How did America rise up from a backwoods country to be one of the greatest nations the world has ever known? We pioneered industries, and all this required the greatest innovations in science and technology--in the world. And so science is a fundamental part of the country that we are. But in this, the 21st century, when it comes time to make decisions about science it seems to me people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not, what is reliable, what is not reliable, what should you believe what you do not believe....

That's not the country I remember growing up in. Not that we didn't have challenges. I'm old enough to remember the 60s and the 70s--got a hot war and a cold war civil rights movement and all this was going on. But I don't remember any time where people were standing in denial of what science was. One of the great things about science is that it is an entire exercise in finding what is true. The hypothesis, you test. I get a result. A rival of mine double checks it. Because they think I might be wrong. They perform an even better experiment than I did, and they find out, hey, this experiment matches. Oh my gosh, we're onto something here! And out of this rises a new emergent truth...