16/09/2025
🔬 SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE 🔥
By Michael Mann and Peter Hotez
‘In Science Under Siege, co-authors Michael Mann and Peter Hotez, leading researchers and advocates in their respective fields of environmental science and immunology, warn that science itself, as a credible and trusted method of establishing truth, is in crisis.
The pair outline, in horrifying detail, the various methods used to vilify scientists by right-wing media, “influencers” flogging snake-oil remedies for everything from COVID to cancer, and a cowering Republican Party in the US Congress. American scientists are howled down by a Trumpian chorus of fury and ignorance. Critical medical and environmental research is trashed by rubber-stamping the appointment of oblivious and dangerous demagogues to positions responsible for making life-and-death decisions.
This important book does more than simply enumerate and excoriate the forces railing against science and scientists, but offers hope for civilised solutions, from gentle persuasion and rational debate to being heard in the media and at the ballot box.
American science, an inspiration for more than a century, is rapidly declining into tragic farce, a nightmare which only the voters there can fix.
The rest of us will just have to get along without it for now, and remind sceptics – as Mann and Hotez do – of the words of French scientist Marie Curie.
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we can fear less.”’
Pat Sheil, The Sydney Morning Herald
SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE is out now 🔗
