Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion / Edition 1

by Daniel S. Greenberg

Overview

Each year, Congress appropriates billions of dollars for scientific research. In this book, veteran science reporter Daniel S. Greenberg takes us behind closed doors to show us who gets it, and why. What he reveals is startling: an overlooked world of false claims, pork, and cronyism, where science, money, and politics all manipulate one another.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226306353
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/15/2003
Edition description:	1
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Daniel S. Greenberg is a journalist who has written extensively on science and health politics. He is the author of Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion and The Politics of Pure Science, the former published by the University of Chicago Press.

Read an Excerpt

Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion

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By Daniel S. Greenberg

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2001 Daniel S. Greenberg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226306348

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CHAPTER 1 - The Metropolis of Science

There is something like a Parkinson's Law that scientific activity will grow to meet any set budget and find it to be grossly inadequate. It is in the very nature of science that new discoveries open new fields of further activity. It is like climbing a mountain peak and seeing new landscapes not visible in the valley.

--I. I. Rabi, Nobel laureate in physics, address to the Israel Institute of Technology, 1963

THE WORKPLACES and practitioners of research are now so abundant and so widely dispersed throughout modern America that the familiar terms "scientific community" and "establishment," though convenient and widely used, reflect the cohesion, isolation and smaller scale of a bygone era. Moreover, during the postwar decades, the entanglements between basic and other types of research, and relations among the institutions in which they are performed, have become so extensive that it would be incorrect to assume the existence of a clearly definable community. Basic research once existed as a distinct entity, situated almost wholly in universities, freestanding philanthropically financed research institutes, and a few elite corporate and governmentlaboratories. But in recent years, government has used its financial and regulatory powers to encourage, often with strong incentives, collaborative relations among basic researchers in universities, the government's own laboratories, and industrial organizations. Under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, universities, small businesses, and some contractors running government laboratories received the right to patent the results of federally financed research; the lure of government money was thus enhanced by the possibility of postproject royalties. In 1987, President Reagan extended the provision to large business firms. The National Science Foundation makes money available to universities for collaborations with industry, an enticement for universities to search for corporate partners. Industry, aiming to find profit in research distant from immediate commercial application, has on its own initiative expanded its relations with universities and federal laboratories. Between 1992 and 1997, industrial support for research in universities rose from $1.3 billion to $1.71 billion--7.1 percent of all research spending in university facilities. The industrial money is a small percentage of the total expenditures for academic research, and the growth of industrial funding for universities has tapered off in recent years. But industrial money is a particularly enticing kind of money for universities. As a relatively unexploited source of support in the harshly competitive business of academic fund-raising, it inspires high hopes and aggressive tactics to get some, or more. Many universities, desiring new sources of revenue, chase industrial research partnerships without prompting from Washington. In conjunction with this quest, they are increasingly attentive to the potential of royalties from discoveries in campus laboratories. This pursuit has broadened a career path for lawyers, as university patent attorneys; it has spawned its own professional society, the Association of University Technology Managers. In 1997, according to the association, gross income for universities from licenses and options reached a record high of $591 million, an increase of nearly 20 percent since 1995. That's a minor amount when measured against the $25 billion expended on university research of all types in 1998 by the federal and state governments, private foundations, and the universities themselves. But large shares of the royalty income were concentrated in a small number of universities, where they often exceeded 10 or 15 percent of total expenditures for research. In 1996, for example, Stanford University spent $395. million on research and received $43.7 million in gross licensing income. The comparable figures for Columbia University were $231.6 million in expenditures and $40.6 million in gross income, and for Michigan State University, $139.8 million and $17.2 million. Licensing income, however, lagged far behind these plump figures in other well-known universities. Harvard University, for example, reported $347 million in research and only $7.6 million in licensing income, and Ohio State University $207.7 million for research and $1 million in income. For many financially hard-pressed university administrators, the large licensing fees collected by a few institutions are an inspiration to get in on the game of wringing revenues from science through commercial transactions with industry.

