Dear Editor,

A few months ago I read a May, 2011, Scientific American article, “Trust Me, I’m a Scientist, why so many people choose not to believe what scientists say.”

I love science. I subscribed to Scientific American all through high school. However, what follows are some reasons why I, at times, do not trust some scientists and their research.

Many scientists have been bought with large amounts of money by corporate entities to promote a particular position that these corporate entities want the public to believe, e.g., fossil fuel industry (discredit climate change science), big tobacco, big pharmaceuticals, pesticide manufacturers and GMO companies like Monsanto.

When government agencies such as the FDA are stacked with “scientists” and administrators who once worked for those they are supposed to be overseeing; this does not instill much confidence in the “science” they are doing.

Marijuana has been lumped in with hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine by government scientists for years. The DARE program was based on this government “science” and assumed school kids, those this program was aimed at, are idiots and would believe what they are told. The DARE program did far more harm than good. These kids were not stupid. After trying marijuana these kids realized they were being lied to by these government “scientists” and figured these government “scientists” must be lying about the hard drugs too.

When some scientific disciplines behave as a religion, like Darwinism and Egyptology, how can we take these self-serving scientists seriously?

Some of the most jealous, myopic and narrow-minded people are scientists. To offer a challenge to their belief system, one risks being labeled a heretic, (as happened to Immanuel Velikovsky), especially if a challenge is presented that questions a scientist’s position that he/she has spent a lifetime pursuing. These scientists will vigorously defend their “science” so as to continue receiving funding.

The scientific community should be ashamed of itself for the way it attacked and vilified Velikovsky. One of those attackers was Carl Sagan who eventually adopted some of Velikovsky’s ideas as though they were his own. Intellectual plagiarism.

Any evidence that is an anomaly and/or does not support a scientist’s particular position, more often than not, gets swept under the rug to be ignored. To me that is bad science. See the website Science Frontiers (https://www.science-frontiers.com/sourcebk.htm) which is a catalog of anomalies.

Lee Santa
Sandpoint