Politics has already ruined science (at least in America). The way government funding agencies select grants has created a herd mentality in science in which everyone does the same thing, expects the same outcomes, contrarian research programs (often the most important and fruitful, esp. when the herd is running the wrong way) are stifled, and decades can go by with out any real progress. String theory provides an example of this in which there is no more direct contact with politics than through the funding process -- 40 years of nothing much, no testable predictions since everything important gets attributed to the (unobservable and unfalsifiable) state of the early universe.
It's worse when the science gets close to anything bearing on public policy -- one gets almost literal witch hunts directed against contrarians, as in the case of research into climate dynamics or variability of human intelligence.