When Did Science Turn Into A Special Interest?

"About 30 years ago, science pointed its solvent-stained finger at something that humans were doing wrong, something that would kill us if we kept it up. And the politicians listened and said: Whoa â€" let's stop doing that....[Today] science is regarded in some quarters not as a white-coat, white-hat savior but as just another whining special interest to be appeased or squelched. On a few blogs and blowhard broadcasts, science gets slagged as 'opinion.'...Today, there's the example of NASA's James Hansen, another veteran atmospheric scientist, who was warned of "dire consequences" if he kept talking about the dire consequences of global warming. A 24-year-old college dropout with a PR job at NASA tried to keep reporters away from Hansen and changed the science content on the NASA website...the administration has disciplined and overruled some of its own career researchers because their findings contradicted the White House's agenda."