Leaders of the scientific community are frequently isolated from the general public in an exclusionary, closed culture, surprisingly resistant to new ideas. Science performed by a government agency produces even more risk, because it serves that agency, not the public. I want to emphasize at the outset that, contrary to popular belief, scientists are not detached observers of nature and the facts they discover are not simply inherent in the natural phenomena they observe. Scientists construct facts by constantly making decisions about what they will consider significant, what experiments they should pursue, and how they will describe their observations. These choices are not merely individual or idiosyncratic but reflect the society in which the scientists live and work.
Scientists tend to be isolated from the general public.
Some, such as Dr. Koshland, editor of Science , mock activists' concerns about safety. As a leader in the scientific community, at that moment Dr. Kennedy was charging such items as a yacht, antique French commodes, and wedding receptions to overhead on research grants. Taxpayers, in the form of Congressman Dingle, pointed out that this kind of greed is intolerable to the public. Dr. Kennedy wisely resigned as President of Stanford. He has since replaced Dr. Koshland as Editor of Science .