The Perversion of Science
Alan Joseph Bauer | Nov 18, 2025
My family is one of chemists. My grandfather started his studies at the University of Nuremberg in chemistry before being called up to serve in Germany artillery in World War I. My father took his bachelor's and master's in chemistry in Sydney, Australia, and his Ph.D. in the same at Northwestern University. He taught medicinal chemistry at the University of Illinois for 42 years. There wasn't a pharmacist in the state who was not a former student. Even when my folks retired to Vegas, there were a couple of former students who also had made their way there and, of course, remembered Professor Bauer.
Growing up in a house of science, I too followed in the same path. I took a bachelor's in biochemistry from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Wisconsin. I have great pride that the latter degree was from the School of Agriculture, because that's where all of biochemistry started. I always find it fascinating to read the history of scientific discoveries. The things we take for granted at some point were great mysteries, and there was that eureka moment when something not understood became clear. Whether it was the discovery of the composition of atoms or the identification of vitamins and their role in health, each discovery was a watershed event in our better understanding and improving our world. For a long time, it was not known that enzymes were a form of protein that can perform catalytic activity in breaking down or building up cellular components. It was thought that some element transiently associated with a protein did the work. An American scientist was the first to grow crystals of an enzyme. He went to Uppsala, Sweden, which at the time was a hotbed of biochemical research. He went to the front door of a top scientist and announced that he had grown crystals of an enzyme. The fellow said, "Yes, yes, wait here," as he called the police. He was sure that he had a loon on his front door.
The perversion of science is nothing new. Throughout history, scientists and others have bent scientific norms and outcomes in order to push ideologically driven goals. In order to justify one's position or behavior, all he needed to do was whip out some graphs or statistics in order to claim that unbiased science was on his side. While the trend is not new, the rate of scientific malfeasance would seem to be increasing. All of COVID, from soup to nuts, involved bad science, manipulated results, and false conclusions. No one should take a scientific conclusion as truth without looking into the matter fully.
https://townhall.com/columnists/alanjosephbauer/2025/11/18/the-perversion-of-science-n2666569
