Word: scientistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...willingness of patients to sue physicians to make them account for mistakes in treatment. Sci-Tech, in a sense, has been demoted from its demigodhood. The public today rallies, in its untidy way, around the notion that Hans J. Morgenthau put into words in Science: Servant or Master?. "The scientist's monopoly of the answers to the questions of the future is a myth...
...halls of science. Biologist Barry Commoner's Science and Survival, documenting an erosion of scientific integrity and denouncing official secrecy and lying about nuclear fallout, came in 1966 as merely an early ripple in a wave of muckraking that has washed away the glowing image of the scientist as some kind of superman. Scientists now appear to be as fallible as the politicians with whom they increasingly consort. In Advice and Dissent: Scientists in the Political Arena, two academic scientists, Physics Teacher Joel Primack of the University of California and Environmentalist Frank von Hippel of Princeton, present case histories...
...cars to make sure that they meet emission standards. Skepticism can be credited with last year's California referendum on nuclear power; the fact that the voters did not veto nuclear expansion misses the point, which is that an arcane subject hitherto considered the sole province of the scientist and engineer was submitted to ordinary citizens. And only a remarkably awakened citizenry could have inspired the self-criticism of the recent Senate committee report that chastised the Senate for laxness in overseeing the agencies that oversee the industries that are conduits of Sci-Tech...
Beyond such techniques to reduce the dire consequences of future droughts, University of Nebraska Political Scientist Robert Miewald asked more fundamental questions about the way the nation uses its land. "What really is the problem in Marin County?" he asked his scientific colleagues. "Is it too little water? Or is it too many people? Has the area been developed beyond the capability of its resources to support people?" He suggested that perhaps people should live where water is available rather than haul water to where they want to live...
Perhaps the most intriguing scheme came from an imaginative scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. After an earlier drought in the 1950s, John Isaacs proposed towing giant, flat-topped icebergs from Antarctica (those from the Arctic would not be big enough) to the California coast; as they melted, fresh water could be siphoned out of the lakes that would form on top of them. The idea has impressed at least one country: petroleum-rich, water-poor Saudi Arabia. A French engineering firm hired by the Saudis is studying whether or not the plan is practical. Towed by six tugs...