Sometimes, questions get so politically loaded that you have to get tricky. To name a perennial favorite: Is global warming happening, and if it is, how much damage will it cause? It doesn't matter how much funding the NSF or some other agency gives this question, because the answers are already pre-determined; "yes" and "a lot" if you're a Blue, and "no" and "not much" if you're a Green.

At this point, I have to object... the one thing that guarantees lasting fame to a scientist is to successfully overthrow a widely believed theory.

"There’s a degree to which it is just a status and political-correctness issue. The debates are for the most part not about the policies or about the ideas, but what is cool, what is trendy. Take something like the climate-change debate. I think it’s an important question, and I think it’s actually quite hard to figure out what the science is. It might be something for us to worry about. But I think there’s actually no debate at all — there’s no attempt to understand the science. It’s mostly moral posturing of one form or another.

This is pretty much accurate. As far as I can tell, the "debate" is mostly among people who don't actually know the science; most of the people who do know the science tend to come down on one side. And, as I have said before, I am not one of the people who knows the science and anyone who wants to convince me otherwise needs to take it up with them.