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biostitute (by.AWS.tuh.toot) n. A biologist who supports a company or activity that is harmful to the environment.
biostitution n.

Example Citations:
I think the organization that Myron works for is an organization that is funded by the coal industry, by the oil industry. And for 20 years, they've been trying to deceive the American public by housing these phony scientists. We call them biostitutes who are lying and deceiving the American public and saying there's no such thing as global warming.
—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., "Scarborough Country," MSNBC, May 25, 2004

Call it Murphy's law: To preserve species and their land, you sometimes have to destroy them as well.

"That is the reality of this dirty work we do in conservation planning on private property — that the bulldozers are going to roll," he says. "But if you help direct where they roll, and you have contributed to the conservation of that open space that's left over, there is a certain satisfaction there."

That reasoning angers Murphy's critics, who say that he and others like him are little more than "rent-a-scientists" paid to testify before planning commissions, in court and in environmental impact reports. The critics have even coined a name for them: biostitutes.
—Evan Halper and Janet Wilson, "A Sellout, or Just Practical?," Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2003

Earliest Citation:
The combination of these factors forced universities to swallow an "institutional mindset against corporate sponsorship," said Licatta. "I remember in graduate school, biologists went on to work in an academic setting or for the government. Biostitutes went to work in the corporate setting or for a consultant."
—Faith Lyman Ham, "Jefferson Office Protects Its Technology," Philadelphia Business Journal, January 25, 1988

Notes:
This inflammatory term is a blend of the words biologist and prostitute.

Related Words:
agnotology
anecdata
biofraud
blurb whore
eco-scam
fact-free science
greenwash

Subject Categories:
Language - Insults
Science - Biology
Science - Environment
Sociology - People

Posted on June 2, 2005


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