So They Say

Verbatim excerpts from the media on the conduct of science. Space Spectators or Participants? … there is no doubt that every scientist connected with space research is concerned with the costs of scientific activities in space and the consequences of the development of expensive flight hardware. It is the scientific community's responsibility to inform NASA of its concerns and to argue in national forums for an economically responsible program for scientific investigations in space that includes a balanced continuation of the older space science investigations as well as the development of new opportunities under the broader title "science in space." At issue is the extent to which national leaders are sincere in wanting to support space research, both as it applies to understanding fundamental processes and as it relates to important, practical applications. If we do not accept the challenge of manned space exploration, other nations will not wait for us to do so. The Soviet Mir station, and its successors, and the planned facilities to be developed by the European Space Agency and Japan for independent manned space flight will be used for important scientific and technological pursuits. The United States must decide whether its scientists and other space users are to be spectators or participants in this new phase of space exploration. —Peter M. Banks and David C. Black "The Future of Science in Space" Science, p. 245, April 17, 1987 Greenpeace Chief Jumps Ship A leading campaigner against the dumping of nuclear waste has resigned from the Greenpeace environmental group to join a project proposing to store it below the seabed. Mr. George Pritchard, 45, said yesterday he had quit as head of Greenpeace's nuclear campaign in Britain because he believed a realistic answer had to be found to nuclear waste disposal, and Greenpeace was not yet ready to work for it. "My feeling is that if we don't find an answer, then the nuclear industry will find its own answer, and I believe that answer would be unacceptable," he added. —R. Barry O'Brien "Greenpeace Chief Quits to Join Nuclear Project" The Daily Telegraph, p. 2 April 6, 1987 Ideal Itineraries The salient observable characteristic of problem choice in quasi-academic science is sheer persistence. This is to say, in a great majority of cases the individual scientist decides to attack a problem in the same "problem area" as he or she has done in the past. This tendency has not been studied in close detail step by step along individual research trails, but it must be very strong, since most scientists stay within narrowly defined specialties for large parts of their careers. Persistence within a specialised area of research is not necessarily disadvantageous to the individual or to the progress of science. One can think of many cases where it has been crowned at last with out-standing success. The fable of Bruce and the spider tells of a virtue that is sometimes as heroic in science as it is in life—but it can make a research worker very vulnerable to scientific change. The "map" of science is continually being redrawn. Problems that were once thought very difficult suddenly become soluble by new methods, which make all the efforts invested in other techniques worthless. Failure to make a rapid change under such circumstances can be disastrous. —J. Ziman "The Problem of 'Problem Choice'" Minerva, pp. 101-102 Spring-Summer 1987 Science is Not Just Physics We must stop thinking of "science" as "physics." The tendency to equate "science" and "physics" has obscured the significant discoveries of the social sciences, and made sciences like ecology, biology, and chemistry seem like second-class modes of inquiry. And the "science equals physics" equation, along with a psychologistic, a historical, and asocial conception of consciousness and behavior has fueled misguided efforts to link scientific and mystical traditions…. Both those who are awed by or seek to share in the power and glory of modem science and many of the critics share a common conception of science rooted in the prestige and organization of the physical sciences. But science is not the professional activity of physical scientists. Our future depends not on modern science (a social institution) but on the proper cultivation of human inquiry in new organizational, institutional, and broader social settings. —Sal Restivo "Science Studies—What Is to Be Done" Science, Technology, & Human Values, pp. 15, 17. Spring 1987 A Woodstock For Nerds? [Cornell University] Physics Professor Neil W. Ashcroft said general physics in the United States is in a slow decline, with only about one physicist per 5,000 people. This trend is likely to continue unless new government policies en-courage students to become scientists and provide funding for the many creative areas of physics research, he predicted. With such new policies, however, he believes the country could rise to take the lead in the new technology in superconductors. "Bright students notice the sagging support for careers in science and opt out early," he said, referring to the phenomenon as "premature scientific euthanasia." "And even if a student does continue on in science and takes the large step to graduate school, he or she is stepping out of the main-stream of America," said Ashcroft, noting that the huge scientific meeting on superconductors held in New York last March was dubbed a "Woodstock for nerds." —Dennis Meredith "America Ill-Prepared for Superconductor