Engaging the Rest of Humanity

"Science... is good for the scientist; whether also for the rest of humanity is arguable." Erwin Chargaff Recently, a headline in the UK newspaper The Sun screamed "Your Mother Was Aborted Baby." The story dealt with the possibility of using aborted fetuses as a new source of donor eggs for couples needing fertility treatment. In the same week, the headline "Test-tube 'Monster' Condemned" ran in several publications, dealing with the creation of chimeric human embryos, part-male and part-female, which survived for six days. Both stories originated at a reproduction and embryology society meeting. As ethicists lined up to condemn and opponents made hay, the research community did a poor job of justifying the work, even days after the story broke. Those who did the research appeared blithely unaware of the gathering storm, with one quoted as saying simply that "I'm fully aware of the controversy about this -- but probably, in some place, it will be ethically acceptable." Predictably, the public slammed the scientists. Said some on the BBC Web site: "This madness needs to be stopped before it gets started. We are still human and hopefully will remain so, in spite of mad scientists who would play with humanity as they do with crops and mathematics." "Anyone reading the reports from the latest conference in fertility science would be forgiven for thinking that we have descended into a bizarre world in which hundreds of mad scientists are competing to produce the most bizarre permutations of human life." We, The People of the Scientific Community, In Order To Find... What companies and products have made the biggest difference to your research? The Scientist Annual Readers' Choice Awards gives practicing scientists the opportunity to recognize excellence. You are invited to propose candidates for the 2004 awards by completing the form on our Web site, www.the-scientist.com/surveys/readerschoicenominations2003.htm. Voting for the awards will take place in the fall. Progress in science, technology, and medicine has improved almost every aspect of life over the last century, and these generally have been received appreciatively. But lately, skepticism concerning progress has been rising. A variety of reasons exist for this, some of which are valid. One problem is the speed of progress. In fields such as stem cells, cloning, and genetics, the nature and pace of research is deeply unsettling to many people. It challenges their strongly held beliefs about human dignity, sacrosanctity and individuality. Says Paul Nurse, the recently appointed President of Rockefeller University: Science is "truly revolutionary in a disturbing way." Researchers must concede this distress and be willing to discuss it. Scientists have become adept at converting the technical aspects of their work into lay terms, but that is not enough--societal and ethical implications must be acknowledged. How to do this? As a short-term step, we need to identify members of the research community who are knowledgeable about the issues, sympathetic to them, and confident in front of a camera. These spokespersons will nip the "mad scientist" label in the bud. In the long term, the scientific community needs to position the socially revolutionary aspects of research onto center stage. This is the case in high school teaching, but it fades at the undergraduate level, and scientists rarely integrate these aspects into actual research projects. This omission must change if science is going to become less disturbing--read less mad--to the rest of humanity. Richard Gallagher, Editor (rgallagher@the-scientist.com) function sendData() { document.frm.pathName.value = location.pathname; result = false if (document.frm.score[0].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[1].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[2].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[3].checked) result = true; if (document.frm.score[4].checked) result = true; if (!result) alert("Please select") return result; } .myradio{background-color : #94bee5} Please indicate on a 1 - 5 scale how strongly you would recommend this article to your colleagues? Not recommended 1 2 3 4 5 Highly recommended Please register your vote

Engaging the Rest of Humanity

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