> I didn't mean that [UCS's] science was outside the mainstream, I meant that
> the group's activities were. Like you, I think their scientific positions
> are pretty non-controversial
I guess my sense of "mainstream" isn't the same thing as "most people do do it" -- that is, the majority may not be involved in UCS-ish activities, but it's not considered anything unusual. At least half of my grad school faculty openly discussed climate policy, and notable people at Rep-friendly MIT have taken public stands (perhaps kicking and screaming). But again, maybe my perspective is skewed by working in something that falls on one side of a hot policy topic. And nothing gets your attention like being a target.
> I've sat in seminars and meetings with agbiotechnologists at a number of
> research universities and a few professional meetings and watched/listened
> to them sneer at opponents in just this way. The contradictory/sad thing -
> and perhaps the thing that drove me most nuts - was that these very same
> people were those likely to institute demands on graduate students in their
> programs that they participate in regular seminars on the ethics of
> agbiotech and who had heard a few hundred times from folks like me about
> the limitations of the "agbiotech's going to save the peasantry and feed
> the world" position.
I've wondered at times about the link between character of subfields and the prospect of their profitability -- that what you describe is in some sense driven by the possibility that researchers could get a cut of the profits from their work, which seems like more of a possibility in biotech that what I'm familiar with. Do you sense some gradient in attitudes with immediate applicability of the researcher's work?
-- Andy