You’re free to, but I can’t read the OP as defining it that way.
Controlling the rate of.
Sure, i think we can both agree, that no big scientific advancement has even been totally and forever repressed.
And I don’t count the ancient Greek Philosophers with their thought concepts- like atoms. Many were not truly scientists. Yes, some did perform actual experimental science, but many were just ideas- which turned out to have scientific validity. Democritus did no science.
But even new discoveries that have been “repressed” because they run counter to established knowledge are still known, they’re just ridiculed. Heliocentrism and plate tectonics were both ideas that took decades to break into mainstream science, but even during those decades, lots of people had heard about them. Heck, how do you ridicule an idea that no one knows about?
And we still see that today. Cold fusion (and several of its offshoots) has been lingering about for about 35 years now, and there’s still people who passionately believe it’s real, and still lots of labs trying to replicate it.
I used the word “imposed” intentionally, to talk about some theoretical entity which had enough power to control and repress scientific discoveries; I also said this doesn’t exist at this time.
Exactly. They really don’t need to. There’s far too many people who the saying “there’s none so blind as those who will not see” applies to. Just put out a little propaganda to appeal to those people, and Big Money does just fine. It’s a lot easier and cheaper than getting into things like actual suppression of data, threatening scientists, etc.
The crucial difference is that public opinion is easily repressed. Science as scientific research and knowledge isn’t. It sticks around being bothersome. It’s that damn little bit of stringy food buried deep between two teeth that will never let you rest until you take care of it properly.
That’s because casting doubt on the science is what works. Hiding science that is waiting to be discovered is going to be impossible. Even if you can keep one lab from publishing their results, some other unrelated lab in some other country will find the same thing soon enough.
By bringing the science into doubt, it doesn’t matter who publishes what, because it’s all “wrong”.
The OP does mention the rate of progress, and that certainly can be repressed. Look what is happening in the US now: cuts to scientific funding, political interference with research, and roadblocks on international collaboration. All of these will slow progress.
So to repress vaccine development just spread lies about how vaccines are dangerous, cut funding to academic vaccine research programs, introduce chaos into the approval of new vaccines, and make it obvious to corporations that vaccine research will not be profitable. Progress on vaccine development is greatly diminished, protecting our precious bodily fluids for another few years, or whatever the goal is.
See here for some real outrage fuel on this topic: Action! Action Now. | Science | AAAS
You’ll get no argument from me. After half a million extra COVID deaths, the Trump administration is trying to top that this term, and will certainly succeed worldwide.
I still insist not to confuse current opposition from elimination. The latter is impossible, the former all too prevalent.
That’s bad, but thankfully the U.S. is just one country. The rest of the world is perfectly capable of picking up its slack.
And that’s a major factor. So long as there are independent jurisdictions, someone may decide to pursue the research one country is trying to repress. Most science is done in small labs, you don’t usually need things like the Large Hadron Collider. Almost anyone can do small science that still advances knowledge.
But it wasn’t repressed. The science was there. In public forums for anyone to see. E.g.
There were lots of reasons the science didn’t have any effect on public policy, including* heavily funded corrupt efforts on the part of the tobacco lobby. But the actual science was not repressed.
[1] And also actual sincerely held doubts about the casual relationship, which led to the Type A/B personality hypothesis which gave use the term “type A personality”
Footnotes ↩︎
Though that didn’t suppress any science, it suppressed the scientific community. That is obviously possible but just benefits the scientific community elsewhere (as America is currently finding out 
). Even in Nazi Germany the science itself was not repressed, Einstein and other “Jewish physics” papers were available even if citing them may have been a bad thing for your career.
Two comments
1.) Aside from people hiding away results of studies (as in the cigarette-cancer link cited above, and similar things) I don’t know about science being repressed, but there are cases of it being forgotten. In one of the great coincidences of all time, an Persian scientist, Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi and his pupil Kamal al-Din al-Farisi modeled the physics of the rainbow using a spherical globe filled with water and ray of sunlight AND the exact same thing was done by a French-German monk, Theodoric of Freibourg within a period of twenty years. Unless Theodoric somehow learned of al-Shirazi’s work (which seems extremely unlikely), it’s a case of simultaneous discovery. It’s even weirder because this was not part of some inevitable trend that lead inexorably to this particular experiment. It sort of appeared spontaneously, and in both cases was immediately forgotten, with later theorists bumbling along on unprofitable lines of inquiry for several centuries afterwards.
Similarly, Claudius Ptolemy measured the refraction of light at the interface of air and water and of air and glass and empirically discovered the data of refraction, even if his formulation, although a surprisingly good fit, was theoretically incorrect. But Ptolemy didn’t follow up on it. Nor did anyone else for an awful long time.
2,) Technology isn’t the same thing as science, but a lot of technology has been discovered and subsequently forgotten for a long time. Damascus steel, for instance, although we seem to know how to make that now. Or the formulation of Greek Fire, which I still don’t think has been satisfactorily explained.
But technology HAS been suppressed – or at least attempts to do so were. One example was the crossbow, which before the spread of gunpowder provided a means of piercing armor thsat didn’t require the long training necessary for a longbow. Crossbow technology and ownership was suppressed in medieval Europe and in China.
Japan picked up the use of rifles from the Portuguese, then banned the use of the weapons circa 1588 in an effort to suppress peasant revolt and to establsh a long-lasting peace. Which worked, for a couple of centuries.
This was an example I was thinking of, which demonstrates what you’d need to even come close to suppressing a technology.
Japan, after unification, had a strong central government, with few internal opponents with enough power to be a problem. They ruled a largely homogeneous population, that believed in obedience to authority and social conformity, and reverence of tradition. When ordered to destroy their guns and the means of producing them, they obeyed.
They also faced no serious external threats. They were too small and poor to be worth invading, and so never needed guns to repel such an invasion.
Producing those kinds of results elsewhere in the world proved to be too difficult to ever ban guns. European nobility at the time guns were introduced hated them for the impact they had on the nobility’s power as the main armed forces in Europe, but none of them ever had this level of control, so they were never able to effectively ban guns. Anyone who tried would have been overrun by any of their neighbours who decided to invade them.
And we see this now, with any controversial technology. Some countries may try to ban them, but there’s always some other jurisdiction that is happy to take the lead, and keep developing the science.
The secrets about how to build a nuke are more a matter of engineering than science
The paradigmatic example of science some would want to suppress is biological evolution, and every attempt to suppress it has only drawn more public attention to it and made the deniers look ridiculous.
Good point. Welcome to the SDMB!
Yeah, but the world tried to keep the engineering about how to enrich uranium a secret, and it failed. The engineering blueprints have been stolen and spread all over the world.
Well no, it wasn’t. It may have been denied by some long enough to create a pseudo-controversy which impressed no one familiar with the epidemiologic data.
The idea that good science can be suppressed long-term is a staple of denialists and conspiracy theorists. Fantasies that They (the magical They) somehow manage to conceal cheap, universally safe and effective cancer cures and suppress data showng horrific hazards of vaccines, cellphones, evidence of “chemtrails” etc. strike a chord in the susceptible minds of those who lack critical thinking skills.
You see, the insidious, evil They along with Their families and relatives are immune to the consequences of their Suppression.
Tools of these weak-minded conspiracy theorists include pretending that a single tainted study overturns a ton of corroborating evidence (i.e. the Monsanto-influenced glyphosate safety paper, the few vaccine studies on which suspected embezzler Poul Thorsen was a secondary author) or that all the research one dislikes is bought and paid for by Big Something.*
*wrong, as in the case of HCFS, which has been found virtually biologically identical to sucrose in non-industry funded research.