ABSTRACT
Scientists, like journalists, see themselves as standing apart from the world of politics. The scientific enterprise has historically been imbued with an aura of objective authority, and the laboratory setting, where scientists give free rein to their curiosity, is at the opposite end of the world from the legislative chamber, where society’s immediate problems and needs are the focus of inquiry. The systematic pursuit of ultimate truths, the freedom from coercion, the self-imposed isolation from the events, circumstances, and pressures of the day-these represent the context in which scientists ideally like to work.
