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Science 5 September 1986:
Vol. 233. no. 4768, pp. 1056 - 1060
DOI: 10.1126/science.233.4768.1056
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Articles

Natural Philosophy in the Constitution

GERARD PIEL 1

1 Chairman of the board, Scientific American, New York 10017

The natural philosophers who wrote the U.S. social contract held the advancement of science to be the supreme exercise of citizen sovereignty. The rising nation, in the late 19th century, established the seat of that sovereignty in its universities. Today those institutions have come to be regarded as contract research centers at the service of the federal government. Research contracts in support of the proposed Strategic Defense Initiative are pressed on them against the consensus of the scientific community that holds this "Star Wars" enterprise to be technically infeasible. The time has come to reconstruct the relation between the federal government and university science in the spirit of our social contract.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)