This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 4th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The federal government has long had its thumb on the scale of scientific inquiry.

But that wasn't always the case.

At a recent Capitol Hill briefing, Terence Keeley, a professor of clinical biochemistry,

and former vice chancellor at the University of Buckingham in England,

discussed the many times U. times US presidents expressed their skepticism toward

and outright opposition to the government funding of science.

When the Declaration of Independence was declared in 1776 and then when the Constitution

was created it was in a world where the majority of the founding fathers had read

Adam Smith and Adam Smith had explained very clearly

that there was no need for governments to fund science.

And he went to the early Industrial Revolution in England and of course particularly in Scotland and he showed example after example

of how industry produced as much science as it needed.

He also took on Francis Bacon, the Englishman who in 1605 had argued that science was a public good and that governments should in fact fund it.

And although he never mentioned the word Francis Bacon because Adam Smith was a very courteous man, very diplomatic man,

he didn't want to confront people and the Royal Society in England was absolutely the product of Francis Bacon's thought and he didn't want the

Royal Society descending upon him like a ton of bricks.

He actually pointed out that Francis Bacon's argument was purely a theoretical argument not based on practice.

In practice he pointed out the universities of the day had nothing to contribute to the advance

of industrial science and indeed pure science academic science

was actually feeding off industrial science it was the industrial

...