Speak out if you can

摘要

Werner Heisenberg did not like the Nazis, but he worked on their project to build a nuclear bomb. The English physicist Paul Dirac came to his defence. "It is easy to be a hero in a democracy," he said. Science does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it inhabits "a world of money and votes, a world of media enquiry and lobbyists, of pharmaceutical manufacturing and environmental activism and religions and political ideologies and all the other complexities of human life," as UK epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani has written.