The boundaries between academic science and commerce are also blurred by the money-making opportunities created by the dynamic pace of modern research. In biotechnology, electronics, materials, and other fields, the intervals between discovery and commercial application have greatly diminished, thus drawing universities and industry into closer relationships. Academe, however, writhes with ethical concerns about the propriety of its expanding links with industrial mammon, which can be accompanied by restrictions on publication of scientific findings and skewing of academic programs toward industrial interests.

Pained assessments, while increasingly heard, are disputed by many university administrators, researchers, and industrial managers. They insist that academic-industrial collaboration can be structured for the benefit of both parties, without endangering traditional educational values and the principles of scientific collaboration and openness. Perhaps. But during the 1990s, ethical agonizing about the growing presence of commercial values in university laboratories rose from a distant whisper to an unavoidable din in the scientific enterprise. In May 2000, Harvard University, following a two-year study, reaffirmed its limitations on commercial involvements by its faculty members, limiting outside employment to 20 percent of work time and prohibiting stock holdings of more than $20,000 in firms financing research in their laboratories. Though similar rules exist at other universities, they are often winked at; while at some institutions, it's open season on outside financial ties.

THE WORKFORCE AND ITS LOCALES

For the nearly 3.2 million people with bachelor's or advanced degrees employed in 1995 in occupations categorized by the National Science Foundation as "science or engineering," there is no single community. Rather, the nation's scientific and technical enterprises are akin to a major metropolitan area that sprawls beyond the irregular boundaries of its core city. At the center are the traditional institutions of science: some two hundred Ph.D.-granting universities, of which perhaps fifty are major-league science centers, and about seven hundred laboratories of the federal government, ranging from small research units of the National Forest Service to the great research centers of the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, with thousands of staff scientists and budgets each of a billion dollars or more. At the core, too, are elite corporate laboratories that bridge basic science and advanced technology, few in number but professionally close to academe and increasingly so. The core of the metropolis of science includes the money-dispensing federal research agencies and the advisory bodies that link science and government; the professional societies that foster individual scientific disciplines; the multidisciplinary organizations, such as the elite National Academy of Sciences and the open-to-all American Association for the Advancement of Science; and the professional journals that publish research and news of science.

Beyond the core are federal, state, and local agencies, in public health, environmental safety, law enforcement, transportation, and other public-sector functions, that rely on sophisticated technology for fulfilling their responsibilities; and, increasingly, research universities function as the centerpieces of state and regional undertakings to promote innovation and the creation of high-tech employment. The dream is to emulate the productive academic-industrial couplings of Stanford University and Silicon Valley, MIT-Harvard and Route 128 (in its boom period), and North Carolina's Research Triangle Park and the surrounding universities.

In ways that are not yet clearly defined, many of these institutions are melding with the new information economy and the associated software and dot-com industries. But a kind of self-segregation still prevails in science politics, with the pre-Internet veterans of Washington committee rooms, and the system in which they politick, showing remarkable durability, while the Silicon Valley elite and their professional brethren concentrate on making money. Until recently, the cyber chieftains deliberately avoided politics and its Washington manifestations. However, the Microsoft antitrust case demonstrated that Washington cannot be ignored. The corporate wizards of the new economy have responded by signing up old-fashioned Washington lobbyists and contributing heavily to both political parties, rather than by knocking on the doors of old-fashioned science politics. Little changed in style over many decades, those politics still dispose of billions of dollars of government money for research.

