It is at first sight curious how concerned people are about genetic engineering, which has so far damaged no one. By contrast, smoking, AIDS, drugs and alcohol have caused massive damage to children in utero. Perhaps a clue to this attitude lies, again, in the unnatural nature of science. It stems from the fear of the unknown – of processes, words, techniques that people do not understand. Compare attitudes to genetic engineering with those to euthanasia. Both have ethical aspects and are of public concern, but no one links the euthanasia debate with science, and the reason is that it involves no complex science or technology which they do not understand. It is worth remembering the tremendous hostility there was to vaccination in the last century; it was only when the public had sufficient understanding of it that it became accepted and became part of ‘common sense’. A strong case can be made for trying to make people ‘DNA-literate’ so that they can appreciate the issues associated with genetic engineering; only then may many of the misplaced fears disappear.
There is, for example, considerable anxiety about the human genome project – a project which aims to map all human genes on the chromosome and even to determine the nature, and ultimately the function, of every gene. Many are frightened by the detailed information about human make-up that this project will provide. It will certainly provide improved means for the early detection of genetic ‘abnormalities’ such as a predisposition to cancer or heart disease or mental ill-health, and this could be used by employers or insurance companies in antisocial ways. But, against this, it must be understood that the genetics of such disabilities is already being worked out by classical techniques, and surely it is better to have the possibility of the individual knowing about any problems early on, rather than waiting for the disease or abnormality to become evident. The human genome project would provide an early indication of genetic characters by enabling an early examination of the DNA, rather than waiting until the effect is expressed. For example, Huntington’s Chorea is a tragic and incurable neurological disturbance which affects men in their fifties. Its genetics is well understood, and an examination of the DNA of an individual who is at risk can now show whether he will be affected or not. This might seem to pose a major ethical issue: should people be tested and be told the result, particularly if it is positive, knowing that nothing can be done. But that is the wrong way to look at the problem: rather, one should ask what people who might develop the disease actually want. The results are unequivocal: they prefer to know and have the test done.
I am not trying to suggest that genetic engineering does not raise any difficult issues, but I am suggesting that most of the problems are ones that have been met before. For example, the problem of knowledge of potential disposition to an illness is important in relation to insurance companies. But insurance companies already have to face this problem in relation to other illnesses, such as AIDS and smoking. There is a quite different set of problems with respect to safety when genetically engineered organisms are released into the environment, but safety issues with respect to the environment are hardly new. One should not muddy one’s appreciation of these problems because of ignorance about genetics or a primitive fear of mythical chimeric animals. What is essential is openness and public debate.
These are issues not for the scientist but for the public at large. For the scientist who has special access to knowledge about genetics, for example, the issue is whether the genes will bring about the hoped-for changes and what dangers there might be. Even for the introduction of genes into human cells, it is not for the scientists or the doctors to decide on the wisdom or otherwise of such procedures: the obligation of the scientist and the doctor is simply to spell out the procedures’ implications.
It is not for scientists to take moral or ethical decisions on their own: they have neither the right nor any special skills in this area. There is, in fact, a grave danger in asking scientists to be more socially responsible – the history of eugenics alone illustrates at least some of the dangers. Asking scientists to be socially responsible, other than by being cautious in areas where there are social implications, would implicitly be to give power to a group who are neither trained nor competent to exert it.
Scientists will undoubtedly be faced with difficult social and ethical problems in areas as diverse as nuclear power, ecology, clinical trials and research on human embryos. In each case their obligation, in addition to those responsibilities of every citizen, is to inform the public and to be open. For example, the issues relating to research on human embryos are complex, and biologists have much to contribute to issues such as at what stage the developing embryo can be regarded as an individual. But there are many other issues outside their specific area of competence, including consideration of the rights of the foetus and whether it is ethically permissible to use a patient to do research without that person’s permission.
To those who doubt whether the public or the politicians are capable of taking the correct decisions, I would commend the words of Thomas Jefferson: ‘I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.’ When the public are gene-literate, the problems of genetic engineering will seem no different in principle from those like euthanasia and abortion which are not obfuscated by an alienating scientific ignorance.
With significant exceptions, I believe that the scientific community has, on the whole, behaved responsibly with respect to the public. It would be a great error if sole responsibility for ethical decisions were given to scientists or if they were to assume it, for these are decisions that belong to the public as a whole – decisions that are essentially social and political. No one would expect scientists to be responsible for deciding whether abortion should be legal or not, though scientific information would be vital. The decisions ultimately have to be made by our elected representatives, informed by the best available scientific knowledge.
