Genetic fix / by Amitai Etzioni.

  • Etzioni, Amitai.
Date:
1973
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Genetic fix / by Amitai Etzioni. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    34 GENETIC FIX As much as any citizen, in his citizen capacity, Austin inter¬ jected. No, I retorted. More so. No tools are neutral; it's like leaving long knives among small children and saying, 'Well, let them decide what to do with them.' The society has an immature mind, and is unable to digest complicated information and make complex decisions. The scientist, both because he has more information and because he causes the problem, has an extra responsibility. Would you agree, asked Prof. G. R. Fraser of the Department of Human Genetics, University of Leiden, Netherlands, that this is a matter of controlling technology—not science? Could not one curb the applications rather than basic research? I wish I could agree, I replied; and since I'm never able to answer succinctly, I continued: But unfortunately there are now many scientific findings that short-circuit technological steps. Thus, once the formula for LSD is published in a scientific journal, almost any student of chemistry can make it in his basement—wí/Zíomí any additional technological development. Similarly, I am told by my colleagues in physics, it will be possible in the foreseeable future to make A-bombs in high-school labs on the basis of published data. I went on. Even more important—and again I won't have the time to document this, but if I'm challenged, I will—it can be empirically demonstrated that the scientific process is not random. It's not true that as we conduct research at any one point we could make an unexpected tum and come up with a finding we never prepared for. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the findings are in the area we investigate. So when scientists work in astronomy, they come up with very few findings that are of great medical significance. And people who work in physiology are usually not very helpful when it comes to studying solar eclipses. Practically all findings are in the area of specialization. Now there are a few exceptions we can point to, but we should not try to make generalizations from the exceptions. That means that science is, in efi'ect, already guided by society. Decisions are made in committees about where to invest resources, in what areas to train new Ph.D.'s. Thus committees determine where most of the scientific energy will be directed. So science direction is not random to begin with. Therefore, to say in efi'ect, 'Why don't you worry more about the physiology of nutrition and less about the structure of crystals?' or in some other way help the scientific com-