During my years at NASA, I frequently encountered the anti-psycholog-
ical bias that was rampant in the agency. The most blatant example of this
bias occurred in the fall of 1988. I had conducted a rather fruitless search
for the original Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo psychological data and had
also discovered that no documentation of psychiatric procedures existed
for the entire Shuttle period. This caused me to suggest to management
that NASA might want to review its current psychological selection pro-
cesses, since they seemed to be inadequate. To that end, I made a presenta-
tion to an outside review committee formed by NASA and chaired by
Chris Kraft, former director of the Manned Spacecraft Center -- as the
Johnson Space Center used to be called. The committee was charged with
the task of evaluating NASA's selection methods, and as part of that, it
requested that I present a history of the psychological aspects of selection.
During my presentation, I stated that no performance data were available
to validate the psychological selection criteria used in the Mercury program
and thereafter and that the documentation of the psychological proce-
dures currently used was nonexistent. Kraft became agitated and inter-
rupted me after only a few slides had been shown.

"Young lady, you are a dangerous person and are out to destroy NASA! I
will not permit that to happen."

I responded that if the data or the documentation existed, I had been
unable to find it.

He angrily replied, "You never will because it's [the data] in here [point-
ing to his head], and it's going to stay there so that people like you can't use
it against NASA."

Years later, I was finally able to obtain a copy of the original Mercury,
Gemini, and Apollo psychiatric evaluations and psychometric test results
from a source outside of NASA. I cannot help but speculate that Kraft's --
and NASA's -- behavior suggested that there was something he believes
needed to be hidden. I wondered what it was as I studied the original re-
ports.

Many forces -- nations, institutions, and individuals -- in the world today
work to limit the dissemination of information. Sometimes the purpose of
the suppression is genuinely malicious: to suppress knowledge entirely;
sometimes it is merely a practical matter: a desire to control knowledge and
information. Lewis Thomas wrote in his book The Fragile Species:

The scientific community has emerged in this century as the only genuine world
community that I can think of. It has had nothing to connect it to the special inter-
ests of nation-states, it carries out its work of inquiry without respect for national
borders, it passes information around as though at a great party; and because of
these habits, science itself has grown and prospered. Every researcher, in whatever
laboratory, depends for the work's progress on the cascades of information coming
in from other laboratories everywhere, and sends out his laboratory's latest findings
on whatever wind is, at the moment, blowing.

I do not believe that science can be done in any other way. . . . ³

-xvi-