<nettime> "dictatorship of lab coats"?

[Ryan Griffis <grifray@yahoo.com>]

"Some experts warn that if support for science falters
and if the American public loses interest in it, such
apathy may foster an age in which scientific elites
ignore the public weal and global imperatives for
their own narrow interests, producing something like a
dictatorship of the lab coats."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11MATT.html?pagewanted=1&th

no doubt larger numbers of the public need to be
engaged in scientific discourse beyond consumer
products, but a dictatorship of lab coats seems a
ludicrous concept. it seems, with the direction many
things are going, the scientific community is hardly
pulling the strings, outside of corporate R+D anyway.
i don't think, for example, the removal of sex ed in
public schools is a mandate from science, nor the
continuing neglect of global warming. there are
different forms of neo-luddites, no?
i think this statement says a lot:

"But major problems also arose: acid rain,
environmental toxins, the Bhopal chemical disaster,
nuclear waste, global warming, the ozone hole, fears
over genetically modified food and the fiery
destruction of two space shuttles, not to mention the
curse of junk e-mail. Such troubles have helped feed
social disenchantment with science."

what does it mean to list the Bhopal chemical disaster
and "junk e-mail" together in the same list of "major
problems?"
it's also interesting that the only "opposition" to
Darwinian evolution talked about is "intellegent
design," rather than the theories of catastrophic
markers of ecological change that have more direct
significance to the kinds of actions capital is
inacting on various ecologies.
ryan


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