Non speak week: silencing scientists

A must read: Non speak week: silencing scientists by Stephen Strauss: http://pencanada.ca/blog/how-science-can-help-the-feds-save-face/ "Whenever I try to explain to ordinary people why the present Conservative government’s muzzling of its scientists is a wrongheaded and self-destructive act, I begin by stating the obvious. Not letting scientists readily talk to journalists expresses a fundamentally un-scientific mentality.
Then I quote what French historian Arthur Mangin wrote nearly 150 years ago. “Connaître, découvrir, communiquer — telle est la destinée d’un savant” or as that reads in English “to get to know, to discover, to communicate – this is the destiny of a scientist.” The sentence announces what anyone who knows anything about science already understands. Science is not about uncovering something that you aren’t going to tell anyone else about because you are afraid of what they are going to make of your discovery. Science is intrinsically a hive activity in which communication and explication of a discovery isn’t just a good thing, it is an intrinsic thing. Maybe almost the intrinsic thing.
Science is intrinsically a hive activity in which communication and explication of a discovery isn’t just a good thing, it is an intrinsic thing. Maybe almost the intrinsic thing.
Scientists measure the impact of what they have found by the numbers of times others cite their work. They love it when others try to reproduce their findings. They speak about what they have done at any institution, conference or webinar which will have them. And they are increasingly blogging like mad about what is going on in their fields – a communicating mania that can viewed at sites such as scienceblogs and technorati. I personally have never seen as gossipy a collective as the hallways and meeting rooms and even lavatories of a scientific get-together.
So when the government muzzles its scientists and forbids them from talking journalists it has resulted in behavior that seems almost pathologically non-scientific.
Think of when Ottawa Citizen reporter Tom Spears asked the National Research Council what its joint falling snow study with NASA was about. After 11 staffers and dozens of emails went back and forth considering the request, the NRC really didn’t respond. While this was occurring, a request to a NASA scientist for information got all Spears’ questions answered in 15 minutes."