Race: Ashcroft" Cornell Chronicle, p. 3 May 7, 1987 Let's Start Running Along The Chromosomes … the obvious answer as to whether the human genome should be sequenced is, "Yes. Why do you ask?" The next question is who should do the job. The National Institutes of Health has funded most of the scientists who have made the project possible, but it would be in danger of a Big Science-Little Science conflict. The Department of Energy has only a few scientists in the proper leadership area, but has had experience with large projects and offers a political arrangement that could ensure that the program is an add-on, not a subtraction from Little Science. … A DOE program should … act more as a nerve center, both monitoring and administering a large number of smaller grants to investigators located all over the world. This effort should be international with contributions from different countries in terms of grants, investigators, and leadership advice. A plan in which DOE recognizes the importance of peer review and decentralized administration would thus be a compromise, but it would ensure proper quality and avoid a budget situation that placed Big Science and Little Science in dangerously direct financial competition…. … The opportunities are enormous. We have been "walking along the chromosomes" long enough. It is time to start running. —Daniel E. Koshland Jr. Editorial: "Sequencing the Human Genome," Science, p. 505 May 1, 1987 Science Is Up To Its Old Tricks Again Science is having a picnic with the human embryo. In South Africa it has a woman pregnant with her own grandchildren—three of them at latest count. This woman is not only going to give birth to triplets, which used to be mildly remarkable, but those triplets are also going to be her grandchildren, which is a first. You can bet it won't be the last. Before the biological sciences brought progress to the embryo, this sort of thing was confined to low comedy. I dimly recall way back in the mid-2Oth century a hillbilly song titled, "I'm my own Granpaw." Details of the South African experiment are closely held by a London newspaper which is paying money for exclusive rights to the story. My bias about this event should be declared: I don't like it. It sounds to me like another dismal example of science up to its old trick of doing terrible things simply because they can be done.... Progress, bah. Living in a world where you can be your own uncle is the same kind of progress the mad scientists in old movies sought when they turned starlets into gorillas. —Russell Baker "In the Name of Progress" The New York Times, p.18 May 3, 1987 The Meaning of Freedom Scientific freedom is not the same thing as the unrestricted dissemination of information. Cracking down on pirate bulletin boards that post stolen credit card numbers is not a violation of scientific freedom. And few would maintain that in a world of conflict and competition, no scientific information should be secret. There are valid reasons relating to commercial or national security why some research results, generated in commercial or secure environments, ought not to be revealed. The boundary is a fuzzy one, but independent discovery is one test and the scientific nature of the discovered information is another. Suppression of an independently developed scientific discovery is generally not consistent with scientific freedom. —Paul Abrahams "President's Letter: Scientific Freedom" The Association for Computing Machinery Communications of the ACM, p. 277 April 1987 Looking to The Future "I'm not sure if I want to be a scientist or an artist," said Stephen, a fourth grader at Concord Elementary School in District Heights [Maryland]. "But I'm very much interested in science, and I really like snakes. It's good to know about science. It helps you understand the world." —Sue Anne Pressley "Science Comes Alive for Youngsters" The Washington Post, p. B3 April 26, 1987 Whistle While You Work … about half the week I'm in the lab rather than at the word-processor, working on experiments intended to reveal how the brain stores new information acquired from the interaction of animals with their environments, the cellular and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory. And when I'm designing and doing these experiments, which test to the limit my understanding of the world, and the powers of my machinery— monoclonal antibodies, electron microscopes, ultracentrifuges, microelectrodes and image analysers—when I'm deeply engaged in that strange mix of manual dexterity and experimental ingenuity which characterizes doing science, I find I do something that I do at almost no other time in my waking life. I sing. Tuneless, but unquestionable singing. Just possibly, that singing might be about the hope for a world made whole again. —Steven Rose The Guardian, p. 13 May 4, 1987 Words From The Wise Edwin Land, the brilliant business-mm/scientist who created Polaroid, building it into what is now a $1.6 billion company with a house-hold name, sets high standards for himself. "My motto," says Land, now 78, "is very personal and may not fit anyone else or any other company. It is: Don't do anything that someone else can do. Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible. "If it is manifestly important," Land continues, "then you don't have to worry about its significance. Since it's nearly impossible, you know that no one else is likely to be doing it, so if you do succeed, you will have created a whole domain for yourself." —Subrata N. Chakravarty "The Vindication of Edwin Land," Forbes, p. 83 May 4, 1987 The Men of Cavendish … In the Cavendish before the last war, science used human intelligence to furnish the world with knowledge that, the nature of the modern state being what it is, became known as intelligence in another sense—intelligence as a potential or actual weapon. The men of Cavendish were liberal-minded in a manner that Oxford approved: they believed in the dissemination of scientific intelligence without reference to what this, that or the other sovereign state could make of it. Such men were not naive: they were well aware that the splitting or the atom had a destructive potential, but they placed free access to scientific knowledge far above the exigencies of statecraft. This was the ancient tradition, a subscription to the belief that universities were universal. But these scientists also had their political beliefs. Being human, they could scarcely subsist without them. They lived and worked in a country whose rulers, mostly in the Oxford tradition of classical humanism, tended to despise science. The scientists saw in Soviet Russia the fulfillment of a dream—a state founded on scientific principles (even though Marx-ism followed an outdated materialistic philosophy)…. The only conceivable political philosophy for a Cambridge scientist was socialistic. The only socialistic state in the world was Soviet Russia. It was as simple as that. —Anthony Burgess "School for Scandal" Review of "The Red and the Blue: Cambridge, Treason and Intelligence" by Andrew Sinclair The Atlantic, pp. 92-93 May 1987 Third World Guinea Pigs Biotechnology is the fastest growing industry in the world today. Its new inventions, perhaps the greatest technological advances since the discovery of fire, could totally transform major industries, agriculture, livestock breeding and forestry. With multinationals monopolising these sectors there is serious danger of the further enslavement of the third world by the first world…. Moreover, since there are absolutely no regulatory mechanisms in most third world countries for the testing and marketing of biotech products, the MNCs are also likely to use us as guinea pigs with harmful consequences. One fears that the impact of the biotechnology revolution will be worse than that of the green revolution. —Praful Bidwai The Times of India, p. 1 April 19, 1987 Yuri Orlov Speaks Out Every scientist in the free world should speak out and say what he is thinking to the Soviet scientists or the Soviet officials, either here or there. If scientists like Sakharov and Keryagin manage to preserve their integrity there, I think it is much easier for you, in the free world, to do the same. Each free word that we (in the Soviet Union) have uttered has resulted in persecution and punishment for us. You, on the other hand, are not threatened by anything from the Soviet authorities. You should disregard political and diplomatic considerations—threats that the Soviet powers might cut off the contacts or severely limit them. This does not pertain to the matter. We are free people and we should express ourselves freely. —Yuri Orlov Speech at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory LBL Review, p. 14, Spring 1987 Misguided Course on Animal Rights Medical research requires highly trained scientists, years of trial and error and lots of money. Sometimes this work must also involve animals. Tests on primates led to the development of the polio vaccine, the discovery of insulin, the invention of transplant techniques and the improvement of cancer therapies. Scientists expect that such tests will also play an important role in finding cures for multiple sclerosis, AIDS and Alzheimer's disease. Nobody likes what this involves doing to animals, and protest has had its useful effect in pressing some especially callous and casual researchers to put an end to their gratuitous cruelty. But some would go further: they would put a stop to all research involving animals, a course we think is wholly misguided. Private citizens obviously have the right to work on behalf of any legal course, and those with strong concerns about animals will continue to do so. But the advancement of science and the humane treatment of animals are not mutually inconsistent goals. It remains the government's obligation to work to ensure that both are achieved without the intervention of private litigants. —Editorial: "Lab Animals and the Law," The Washington Post, p. A16, April 7, 1987 Computer Power Its champions call it "computational science" and claim that it is the greatest breakthrough in scientific method since Sir Isaac Newton invented theoretical science and Galileo before him set down the techniques of observational and experimental science. Computational science is science done on a computer. A computer can serve as a laboratory for researchers who cannot experiment with their subjects, and as a calculator for those who otherwise might need centuries to solve some problems mathematically—if they could be solved at all. While some scientists insist that computational science differs in a qualitative way from what they have done before, others say that it is just a faster way of doing what they have always done. —Judith Axier Turner "Some Hail 'Computational Science' as Biggest Advance Since Newton, Galileo" The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. 1 May 6, 1987

So They Say

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