How Science, Culture, and Power is Not, and Never Was, Separate

Our World Openly with Antoni Kalkowski

Academically, Professor Fortun understands himself as a historian and anthropologist of the life sciences, genetics and genomics in particular.

Fortun studied physics as an undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (one of oldest polytechnic institutes in the U.S.), until he transferred to Hampshire College and switched to philosophy of science. He worked in Washington DC at the Institute for Policy Studies for a good chunk of the Eighties, before completing a PhD in the History of Science in 1993 at Harvard University. For almost twenty years he was in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer, before coming to the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine in 2017. He is the author of several books including Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century, co-authored with physicist Herbert J. Bernstein; and the book Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation, and most recently Genomics With Care: Minding the Double Binds of Science, just published by Duke University Press.

In the podcast we talk about: the general intersections of science culture and power, loving and hating science simultaneously and the need for that paradoxical relationship, the science, culture and power in the Manhattan project and genocidal weapons, the intersections of the science with the military and empire, the importance of who funds science and thereby what scientific truth gets researched, the history of Darwinian evolution, intelligent design as political agenda, how politics and science are made to be seen as separate but are not, feminist scientists, benefits of diversity within scientific collectives, the reason to be pro science and the philosophical arguments for trusting science and its truth even if truth is often nebulous, ideologies of truth and purity in Greek history and certain strands of the modern physicists and mathematical disciplines, and much more.