As I have pointed to before: Science is not everything.

There is absolutely no basis for ethics in science.

How could there be?

I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning—to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge.

-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Amazon)

Science can be political and self serving.

See, people have this warped view that science is this huge end-all-be-all.

And don’t get me wrong, science is great.

The formalized trial and error that it codifies (along with economic freedom) have led us to amazing advancements and prosperity.

But when governments only want to fund research that shows a certain thing…

When scientists bend data so get the answer they want…

When science is politicized to get votes…

Good-grief.

When people start saying things like “the science is settled” – I think: “Uh, I don’t think you know how science works.”

I have written about the ethics of this issue before.

This is nothing particular to science, of course – it’s just humans.

Maybe don’t hold it in such a hallowed place?

After I’d been there for a year, V and I sat down for one of our weekly meetings. I had grown to love these chats. V was not like other scientists I knew. He was soft-spoken and cared deeply about people and the clinical mission, and he often confessed to me that he wished he’d been a surgeon himself. Science, I had come to learn, is as political, competitive, and fierce a career as you can find, full of the temptation to find easy paths.

-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Amazon)