Biased for Science (or Thus Spoke Obama)

 World Federation of Science Journalists

President Obama was characteristically adroit with language when he declared on March 9th that he would “restore science to its rightful place.” The decision was to undo some of the restrictions on federal funding to stem cell research imposed by Obama’s predecessor in 2001.

To that, half a dozen editorials responded with praise — as did, of course, most in the science community.

That was not how I received the news. 

The “P” Word, Thomas Kuhn, and I

 World Federation of Science Journalists

In a way, you can blame it on Thomas Kuhn. It was he who introduced too beautiful and brilliant a term in the early 1960s: paradigm shift. A term that writers of all sorts, particularly about business and information technology, have had no shame abusing since. Myself included. [I can’t help thinking that  if the editors of Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had known that the term would  be such a hit, they would have probably made it the title of the book.]

So I was reminded of my secret guilt about Kuhn’s term late in October, while attending the first conference for Arab science journalists, in Fez, Morocco. In the Q & A that followed a panel on
“Finding Science Stories in the Arab World,” a man in the audience made a comment to this effect: “This sounds to me like all you [Arab science journalists] do is market or publicize Western science and Western paradigms. Unless the departure point in your work is an Arabic and Islamic paradigm of science, he added, your efforts amount to little.