From the Archives: Book Review in Harvard Law and Policy Review

"Fool Me Twice: The Assault on Science in America."

We live a world of unparalleled scientific innovation; it’s a good thing, too, because we are wholly dependent on the scientific process to resolve the issues related to feeding the 7 billion people on the planet without destroying the earth in the process. Despite the crisis confronting us, political discourse in the United States in the last decade has seen a reactionary pullback from science and reason, as manifested in the decline of science journalism and the prideful ignorance of scientific facts by certain elected officials. This problem is artfully described in Shawn Lawrence Otto’s recent book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America (Rodale Books 2011).

Otto describes the peculiar ghettoization of science in American journalism, whereby the policy implications of scientific issues are simply not reported in the way that the effects of business and economy are. Science has earned a sort of taboo status in American discourse, creating a kind of “dumbing down” …