Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry embodies America's heroic vision of science. Its space shuttle, U2 submarine, house-sized heart, and coal mine with a doomed animatronic canary are grand in scale and rich in meaning. The museum's exhibits depict triumphs of the highest virtues of our scientific history and technological present: equanimity, collaboration, and reverence for nature. Gazing into that rotunda as a child, one's choice comes down to a career of revelation or one of committed humanism; the drudgery of gel electrophoresis is only revealed years later.

The delineation between decrypting nature and fashioning it to meet needs is deeply rooted. Perhaps that is due to slogans filling museum rotundas; perhaps it is because our intellectual property regime partitions research along such lines. Either way, it is an imperfect intuition. Science and industry are tightly bound. Industry massively invests in basic research. Tenured researchers and government scientists spend much of their time, and generate much of their livelihood, attending to commercial interests. Even the quasi mystics of scientific history—the alchemists and string theorists—did science for the sake of very concrete, human goals.

Science and industry, discovery and invention—these categories are not of science. They were not, at some critical moment, plucked from Platonic ether. They are deeply human and partial categories that reflect particular accounts of what we think we do when we do science, a legal system that relentlessly parses endeavors, and the contours of our political economy. The reality of science is far messier and far less categorical. The lines between research and application, between man's place in nature and study of nature, have ever defied glib summary. Entire disciplines study the sociology, history, and philosophy of science. How we think and write about science is a flashpoint because of what it may signal about weighty topics like truth and certainty. Most of these discussions take the form of academic abstraction, drawing popular attention only with high-profile Sokal Hoaxes or intermittent storms over the difference between scientific theory (say, regarding the descent of man through time) and scientific fact.