It is important to remember that, as the French poet Paul Valéry said, ‘We enter the future backwards.’ Scientists cannot know all the technical or social implications of their work. There was no way that those who were investigating the peculiar behaviour of certain bacteria with respect to the bacterial virus that infected them could know that they would discover restriction enzymes which cut DNA at specific sites and which are now fundamental to genetic engineering. Today’s moonshine is tomorrow’s technology, and it is with technology and politics that the real responsibility lies. Even so, one must guard against taking scientific ideas as dogma and treating science as infallible.
9
Science and the Public
If science is so unnatural and leads to misunderstandings about science and even hostility towards it by some of the public, what can be done? The question is important, because science provides the best way of understanding the world. The achievements of unifying the laws of physics and of synthesizing new chemicals are breathtaking, and there is every reason to believe that the future achievements in biology will be equally impressive. Yet the misunderstandings remain, even though making one’s work accessible to the public is at last becoming acceptable within the scientific community. No longer is such ‘popularization’ treated by scientists with contempt and suspicion, as if it were a vulgar activity. The hope is, of course, that if the public understand science better they will be in a better position to understand its role in current life and will be better able to make informed decisions on issues relating to the environment, genetic engineering, nuclear power and many other concerns. Also, it is felt that if the public have an improved understanding of science they will have a more sympathetic attitude towards it. However, attempts at ‘popularization’ perhaps failed to emphasize two important features of science: what science cannot do, the problems that cannot be solved by science, and, of course, its unnatural nature.
When Vaclav Havel, quoted in the Int
roduction, talks about science being the sole legitimate arbiter of all relevant truth, he does both science and truth a disservice. He has also forgotten Tolstoy’s correct claim that science does not tell us how to live: that it has nothing to contribute on moral issues. It is the politicians, lawyers, philosophers and finally all citizens who have to decide what sort of society we will live in. It is necessary constantly to remind Havel, and the many like him, that knowledge is not the same as its applications. To blame science for the bomb or for industrial pollution is to fail to realize that the decisions involved are political and economic, and not just about scientific understanding, and so is unfair. To blame science may be convenient, but it is wasted effort.
It is true that science might have killed God for some people, but many scientists are filled with religion, and the capacity for mystical belief still seems very large for many people. One need only look at the extraordinary popularity of astrology for evidence of this. Scientific knowledge and method may be uncomfortable, but such discomfort is surely better than ignorance. And, while it can in no way tell us how to live, science may help us achieve specific aims once these have been chosen. Science could be used to alleviate genetic diseases by genetic engineering if society as a whole finds it acceptable. If not, then, like euthanasia, it can be banned. These are decisions which everyone must help take: certainly it would be a great folly to entrust decisions about how to use science to scientists or any other group of experts.
It is not just moral and political issues for which science may be unable to provide solutions: science may not be able to provide solutions to all technical problems. Indeed, it is not really possible to predict what science will produce in the future – it is not possible to predict radical innovations. While one may be able to predict inventions based on current knowledge, such as a cure for cancer based on current technologies, we have no idea what future scientific advances will bring; that is of the very nature of scientific advance.
Dostoevsky feared that science could predict the future:
Therefore all there is left to do is to discover these laws and man will no longer be responsible for his acts. Life will be really easy for him then. All human acts will be listed on something like logarithm tables, say up to 108,000 and transferred to a timetable … They will carry detailed calculations and exact forecasts of everything to come, and so no adventure and no action will remain.
This fear is quite without foundation. Science tries to understand how the diversity of the physical and natural world can be explained by a limited number of laws. The phenomena to be explained are much more complex than the laws themselves. Newton’s laws of motion, for example, are quite simple compared to the enormous variety of motions they can account for. It is important to realize that knowing the laws does not mean that the behaviour of the system can be described. For example, one can write down the equations of motion of three bodies which attract each other with a gravitational force, but to solve these equations so that one can actually have a description of their motion is enormously difficult, and has yet to be achieved.
To take another example, predicting global climate change is very difficult and at present far from reliable. The system is enormously complex and the models give no more than quite crude approximations. Much more basic research is required. Confident detailed predictions should be treated with caution.
Just how difficult it can be to predict the future behaviour of some systems, such as the weather, has become clear from recent studies on chaos. The basic idea is that some systems are so sensitive to the smallest of perturbations that the beat of a butterfly’s wings in an English garden could lead to a hurricane in some distant part of the world. Another example which illustrates some of the problems of predictability is provided by the effect of a single electron at the end of the universe.
