A couple of years ago, a fairly well-known scientist made a shocking revelation to me. The advance for which the scientist was most widely known and admired within the scientific community was not something they had set out to accomplish. In fact, it was not even something they had considered until they actually achieved it. A collaborator (who, unlike my friend, had fully anticipated the outcome) pointed out the implications after their success. The interesting part of this crusty yarn is that the advance, which was of a technical nature, was huge. Their breakthrough has fundamentally changed the way in which scientists in my field can work, and has also contributed in significant ways to ethical concerns about the practice of science and medicine.
I had listened to the Dalai Lama’s book Ethics for the New Millennium just prior to my friend’s revelation. His Holiness mentions the obligations of scientists to consider the implications of what we do. From an ethical standpoint, this is infallible. Obviously, we must each do our best. From a practical standpoint, most scientists can honestly say that our best in this area is usually not good enough. We are unable to predict the full implications of our research discoveries. Perhaps our ethical obligations are covered by the catch all “do your best”. Maybe not.
Academics is an institution for revolutionary change, and the very existence of such a thing is almost counterintuitive from the standpoint of a stable society. In the way that the act of eating a meal is dangerous to your homeostatic mechanisms (it’s a miracle that we don’t just keel over and die from the electrolyte imbalances alone). Like most institutions, it is a creaky, ritualized barrier device because the (perhaps primary) purpose of academia is to keep radical change in check. Science is hierarchical not because the old farts necessarily have the best new ideas but because, in the fullness of their wisdom, they can be trusted not to turn the foundations of our society over to their wild and crazy junior colleagues. And frankly that’s a system that I can respect in many ways.
Watching Ghost in The Shell the other evening, I wondered again whether scientists will be the ones to really answer society about the implications of our work. How can we compete with the power of the anecdote for the attention of the human mind? People will understand logic, but they will internalize a myth. I wonder what that explicatory book / movie / virtual reality experience will be. And, incidentally, I wonder if it is true that, in order for our culture to take a myth seriously, the hero protagonist must be male.
Song of the Day: Gangster’s Paradise, Coolio
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