From his decades in the news business, H.L. Mencken observed that “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

Alas, or maybe fortunately, for him, he did not live to experience the Internet — which, far more than any newspaper, must be having profound if immeasurable effects on the hundreds of millions, or more likely billions, who ingest its limitless offerings. As Internet usage rapidly climbs, newspaper reading continues to decline, to the point where survival of conventional news in print is becoming doubtful.

Meanwhile, from an infinity of online sources, heads are being filled with data, information, and images, from all manner of sources — responsible, sensible, loony, exploitative, and malevolent. Fencing off children from much of this stuff has become a major parental concern, as well as a hopeless task, given children’s zest for...

A spectacle of our time is academe’s upscale sector proceeding in herdlike fashion to let in promising poor students, along with some of the not-so-poor, at bargain prices or no cost at all.

When and why did it dawn upon the managerial savants at these institutions that $40,000 or more a year for tuition, room, and board was a bit much for many talented students — even with generous reductions for the most needy?

Why did a flock of wealthy private schools, within months of one another, succumb to charitable impulses and, with a blare of self-congratulation, designate a dollop of their bountiful resources for the offspring of low and middling earners? We’ll probably never get the inside story of decision making at higher education’s highest levels, since private universities are secretive about their financial dealings.

But the stampede factor is evident. As are rumblings in...

Senator Clinton received a burst of applause at the Texas debate February 21 when she denounced “George Bush’s war on science.”

War? The word has frequently been applied to the Bush administration’s dealings with science. But it’s off the mark, and clouds understanding of what’s been happening between science and government over the past seven years. Rather than warring on science, Bush and company are selective science bashers, abusing science and scientists when it serves their ideological and political purposes, but otherwise keeping hands off.

The subjects that grip them and set off their worst behavior are fortunately few. Pandering to its fundamentalist religious base, the administration is on guard about anything related to reproductive biology. Hence the restraints on stem cell research, false alarms about the health effects of abortion, and discouragement of research on...

This is the season when political hallucinations erupt in the scientific community.

Rare to nonexistent among other academic and professional disciplines, the phenomenon is driven by scientists’ reverence for science and dependence on government money. The neglect of these matters — especially the latter — on the presidential campaign trail has produced petitions for a presidential debate on science (discussed in my January 8 post here).

Now comes an earnest appeal for going beyond mere debate (which has not yet happened, nor is it likely to). Titled “A Physicist for President,” it’s by U.S. Rep. Vern J. Ehlers, Republican of Michigan, who is a rarity in the U.S. Congress. He’s a nuclear physicist, one of only seven Ph.D scientists among the 535 members of the House and Senate.

Writing in the February issue of APS News, published by the American Physical Society (subscription...

Is academic science corrupt, beholden to big business, riddled with conflicts of interest, and tirelessly on the prowl for money, clean or soiled?

The question reeks of hostility, to the point where some might feel it deserves consignment to the crackpot bin. But as a journalist who regularly writes about science, professors, and universities, I find that people both close to and distant from academic science possess ugly opinions about its ethical condition. Many friends and acquaintances who learned I was working on a book about academic science and commercialization confidently assured me that the combo was evil. Some of the harshest indictments of scientific rectitude come from successful scientists deep inside the scientific enterprise.

There’s no paucity of published reports about researchers who are discovered endorsing products in which they quietly hold financial interest...

For awarding government money for basic biomedical research, would a lottery out perform the traditional system of peer review? A lottery? Ridiculous, when peer review brings knowledge and experience, rather than chance, to the selection process. Maybe not so ridiculous. Read on.

We’re talking mainly about the National Institutes of Health, which presides over the world’s biggest bankroll for health-related research, nearly $30-billion this year. (See a Chronicle story on the matter here.) About half is for grants to individual researchers. As plump as that sum is, there isn’t enough to satisfy all reasonably competent supplicants for grants.

The insufficiency is so great that it’s generally acknowledged that many winners and losers are indistinguishable in terms of capability and the scientific importance of their proposed projects. Moreover, the process for deciding who gets...

Biomedical research is in particularly shaky and despairing condition these days. Its principle source of money, the National Institutes of Health, is immensely richer than any counterpart organization in any nation or combine of nations. But NIH can’t meet the demand for its grants, and in the grueling competition for budget shares, it has difficulty starting up new programs when it lacks money for sustaining the old ones.

Because that’s where the money is, scientists in record numbers are seeking NIH grants. But while the bankroll is big, it has grown very little since 2003, leaving NIH with a big decline in purchasing power. The system rings with alarms about conservatism and risk-avoidance in research, as money-seeking scientists vie for the favor of committees that rate their grant applications.

Politics gives and politics withholds, with little attention to the effects of...

Don’t be scared. Dentistry’s come a long way. Can the rest of medicine follow?

Dentistry doesn’t get the recognition and gratitude it deserves.

Lame writers seeking that vivid image of horrors to be avoided will invoke a visit to the dentist, and when they’re reaching all out for literary impact, it’s a root canal. Oh, my.

The reality is that modern dentistry is painless or only briefly painful. But of greater importance, it’s perhaps second only to vaccination as a monumentally successful health technology.

Among the health specialties, dentistry has been so successful that half a dozen dental schools closed down between 1985 and 1995 for lack of students, and since then only three new ones have opened. Complete toothlessness or many missing teeth in the adult years used to be commonplace. Today it is a rarity.

Fluoridation of public water supplies and toothpaste is...

The answer to the question of how the U.S. manages its great scientific resources and potential is that it doesn’t. There’s no explicit science policy to guide the government’s major role, and as for industry, which outspends government 2-1 on R&D — it’s pretty much free to do and spend as it pleases, within safety and environmental laws and regulations.

In the federal sector, the result is a hodgepodge of policies and practices, with priorities influenced by a variety of factors, sensible and otherwise. There are pork-barrel considerations — just try to close a federal laboratory. Then there’s the simplicity of carrying on existing activities, even if they’re ruinously expensive and of scant value by any reasonable measure — such as the International Space Station, which in all its requirements, consumes about half of NASA’s budget. And sometimes, there’s good scientific sense at...

“I’m sure if there were anything to report they’d have sent it in.”

The National Institutes of Health does not like to play cop. Several years ago, it was caught neglectfully unaware of conflicts of interests among some of its own senior administrators and researchers. Several had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from pharmaceutical firms while on the NIH payroll. With Congress glaring in disappointment at the tarnished halo of its favorite agency, NIH management saw no choice and hurriedly imposed harsh restrictions on outside dealings by staff members.

Now, as periodically happens, the spotlight has turned to conflicts of interest in the ranks of NIH grantees. For identifying a conflict, federal regulations set a threshold of $10,000, in equity or annual payment, that might affect the design, conduct or reporting of NIH-supported research. Foolishly, NIH has...