At British universities, as recently described, scientific greats from Isaac Newton to Carl von Linné are subjected to an inspection that is critical of racism. Newton, for example, is accused of having benefited from the colonialism of his time as a shareholder. In some schools one should no longer speak of Newton's laws, writes Anna Krylov in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The chemistry professor at the University of Southern California is reminded of her past under communism, when names were constantly exchanged or silenced, even as far as entire branches of science were concerned. For the agricultural scientist and science functionary Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who was very influential under Stalin, all genetics were capitalist devil stuff.His own plant experiments, carried out according to socialist principles, starved hundreds of thousands of people. The example shows in the extreme what damage ideological appropriation can do to science (and the population). The science journalist Philip Ball counters Krylov in the same journal that science should stop indulging in self-delusions and finally perceive itself as the political force it has always been. Does that also apply to spleen research or materials science? Ball's conclusion that the political is inherent in science leaves it just as little a sphere of knowledge as the anti-racist activists who define it as a pure power enterprise.
One should not be surprised if it is measured against foreign standards that are by no means beyond doubt. The increasing politicization is expressed in the university models, which focus a lot on ethical goals such as anti-racism and diversity and hardly any more genuinely scientific such as education and knowledge. It is also reflected in the decision of the German Research Foundation to make the approval of research applications dependent on measures on equality and diversity. Proof of moral cleanliness precedes access to funding. Are you still clean when you talk about quantum supremacy? Authors of the journal Nature want to replace the term with quantum advantage in order not to scare off sensitive minds.Contrary to what is claimed, the “new morality” not only touches the institutional outside of science, it covers its epistemic core like a film.