From: Beware the Fausts of Neuroscience, George Walden, Standpoint, April 2012 (edited)
As a minister for science, had I been able to rely on scientists for rational and detached advice, things would have been simpler.
But my impressions of those I met convinced me of two things:
1. their awesome intelligence and real achievements
2. in some cases an equally awesome propensity to overweening ambition and incurable condescension towards the common man.
I arrived with my own prejudices. I was a diplomatic specialist in Communism.
In China and the Soviet Union I had witnessed at first hand the biggest live experiment in history, as more than a billion human beings, caged in their own countries like laboratory mice, were subjected to the parascientific creed of dialectical materialism and Marxism-Leninism.
Of the outcome — some hundred million dead, three million in China during 1966-69 the years I was there — there is little more to be said, except to recall how many Western scientists, some eminent, went along with the experiment.
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