Political Science
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Political Science It is not often that a scientist or engineer attains high public office. Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer; John Sununu, a nuclear engineer; Margaret Thatcher, a chemist turned lawyer.. .ail are highly unconventional in their careers. More often, we find scientists and nearscientists engaging in political activity: the priorities of those such as Noam Chomsky are common enough not to occasion surprise today. Margaret Thatcher does not often need to consult chemical principle to guide her political décisions (environmental matters apart); Chomsky, when fulminating against Vietnam policy, could hardly hâve been moved by philological passion. A real danger appears, however, when an active professional scientist gains political power as well, and uses that to proselytize, or even impose a particular scientific theory. One such person was Marcelin Berthelot (1827-1907), an eminent French chemist who did not believe in atoms. Berthelot remained active in research almost to the end of his days—he was a man of demonic energy—but he also became, for a while, Inspecter of Higher Education and even Foreign Minister in the French government. He was regularly elected président of the French Chemical Society as well. His skepticism concerning atoms arose, to simplify the matter, from a conviction that the "atomic hypothesis" required ail gaseous molécules to be diatomic, and since this led to contradictions, the entire hypothesis must be erroneous. Because of the highly centralized nature of French éducation (university professors still, nominally, require ministerial approval for a change in course structure and content), and because of the excessive power of a "grand patron" in those days, Berthelot apparently succeeded in indoctrinating générations of French chemistry students with his obsession. If there were no atoms, then stereochemistry had to be a fantasy (in spite of Pasteur's towering achievements!) and without that inteUectual tool, organic chemistry could not develop properly. This récognition led the French chemist Haller in 1900, the year when Berthelot was elected to the French Academy, to
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declaim furiously that Berthelot's pièce of "pure doctrine" had disastrously held back the production of organic chemicals in France, while it roared ahead in Germany. Organic chemistry, Haller declared, is "directly inspired by theory" and a false theory meant mis-inspiration. One récent commentator has gone so far as to claim that young French chemists continued to be taught atomic skepticism until the eve of the atomic bomb! The only safe vaccine against épisodes of this sort is a multiplicity of centers of initiative.. .free and entirely independent universities, multiple independent professional bodies (preferably in compétition), and multiple journals in the same field. Today, of course, science is international to a degree that protects against national extravagance...unless, of course, frontiers are closed; then the Lysenkos of this world seize their chance. The most important protection, perhaps,
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