The series slipped up badly on this very subject in one 2003 episode, in which someone from a thinly disguised Slashdot says he has a tipoff about military research on mind control.
Horrified press spokesperson C J Cregg looks into it and is visited by a scientist from US defence research agency DARPA - one of the most hilariously portrayed nerds TV has ever screened.
Things soon turn nasty for viewers, though. The dialogue proceeds to jumble together the MK-Ultra project of the 1960s, in which the CIA really did use drugs for mind control, with more current research, by DARPA and others. This ranged from tiny cameras to adhesives based on gecko feet to mind-computer interfaces to, yes, gait analysis. Except this gait analysis was supposed to tell if a person is a potential criminal. Nonsense.
A colleague tells Cregg to leak the story to the press, so this horror will be shut down. Sadly that is where the show veered back towards the real world. True, horrific research such as MK-Ultra has been done in the name of security. But some research by the military, especially blue-sky types like DARPA, is merely banal, and even beneficial - like this internet thing you are currently using.
Much fear of science is engendered by the sloppy, arm-waving, button-pushing alarmism that results when commentators garble all research with horrors like MK-Ultra. And sometimes good research is threatened by this fear.
In this case, the otherwise brilliant writers of West Wing engaged in just such sloppiness. Disappointing, but cautionary - an occasion, in this US election year, to remind ourselves to beware such dishonest portrayals of science, even by writers we can otherwise trust.
Debbie MacKenzie, Brussels correspondentImage courtesy FotografarLabels: DARPA, security, tvPosted by Tom at 4:20 PM
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