Society and the scientists
John Maddox
What Is Science For? Bernard Dixon (Collins £2.50) Dr Bernard Dixon, the editor of New Scientist, has written a well-tempered and welldocumented account of the present condition of science. Properly, he is much concerned with the warts.
Why do professional scientists so eagerly enjoy their own rat-race, exemplified for the academics among them by what Dixon calls the paper-chase — the hunt for recognition by publishing academic papers? Why is there so much secrecy — both the Apollo programme and the Concorde project were embarked on for political reasons, with the scientists consulted only after the event? How did it come about that Lord Zuckerman, still then Sir Solly but already the Pooh-Bah of British science, persuaded the British government not to invest in the new high energy physics machine at Geneva when the advisory committees most concerned were not merely anxious to go ahead but were also willing to cut their existing budgets to make room for this new project?
Dixon is also concerned with the recent fashion for criticising science, from within as well as from without. And Rachel Carson was of course right to protest that American farmers in the late 1950s were using pesticides much too lightheartedly — Dixon might have added that she marred her book with an overspecific account of how DDT can cause cancer. He is over-tolerant of people such as Drs Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner, for calculated exaggeration can make people catatonic. It would also be helpful to have known more explicitly where Dixon himself stands on the views of those like Jacques Ellul who complain that science and technology between them have damaged the character of society. The essence of Dixon's case, however, is that these quizzical views have helped enormously to sharpen the making of decisions in science and technology, and that wider participation will still further help to =ravel what Dixon considers to be the greatest evil — the confusion between the pursuit of truth and practical application. Both, says Dixon, must be supported, but for reasons which are well understood.
All this is fair enough. Unhappily, there are practical problems. In the past two years, in the United States especially, there has emerged a fashion for what is called technology assessment, the process of anticipating the consequences of proposed technological innovation, and the US Congress now has machinery for helping it to know in
advance, But nobody knows how well the technique will work. Hindsight suggests there may be snags. Who, for example, would have predicted in the 1910s, when the men with red flags were no longer regarded as a necessary warning against the hazards, that auto mobiles would now be widely reviled for their presence in cities and that the automobile in dustry itself would have grown to be a pow erful social and economic force'? The truth is that uncertainty is inseparable from technical innovation. Most important innovations are in some sense adventures, and there is no escape from continual reassessment.
I am also suspicious of Dixon's plea for more democracy in science, not merely be cause I am not clear what it means but be cause the achievements of the recently fashionable pressure groups are by no means as creditable as this charitable account suggests. It is true that the American use of de
foliants in Vietnam was both a human and an ecological hazard, and that informed criticism from academic .scientists did much to stop the process. But the several American campaigns against nuclear power have exacerbated the present shortage of energy in the United States and have left the public with a quite unwarrantable suspicion of nuclear energy. Yet the much-maligned Atomic Energy Commission has been as vigorous as any of the pressure groups in identifying the real hazards. Like similar organisations elsewhere, it is now busily working out ways of removing the radioactive gas krypton-85 from the exhaust gases from nuclear reprocessing plants, recognising the need of this in the 1990s. The technical community has also done as much as any other pressure group to formulate the now-accepted policy that the radioactive wastes from nuclear power stations should not be disposed of for the time being, but stored in solid form in some accessible place.
So what is science for? Dixon is right to protest at irrational goals. The unreasonable and badly worked out ambitions of a group of academic scientists to drill a hole into the mantle of the earth, one of the fiascos of the early 1960s, was as reprehensible as the Anglo-French wish to make political capital out of technology. But there are other things to say. Until just recently, science and technology were regarded as ways of making people prosperous and healthy, of improving the environment in which we all live. In me view, those old-fashioned goals are still legitimate. It will be disastrous for us all if they are forgotten, yet they pop up almost accidentally in Dixon's otherwise compelling account of the condition of modern science.
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