Worst Case Scenario Read Online Free

biology. He had served in an array of obscure public health outposts, including a stint in the late eighties and early nineties as director of the National Medical Records Compilation, Data Collection and Privacy Concerns Bureau, which he often said was every bit as exciting as its name suggested. He’d gone on to become assistant chief of the applied research staff at the National Institutes of Health and then, quickly and unexpectedly, had moved up to head the policy and planning directorate at the National Health Research Agency.
    Wendy wasn’t sure what she was expecting, based on that introduction. Marcus Welby in a lab coat maybe. Whatever it was, she didn’t get it. Marciniak strode in wearing a kelly green cardigan sweater over a plaid shirt and khaki slacks. He took off a New York Mets baseball cap as he turned to face the audience and, seeing no place convenient to put the headgear, hung it by its adjustment strap from the microphone post. A spare six feet with Brillo-colored hair, he looked the audience over with lively green eyes before he launched into his talk.
    Along with most of the people in the well-filled room, Wendy assumed he was going to talk about health-care reform: the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that no politician could ignore, the delicate question of having the government take over a piece of the economy ten times larger than the automobile industry without raising anybody’s taxes.
    She was wrong. He had come to talk about politics and science. Dr. Marc was here to preach the gospel. He spoke in a fast, catchy New York City dialect, his voice just this side of gravelly, referring to the audience as “boys and girls” with a smile and wink that made it all right. But he spoke with prophetic passion, and as he hammered the passages out, his eyes gleamed with Pentecostal flame.
    Politics corrupted science. Politics had been corrupting science since before some impatient soldier cut Archimedes’ throat, and it hadn’t stopped. Labs and basic research outfits published articles every year based on data faked fourteen ways from Sunday. When the universities weren’t cranking out cheap, Madison Avenue publicity for experiments that turned out not to be replicable, they were getting nailed right, left, and sideways for lying about what they were doing with grant money. And the nonacademic public sector was the worst of all. When AIDS was threatening the United States with its first fatal pandemic since the influenza scourge just after World War I, “our best scientists spent five blessed years arguing about who gets credit for isolating the virus.”
    Brief pause. Disgusted, cap-shaking slap at the podium.
    â€œScience isn’t about getting credit for isolating a virus,” he boomed then. “Science is about finding a way to kill the damn thing.”
    Punctuated with a fist slam. Applause, scattered but enthusiastic. Some of the boys and girls were buying it. Wendy wasn’t ready to swallow his argument whole, but Marciniak’s sense of absolute conviction stirred her. In a weekend strewn with people who believed in nothing, she’d stumbled on a man who believed in something.
    Why was this happening? Marciniak continued. The politics of money. The politics of greed. The politics of the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.
    Are things getting better? No, things are getting worse. Every day they get worse faster than they did the day before. We’re not talking arithmetically, he insisted, we’re not talking geometrically, we’re talking exponentially. We have to find an answer. We have to protect science, insulate it from pressure groups, special interests, venal politicians.
    There is absolutely nothing inevitable about progress, he concluded solemnly, nothing inevitable about the triumph of knowledge or reason or truth. The seventh century was a lot worse than the fourth, not a lot better, and at the end of the day