Two recent articles, one in the New York Times and one in The New Republic, worry that Americans are anti-science.  They are written, of course, by scientists.  I'm actually more worried that Americans are anti-literature.  There's always something that keeps us up at night, isn't there?

My friend Jon has always been smarter than me and the science debate reminds me why.  Back when we were kids, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation we debated a frequent trope on the show which is that one character or another would complain that "replicated" food did not taste as good as home cooked food, usually home cooked food on earth.  Star Trek's "replicators" were the technology by which humanity had defeated scarcity.  Energy could be converted into matter, replicating anything with a known atomic structure with presumably quantum level accuracy.  If this was true, argued Jon, nobody would be able to taste the difference between a replicated quiche and mom's quiche.  One would be an exact copy of another.  There would be no difference.  Similarly, you could taste any wine of any vintage from any era, so long as the atomic structure was known.  Any complaints to the contrary would be sentimentality.  Jon was the smart one, I sided with the sentimental complainers.

These days, we have a similar debate about the safety of genetically modified foods.  I'd note that in both the Times and The New Republic that the authors wisely avoided GMO.  It's easier to court a progressive audience if you focus on creationists and climate change deniers.  Shoppers at the libertarian paradise that is Whole Foods tend to believe that organic foods taste better and are better for you.  Hard core scientists will argue that GMO is entirely safe, but informed people remain skeptical on both esthetic and health grounds.

Still, other progressives are very much in favor of GMO because it increases food yields and presents a solution to global want.  It's all well and good for me to want grass fed beef.  But who will supply the steak for Hong Kong's emerging middle class?  It's not going to be a family farm in Oregon where I can get a biography of the cow I am eating.  These progressives are very frustrated with the anti-GMO left.  Why won't they listen to science?

Back to Star Trek... the characters most likely to complain about replicated food also had other reasons to be skeptical of the Federation and Starfleet.  They had often been done wrong.  They were skeptical not of the science of the institution behind the science.  GMO is just like this.  When a progressive looks at the behavior of Monsanto or ADM or Cargill it becomes difficult to trust the science and technologies employed by those companies.

From here we can look at people who are refusing to vaccinate their children for fear of autism or other dangers might not have science on their side but they are not acting without reason.  To ask them to believe the scientific evidence is to ask them to adopt the same position as a pharmaceutical industry that has behaved very badly, denying life saving drugs to some who can't afford them and marketing dangerous drugs that have hurt people, all the while lobbying the government for more of what it wants.  It was the pharmaceutical companies that struck the first blow against the public option during the Obamacare debates.

Climate change denial seems to stem more from conservative mistrust of academia than anything.  As much as I think that mistrust is misplaced (you don't trust the public university but you do trust Exxon?) I have to admit that to a conservative, academia can seem an inhospitable place.  It might be that some outreach is in order.

Certainly, science is going to have to be more cognizant of how its institutions are perceived by the people who rely on them.  In The Times Adam Frank writes:

"This is not a world the scientists I trained with would recognize. Many of them served on the Manhattan Project. Afterward, they helped create the technologies that drove America’s postwar prosperity."

It might be that to many people "The Manhattan Project" is not synonymous with postwar prosperity but rather with postwar brinksmanship where, on multiple occasions over the course of decades, millions of entirely innocent lives were almost snuffed out by technologies developed in secret and without people's express consent.

This is also, by the way, why the NSA will get no benefit from releasing information, as it did yesterday, about how it has effectively self-reported mistakes and errors in its surveillance program.  The institution itself has been discredited.  Like big food, big pharma and big weapons, big intelligence no longer gets the benefit of the doubt.