by Lewis Thomas
Anyway, it seems to me a notion in biology not to be dismissed lightly, and requiring a great deal more thought and a lot more science. Part of the science can be done best by the technologies developed for space exploration. One thing discovered since NASA began its work, on which I should think almost everyone would now agree, is that by far the most interesting, engrossing, and puzzling object in the solar system—maybe in the whole galaxy—is our own planet. It needs more research, huge-scale and at the same time delicate, highly reductionist work, but in the meantime it is there for the humanists to think about, something new and amiable, a free gift from science and high technology, a nice piece of bewilderment for the poets, an instruction in humility for all the rest of us.
In the everyday middle-sized world where I live, biology has only begun to work. Medicine, the newest and youngest of all the sciences, bobs along in the wake of biology, indeed not yet sure that it is all that much a science, but certain that if there is to be a scientific future for medicine it can come only from basic biomedical research. I’m not sure who invented that convenient hybrid word “biomedical.” I think it was someone from my professional side, wanting to lay claims on respectable science by the prefix “bio”; but it could as well have been a pure biologist wanting the suffix “medical” as a way to lay hands on NIH grants. Whichever, it is a nice word and it contains the truth: medicine is a branch of biological science for the long-term future.
This means that I am entitled, as a physician, to ask my biologist friends to answer a range of questions that are not yet perceived as an immediate part of my own bailiwick, just as they can expect me and my colleagues to turn up some quick answers to problems like cancer, coronary disease, schizophrenia, heartburn, whatever. Indeed, the only question I am inclined to turn aside as being impossible to respond to happens to be the one most often raised these days, not just by my biologist friends but by everyone: the question about stress, how to avoid stress, prevent stress, allay stress. I refuse to have anything to do with this matter, having made up my mind, from everything I have read or heard about it in recent years, that what people mean by stress is simply the condition of being human, and I will not recommend any meddling with that, by medicine or any other profession.
But I digress. What I wish to get at is an imaginary situation in which I am allowed three or four questions to ask the world of biomedical science to settle for me by research, as soon as possible. Can I make a short list of top-priority puzzles, things I am more puzzled by than anything else? I can.
First, I want to know what goes on in the mind of a honeybee. Is it true, as is often asserted, that a bee is simply a small, neatly assembled robot, capable only of behaving in ways for which the bee is programmed by instructions in bee DNA, or is something else going on? In short, does a bee know what is going on in its mind when it navigates its way to distant food sources and back to the hive, using polarized sunlight and the tiny magnet it carries as a navigational aid? Or is the bee just a machine, unable to do its mathematics and dance its language in any other way? To use Donald Griffin’s term, does a bee have “awareness”; or to use a phrase I like better, can a bee think and imagine?
There is an experiment for this, or at least an observation made long ago by Karl von Frisch and more recently confirmed by James Gould at Princeton. Biologists who wish to study such things as bee navigation, language, and behavior in general have to train their bees to fly from the hive to one or another special place. To do this, they begin by placing a source of sugar very close to the hive so that the bees (considered by their trainers to be very dumb beasts) can learn what the game is about. Then, at regular intervals, the dish or whatever is moved progressively farther and farther from the hive, in increments of about 25 percent at each move. Eventually, the target is being moved a hundred feet or more at a jump, very far from the hive. Sooner or later, while this process is going on, the biologist shifting the dish of sugar will find that his bees are out there waiting for him, precisely where the next position had been planned. This is an uncomfortable observation to make, harder still to explain in conventional terms: Why would bees be programmed for such behavior in their evolution? Flowers do not walk away in regular, predictable leaps. One possible explanation, put forward by Gould but with deep reservations and some doubt, is that bees are very smart animals who know what the biologist is up to and can imagine where he will turn up next with his sugar. Another possibility favored by Gould is that we simply do not understand the matter and need to learn more about bees. I like this answer, and it is my reason for putting the bee question at the top of my list.
My second question, addressed at large to the world of biology, concerns music. Surely, music (along with ordinary language) is as profound a problem for human biology as can be thought of, and I would like to see something done about it. A few years ago the German government set a large advisory committee to work on the question of what the next Max Planck Institute should be taking on as its scientific mission. The committee worked for a very long time and emerged with the recommendation that the new Max Planck Institute should be dedicated to the problem of music—what music is, why it is indispensable for human existence, what music really means—hard questions like that. The government, in its wisdom, turned down the idea, muttering something in administrative language about relevance, and there the matter rests. I shall take it as a sign of growing-up in the United States when we can assemble a similar committee for the same purpose and have the idea of the National Institute of Music approved and funded. I will not wait up for this to happen, but I can imagine it starting on a very small scale and with a very limited mission and a modest budget: a narrow question, like Why is The Art of Fugue so important and what does this single piece of music do to the human mind? Later on, there will be other questions, harder to deal with.