THE CAST OF SCIENCE POLITICS

Thousands of scientists perform the housekeeping chores of the research enterprise, serving, for example, on committees that evaluate grant applications and that advise Washington on emerging fields of research; others assist regulatory agencies with technical advice concerning pharmaceutical drugs and environmental issues. Thousands more stick to their work in the laboratory, aloof from the inner sanctums of policy, politics, and decision making in the capital city. At the interface of science and politics, the cast is small, perhaps two hundred in all. Participatory roles in science politics come ex officio with particular jobs in the federal research hierarchy, Congress, and in the nongovernmental infrastructure of the scientific enterprise. Certain positions come with preordained political roles. Thus, the senior science official in the U.S. government, the president's science adviser, serves as a link between science, especially university-based science, and real politics. The academic emphasis in that role comes by default: industry mainly looks after itself in scientific matters, though it often deals with the president's assistant for science and technology on issues of industrial-government cooperation in research; the government's own science agencies cultivate congressional ties for their political wellbeing. For academic science, the scientist in the White House is a special friend--and, with rare exception throughout the postwar decades, the scientist in the service of the president is a career academic. The directors of the two federal mainstays of academic science, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, customarily feign political chastity. But in annually presiding over the distribution of billions of congressionally appropriated dollars, while always seeking more, they must be attentive to power and influence in Washington and its extensions nationally. The director of NIH prudently refrains from battles over right-wing restrictions on fetal research, and the director of NSF wisely supports special programs to assist backward states in raising their capacity to compete for research funds from the elitist agency. The administrator of NASA, whatever his professional background, is necessarily and primarily a politician, managing the warring tribes of aerospace in doling out shares for the space station, planetary exploration, commercial technology, aeronautics, and academic programs.

The president of the National Academy of Sciences, an organization close to but officially separate from the federal government, occupies an assured place in the politics of science, whether or not he (since its founding in 1863, it has always been a he in the overwhelmingly male Academy) is suited by temperament and experience for science politics at the national level. The Academy looms large in government scientific and technical affairs principally because of its cultivated reputation as a provider of untainted, expert scientific and technical advice for federal agencies and Congress. From 1981 to 1993, the Academy presidency was filled by Frank Press, a distinguished geophysicist, long steeped in Washington affairs as a part-time White House adviser and, from 1977 to 1981, as President Carter's special assistant for science and technology. Press knew his way around Washington, and, notably, virtually alone among the science mandarins, cautioned against demanding a blank check for science--not because he felt it was undeserved but because it wouldn't sell politically, he warned his clamoring colleagues. In 1993, when Press completed the two-term maximum for an Academy president, the elders of the institution opted for a political virgin, choosing as his successor an outstanding molecular biologist, Bruce Alberts, of the University of California, San Francisco. After repeatedly declining, Alberts was ultimately persuaded to accept nomination for the presidency, with his election assured by the Academy's Stalinist tradition of one-candidate ballots. Upon taking office, Alberts boasted that he knew nothing about Washington or politics; his consuming interest, he declared, was the improvement of precollege science education. Nevertheless, Academy President Alberts, by virtue of his office, was unavoidably drawn into the politics of science.

Mixed in with the ex offcio participants are volunteers from the scientific enterprise who appear to relish science politics, often from a taste of it in a prior official capacity. Their motivations may vary, from personal glory-seeking to the performance of good works in the public interest. These volunteer politicians of science, joined by similarly inclined engineers, educators, and high-tech corporate executives, stimulate one another by voicing and endorsing arguments for politics to pay more attention to science and scientists. Count among them H. Guyford Stever, renowned as a workhorse committeeman in the decades following his service as director of the National Science Foundation under Richard Nixon and then as President Ford's special assistant for science and technology; Richard Garwin, a career-long IBM physicist, esteemed by peers as stunningly brilliant and recognized as a tireless arms-control advocate and White House adviser through many presidential administrations; Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate in physics, irrepressible evangelist of science education and the public understanding of science, and advocate of open-ended federal financial support for science; D. Allan Bromley, White House science adviser under George Bush, and before and after, professor of physics at Yale, and president, post-White House, of several leading national scientific societies; Edward E. David Jr., a durable figure in science politics for decades after emerging unscathed from thankless service as science adviser to President Richard Nixon; David Hamburg, a psychiatrist who headed the Institute of Medicine, the health-policy arm of the National Academy of Sciences, before becoming the president of the philanthropic, bountifully endowed Carnegie Corporation; Maxine Singer, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, one of the very few women prominent in the politics of science; Robert M. White, who, as president of the National Academy of Engineering from 1983 to 1995, publicly chastised his scientific colleagues for their unceasing demands for more government money; John A. Young, cochair of the President's Committee of Advisors for Science and Technology under President Clinton, former president of Hewlett-Packard, and founding chair of the Council on Competitiveness, a creation of high-tech industries and big-league academe united in support of government research spending; Erich Bloch, former IBM computer engineer and research executive, who, after six years as director of the National Science Foundation under President Reagan, proselytized for science as a distinguished fellow of the Council on Competitiveness; Roland W. Schmitt, a GE research executive, university president and ubiquitous committeeman; Lewis Branscomb, who went from director of the National Bureau of Standards to chief scientist of IBM and then to head of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

