The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among thier chattels. But the meaning of "educated" has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

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How is the knowledge in the possession of the scientific elites to be factored into a process of decision in which considerations of economy, ideology, and political power also enter? Is elite knowledge to be given absolute priority? Why should we trust scientists, who, after all, have their own political and economic agendas? On the other hand how can we decide by vote when the voters and their representatives have no understanding of the facts of nature?

The American government, like others, has attempted to solve the problem by co-opting scientists into the apparatus of the state in three ways. Most directly it has built an executive apparatus including the president's science adviser, the Office of Science and Technology, and regulatory bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency. Second, it has created quasi-governmental bodies made up of senior scientists, like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, that are obliged to provide expert scientific advice and evaluation on request from any government agency. Finally, after the Second World War, the state became the chief patron of science, currently committing about $35 billion annually directly to basic and applied research.

Because of fears that federal support of research would result in political interference with the research process, the pattern established by Congress for the funding of research gave the representatives of the scientific community itself the day-to-day power to decide what research is to be done. Even in funding from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission), decisions about grants are made by a peer review system in which the reviewers and agency administrators are drawn from the research community and share in its general culture.

As a consequence, instead of producing a mass of grateful recipients of state patronage, public research support has created a large and prospering community of independent investigators—most of them affiliated with universities—with immense public prestige and with effective control over the distribution of funds for research.

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Studies of climate change, endangered species, acceptable pollution levels, or the effect of sexual practices have not been called forth by pure scientific curiosity. Like all processes that are of direct relevance to human physical and psychic welfare, the costs and benefits of decisions will fall differently on different people. Any amount of lead is bad for your health. So what should be the minimum acceptable level of lead in the bloodstream? Whose bloodstream? Acceptable to whom? The worker in a lead refinery who lives in a badly polluted neighborhood near the plant whose family will bear the cost to their health and longevity of too much lead? The owner of shares in the refinery who winters in Sedona and summers on Cape Cod, whose health is not at issue but who will bear an economic cost of pollution control? A popular bumper sticker in Vermont reads "Another Vermonter for Global Warming." (That, of course, may be a scientific mistake, since general global warming may make Vermont colder.)

My friends who are lawyers insist that the only general rule for deciding legal disputes is "It depends on the jurisdiction," and that rule applies equally to decisions about scientific questions of public import. It is disingenuous to claim that scientists come to their scientific work without prior ethical, economic, and social values and motivations. Everyone I know who studies endangered species cares about saving them. One never hears that the malarial parasite is "endangered." To do science is to be political if only because it is a political decision to spend some amount of limited human energy and social resources on a particular question.

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If knowledge about the natural world is to rationally influence the decisions of an informed electorate, then people must believe that scientists tell the truth about nature insofar as they know it. While we might agree that prior political commitment could lead us to ask one question rather than another, or to put more weight on the result of a study that conforms to our prejudice rather than one that refutes it, every scientist must agree that outright fraud is beyond the pale. Putting aside the issue of morality, scientific investigation would be destroyed as a useful human endeavor and scientists would lose any claim on social resources if deliberate falsifications were not exposed. So scientists must be on the alert, ready to detect lies arising from within their institution. But this leads to a contradiction. To survive, science must expose dishonesty, but every such public exposure produces cynicism about the purity and disinterestedness of the institution and provides fuel for ideological anti-rationalism. The revelation that the paradoxical Piltdown Man fossil skull was, in fact, a hoax was a great relief to perplexed paleontologists but a cause of great exultation in Texas tabernacles.