Scientists Under Surveillance: The FBI Files—edited by JPat Brown, B. C. D. Lipton, and Michael Morisy (Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press, 2019, 413 + xix pp.)

Abstract

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">The volume under</b> review is a selection of declassified FBI documents, reproduced in facsimile, from the Cold War era files of 16 people (15 men and one woman) described as scientists. The editors do not explain their criteria for the choice of subjects. One, Mikhail Kalashnikov, was a Russian soldier who invented a durable automatic assault rifle, the popular AK-47. It is a stretch to call that science. Moreover, Kalashnikov never set foot in the United States. (A recently erected monument to him in Moscow had to be fixed since it showed him toting a German submachine gun. At least there was no mob, yanking it off its pedestal amidst howls denouncing Mikhail Timofeyevich’s “white privilege” or “toxic masculinity.”) Isaac Asimov had a degree in science (he and my mother were classmates at Brooklyn College) and was a professor of biochemistry but is famous as a popular writer of science fiction and books on science for the layman. Alfred Kinsey was an enthusiastic, hands-on researcher of male sexuality: more a sociologist than a hard scientist, perhaps. Timothy Leary did scientific research but is better known as an apostle of the counterculture whose invitation to take LSD, “turn on, tune in, and drop out” some of you may remember. Though they say that if you remember the 1960s you were not there. The book, the editors note, is a companion volume to a similar assemblage of FBI files on famous writers that they published with the same MIT series.