Previous
Merchants of Doubt
The National Academy of Sciences is the leading organization of professional scientists in the United States. It is responsible for formally advising the U.S government on the state of current science and medicine.
National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by National Academy of Sciences (NAS) or refer to National Academy of Sciences (NAS). For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 2
Quotes
“Does all this matter?” he asked rhetorically. Indeed it did. Seitz was painting a canvas of politically motivated exclusion—conservative victimhood, as it were. If all this were true—or even if any of it were true—it meant that science, even mainstream science, was just politics by other means. Therefore if you disagreed with it politically, you could dismiss it as political.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Merchants of Doubt LitChart as a printable PDF.
National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Term Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
The timeline below shows where the term National Academy of Sciences (NAS) appears in Merchants of Doubt. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...the atomic bomb and publishing leading textbooks in the 1940s, Seitz became president of the National Academy of Sciences , then Rockefeller University—which he left in 1979 to work for the R.J. Reynolds tobacco...
(full context)
Chapter 2
...he presented the whole U.S. scientific establishment—including the Union of Concerned Scientists and even the National Academy of Sciences —as politically corrupt. By presenting science as nothing more than politics, the authors argue, Seitz...
(full context)
...Most scientists were liberals, but the conservative minority had outside influence—particularly under Reagan. Moreover, the National Academy of Sciences is a famously conservative agency, and hundreds of other scientists had checked and verified the...
(full context)
Chapter 3
Getting a Third Opinion. Oreskes and Conway explain how, after the National Academy of Sciences reviewed the U.S.-Canada study and concluded that acid rain posed serious dangers, Reagan created his...
(full context)
Chapter 4
...to defend them. A U.S. government task force recommended banning CFCs, and it assigned the National Academy of Sciences to review the evidence. In response, the aerosol industry paid a British professor to tour...
(full context)
...for ozone depletion: it is only produced when chlorine breaks down ozone. However, when the NAS delayed its final report on ozone to make revisions—new data suggested that ozone breakdown could...
(full context)
Chapter 6
The Carter administration asked the NAS to peer review the Jasons’ study. Leading climate modeler Jule Charney led a nine-member panel...
(full context)
Organizing Delay: The Second and Third Academy Assessments. The NAS commissioned a new study to follow up on the previous report. The economist Thomas Schelling...
(full context)
Yet other prominent scientists firmly disagreed with the panel’s conclusion. The NAS’s top climate researcher, John Perry, wrote an article calling climate change “Today’s Problem, Not Tomorrow’s.”...
(full context)
...study CO2, then put Bill Nierenberg in charge. Rather than publishing a collectively-authored report, like NAS committees usually do, Nierenberg’s group instead released a report with several individually-authored chapters. Five chapters...
(full context)
...reviewers like physicist Alvin Weinberg critiqued the report’s unsupported claims about climate adaptation, but the NAS ignored their comments. One researcher later told Oreskes that scientists “knew [the report] was garbage...
(full context)
Conclusion
...the document, and he even formatted it so that it appeared to be from the NAS. He reported receiving 15,000 signatures from scientists, but they’re unverifiable. The NAS held a special...
(full context)