Consider a box containing molecules of a simple gas. Say I were to tell you the position and velocity of every one of these molecules, exactly. Using simple mechanics, you could then work out the future behaviour of the system, again exactly, as the molecules bump into one another and the walls of the box. Now introduce a small degree of uncertainty, such as a force originating outside the box and acting on the molecules. The force can be very small, say one single electron. To minimize the effect, we can put this electron a very long way away – at the end of the universe. The only uncertainty is where it is placed. The effect of this uncertain force on the behaviour of our molecules is that in less than fifty collisions for each molecule our predictions become totally wrong. Predictability lasts for less than one-millionth of a second. This clearly shows that causality is present in such systems but that detailed predictability is impossible.
Even in cases where all the facts are known, it still may not be possible to make a logical scientific choice between various possibilities. It is quite easy for a group of people to agree to choose between alternatives: a simple majority vote is the obvious way. But what if there are three or more possibilities? One might think that if everyone ranks their choice then it would easily be possible to select the most favoured choice. Consider eleven people with choices A, B, C, who order their preferences. Suppose four prefer ABC, five prefer BCA, two prefer CAB. As can be seen, A beats B (six to five) B beats C (nine to two) and C beats A (seven to four). Thus A beats B beats C beats A. And so this method can lead to a contradiction and cannot be used. In more general terms this is known as Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem in economics, which says that there may be no rational solution for distributing resources among people or groups with conflicting demands. This has important implications, for it means that even when we have total information we cannot solve an important problem. So, while science can help define the problems in allocating resources in the health services, say, there need be no unique solution and compromises may have to be made.
The same is true for moral and political problems: there is no way of achieving all the desirable virtues of a ‘perfect’ society. For example, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin makes this clear in relation to the ideal of freedom:
One freedom may abort another; one freedom may obstruct or fail to create conditions which make other freedoms, or a larger degree of freedom, or freedom for more persons, possible; … the freedom of the individual or the group may not be fully compatible with a full degree of participation in a common life, with its demands for cooperation, solidarity, fraternity. But beyond all these there is an acuter issue: the paramount need to satisfy the claims of other no less ultimate values: justice, happiness, love, the realization of capacities to create new things and experiences and ideas, the discovery of truth.
We must resist being seduced by science into thinking that all problems will yield to its approach. They may, in the future. But at present our understanding of such complex systems as human behaviour and society as a whole is so limited that knowledge in these fields is barely at the stage of a primitive science. Marxism should serve as a reminder as to how dangerous ‘scientific’ claims to understanding social processes can be. Economic predictions, too, are remarkably unreliable. And this presents a real problem, for, as the economist Robert Heillbroner has pointed out, ‘The human psyche can tolerate a great deal of prospective misery, but it cannot bear the thought that the future is beyond all power of anticipation.’
Science is wrongly perceived to be homogeneous. The anonymity of scientists, as presented by the media, has helped to contribute to the idea that scientists know everything in science – that biologists, for example, will have a good understanding of physics, and vice versa. But in fact science is quite difficult even for scientists. Physicists may have little understanding of even the basic ideas of cell biology, and biologists, on the whole, are out of their depth with much of modern physics. Even mathematicians would have to work for many months in order to understand work in a different area. And that is what makes scientists different: they feel confident that, given the effort and time, they could understand most other areas of science, if
not in detail then at least in general principles. Non-scientists do not in general have this confidence, nor do they have any familiarity with scientific thinking. For example, only about 5 per cent of Americans have been found to be reasonably scientifically literate, even though about half the bills before Congress involve either science or technology.
This general lack of familiarity with scientific thinking is very clear in relation to the experience of illness, where the implications are highly relevant. Patients suffer an illness whereas doctors treat a disease – the gap between these perceptual frameworks can be big. People who are ill have an overwhelming need to make sense of their personal misfortune. Cancer patients often ascribe their condition to fate, and this may be scientifically quite close to the truth, since cancer is due to the accumulation in a single cell of a number of rare events. But fate is not seen like that, but rather as some higher power controlling our destiny. Stress and diet are widely seen as sole causes of illness, since, after all, these are the variables everyone is familiar with in their daily life. However, much current thinking about disease is in cellular and molecular terms, so explanations to a patient are very difficult. For most people, even the distinction between infections due to viruses (which are not free-living but must enter cells) and bacteria (which are cells) is poorly grasped.
There is no easy road to understanding science, the more so because there is no formula for scientific method. The best and probably the only way to understand science is to do scientific research, but that clearly is not an option to improve public understanding. However, it may well be that science education should take into account the unnatural nature of the subject. Instead of teaching science only as a rigorous, self-contained subject, it may be beneficial to compare common-sense ideas about the world with scientific views. Studies (Chapter 1) already show that children do better at science if they acquire some understanding of independent variables, for example. But perhaps that is not enough. They need to appreciate just how different scientific thinking is and how much more natural were Aristotle’s ideas as compared to those of Galileo and Newton.
The Unnatural Nature of Science Page 21
