I’m back at work on my next book, Science in Turbulent Times (20??) which has changed much since I first thought about it. The book is now an account of the rise and decline of science. There’s no golden age left. All that we have is Temu tin foil painted in gold. Like most decorations in the White House. I share the introduction of chapter 3 (on the unravelling of the social contract) here (it’s just a draft!!!):
My memories of the incident are blurry, but I can still recall some of the excitement, shock, and unexpected grief that followed this catastrophic event. This wasn’t a regular shuttle launch. It was multiply special, a spectacle meant to celebrate America’s prowess in space extending closer into the lives of everyday folk. A teacher, traveling into Earth’s orbit, became the metaphor for a bold, spectacular promise of the future materializing in real time on our grainy analog TV screens.
The promise broke quickly. At the time, I could only grasp the sense of loss through an emotional register. As I sat in Mrs. White’s classroom in elementary school, I understood little about what had been going on in the past few weeks; I was a newcomer, still learning the language and the ropes of a country I didn’t fully understand. But I could sense the collective energy at home, in my school, and in my classroom. The excitement was palpable; it had been everywhere. “They’re sending a shuttle to space”, my parents explained a few days before, providing me an anchor to understand the effervescence I sensed around me. “Shuttle” quickly joined my vocabulary.
Sitting in the classroom around that boxy school TV, we grew anxious, even impatient. “Shhh”, Mrs. White said, followed by something I didn’t entirely comprehend. Between Mrs. White’s words and the countdown, the room became silent, only to erupt in cheers as the rocket left the platform. A few seconds later, the shock of the explosion trampled our celebration. The TV was turned off. Confusion reigned over our faces; grief engulfed the room.
For a long time, I saw the Challenger disaster as an iconic representation of what I would much later learn to call a ‘sociotechnical failure’: a series of mistakes that were bound to the way knowledge-intensive, technology-critical organizations operate. But it became, too, a clear demonstration of the importance held by science and expertise in US governance at the time. As one of the flagship investments of the government throughout the Cold War, the catastrophic and publicly visible fiasco of the peopled-space exploration program invited an intense reflection and investigation—it became the news, and for more than just one cycle, with some notable household names talking and reflecting about it. For the renowned astronomer Carl Sagan, for example, Challenger offered a painful opportunity to rethink the way resources were distributed between competing space exploration programs, a moment for renewing rather than abandoning the efforts by NASA. For others, it necessitated accountability over actions and decisions, with the aim of maintaining the country’s perceived superiority in the space race. For the United States Congress, in particular, this materialized as oversight hearings and a presidential commission, chaired by William P. Rogers which, like many such commissions, scrutinized in detail the origins and implications of the tragedy. (Memorably, the commission included physicist Richard Feynman who, during televised hearings, performed a little experiment to show the public what had gone wrong: submerging in cold water a bit of O-ring material like the one that failed during launch, he gave a vivid demonstration of the frailty that caused the Challenger disaster.) But even when critics emerged, even as the commission deliberated in contentious public hearings crowded with both politicians and experts and where multi-billion dollars budgets were at stake, it was clear that the commitment towards investments in science remained. The question was not whether to invest in space exploration but, rather, how best to proceed.
The images of the Challenger disaster and its political aftermath contrast starkly with those of a more recent tragedy, the COVID-19 pandemic, responsible for 7.1 million deaths worldwide—in the conservative count of the World Health Organization. Comparing both seems, admittedly, quite a stretch. Challenger was the result of failures in the organizational cultures of NASA that made decision-making around critical technical information flawed. At first glance, COVID-19 was a natural disaster, its random viral mutations unbothered by any cultures or organizational structures. And yet, like any other natural disaster, the COVID pandemic was partly human made: the responses and coordination of governments, health agencies, scientific organizations, and pharmaceutical companies shaped outcomes in distinct ways, sometimes for the better but often for the worse. This is where these two apparently incommensurable cases find a point of comparison: in the quality of their political aftermath. In the United States, the politics surrounding the pandemic bore little resemblance to the kind of sustained engagement that occurred around Challenger. Throughout partisan congressional hearings, elected officials contested the legitimacy of science, accused scientists of fraud and obfuscation, presented unverified and unlikely theories about the origin of the virus, and went as far as to threaten leading experts with the shadow of criminal prosecution. Iconically, Anthony Fauci, an impressive scientist and civil servant who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades and advised seven presidents through multiple national health emergencies (including the US response to the COVID pandemic) faced a kind of peril that was historically unparalleled. Not a single expert at NASA required a presidential pardon as pre-emptive protection for the Challenger disaster. But Fauci certainly did.
