Is Science Universal?

    The speech given recently by Nobel Prize winners as to the universality of science, has a nice ring to it.  "[T]here is no Chinese science, no German science, no American science.  Science transcends national borders.  Sounds very inspiring, and well it should be.  However, we must ask, "is it true?"   Certainly, there is a body of scientific articles that are published and accessible world-wide.  However, the sad fact is that science is not universal, in the diverse meanings this phrase might have.  As Derek de Solla Price observed many years ago, not all scientific literature is avidly read.  Latin American journals tend to be ignored in the "Western world".   Perhaps even more important is the observation that the conditions under which scientific practice occurs are not equally distributed worldwide, in terms of opportunities and resources.  Scientists in certain societies suffer many more obstacles--including cultural ones brought upon by social sectors who fear a reduction of their political power and legitimacy.   We might  note that even within scientific nations, the diffusion of the understanding of 'scientific thinking' varies a great deal, as demonstrated recent efforts to institutionalize "creationism" in public schools across the United States.  The gamut in the inequality of conditions for scientific practice--technological, economic, and cultural--unfortunately means that "science is not universal".  However, this does not mean that we should not make it so.