Science and Politics

This is Katalin Karikó, in Breaking Through: My Life in Science.

But I was learning that succeeding at a research institution like Penn required skills that had little to do with science. You needed the ability to sell yourself and your work. You needed to attract funding. You needed the kind of interpersonal savvy that got you invited to speak at conferences or made people eager to mentor and support you. You needed to know how to do things in which I have never had any interest (flattering people, schmoozing, being agreeable when you disagree, even when you are 100 percent certain that you are correct). You needed to know how to climb a political ladder, to value a hierarchy that had always seemed, at best, wholly uninteresting (and, at worst, antithetical to good science). I wasn’t interested in those skills. I didn’t want to play political games. Nor did I think I should have to. Nobody had ever taught me those skills, and frankly I wasn’t interested in them anyway.

This is Gian-Carlo Rota, in Indiscrete Thoughts.

Let me put it to you in the P.R. language that you detest. It is not enough for you (or anyone) to have a good product to sell; you must package it right and advertise it properly. Otherwise you will go out of business.

And this is Gian-Carlo Rota, again.

Now don’t tell me that you are a pure mathematician and therefore that you are above and beyond such lowly details. It is the results of pure mathematics and not of applied mathematics that are most sought-after by physicists and engineers (and soon, we hope, by biologists as well). Let us do our best to make our results available to them in a language they can understand. If we don’t, they will some day no longer believe we have any new results, and they will cut off our research funds. Remember, they are the ones who control the purse strings since we mathematicians have always proven ourselves inept in all political and financial matters.