Database - Medical Education - Part I - The Double Standard Test. (version 1.0)

Rather than being solely a search for the truth, science is closely bound up with the exercise of power. This is normally acknowledged for totalitarian regimes and for military dictatorships, where intellectual suppression is overt.

But the same sorts of processes occur, usually in a more subtle fashion, in liberal democracies. From Copernicus to Darwin to Einstein, as well as countless others who have challenged the conventional wisdom, it has been the dissidents, the outsiders, the contrarians who have spurred science on. We should protect and encourage dissent, even when we disagree with the dissidents.” Brian Martin is in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, Australia --- Evidence of stamping out suppression of dissent, by the means of the double standard test, at Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia.