Justice & Law Quote by Serge Lang

Lang’s sentence has the clipped impatience of someone who’s watched “accountability” get outsourced to institutions that don’t actually understand the thing they’re meant to oversee. The blunt repetition of “they cannot count on” isn’t just emphasis; it’s an indictment of a civic fantasy: that journalism and Congress will reliably surface scientific misconduct, conflicts of interest, or systemic rot. Lang is warning that the usual democratic watchdogs are structurally mismatched to the job.

The subtext is that science is not self-correcting on any politically useful timetable. Peer review moves slowly, reputations calcify, and technical complexity provides convenient cover. The press, chasing legible narratives and deadlines, tends to arrive late and simplify; Congressional committees, meanwhile, are episodic, performative, and easily bent by ideology or lobbying. “Bring the problems... to their own attention” reads like a dig at scientists and administrators who prefer not to know what would require action. Lang suggests the default state is willful blindness until a scandal becomes unignorable.

Context matters: Lang was a formidable mathematician who became a notorious critic of what he saw as scientific complacency and institutional protectionism, most famously around the Baltimore affair and questions of research integrity. He’s speaking as an insider who distrusts the comfort of external referees. The intent isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-deference. If the scientific community wants legitimacy, Lang implies, it has to build real internal mechanisms for scrutiny and correction, because the public-facing ones are too crude to do more than stage accountability after the damage is done.