I think your question shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what science and scientific inquiry is.

There is no agenda - it's not promoting anything, nor should it. It's a neutral inquiry into observable facts. It's an attempt to prove (or disprove) testable hypotheses.

If people put the facts to use - for good or bad purposes - that's beyond the boundaries of science.

Hi MarkinKentuckiana,

It may very well be the case that I fundamentally misunderstand what science and scientific inquiry is. Getting clear about what those are precisely is a very difficult thing to do.

Let me make the question a bit more precise. There are a lot of interesting questions for science to try to answer. In fact, there are probably an infinite number of scientific questions.

We, of course, have finite resources available to try to answer them. We must, therefore, make decisions about which lines of inquiry to support and which ones to do without.

Why should we pursue cures for male pattern baldness instead of malaria research? Why a female birth control pill instead of a male pill? Why invest in the space shuttle instead of missions to Mars? Why spend a $100 billion to build a huge particle accelerator in Europe rather than spending those funds researching and developing alternative energy or cures for cancer or climate-change resistant crops, etc, etc?

Whatever lines of inquiry we choose, we serve some (perhaps unconscious agenda). We bring about some state of affairs with respect to our scientific knowledge.

It seems to me that it is, therefore, impossible to be neutral in deciding which inquiries we ought to pursue. So while I agree that actual scientists ought to be unbiased in their practice of the scientific method, our decisions about what collective good our funding and support of scientific inquiry is an important and coherent question.

People put the facts to use for good or bad purposes. But keep in mind that our purposes guide or decisions about which facts to learn. This is indeed beyond the boundaries of science. It is not a scientific question at all. It's a philosophical one.

Wow, hard question. Here's my understanding of how things are done now, in the U.S.

A new President is elected, who comes in with a science policy--if not an explicit policy [PDF], then at least ideas about what's worth doing. We've elected this President based partly on his policies, and so there's some element of indirect democracy at work. The science policy is likely to be revised over time, because of changing circumstances and Congressional input (Congress holds the purse strings, in the end).

Based on the policy (or informal preferences), funding levels and funding priorities are distributed to various agencies (NIH, NSF, NASA, DOE, DOD, etc.), each responsible for disbursing funds. At NSF, where I get most of my funding, there are announcements of what various programs are looking for, and people write research proposals for funding. Proposals are reviewed by panels of experts and some get accepted.

So there's a plausible separation here between goals and means: Elected representatives choose the directions we go, and people with enough expertise to judge how to effectively move in those directions are charged with the detailed allocation of resources.

It works okay, I think.