It's no secret that universities are left-wing - conservatives have complained about that since the early 1950s, but back then it was mostly in the humanities so only those conservatives who came from the humanities and invariably ended up in Washington, D.C. - think tanks or whereever - cared. To the public, the concern was...academic.

It is only recently that science academia followed suit and has become far out of the American mainstream politically. As that shift to the left happened, and science policies issues became part of mainstream discourse, concerns rose that academic science was politically or financially motivated rather than being in the public interest.

A decade ago, gas was cheap, the American economy was booming and so was partisan rhetoric about a disconnect on science related to politics. One side was good, one was bad.

President George W. Bush, who had boosted NASA funding after declines in the Clinton years, had doubled the budget for the NIH, and funded human embryonic stem cells, was anti-science. And so was the entire Republican party, we were assured.

In 1992, some shipping containers got washed overboard on a trip from Hong Kong to Tacoma. Among the losses was one containing 28,800 plastic bath toys known as Friendly Floatees - frogs, turtles, ducks, that kind of thing. It's not an uncommon event, storms cause, on average, about one container per day to get lost at sea, a minor amount when we consider how much shipping is done annually.