Scientists unable to keep politics out of their labs

There’s a scene in the movie “Oppenheimer” in which Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron and head of his own lab at UC Berkeley, reacts angrily when he discovers his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer trying to recruit lab assistants toa communist-linked campus labor union.

- MICHAEL HILTZIK

VIROLOGISTS Robert Garry and Kristian Andersen listen as House Republicans criticize their findings.

It’s one of the few scenes in this largely factual film that may actually have downplayed the real event. Lawrence was beyond furious at Oppenheimer for bringing politics—and left-wing politics at that — into the lab. For Lawrence —whose personal journey would transform him from New Deal liberalism to solid Republican conservatism — ascientific lab was no place for anything but pure science, uninfected by politics.

It’s one of the tragedies of Lawrence's life and career that he ultimately was unable to keep his lab politics-free. He would be swept up in UC’s capitulation to the 1950s red scare in California, which culminated in the mandate that all faculty sign an anticommunist loyalty oath.

In acceding to the mandate by requiring his lab staff to sign the oath in order to assuage the right-wingers on the UC Board of Regents, Lawrence — the most famous and eminent scientist on the Berkeley faculty — discovered that in aturbocharged partisan atmosphere, no science laboratory could keep politics from crashing through the door.

Scientists in today’s America are relearning that lesson. Two who learned it the hard way are Peter Hotez, an eminent vaccinol-ogist affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine, and Michael E. Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania. They've collaborated on anew book, “Science Under Siege,” that analyzes the forces fueling the politicization of science and its consequences and map outa possible path out of the wilderness.

Both come to the topic via personal experience. After Hotez’s frequent television appearances speaking out against mi:formation and disinformation about vaccines, he and his family came under attack.

“This translated into death threats and in-person confrontations at his lectures and even at his home,” they write.