SCIENTISTS
The beauty of nature is suspect.
Oh yes, the splendor of flowers.
Science is concerned to deprive us of illusions.
Though why it is eager to do so is unclear.
The battles among genes, traits that secure success, gains and losses.
My God, what language these people speak
In their white coats. Charles Darwin
At least had pangs of conscience
Making public a theory that was, as he said, devilish.
And they? It was, after all, their idea:
To segregate rats in separate cages.
To separate humans, write off as a genetic loss
Some of their own species and poison them.
“The pride of the peacock is the glory of God,”
Wrote William Blake. There was a time
When disinterested beauty by its sheer superabundance
Gratified our eyes. What have they left us?
Only the accountancy of a capitalist enterprise.
-Czeslaw Milosz
From Second Space, 2004
Gladsome Lights 
Or, there’s this, from scientist Richard Feynman:
“I have a friend who’s an artist. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is.” Then he says, “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” I think that’s kind of nutty.
“First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. All kinds of interesting questions which emerge from science only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”
Both views are supportable, of course, but I’ve kept Feynman’s words since finding them. I think they help to resolve some of the ambivalence people often feel about a scientific approach to nature.
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I found this, also, from Feynman:
“The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.”
The eugenicists Milosz seems to be considering in his poem certainly give science a bad name.
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Wow!!
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This also speaks to the differing attitudes among scientists:
“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.”
-C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man
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