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Last year one of my students in a history of science class commented that "no one knows which doctors to trust because they are politicizing the pandemic, just like politicians are." The interactions between science and politics are now so complex, so numerous and often so opaque that, as my student noted, it's not clear anymore whom to trust.

People often assume that the objectivity of science requires it to be from governmental politics. However, scientists have as and through shaping public opinion. And science itself—how scientists are and how they choose their research priorities—.

The coronavirus pandemic showed both the and of this relationship—from the to the efforts of allowing researchers to develop vaccines in less than a year.

In this context, it is understandable that many people began to doubt whether they should trust science at all. As a , I know that the question is not whether science and politics ought to be involved—they are already. Rather, it is important for people to understand how this relationship can produce either good or bad outcomes for scientific progress and society.

The historical relationship of science and politics

Historically, political needs have acted as but have also at times .

drive a large part of scientific research. For example, the was more by the competition between superpowers in the Cold War than by science. In this case, government's funding contributed to scientific progress.

In contrast, in the early days of the Soviet Union, the government's involvement in biology had a stifling effect on science. was a biologist under Stalin who denounced modern genetics. As he became head of top , his opponents were arrested or executed. Lysenkoism—despite being dead wrong—became the accepted orthodoxy in the academies and universities of communist Europe until the mid-1960s.

As the Lysenko story demonstrates, when political powers decide the questions that scientists should work on—and, more importantly, what kind of answers science should find—it can harm both scientific progress and society.

Two political parties, two scientific realities

The relationship between science and politics has always been dynamic, but the rise of social media has changed it in an important way. Because it's more difficult to discern between online, it's now easier than ever before to spread politically motivated .

In the U.S., social media has massively accelerated a long–growing political divide in scientific trust. Starting with , have turned science into a partisan field. The ideology of is one of the main reasons for this attitude. Republican lawmakers often despite scientific consensus on the causes and dangerous effects these issues lead to.

President Trump brought the to another level by treating science as essentially just another political opinion. He argued that scientists and institutions who contradicted his views were motivated by their —and, by extension, that the science itself . By contrast, has put at the top of his .

As a result, the divide between scientific and anti-scientific positions—at least in the U.S. – is now often . People of different political views, even when they are educated, are sometimes not able to agree on facts. For instance, among U.S. citizens with a high level of scientific knowledge, 89% of Democrats say that human activity contributes a great deal to climate change, . Democrats are not immune to this either, as seen by the for labeling genetically modified foods. This is despite . But overall, Republicans tend to be much more than Democrats.

The pandemic has shown the risks of this political divide. People who identify as Republican are much more likely to be resistant to and .

Disagreements in science are necessary for . But if each party has its own definition of science, scientific truths become a matter of opinion rather than objective facts of how the world works.

Where is the relationship going?

Because trust in science was so during Trump's presidency, several endorsed Biden as a presidential candidate. This was perhaps the first time in history that such a of scientific journals and took clear stances for a U.S. presidential election.

The fact that the acceptance or rejection of science is increasingly determined by threatens the autonomy of scientists. Once a theory is "conservative" or "liberal" it becomes difficult for scientists to challenge it. Thus, some scientists are less prone to question hypotheses for fear of and .

In my opinion, science cannot thrive under an administration that as a whole; but neither can it thrive if scientists are told which political and moral values they must embrace. This could slow down or even prevent the emergence of new scientific hypotheses. Indeed, when scientists align themselves with or against political power, science can easily lose its most important asset: the ability to encourage disagreement and to raise new hypotheses that may go against common sense.

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