Science increasingly fell victim to two cancers of the 20th century: Big state and big business. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson announced the ‘Great Society’ program, and American society embarked on a path that had long since destroyed the social sciences in the East. The federal government declared war on poverty, war on racism, and war on illiteracy, and in all these campaigns, it needed social science to legitimize its political goals.
The amount of public funding increased sharply and more and more research areas started to appear, where it was clear which results were politically desirable and which were not. It mostly concerned social sciences, which willingly metastasized under state funding into various branches of Gender Studies, Puppet Arts, and EcoGastronomy, but in the end, Natural science was not spared either. Historically, the first post-war victim of ‘nationalized science’ was climatology, which today serves exclusively to legitimize the political goals of the deindustrialization of the West.
Moreover, the second deadly threat to science – corruption by big business – started to creep in. The history of this tragedy can be traced back to 1912, when a German medical doctor named Isaac Adler first hypothesized that smoking might cause lung cancer. It took more than 50 years – and 20 million deaths – for this hypothesis to be confirmed. This absurdly long time is explained, among other things, by the fact that the greatest figure in statistics of the 20th century, the avid smoker Ronald Fischer, devoted a large part of his mind and influence to vehemently and very inventively denying any causal link between smoking and lung cancer.
He didn’t do it for free – it was later discovered that he was paid by the tobacco industry.