This grim episode was but one datapoint of a larger shift in forms of support towards science. As Fauci testified before a hostile Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee in July 2027, for example, federal funding for research was being arbitrarily impounded by the White House, draconian cuts were proposed for future budgets, organizational restructuring kneecapped government bodies that are central to the research ecosystem of the country, and increasingly large contracts routed resources away from government-funded labs and into private corporations. Even after lawsuits, collective mobilization, and backroom politics, the levels of support that science receives at the time of writing in 2026—particularly at institutions like universities and independent research organizations—remains critically low.
What changed? For most of the late twentieth century, science and its allied institutions enjoyed robust support from political and economic elites as well as wider publics across the world. Whether folded into the discourse of economic competitiveness, the knowledge economy, or strategic defense, “science” was an object of investment in a common good (or, at the very least, in some kind of mutual defense), commanding ever increasing resources from states, public institutions, and private organizations.
Built over decades, the structures of support and patronage behind these investments now show significant fractures, rapidly propagating throughout the institutional fabric of research and knowledge production communities. What caused these fractures? Three interconnected mechanisms help us understand the increasingly challenging environment facing science. The first is fiscal: government investments in science declined over time relative to other sources of funding, providing private interests with a greater stake in the production of knowledge hence fostering greater skepticism from broader publics about the neutrality of scientific institutions and claims. This shift was anchored on a second mechanism of elite realignment. Changes in the composition of the elites that exercised power over the flow of resources transformed the position of scientific research in relation to the state. Not only did this lead to lower levels of economic support but, in some cases, moved science closer to the world of private commodities and for-profit interests and further away from its partial incarnation as a public good; in other cases, it repurposed research directions with a government-mandated priorities, excluding much of the scientific community in the process. More generally, elite realignment meant that the pact that had prevailed between science and the state was re-written, always at the cost of autonomy and self-determination. A third mechanism complicated this scenario: a shift in the structure of the public sphere, brought on by the rise of digital platforms over traditional media, that created greater competition for science to establish its legitimacy. Despite its prime cultural position, the epistemic authority of science was no longer a given and, lacking the checks and balances of traditional media, had greater difficulties navigating new information ecologies. Working as feedback loops, these mechanisms became the relentless waves that eroded the sandcastle that is science.
In this chapter, I focus on how the first two mechanisms—fiscal constraint and elite realignment—led to the fracturing of modern scientific institutions, leaving the question of the structural transformation of the public sphere for a later chapter of the book. Conjoining these two mechanisms is a sensible strategy: at the end of the day, elites often dictate the shape that fiscal systems will take and so changes to elites are normally tied to changes in how states fund their activities. Although manifesting in slightly different forms, science is a global phenomenon and, as such, the argument I put forward is general and applies to most forms of post-war scientific activity. I will use two cases to address some of the dynamics of the mechanisms of institutional erosion, these are widely applicable—partly because science has followed very similar organizational paths. Of course, the specific form that the fractures take across counties varies considerably, but the similarities in the patterns of elite realignment and public defunding are, unfortunately, quite more common. In some cases, elite realignments were clearer and more dramatic than in others, but they nonetheless play a central role in shaping how scientific institutions fare in their local environments. The cases of science in the United States and Mexico serve as examples. Of very different magnitudes (science in Mexico was always smaller and institutionally weaker), both countries saw a dramatic shift in the state’s relation to research after critical breaks in the political establishment: the election of Donald Trump in the United States and of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico. The degree of collapse varied across these two cases but was driven by the same kind of gravitational pull.