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American Science is in Dangerous Decline while Chinese Research Surges, Experts Warn
(www.scientificamerican.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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One of my favourite figures in science was the American chemist Harrison Brown. Not only was he a very good chemist, but he had a knack for basically scamming the US military into funding important research that he privately knew could never be applied to weapons. And he didn't just do that scamming for his own projects, but he applied those scamming skills to help his colleagues get funding for theirs. He was a one-man reverse-military-industrial-complex.
Brown was also the PhD advisor for Claire Patterson, the man who figured out how old Earth is by comparing isotopes of uranium and lead. During that research he developed the world's first proper cleanroom protocols for chemists. He later spearheaded the fight against the use of lead in consumer products (paint, toys, solder, gasoline, etc) after discovering how prevalent it was during his experiments to figure out the age of Earth. He personally travelled the entire world to gather samples to prove that lead pollution was a relatively recent phenomenon cause by industrial activity, and not something naturally-occuring as the oil companies and their hired guns were arguing.