Sounds interesting, but I can see that the problem with a society like that is that by restricting the practice of science to a select group of elites, you're h

Sounds interesting, but I can see that the problem with a society like that is that by restricting the practice of science to a select group of elites, you're holding back progress because people who aren't in that group, who have a great talent (or determination) for scientific work, are presumably being prevented from entering the field. Imagine if we went back in time to 1980, and made it so that the only people who could write computer programs had to attend special schools and go through an expensive licensing process, and no one was allowed to do it on their own, schools weren't allowed to establish their own programs, and people couldn't even write a simple shell script without going to jail. We wouldn't have the technology we have today.