understanding of science is somehow akin to public support. “The unfortunate, nondemocratic truth is that science prospers in a state of disengagement from public understanding of the substance of science.”

Perhaps the book’s most focused reporting is about the dispute in the mid-1980s over a possible “shortage” of science and engineering doctorates, fear based largely on analyses done by NSF. It was argued that a shortfall of college-age population in the 1980s, because of the baby bust of the 1960s, would translate into a shortage of new doctorates in science and engineering. However, the conversion of a shortfall into a shortage lacked analysis as to demand; that is, how many new doctorates would be needed to restock university faculties and supply industry. In fact, the shortage turned into a slight excess, colored by tales of physics doctorates driving cabs and the like. Greenberg tells the story in documented detail and with barely concealed anger at what he seems to believe was the misuse of NSF resources and reputation to get more money.

The shock induced in a reader by the author’s “modest prescriptions” for the scientific establishment may be joined by vertigo as readers try to decode the book’s seeming contradictions. In one chapter, on “The Ossified Enterprise,” Greenberg describes American science on one page as a “scarcity economy of too many people, too many institutions, too many promising ideas pursuing too little money.” A few pages later, the same entity becomes an “enterprise that is rich and robust. … nimble, competitive, and innovative” and “successful at producing scientific knowledge.” One of Greenberg’s suggested cures—that of more scientists engaging in electoral politics—butts up against his repeated accounts of scientists failing or stumbling badly at politics. Moreover, Greenberg, quite rightly, I think, observes that the “training regime and work style of the laboratory sciences, in contrast to those of law, business, and other professions, are unfavorable, even hostile, to the development of political interests, skills, and advancement.” Just so, which makes it difficult to accept a cure that asks for Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.

The reader may also be left vertiginous by leaps from limited data to general indictment. Greenberg, noting that, in the US, industry now dominates in funding for research and development, argues that “academic science increasingly embraces marketplace values, with embarrassed apologies for departures from conflicting, cherished academic values, but with little restraint.” That seems overdrawn. Industry in 1999 supported less than 8% of academic research, and, within that, a quite limited set of fields. Yes, there have been some bad cases, but it seems over the top to me to characterize academe’s dealings with industry as “so much ignominy and hypocrisy, for so little lucre; so much neglect, even betrayal, of principle and tradition, for minor gains.”

A final symptom to be suffered by readers, I’m sorry to say, may be narcolepsy tinged by regret. Narcolepsy not because the book is sizable but because of eye-glazing accounts of tedious stuff. There is, for example, a memo-by-memo, e-mail-by-e-mail recounting of the drafting of a summary of a National Science Board report of uncertain impact. Or of the protracted negotiations between the Department of State and NAS over yet another examination of the poor competence in science and technology in State Department headquarters. One chapter is given over to the quite right observation that people often get it wrong in ascribing to Van-nevar Bush the creation of NSF. Well, yes, but a footnote would have sufficed. And the often-dubious claims of poverty by the scientific enterprise against the reality of generous federal funding is incessantly repeated.

Science, Money, and Politics is an important book for those interested in sharply critical views of the relation of science and politics. The regret is that it could have been a more powerful book and less wearying if the author had taken the time to write it short. My advice? Read the book, but get a second opinion.