American Science in Crisis! Really?(The GOOD Book) (Unscientific America: How Science Illiteracy Threatens Our Future ) (Book Review‪)‬

"EVEN AS our scientists get up each morning and resume the task of remaking the world," warn science journalist Chris Mooney and marine biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum--authors of Unscientific America: How Science Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (Basic Books, 2009), "the American public all too rarely follows along." Convinced of a plummeting sky over the future of American science, Mooney and Kirshenbaum cite a host of worrisome facts and figures. Federal investment in non-military science research began its precipitous decline within a few years of the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957. Since Ronald Reagan's presidency, the Republican Party has infused anti-science sentiment into mainstream politics, with little Democratic opposition. Between 1989 and 2005, U.S. newspapers slashed science coverage by a whopping two-thirds even as mind-blowing advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, genetics, and personalized medicine exploded. In 2008 comedian Ben Steins absurdly inaccurate anti-evolution flick, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, grossed over $7 million, becoming the fifth most lucrative political documentary ever.