Science is not apolitical. Here's why

“Science is apolitical”  is a thought that everyone who has finished high school should get out of their heads. Practically, no field of human action or activity is apolitical and does not stand on its own, separated from society and the repercussions that it can have on society.

• through education we learn a lot of scientific facts, but almost nothing about how science works, so the image is created that science is separated from society and politics

• science and politics intertwine and influence each other – sometimes this is positive and strengthens democracy, and sometimes politics negatively affects science

• funding of science also depends on the political centers of power, and science is a prerequisite for making decisions in politics based on facts.

Why do many people often perceive science as something that has nothing to do with politics?

One of the causes of this misconception is that we encounter science early in life, even before elementary school. We are used to popular science shows, for example those about dinosaurs and sharks, to “home experiments”, we watch how plants grow from seeds and we know that this is also science. And that's good – we should all be exposed to science, scientific thinking and concepts from the early stages of development. However, this infantile attitude towards science too often persists even in adults.

We “learn” science too much – we “learn it”, and we learn too little about its structure and steps. Too little is discussed at school about the implications of science for society. This creates the illusion that science is a noble, sublime human activity that is completely separated from the “dirt” of everyday life and political manipulations. We imagine scientists as scholars from Hesse's novel “The Game of Glass Beads” who, in a kind of isolation, a social ghetto, calmly think about how the world works.

It is true, there are scientists who work in remote scientific stations like some observatories, who are physically quite isolated, but that still does not mean that what they do is completely isolated from society. There are scientists who are in some kind of their own world and declare themselves to be apolitical, but this does not mean that all scientists are like that, nor that their refusal to express political views in public (or frankly the lack of such views, which is hard to imagine in modern society) makes science apolitical.

On the other hand, we perceive politics as “dirty”. We have lost the perception of politics as diplomatic skills and the skills of managing a complex state structure.

This perception of light and dark, “good”, “noble” and “bad”, “dirty”, where science is perceived as something sublime, a kind of Beatrice Pontinari, of untainted  and unattainable holiness, is actually very dangerous. We perceive politics as politicking, an eternal struggle of petty interests, and science as a good force. And then once, when we see some scandal in science, we lose faith in that “holiness”. And that is exactly what is happening, especially during the pandemic period, but it has happened before.

The ultimate, worst instance of this kind of reaction can be radicalization against science. And this is happening to us.

In one of my popular lectures on science, I spoke about the importance of Richard Feynman to the high school graduates. And, of course, I saw that part of the class was following closely, it was the “Big Bang”, nerdy part of the class, while the sports-social-sciences part of the class was following me only out of respect, so as not to offend me. Yes, it happens and I simply don't expect everyone to find a story about science interesting, or even about the charming Feynman, who was such a charismatic personality and had such an interesting life that he is indispensable in every scientific-popular “expedition”. What I knew from talking to those young people in the class is that there are a few of them who are really interested in law, history, philosophy. That is why I devoted the second part of my presentation about Feynman to the influence of American politics at that time, the era of McCarthyism. And indeed, I hit the right button – explaining the influence of the politics of a time on science and on an individual who is a prominent member of the scientific community, with digressions towards Oppenheimer and at the end the whole story about the Manhattan Project and the post scriptum about the Pugwash Conference, was greeted with wide-open eyes by this young, but not at all naive and very serious audience. 

In that presentation at the high school, I mentioned only a few historical examples of the intertwining of science and politics. But still, people are poorly aware of this connection. At the same time, it has become almost out of place to talk about l'art pour art and we somehow accept that art is politically active. Why is it not so easy for us to accept that science is like that?

The Vatican, then and now a major political influencer, imprisoned Galileo and forced him to recant his scientific claims that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

Under Stalin's tutelage, the official science in the USSR was the one blessed by Trofim Denisovič Lysenko. Those who opposed this pseudoscience, according to which living beings acquire characteristics under the influence of their environment, and the concept of genes is ignored, were not only discriminated against, but lost their lives in the gulags. Lysenko rejected the basic principles in biology, because his theories supported the principles of Marxism, and from this scandalous example of science under political repression arose Lysenkoism, a term used to refer to the manipulation of the scientific process to achieve ideological goals.