And while you are on your feet, Science, I have one last question, this time one closer to medicine. Some years ago, Dr. Harold Wolff, professor of neurology at Cornell, conducted the following experiment. He hypnotized some healthy volunteer subjects, and while they were under deep hypnosis he touched their forearms with an ordinary pencil, which he told them was an extremely hot object; then he brought them out of the hypnotic state. In most cases, what happened was the prompt development of an area of redness and swelling at the skin site touched by the pencil, and in some subjects this went on to form a typical blister. I want to know all about that phenomenon. I also want to know how it happens that patients with intractable warts of long standing can have their warts instructed to drop off while under hypnosis.
Come to think of it, I would rather have a clear understanding of this phenomenon than anything else I can think of at the moment. The bees and the music can wait. If it is true, as it seems to be, that the human central nervous system can figure out how to go about creating a blister at a particular skin site, all on its own, or how to instruct its blood vessels, lymphocytes, and heaven knows what other participants in the tissues to eliminate a wart, then it is clear that the human nervous system has already evolved a vast distance beyond biomedical science. If I had a good wart I’d be happy to be a participant in this experiment, and I’ll be glad any day to try my brain on a blister, but my motive for doing so would be less than worthy. If it worked I would feel gratified by the skill, excessively vain, and ready to dine out forever on the news that my own mind is so much smarter than I am.
BASIC SCIENCE AND THE PENTAGON
Basic science can be defined in a number of ways, but it is generally agreed that a central feature of the endeavor, which distinguishes it from other kinds of scholarship, is the absence of any predictable, usable product. In biology it has been immensely productive despite this apparent restriction; the discovery of mechanisms in nature has sometimes led, indirectly and often inadvertently, to methods for intervening in the same mechanisms. The control of infectious disease is only one example of the process at work.
In the
last few years basic science has fallen on hard times in biology and medicine, even more so in physics and chemistry. Cosmology, perhaps the most basic of the sciences, is in the deepest trouble of all: the opportunities to pursue the exploration of our solar system, brilliantly begun, are being set aside because of the money shortage.
For the time being we seem to be stuck in a period of history when fundamental inquiry into matters of pure interest is being put off to the future. Most of what is going on in research today is aimed at clearly visible targets. It is applied science, intended to produce marketable products, capitalizing on the stores of basic knowledge that have accumulated thus far in a richly productive century.
I do not intend to quarrel here with this drift of things. If the nation has decided, through its elected leadership, to press ahead for practical applications and new technologies rather than to invest in pure inquiry for its own sake, I shall not argue here against that decision. I do not agree with it, I believe it to be unwise, but there it is. We live in a democracy.
But if that is to be the decision, I think it should be made fairly, cleanly, and unequivocally. This means that we should be scrutinizing all aspects of the national research effort in order to make sure that basic science as a whole is damped down. There should not be any exceptions.
Now, I will add to my definition of basic research in order to make clear the sort of science to be looked out for. It is not only the absence of a visible target and the lack of any imaginable product. It is the kind of research that depends on pure hunch, with nothing more than guesswork for the construction of the hypothesis to be tested. It is research carried out in an atmosphere of high uncertainty. The questions to be asked are in the nature of “What if?” questions, not the “How to?” questions that drive applied science along its even paths. It can be regarded as a dreamy sort of work, done by intelligent but highly impractical people, residents of an ivory tower, shielded from any contact with the realities of everyday human existence. Finally, it costs money, taxpayers’ money, sometimes in very large amounts.
I wish I could report that research of this kind was being uniformly restrained, in accord with the perceived national policy, with equity all around for all fields of science. It is not so.
There is one large exception, an anomaly so enormous that it makes the whole policy look ridiculous.
The country, without seeming to notice that it is doing so, persists in one single venture of absolutely pure basic research, more basic in terms of the definitions described above than any other piece of research ever tried in all history. Moreover, the amount of public money being expended runs into many billions of dollars, enough to sustain all other fields of basic science for generations ahead, including the wildest imaginings of the astronomers and astrophysicists. With that kind of money we could be building Scarsdales on Mars if we had a mind to. We could be gardening out in the galaxy. We could free ourselves, our animals, and all our vegetation from disease. We could solve our energy problems and learn how to clean up after ourselves on our own suburban planet. We could begin paying attention to all our children, everywhere on the globe, and their children still to come. We could even begin learning enough about each other to begin growing up as a species, liking each other, on the way to loving each other.
