I sympathise with David Nutt and his on-going battles for evidence-based policy on drugs. I really do. But to claim to have been privy to the "worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo" (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, coverage in the Independent) does seem a bit overblown.

He's not the first to draw on such a narrative. Like many slightly loose appeals to a general sense of scientific rationality, it gets used in a multitude of ways. The revolutionary power of Galileo popped up, for example, in an FT blogpost on energy last month, as some sort of technocratic justification for needing to give into the "reality" of shale gas. A slightly different variant of this myth – that if you are vilified for your ideas, you must be right – is common enough among those who seek to dissent from the scientific consensus that the RationalWiki site has an entry for the "Galileo gambit" (see also Australia's Galileo Movement).

But whether you're pushing acceptance of scientific consensus, the opposite, or simply aiming to paint a particular technology choice with some scientific shine, please stop mentioning Galileo. You look silly. 17th century fancy-dress won't power your idea of the truth.

Unless you're quoting Bertolt Brecht, that is, who offers the only decent bit of Galilean mythologising in recent years; though that won't power rhetoric of truths either, only ask you to think about them. As I recently wrote in response to the RSC's production of Life of Galileo, Brecht's vision of the scientist is far from post-Dawkins "hectoring atheism" and very much a product of the late 1940s.

Rewritten for 1947, in the still-blazing light of Hiroshima, the Galileo portrayed here is far from heroic, or necessarily right, even if he has found something potentially very unsettling and very useful in terms of how to understand our world. He's patronising, arrogant, manipulative, dismissive of women and happy to sell his work to not only the church, but the military too, if it only gives him some time to quietly peruse the stars. And this is his moral failing. The key quote comes at the end, as Galileo muses to an old pupil who has visited him while under house arrest.

What is the purpose of your work Andrea? Surely the purpose of science is to ease human hardship. The movements of the stars have become clearer: but the people still don't understand the movements of their masters. If scientists follow the order of those in power, if they store up knowledge for the sake of storing it up, then science will be crippled and your mew machines will bring new forms of oppression. In time, you may discover everything that there is to discover but you will progress away from humanity. The chasm between you and them will become so vast that one day you will shout for joy at some new achievement and you will be answered by a world shrieking in horror. As a scientist I was presented with a unique opportunity, astronomy had reached the market square. One man standing strong could have shaken the world. If I'd held out, scientists might have made a promise, an oath, to use their knowledge solely for the good of humanity! Now all we've got is a race of inventing pygmies who can be sold to the highest bidder.

With his use of the Galileo story, Brecht asks scientists to consider which masters they serve exactly, and how they might not only work more effectively for the good of the people, but also learn from such engagement too. When Galileo's old pupil exclaims angrily "Unhappy the land that has no heroes", he gets the humble reply "No. Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes." The scientist is an anti-hero here not just for dramatic reasons or historical accuracy, but because Brecht wants to argue for collective rather than individual agency when it comes to understanding our world and working out how to make it better.

There are continued references throughout the script to the need to share scientific knowledge with workers, and learn from their expertise too. The rallying cry of this play is to build a science and technology for the people, by the people, not simply defer to experts. It's a good cry, one we've arguably lost a connection with in recent years.

Technocrats and sceptics of various hues will continue to wave Galileo at us. In response, I suggest we repeat the words that precede the passage above: "Welcome to the gutter, brother in science!" For it is within such a gutter we will see what science is, and discover what it could be.

Alice Bell is research fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex.