Thus the Financial Times today. “Science is a messy affair peopled by characters ready to risk everything to seal their reputations,” explains the newspaper. The article is accompanied by a picture of the Large Hadron Collider or LHC at CERN or Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire near Geneva, Switzerland. The title and especially the byline made me so happy that I skipped the article. They are worth remembering, too. They apply to every field of science, including a vast array of social sciences. If physics is a messy affair, it is easy to imagine how messy are economics, sociology, or psychology that are so much more messy in substance. As I can attest from many years in academia, there is no escaping characters ready to risk everything to seal their reputations even at the best universities in the world. Which goes a long way to explain my early retirement from academia. So many years later, I cannot stop rejoicing at my decision. Sadly, I joined the world of science in my youth on the mistaken belief that this was where everything was decided on the basis of argument and evidence only. In my innocence, reputation was farthest from my mind. Alas, everything humans do is suspect on account of their characters, and science is hardly an exception.