Cold War propaganda spread the myth that science isn’t political

As the United States and the Soviet Union harnessed science to build bigger bombs during the Cold War, the US government was trying to keep tabs on the scientific research going on around the world.That meant sending American scientists abroad to gather scientific intelligence — and the scientists were about as subtle about it as you’d expect. In one case, American bacteriologist Ralph Wyckoff was sent to the United Kingdom, where the US ambassador set him up with a cutting-edge ele