#herdimmunity Anyone remember Lysenko? Who thought ideology could determine biology? Good thing that couldn't possibly happen under capitalism.

@wbtd A bit of stretch. Lysenko devastated Soviet biology, agriculture and genetics for 2 decades and decimated Soviet scientific community (Vavilov).

The current UK policy doesn't reject science, but science doesn't make risk analysis and policy decisions for you - it just provides you with facts to base them on. The UK government made a risk-based decision that is definitely driven by economy but is not unscientific in the way Lysenko did.

@kravietz If your model of research funding is competitive rather than co-operative, and your model of research production is extractive—UK universities now manages themselves explicitly as factories to extract research knowledge and teaching income from lecturers and professors—then yes, actually, you have already made huge decisions about what society is, who are valid persons, what kinds of knowledge can be allowed into public discussion, and how humans should be treated. Those invisible assumptions create specific "research outcomes" that validate the initial assumptions, like this rubbish #herdimmunity claim.

Read anything in the past 40 years of STS studies. Scientific research is not politically neutral, but to claim that it is neutral is a cornerstone of extractive capitalism. That does *not*, by the way, mean that scientific research is paralysed and unable to produce good research; see Sarah Harding's _Objectivity and Diversity_ for a good exposition of one model for how plural socially embedded scientifc research programmes that acknowledge differences of power, entitlement, culture, gender and so forth produce *better* science.

@wbtd

So it seems like this competition and ambition thing seems to be an intrinsic feature of homo sapiens character and I don't think there's any culture in the world that successfully curbed this trait *and* at the same time delivered some great discoveries.

@kravietz I'm an anthropologist -- in terms of cultural comparison, this just isn't true. Our model of "the individual" is actually specific to one (colonial, dominant) culture but it's not a human universal.

@wbtd

Happy to learn more about this - who should be learning from?