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In our recently submitted grants we had to change “traumatic brain injury” to “concussive brain injury” and “male and female mice” to “male and non-male mice” because traumatic and female are now verboten words that can get our grants killed. It’s insanity.
I understand that, my point was in an ideal world expert panels and not politicians would get the final say in policy-setting and funding decisions. My main example is the clusterfuck the NIH and health department has become under the lunatic in charge.
I understand that this stuff is inherently political, I had to pivot on the narrative of my own master's thesis because of the "interesting" results we generated
But
All this is political.
What you’re describing is technocracy. And it has major limitations.
thats fair. I guess there is no such thing as a perfect system, there will always be conflict of interest and bias. I get your point too, just because someone is an expert in their field doesn't mean their knowledge translates to leadership and good judgement on funding decisions ect.
I was thinking along your lines too, but have to concede the rebuttal as well. But I think we can still aim for the ideal of science proceeding as neutrally as possible once the funding is granted. Getting funding is the political interface. The question of “What should we do?” must be political, but “How should we do it?” can be left to science.
Ya its healthy to have this discussion. I still think the policy-makers should have a background in what they are governing but that is what advisory boards and councils are for. I definitely commented with too broad of a generalization with "no politics in science", I should have said I dislike when politics oversteps in medicine/healthcare/research... I do see the value however as this comment chain grows.