The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors.

• Author: Butos, William N.
• Position: Book review

The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors

By James T. Bennett

New York: Springer, 2010.

Pp. vii, 205. $24.95 paperback.

The unrelenting expansion in the scale and scope of government involvement in science receives too little attention. Today in the United States and around the world, government funding and direction of science are presumed to be essential, if not constitutional, prerogatives of the state. The rise of state-run science did not commence in earnest in the United States until World War II and its aftermath, although a substantial amount of the bureaucratic groundwork was put in place by Franklin D. Roosevelt before the war. During the 1930s, Great Britain barely escaped full central planning of science; it was pulled back from that precipice in large part because of the heroic efforts of Michael Polanyi, John Baker, and their Society for Freedom in Science. In the Soviet Union, in contrast, the central planning of science exacted an enormous human cost, with Stalin's embrace of Lysenkoism and the resulting destruction of the country's agricultural sector and its suppression of Western genetics and biological sciences. Today, although central planning in science is rarely mentioned, the United States is at a tipping point: an alliance of government, business, and academia threatens the autonomy and knowledge-generating capacity of science. Only a fiscal constraint seems to hold this revolution in science at bay.

This situation is a relatively modern development. At one time, science was thought to be an undertaking that should be principally financed by private sources and largely removed from the government's oversight and its political aims, which most often involved using science for military purposes. That government's insinuation into science parallels the growth of the modern interventionist state is not a coincidence.

James T. Bennett's most recent book, The Doomsday Lobby, is an excellent antidote to the thinking that has promoted science as an arm of the government during the past seventy-five years. The explanation of how the present situation developed is a complex, intertwined story of the growth of government itself, on the one hand, and political opportunism by government and its clients--scientists, business, and academic institutions--on the other. Bennett wisely carves out a single theme in this story by concentrating on the U.S. space program's development. The bulk of...