The Politics of Science Fraud

Lawrence Krauss, president of the Origins Project Foundation, writes in the Wall Street Journal (“The Ideological Corruption of Science,” July 12) how as a young physics professor at Yale, he and his colleagues in the hard sciences looked with bemusement at the dominant deconstructionism of the comparative literature department, which denied the existence of objective truth itself. That could never happen in the sciences, they assured themselves, except under a totalitarian regime such as Stalin’s.

That idealized view of science as a separate realm devoted to the pursuit of truth and devoid of all political bias, Krauss notes, is no longer sustainable. In June, the American Physical Society, representing 55,000 physicists, declared a one-day “strike for black lives” to eradicate “systemic racism” in science. No evidence was adduced for the latter, other than the underrepresentation of blacks in the sciences.

One of the day’s activities was to organize a protest campaign that resulted in the removal of physicist Stephen Hsu as vice president for research at Michigan State University. His crimes: his own studies in computational genomics to study how human genetics might be related to cognitive ability, and research by MSU psychology professors that did not support the narrative of racial bias in police shootings.

A distinguished Canadian chemist was censured by his university provost for calling for merit-based hiring, and the editors of a journal that accepted an article by him were suspended. Meanwhile, Francis Collins, the director of NIH, declared that he will no longer attend scientific conferences where white males, like him, predominate, regardless of their professional merit.