The aforementioned were among the relatively few eminent citizens and allied neighbors of the scientific community active to greater or lesser degrees in the politics of science for decades in the last century and, in most instances, into the new millennium. Aloof from conventional political tactics, such as collectively raising campaign money to buy access to politicians, they approached their goals confiently, with unalloyed shared faith in the worth of science for prosperity, national security, health, and many other desirable goals. At hearings on Capitol Hill, these and other politicians of science regularly convened with the elected politicians who, by choice or the workings of congressional seniority, occupied important roles in the affairs of science. Always prominent among them was the chairship of the House Science Committee, which, over three decades, served as a forum for the leaders of science to express their anxieties and hopes concerning federal dealings with science. The committee, as we shall see, possessed little legislative power; no matter, it provided a guest pulpit for science. Of a different order were Congress's thirteen appropriations subcommittees, key junctures for getting money from the U.S. Treasury. In the politics of science, none came to be so important, or revered, as the subcommittee responsible for the National Institutes of Health. Not merely by the luck of congressional seniority, but as a reflection of American cultural values, the chairs of the NIH subcommittees have invariably performed as enthusiastic boosters of health research. In grateful response, the biomedical-research enterprise has bestowed upon them innumerable medals, plaques, certificates of appreciation, and all other honors within its reach. In the politics of science, gratitude is expressed to legislators who provide money, but for financing research against dreaded diseases, sainthood is the reward.

Having made a reconnaissance of the metropolis of science, we will now move closer to examine a little-recognized characteristic of major sectors of American science: they creak with age and are bound by conservatism. The geriatric condition merits notice for the strong effects it radiates on the politics of science.



Continues...

