When did "skeptic" become a dirty word in science?

In early 2003 Michael Crichton gave a fascinating Caltech Michelin Lecture titled  Aliens Cause Global Warming.

He argued that a lot of today’s science is bad science and that bad science is often used to back up good policies.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

[via Seth Godin]

Comments

RealClimate posts on Crichton: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=76 and http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74