The huge exception, the field of basic science that has been overlooked in all the cutbacks of funds, the area of fundamental inquiry that nobody seems to have noticed, is research on thermonuclear weapons.
I claim that this has to be classified as basic science on every count. It conforms to every item in any definition.
There is, to begin with, no usable product. To be sure, there are all those missiles, tucked away in their silos or riding through the underseas, but who would call those things a product? Who intends to use them, ever, for any purpose? Not us, we say. Not the Russians, they say. Not the Europeans, surely.
Moreover, an immense scientific establishment exists worldwide, with no research intention other than to make more of them, bigger and better, with more accurate systems for aiming them and guiding them to create new suns at whatever small spot on earth they choose. Worse, the new research programs to be added on, now that these nonproducts are in hand, are designed to protect this or that small spot against the other side’s missiles. And underlying all the scientific questions is a deep, scientifically imponderable, central question. It is the paradigmatic “What if?” question of basic research: What if those things go off? Other imponderable questions: How do you protect a society against destruction if you have an almost-perfect antiballistic missile defense, one that will pick off with unfailing accuracy 950 out of 1000 missiles coming our way but will miss the other 50? Or if you have a system with unbelievable certainty, likely to miss only 10 of the 1000? What happens, then, when each missile is a ten- or twenty-megaton bomb, capable of vaporizing away whatever medium-sized city it happens to touch?
The present administration has no special fondness for the social and behavioral sciences, and the National Science Foundation is sharply reducing its funding—never generous at best—for these stepchildren of scholarship. Very well, the country will survive, and the disciplines of psychology, sociology, economics, and their siblings will have to eat grass until their time comes again. But the basic research enterprise involved in thermonuclear warfare contains a staggering array of behavioral research questions, the purest kind of social science, questions never before asked about human behavior, deep ambiguities approachable only in an atmosphere of almost total uncertainty. Should the country be providing the funding for these basic problems (I assume that the military must have the problems somewhere on its mind) if, at the same time, other fields in social science are to be put off? It is an unfairness, even a betrayal of principle.
But perhaps I am being unfair. Maybe these matters are not scheduled for study and do not exist in any line of the Pentagon budget. But then what? Who will be bringing in the data telling us what to expect when, say, five million of us vanish in twenty minutes and another five million are left behind with bone marrows burned out and skins in shreds, looking at what is left of the dead and waiting to die? Or, to magnify the problem to what will more likely be its true dimension, what will the few million survivors say to each other, or do to each other, at the moment when the other hundred millions are being transmuted back to the old interstellar dust? This, it seems to me, requires study, mandates study. Will no one be casting an anthropological eye at the dilemma to be faced when human beings cease being human?
The fundamental problem is the weaponry itself. Never mind the social sciences, for now. They can wait. If everyone agrees, as everyone seems to, that the weapons will never be let fly, never be used, never even be allowed out of the hatchways of their silos, and if, at the same time, everyone agrees, as everyone seems to agree, that they are indispensable not only for our security but for the security of the U.S.S.R. as well, then we are in the presence of a really great paradox.
Then there is the aspect of uncertainty, one of the rock-solid hallmarks for identifying basic science at its most basic. The problems raised by the mere existence of MIRVs, even more the questions raised by their presence in upper-space trajectories, are basic enough to pop the eyes. If they are flying over the North Pole, as they probably will, how good are the guidance data? Will the things wobble, yaw, shift course from Manhattan to the Sargasso Sea, to Yap, to wherever? Can we count on anything?
The dreamy, heavy-lidded, ivory-tower scientists at work on the weapons are also at work on nuclear defense, with all sorts of possibilities on their minds: laser beams to zap the intruding missiles while they are still safely aloft, anti-hydrogen-bomb hydrogen bombs, cities shielded by God knows what stealth armor, whole populations transported to safety under the hill, countries shielded by hope, by flags, by tears, by any old idea, by reassuring strings of words. Well, I claim this is basic research, and it should be stopped.
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nbsp; Or, if it is to be continued, and funded, I want in. As a citizen and a sometime scientist, I claim rights to a grant, part of the $200 billion or whatever it is. As it happens, I happen to have an idea, as good an idea as any of the thermonuclear notions I’ve heard about so far, worth a few billions. The United States now has around 300,000 American troops stationed in Europe, put there some years ago as a significant token of our determination to defend Europe. We assert, correctly I am sure, that if any nuclear bomb of any size down to the neatest, cleanest, most tactfully tactical “theater” bomb should ever be launched against those troops this country will surely let fly some of ours in return. We acknowledge, most of us, anyway, that that will lead to exchanges of the larger then still larger weapons, across the Atlantic, megaton after megaton, until everything is made dead.