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments and a Note on Sources and Methods
Introduction
1. The Metropolis of Science
2. The Ossified Enterprise
3. Vannevar Bush and the Myth of Creation
4. The Glorious Past
5. The Whimpering Giant
6. Money, More Money, Statistics, and Science
7. The Malthusian Imperative and the Politics of Trust
8. Ph.D. Production: Shortfall, Scarcity, and Shortage
9. The Congressional Griddle
10. Detour into Politics
11. Nixon Banishes the Scientists
12. The Sciences' Way of Politicking
13. The Public Understanding of Science
14. The TV Solution
15. Science and the Illusion of Political Power
16. The Political Few
17. The Scientific Ghetto
18. Connecting to Politics
19. Politicking by Report
20. Science in the State Department: You Need Us
21. From Social and Political Passion to Grubbing for Money
22. The Ethical Erosion of Science
23. Post-Cold War Chills
24. What Future for the National Science Foundation?
25. Clinton, Atom Smashing, and Space
26. Caught between Clinton and Congress
27. Science versus the Budget Cutters
28. The Political Triumph of Science
Epilogue
Appendix
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Washington-based journalist Daniel S. Greenberg (The Politics of Pure Science) delves further into his favorite issue in Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion. Debunking science industry and policy myths left and right, Greenberg combines archival research and interviews with scientists and politicians in the know to explore why and how research has happened in the postwar U.S. "[B]ecause the politics of science is registered in money awarded or denied... [m]oney will serve as a diagnostic tool for our study," says Greenberg. He goes on to describe the sycophancy, backbends and, sometimes, dishonesty practiced by researchers, and the willingness of some government scientists to keep their mouths shut when it behooves their bosses. A disturbing, compelling and well-researched conspiracy story of the "I knew it!" variety. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A broad assault on the business of doing science in America, which, the author argues, prizes profit and professional advancement over knowledge. That emphasis, science journalist Greenberg holds, regularly yields ethical lapses in violation of the spirit of science, which is supposed to value critical inquiry and the search for truth. Reagan's science advisors, for instance, knew that the Star Wars missile-defense program was based on flawed assumptions that would make its implementation all but impossible, but they kept their mouths shut. Rushing to cash in on the human genome bonanza, University of Pennsylvania researchers took a few experimental shortcuts that led to the death of a human subject-not an isolated instance. Greenberg writes, provocatively, that "the scientific gold rush left behind a dead body and revelations of indifference to ethical safeguards and deep concessions to the money chase." In the Eisenhower era, scientists cooked up tales of Soviet scientific supremacy, touching off a massive wave of federal spending, despite evidence that funding had declined in the USSR. And so on. The irony of it all, Greenberg observes, is that there has never been a shortage of federal money available for scientific research, even in times of austerity and libertarian rumblings from the likes of Newt Gingrich and his Republican-radical cronies; in the late 1990s, that funding soared, amounting to grants of more than $25 billion in 1998 alone. Still, he suggests, the scientific establishment has become so used to fat budgets and the absence of accountability that much of its effort is devoted not to research, but to lobbying for still greater access to the public trough. Greenbergurges increased oversight of science at all levels-and a more critical approach to its claims made by the media and government. Sure not to please deans or development officers, Greenberg's heavy-handed but well-reasoned attack on the big-science machine merits attention.

Kirkus Reviews

[T]he culmination of 40 years of pounding the science-policy beat. It is a masterly overview of how big science and big government have operated together in post-war America. . . . It is probably fair to say that, through the medium of his newsletter, Science and Government Report, Mr. Greenberg pretty well invented a new way to cover big science—as a form of government spending no different, in budgetary terms, from defense procurement or agricultural support.

The Economist

Greenberg . . . does not require of us the careful construction of an ideal, but assuming, quite correctly, that we all know corruption and self-interest when we see them in their most egregious manifestations, tells it like it is.

New York Review of Books - Richard Lewontin

Greenberg's book [is] the product of almost four decades of close observation of the Washington science scene by one of its most acute analysts and sharpest critics . . . Greenberg, a former news editor of Science, for many years chronicled in his fortnightly newsletter, Science and Government Report, the complex interaction between the scientific community and the political establishment. No one, therefore, is better placed to document how each has successfully managed to meet the needs of the other since the end of the Second World War. . . . Many scientists continue to believe that science's generous support from the federal government is based primarily on the innate value of its potential contribution to social well-being. Greenberg's analysis of such events may well cause them to reconsider their view of how decisions about science funding are taken in practice. . . . [A] unique and revealing perspective on the way that the science-funding process actually works in Washington. The picture it paints is not a flattering one. But — unlike many of those he writes about —Greenberg is not out to make friends in high places.”— David Dickson, Nature

Nature - David Dickson

In the case of Daniel Greenberg, who has been the gadfly of the U.S. scientific establishment for four decades, stimulation and provocation have often been leavened by wit and always motivated by sharp intelligence. Greenberg has made a career of puncturing the self-important puffery that sometimes passes for public discourse in this community. . . . [In this book] the gadfly delivers a stinging three-count indictment of the contemporary scientific community and adduces a large body of evidence to support it.