In 2019, Planned Parenthood, which, admittedly, is not a scientific organization, but a non-profit organization that provides reproductive health care to millions of women in the US (including performing abortions) but cooperates with scientific institutions, lost $60 million in federal funding that is intended to provide contraception and screening for sexually transmitted diseases, due to the rules and decisions of the Trump administration .

Different US presidents had different attitudes towards science.

Before that, on April 22, 2017, we witnessed the March for Science, an event that began as a non-partisan protest by scientists, primarily in the USA, in which they wanted to point out the importance of making decisions and legislation based on scientific facts – both decisions related to climate change and the protection of the environment and endangered species, to decisions related to embryonic cell research. In fact, the protests were a kind of non-violent reaction to the new working conditions faced by a part of the scientific community, primarily in the USA, after the arrival of Donald Trump as president. Trump, who denied climate change, saying it was a hoax coming from China, created an upheaval on the political scene, gave legitimacy to certain unscientific views, practically legitimized them with his position from which he speaks.

 Now, in 2025. CDC, NIH, and others are practicaly beheaded. 

March for Science, 2017.

 

 

And it doesn't end there: a practical war against science has been launched, which culminated in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. While still a presidential candidate, Trump promised to continue construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and roll back US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations passed by the Obama administration.

Before even entering office, Trump's transition team stunned the scientific community by requesting a list of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy (DOE) scientists who attended climate change conferences, prompting the scientists to try to protect the government's climate change data from being erased from the public record. Then it was promised to reduce the EPA's budget by about 30%, precisely for the fight against climate change, forcing the EPA to withdraw the term “climate change” from its website , and finally, the formal withdrawal of the USA from the Paris Agreement. In February 2017, William Happer, then a possible Trump science adviser with a skeptical view of human-caused global warming, described the field of climate science as “really more like a cult.”

Trump's first arrival at the head of the USA had a profound impact on the scientific community, but this is not the only historical example of the intertwining of science and politics. And it is happening again. In this context, it is important to note that it is simply not true that politics always has a negative impact on science and the scientific community.

On August 2, 1939,  a letter written by Hungarian-American physicist Leo Szilard in consultation with Edward Teller and  Eugen Wigner and signed by Albert Einstein was sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The letter suggested that Germany had its own atomic program and that the US should also develop its own. This resulted in the launch of the Manhattan Project and the creation of the first atomic bomb.

Starting from the fact that science often depends on politics for some projects, to the fact that scientists should be listened to when passing certain laws – on the environment, environmental protection, in vitro fertilization, abortion, energy, genetically modified organisms, agriculture, forestry – we see that science simply cannot do without politics. But, in modern society, where democratic values ​​are placed on a pedestal, even politics cannot do without science, as an ally and advisor, allegorically speaking.

“Scientific research does not take place in a vacuum, it can only happen with the blessing of society. In this way, science is a de facto political institution, governed by society and obeying its political will.”, Ubadah Sabbagh, a neuroscientist at MIT, wrote in Scientific American in 2017.

Politics, determine how much scientific research will be financed and which. 

The European Union's Horizon Program is a key funding program for scientific research and innovation and has a budget of 95.5 billion euros. At the same time, EU policy has shaped science through this program – namely, you cannot apply to the program if the research comes from only one country, but it is necessary to achieve cooperation with other institutions within the EU or countries that are acceding/expected to enter the EU in the foreseeable future. This is how Horizon encourages collaboration and the flow of ideas and people. CERN, the European center for subatomic particle research, also depends on policy and funding from countries that are members of this international collaboration.

There is also a whole concept of “scientific diplomacy” that does not only refer to collaborations such as CERN or the efforts of the European Commission, but also spills over into space law and the use and control of nuclear energy, especially related to the aspect of nuclear weapons.

Scientific diplomacy is the use of scientific cooperation between countries to solve common problems and build constructive international partnerships, and one of the leaders of this activity is certainly UNESCO.

Politics governs science. Science is not free, apart from the world, it is not apolitical, but it is part of political processes. Politicians control money, which is very necessary for the development of science among other things, and the scientific community is there to provide information to political actors in order to make informed and science-based decisions.