Professor Avi Loeb, world renowned physicist, best-selling author, regular contributor to Scientific American, and Frank B. Baird Jr Professor of Science at Harvard University, didn’t write these words lightly. He knows a thing or two about how scientific breakthroughs occur, and just how challenging it can be to move the needle of the scientific orthodoxy after it settles into a pattern that he likens to religious dogma.
More than that, he’s far from alone. Any half serious scientist understands the importance of dissent and discourse if we’re to see genuine scientific progress that benefits people and planet.
Yet we face a time in history wherein the manipulation of both information and people, in order to serve the interests of particular governments and corporations, is unprecedented. While this process is clearly deliberately engineered, the groupthink that has given this process such momentum is less deliberate. Huge numbers of people, from scientists and medics, through to politicians, bureaucrats and the public at large, have become unwitting victims of a very subtle and insidious process that conflates technology with science.
You don’t have to look hard to find examples of this conflation. Back in early 2021, anyone who suggested safety data on C19 genetic vaccines were inadequate and insufficiently transparent was dismissed as being anti-science. Actually, many of us who did just this us are pro-science. We are simply risk aware over a novel technology that we consider was insufficiently tested before being unleashed on the masses. I’m not exactly sure when being cautious became synonymous with being anti-science or a conspiracy theorist? But I think it was around 3 years ago.
