"That brilliant scientists often prove ineffectual in government has been clear since at least the mid-1960s, when the first cross-government chief scientific adviser was appointed in the United Kingdom. “Having gained access to the corridors of power, scientists could not find their way to the men’s room,” wrote science journalist Peter Ritchie Calder, in his 1975 memoir Scientists in the British Government. Politicians weren’t much better, he added: they were “deferential, even gullible, but, by and large, they did not know the right questions to ask”".

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03910-4

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