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Don K. Price
(23 Jan 1910 - 9 Jul 1995)
American political scientist was a Harvard professor and dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government (1958-77) who wrote books on U.S. history and government. He devoted much of his career to promoting the role of science in the American Government. While he worked at the Bureau of the Budget (1945-46), he helped draft the legislation establishing both the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Science Foundation. In 1965 he was chosen to head the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, one of the few social scientists to gain this post, and became its president in 1967.
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Science Quotes by Don K. Price (5 quotes)
Science … cannot exist on the basis of a treaty of strict non-aggression with the rest of society; from either side, there is no defensible frontier.
— Don K. Price
In Government and Science (1954).
Science can be the basis of an objective criticism of political power because it claims no power itself. Politics can afford the independence of science because science does not attempt to dictate its purposes.
— Don K. Price
In The Scientific Estate (1965), 191.
Scientists who dislike constraints on research like to remark that a truly great research worker needs only three pieces of equipment: a pencil, a piece of paper and a brain. But they quote this maxim more often at academic banquets than at budget hearings.
— Don K. Price
In Dr. N Sreedharan, Quotations of Wit and Wisdom (2007), 68.
The politician … is sometimes tempted to encroach on the normal territory of the scientific estate. Sometimes he interferes directly with the scientist’s pursuit of basic science; but he is more likely to interfere when the scientist proposes to publish findings that upset the established political or economic order, or when he joins with the engineering or medical profession in proposing to translate the findings of science into new policies. … Who decides when the apparent consensus of scientific opinion on the relation of cigarettes to lung cancer is great enough to justify governmental regulatory action, and of what kind? In such issues the problem is less often whether politics will presume to dictate to science than it is how much politics is to be influenced by the new findings of science.
— Don K. Price
In The Scientific Estate (1965), 201.
The union of the political and scientific estates is not like a partnership, but a marriage. It will not be improved if the two become like each other, but only if they respect each other's quite different needs and purposes. No great harm is done if in the meantime they quarrel a bit.
— Don K. Price
The Scientific Estate (1965), 71.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