Issues in Science and Technology

[A] unique and indispensable guide to the nether regions of the federally funded research enterprise in the United States. . . . [C]ertainly part of Greenberg's cantankerous intent is to expose the all-too-human motives and behavior of a community that often rests its demands for public support on the claim of special privilege. But this is not the whole story that he wants to tell. He also believes that the scientific community's ongoing infatuation with money has led to a progressive withdrawal from important

 political issues.

Science - Daniel Sarewitz

Greenberg’s Science, Money, and Politicsprovides a more sweeping survey of the disorder that afflicts contemporary science. . . Greenberg’s irreverence has always offered a square meal for those woozy from the puffery and piety served up by most science journalists. The present book doesn’t disappoint; Greenberg is especially adept at capturing folly and hypocrisy with memorable phrases.

The Nation - Jonathan Kimmelman

Other professionals—physicians, lawyers, and teachers—long ago entered electoral politics, but scientists for the most part have stuck to their nineteenth-century detachment. To compensate for the lack of direct access to politics, they simply developed sharper and slyer tools to assure their future access to government money. Science, Money, and Politics is a gripping, sometimes amusing, and often provocative tour de force discussion of the ultimate consequences of their success.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - Michael S. Reidy

"Greenberg has constructed a tour de force exploration of the world of science policy and politics over the pasty forty years, with pleasant forays into the worlds of big science, university research shops, government labs, scientific societies, and granting agencies. . . . [Greenberg] stands without peer as the outside science observer in Washington, and brings to his work both a fine appreciation for the work of scientists and the possible abuses of a system which funnels over $15 billion per year into basic research. . . . This is a superb book, and should interest scholars and laypersons alike interested in how the scientific enterprise has become what it is over the past fifty years.

Journal of the History of Medicine

"Greenberg's profoundly important new book depicts American 'Big Science' as a classic self-perpetuating bureaucracy. . . . [It] is better documented than most National Academy of Sciences reports yet reads as briskly as a Dashiell Hammett detective story. . . . For four decades, Greenberg has been the conscience of American science writers. . . . We need more Greenbergs. . . . This admirable book should be required reading for science policy makers, science journalists, and any American who gives a damn whenever science—one of the nation's crown jewels—falls into irresponsible hands."

Scientific American - Keay Davidson

Although it builds on a vast foundation of first-hand journalistic knowledge, Science, Money and Politics transcends journalistic fact gathering and presents cogently argued themes to explain the history and present state of the ‘science enterprise’ in the United States. . . . The real strength of this study lies in its challenging and disturbing analyses, which constitute an indispensable primer for all serious debate on the future of the science enterprise in the United States."

New England Journal of Medicine - Claude E. Barfield

[H]eroically researched . . .  Were the politics of science as important as the altitude of Presidential trousers, Greenberg would certainly be acknowledged as one of the greatest American investigative journalists of the last half-century. . . . [Greenberg’s]  The Politics of Pure Science, published in 1967, was, like Science, Money and Politics, a lively journalistic book which argued that the politics of science was just like any other kind of politics. Such differences as there were arose from the fact that scientists weren't very good politicians, and the vital role of science and technology in modern American life meant that, for many purposes, they didn't have to be. More vividly written and polemically argued than Greenberg's earlier book, Science, Money and Politics brings the story up to date."

London Review of Books - Steven Shapin

[Greenberg] is snidely contemptuous of the politicos of science, indicting them, often with good reason, for hypocrisy, misrepresentation, and unwarranted doomsaying. This is on the whole an informative and provocative book. It includes riveting material from Greenberg’s conversations with Washington insiders . . . and it advances several arresting themes about the interplay among the subjects of its title.

