Higher Intolerance

"I may be wrong and you may be right, and by all effort we may get nearer to the truth." - Sir Karl Popper Last year my closest friend in the psychology department found angry strangers in her otherwise peaceful neighborhood not far from the university. It was a Sunday. They were protesting her use of animals in research. Of course I knew that other psychological scientists have had these kinds of problems, but my friend works with rats. And her work is the kind that makes important contributions to learning theory, but also to alleviating human suffering, like that of cancer patients. My colleague's story could have been told in a provocative new book called The New Know-Nothings by Morton Hunt (Transaction Publishers, 1999).