Young people need to realize that the things we love about science: the uncompromising search for the truth, its international and no-boundaries character, the ability to bow down to evidence, the ambition of the ideas, are just a very distilled fraction (basically the highlights) of a what it is a very mundane, fragile, political human activity, full of petty and lame characters, absurd situations and pathetic developments.

> full of petty and lame characters, absurd situations and pathetic developments.

Yeh, I wish I could understand this a few years ago. Pursuit of truth is not the primary goal of many tenure profs it seems.

Well there's science and then there are social institutions that undertake science. But science can exist outside the institutions.