[comic] When good scientists go bad

[Labster]

So, like, that cartoon gives me mixed feelings.  Like, anyone who has made it to graduate school knows that some profs can be complete assholes.  Some will straight up steal their student's work.  Some will use their position on journals and name recognition to take someone else's discovery, replicate and publish really fast, and scoop the original discoverer.  And then, there are the really nice ones, the percentage greatly varies by field.    I know less about what's going on on the Humanities side, but honestly there probably aren't going to be very many of them left in ten years so it's probably not worth learning about.

The general public doesn't know any of this, and probably has no idea what professors do all day except "research" and "teach classes".  Of course, in reality, "write grants" takes up an even bigger portion of their time.  But it's okay for academics to have controversial opinions.  Anyone in the field will know when they're full of shit, or talking outside their expertise.  But respected crackpots do happen within the field of expertise.  James Watson is a well known racist/mysogynist/eugenicist who just happens to have discovered DNA.  Linus Pauling is a chemist who put way too much faith in Vitamin C.  

One I think about a lot is Edward Teller, because he was faculty at my university.  Guy had a massive hard-on for nuclear weapons, and was influential from the Manhattan Project all the way to Reagan's Star Wars, er SDI.  It's hard to like a guy who thinks that the main problem with the atom bomb is it's not big enough.  On the other hand, he gave a speech against the danger of anthropogenic climate change from fossil fuel burning in 1957.

Of course, physicists are experts on the causes of climate change, as well as chemists.  Atmospheric scientists and hydrologists are experts on the causes and effects of climate change.  For experts on the effects of climate change, we have biologists, soil scientists, ecologists, civil engineers, environmental policy, agronomers, and the list goes on and on.

I guess I don't get the point of the comic.  It's like, do some of your coworkers have crazy ideas about the world?  It's totally that way in academia too.

Silverfang, one of the things we understand when we enlist in the military is that outside of the ballot box itself, we have no political opinion while serving. If the military can do it, so can scientists.

Wut.

Since most scientists remain scientists until their deathbed, does that mean that they should keep their politics to themselves until the afterlife?