The New Republic - Daniel J. Kevles

Other professionals—physicians, lawyers, and teachers—long ago entered electoral politics, but scientists for the most part have stuck to their nineteenth-century detachment. To compensate for the lack of direct access to politics, they simply developed sharper and slyer tools to assure their future access to government money. Science, Money, and Politics is a gripping, sometimes amusing, and often provocative tour de force discussion of the ultimate consequences of their success.”

— Michael S. Reidy

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

[H]eroically researched . . .  Were the politics of science as important as the altitude of Presidential trousers, Greenberg would certainly be acknowledged as one of the greatest American investigative journalists of the last half-century. . . . [Greenberg’s]  The Politics of Pure Science, published in 1967, was, like Science, Money, and Politics, a lively journalistic book which argued that the politics of science was just like any other kind of politics. Such differences as there were arose from the fact that scientists weren't very good politicians, and the vital role of science and technology in modern American life meant that, for many purposes, they didn't have to be. More vividly written and polemically argued than Greenberg's earlier book, Science, Money, and Politics brings the story up to date.

— Steven Shapin

London Review of Books

Greenberg's book [is] the product of almost four decades of close observation of the Washington science scene by one of its most acute analysts and sharpest critics . . . Greenberg, a former news editor of Science, for many years chronicled in his fortnightly newsletter, Science and Government Report, the complex interaction between the scientific community and the political establishment. No one, therefore, is better placed to document how each has successfully managed to meet the needs of the other since the end of the Second World War. . . . Many scientists continue to believe that science's generous support from the federal government is based primarily on the innate value of its potential contribution to social well-being. Greenberg's analysis of such events may well cause them to reconsider their view of how decisions about science funding are taken in practice. . . . [A] unique and revealing perspective on the way that the science-funding process actually works in Washington. The picture it paints is not a flattering one. But — unlike many of those he writes about —Greenberg is not out to make friends in high places.— David Dickson, Nature

— David Dickson

Nature

Although it builds on a vast foundation of first-hand journalistic knowledge, Science, Money, and Politics transcends journalistic fact gathering and presents cogently argued themes to explain the history and present state of the ‘science enterprise’ in the United States. . . . The real strength of this study lies in its challenging and disturbing analyses, which constitute an indispensable primer for all serious debate on the future of the science enterprise in the United States.

— Claude E. Barfield

New England Journal of Medicine

Greenberg’s Science, Money, and Politicsprovides a more sweeping survey of the disorder that afflicts contemporary science. . . Greenberg’s irreverence has always offered a square meal for those woozy from the puffery and piety served up by most science journalists. The present book doesn’t disappoint; Greenberg is especially adept at capturing folly and hypocrisy with memorable phrases.”

— Jonathan Kimmelman

The Nation

[Greenberg] is snidely contemptuous of the politicos of science, indicting them, often with good reason, for hypocrisy, misrepresentation, and unwarranted doomsaying. This is on the whole an informative and provocative book. It includes riveting material from Greenberg’s conversations with Washington insiders . . . and it advances several arresting themes about the interplay among the subjects of its title.”

— Daniel J. Kevles

The New Republic

Greenberg . . . does not require of us the careful construction of an ideal, but assuming, quite correctly, that we all know corruption and self-interest when we see them in their most egregious manifestations, tells it like it is.”

— Richard Lewontin

New York Review of Books

[A] unique and indispensable guide to the nether regions of the federally funded research enterprise in the United States. . . . [C]ertainly part of Greenberg's cantankerous intent is to expose the all-too-human motives and behavior of a community that often rests its demands for public support on the claim of special privilege. But this is not the whole story that he wants to tell. He also believes that the scientific community's ongoing infatuation with money has led to a progressive withdrawal from important

 political issues.”

— Daniel Sarewitz

Science

Greenberg's profoundly important new book depicts American 'Big Scien
— Keay Davidson

Scientific American

Which science book should the next US president read? . . . . Daniel S. Greenberg is the outstanding writer on the politics of modern US science, and this is his most pertinent book.

— Steven Shapin

Nature (2008)