Agent Orange, Love Canal, Sellafield, the Tuskegee studies, eugenics...

After a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

Further investigation of the Bush administration's abuse of science.

On February 18, 2004, 62 preeminent scientists including Nobel laureates, National Medal of Science recipients, former senior advisers to administrations of both parties, numerous members of the National Academy of Sciences, and other well-known researchers released a statement titled Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making. In this statement, the scientists charged the Bush administration with widespread and unprecedented "manipulation of the process through which science enters into its decisions." The scientists’ statement made brief reference to specific cases that illustrate this pattern of behavior. In conjunction with the statement, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released detailed documentation backing up the scientists’ charges in its report, Scientific Integrity in Policy Making.

Since the release of the UCS report in February, the administration has continued to undermine the integrity of science in policy making seemingly unchecked. Many scientists have spoken out about their frustration with an administration that has undermined the quality of the science that informs policy making by suppressing, distorting, or manipulating the work done by scientists at federal agencies and on scientific advisory panels.

A prominent Canadian researcher is facing claims that data in his widely reported study of a nutritional supplement's effects on thinking and memory in the elderly are so flawed as to have no real value.

The scientist, Dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra, is internationally known for his many contributions to the field of nutrition, and his work has been widely cited in professional and lay publications alike, including The New York Times.

Scientific journals and three independent American scientists have raised questions about the validity of Dr. Chandra's findings, saying the study, published in September 2001 in the journal Nutrition, has statistical irregularities and inconsistencies, and is characterized by improbable research methods.

"Heaven and earth were created all together in the same instant, on October 23rd, 4004 BC at nine o'clock in the morning."
- Professor John Lightfoot, Vice-chancellor of Cambridge University

"Rail travel at high speed is not possible, because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia."
- Dr Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, University College London.

"Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles. The earth does not have limbs and muscles; therefore it does not move."
- Scipio Chiaramonti, Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Pisa (1633).

"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
- Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox in 1946.

"What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?"
- The Quarterly Review, England (March 1825)