La science, les politiques et le public: quelle réalité, quels écueils?

This paper looks at the sciences from an ethnographic perspective, emphasizing that both the creation of scientific results and their evaluation among the general public are social and contextual processes. The loss of scientific credibility among the wider public, particularly in the US, seems due to the fact that after WWII the sciences raised unrealistic expectations and had many unintended and undesirable consequences, while the practice of science became more and more entwined with both business and government. In that context, the relative decay of education in the language of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in the US is of particular importance. To regain the trust of the wider society, a reconsideration of the ways in which we practice and communicate science, as well as the institutional context in which the sciences are practiced, is called for.