Science and Politics

This is the general topic board of this forum. Everything that is not covered by other boards goes here.

The well-known scientific journals also have their interest conflicts: apart from the member fees, they get their money by publishing ads for companies that have an interest in positive findings about their type of research and their products. This will make these journals dependent and make them less critical about what they publish. Although some of those journals adopted a 'publish your interests' policy many still not do so. How can we solve this?

The main stream media normally follow the press releases of studies or the publications in the scientific magazines without any critical research. Are studies supported by other studies? Have the results been significant? All this should be checked by journalists before publishing literally what the researchers state in their press releases. Why doesn't this happen?

In medical journals, very often the deviant statements in reactions to scientific publications are posted by retired scientists. The active scientists tend to follow the political correct policies as defined by the medical community, including the pharmaceutical industry's interests. Deviant scientists have a chance to be excommunicated by the medical elite when they follow other, sometimes promising, paths to solutions for medical problems. Do we see a high peer pressure in the medical elite to follow vested interests? Could cancer have been cured already when the medical society would have had an open eye to alternatives?

One of the major areas where politics are mixed with science is epidemiology. Once invented to track down uni-factorial problems (one virus/bacteria, one disease) it is now used to 'proof' causal relationships between multi-factorial environments - like lifestyle properties - and a disease. Even worse: it starts to be used to make decisions in the 'precautionary principle', a policy that says "if you cannot proof it is not dangerous, it's dangerous". This opens lots of opportunities for misuse. Will Big Brother come through epidemiology?