Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, has been watching too many movies about mad scientists. She has said the following about public health and science research in America,

…(the National Institutes of Health is) the National Endowment for the Arts with a chemistry set.

(Referring to controversy over what kind of artists should be funded.)

We know for a fact that millions and millions of dollars have been flushed down the toilet over the years on this HIV/AIDS scam and sham.

There’s an arrogance in science. Many people who are scientists don’t believe in God because they believe they are God. That’s part of the problem. They treat people with any kind of faith as stupid or ignorant, and it’s not true.

“Political Science” in Johns Hopkins Magazine, November 2004
If anyone is playing God, it’s people like Lafferty who thinks she knows what scientists should research and what they should ignore.

The real scientists I know are aware of how much we DON’T know. Some of them believe in God, and others don’t. None of them have ever had the fleeting belief that they are God because if they did, they would cease to ask questions and stop attempting to find the answers.

Unlike Lafferty, real scientists don’t believe that they have the power to decide who gets to benefit from science. They don’t think that scientific research should benefit only the majority. Real scientists seek to know the truth and to find ways of using it to help everyone no matter how marginalized and undesirable they might seem to the rest of society.

Lafferty clearly does not understand how every scientific discipline and area of research overlap and interact with each other. Denying scientists the right to do one type of research means locking the doors leading to vast rooms of knowledge that we don’t even know are there.

Alfred Sommer, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said it best.

Basic research discoveries usually come at right-hand turns. They’re not what someone was expecting to find. It’s very hard for Congress to know what should be supported and what not.

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