The intellectual legacy of the western world has few equals to the discipline of science. The careful, sometimes chaotic winnowing of facts from the chaff of traditional hearsay and bias is, in the words of a good scientist friend of mine, the process by which you ensure that you aren’t fooling yourself. I consider it to be one of the west’s greatest achievements.

Because science demands that the seeker of facts put aside presuppositions and sometimes even cherished beliefs, science is hard work even before you get to the tasks of designing an experiment or interpreting its results. Most ordinary people don’t have the slightest idea how science is done. Worse, many people assume that science is regularly subject to the whims of politics. This has always been a threat to scientific endeavor in the past, and science departments in universities suffer from as much posturing and politicking as any other departments. But at the end of the day, the evidence will have the last word, and those scientists who cannot or will not bring themselves to accept the verdict of nature’s evidence are left behind by the evolving consensus of their fellows.The last few years have not been kind to the scientific community, if only because the Bush White House and its allies have sought to wring false statements from scientific institutions who before had been kept apart from partisan politics. I’ve written elsewhere on the trials and tribulations of Dr. James Hansen, and if that were the extent of such meddling it would be bad enough. But over time we have seen more examples of not just bad science, but falsified science.

I know enough people in professional science to know that this is the cardinal sin of the scientific community. This is the proverbial third rail. Commit this transgression, and your scientific career is over, forever. Virtually no act of penance will bring complete absolution from the scientific community. At the very best, your subsequent work will be treated with greater skepticism and scrutiny or even rejected out of hand simply because you have demonstrated that you cannot be trusted.

One must respect Dr. Hansen and his colleagues who have spoken out on the distortions of government science carried out to conform to the wishes and fantasies of this White House, but in a sense they were only being true to the dictates of scientific ethics. Even so, it is difficult to stand up before one’s inquisitors, especially when they write your paychecks. In the wake of these travesties, the independent scholar and the amateur scientist are needed now more than ever before in the role of “public intellectuals” to refute this new Galilean harrying of American scientists by making their own voices heard.

Since avocational scientists and scholars are not beholden to corrupt government paymasters, theirs is an opportunity to say what even the boldest government scientists might not be able to articulate. Of course, you don’t have to be a scientist to speak out about political intereference in scientific work. Concern for honesty in government (I know that sounds quaint to a lot of you, but there it is) should be enough.

I recommend you take a look at the web site of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ web page on political meddling, located at http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/. It’s a good, brief summary of the problem, with links to more extensive information on specific abuses.In my previous note on Dr. Hansen, I quoted Noam Chomsky’s dictum that “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” With the consequences of distorted science on public health, the environment, and so on looming over the horizon, we must all be Galileos in the face of politics at the expense of scientific integrity. Eppure si muove.