The great tragedy of science, Thomas Huxley once observed, is a beautiful hypothesis slain by an ugly fact. The great tragedy of science today, complain its champions, is its ugly and polarising politicisation. "Global warming" sceptics are compared to Holocaust deniers. Researchers using embryonic stem cells are called "baby-killers". The left labels the right "anti-science" theocrats; the right says the left perverts science to serve its collectivist agenda. No beautiful hypotheses here.

Perhaps the tragedy, though, is not that science is too political - it is that science is not political enough. Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, scientific conflicts are increasingly too important to be entrusted to the scientists. Public policy would be significantly better off if scientists were treated with greater scepticism and less deference.