Scientists strive to be apolitical, but they can’t keep politics out of their labs
September 12, 2025 | Michael Hiltzik, LA Times
There’s a scene in the movie “Oppenheimer” in which Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron and head of his own lab at UC Berkeley, reacts angrily when he discovers his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer trying to recruit lab assistants to a communist-linked campus labor union.
It’s one of the few scenes in this largely factual film that may actually have downplayed the real event. Lawrence was beyond furious at Oppenheimer for bringing politics — and left-wing politics at that — into the lab. For Lawrence — whose personal journey would transform him from New Deal liberalism to solid Republican conservatism — a scientific lab was no place for anything but pure science, uninfected by politics.
It’s one of the tragedies of Lawrence’s life and career that he ultimately was unable to keep his lab politics-free. He would be swept up in UC’s capitulation to the 1950s red scare in California, which culminated in the mandate that all faculty sign an anti-communist loyalty oath.
In acceding to the mandate by requiring his lab staff to sign the oath in order to assuage the right-wingers on the UC Board of Regents, Lawrence — the most famous and eminent scientist on the Berkeley faculty — discovered that in a turbocharged partisan atmosphere, no science laboratory could keep politics from crashing through the door.
Scientists in today’s America are relearning that lesson. Two who learned it the hard way are Peter Hotez, an eminent vaccinologist affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine, and Michael E. Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania. They’ve collaborated on a new book, “Science Under Siege,” that analyzes the forces fueling the politicization of science and its consequences and map out a possible path out of the wilderness….
… One needs a scorecard to track the devastation wreaked on scientific efforts by the current administration. As it happens, one exists: the Silencing Science Tracker posted by Columbia Law School. It makes dismal reading. In July alone, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would close its office of research and development, cashiering 3,700 workers; the Department of Agriculture said it would close most of its forest research stations nationwide; and NASA removed the congressionally mandated national climate assessments from its website.