Big Science O-de-lay-e-hoo: A Rant for 1945-2005

When science is mentioned around here, it’s usually to defend it against those who would deny or pervert it. Those acts obviously have terrible consequences. But on the anniversary of Hiroshima, it ought to be noted that science has its own problems that have little to do with fundamentalists or the editing of inconvenient scientific findings in the White House.

Big Science, as Laurie Anderson sang about it, has much to answer for. Most science in this country is done either for the Pentagon or big corporations, and very little is done either in a disinterested search for knowledge or to directly benefit the public good.

Research scientists search for weapons-oriented breakthroughs, for genetically altered seeds that agribusiness can patent and use to replace natural ones, and formulas for pharmaceutical companies to patent that mimic the natural medicines that other companies will destroy with the defoliants their scientists devise.

It goes beyond scientific research to practice. The persons of science most people actually see are doctors, who in the U.S. are becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of managed care and pharmaceutical companies. Pharmacological companies pay an average of $13,000 in gifts and perks to each psychiatrist in the American Psychiatric Association, every year. Although pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than research, they dominate what research is done on the safety and effectiveness of the powerful drugs they sell at inflated prices. It’s no mystery why psychiatry is drug dependent, and no wonder that the main studies showing dangerous effects of antidepressants on adolescents and children were done in Italy and the UK.

These are problems that require political solutions, and more leadership and resistance by scientists. But there are others that require that science rethink not only its priorities but its conceptual framework.

Some scientists are doing just that. They recognize the benefits of reductionist science, of taking things apart and isolating the simplest cause and effect relationships. It has allowed science and technology to do many things. But they recognize the limitations that are fast becoming crucial.

Reductionism is science for the hand, for doing. Advanced physics and biology, some environmental and climate science, the working theories of chaos and complexity, all point to the limitations of a reductionist framework in understanding how life, the universe and everything actually work. Science has come up against the limits of reductionism. A better understanding of the interrelationships is needed, not only to continue scientific inquiry, but to know what to do and how to do it.

Because we are also coming up against other limits—our ability to sustain civilization with the kinds of energy we use, with the waste and pollution and damage we create. Because it absolves itself from the consequences it enables, science is also part of the problem. The fear of science, like the image of the mad scientist, is not all based on ignorance.

Reductionism thrives on the myth of value-free science. The value-free myth helped science advance when used as a bulwark against preconceptions based on various prejudices, primarily promulgated by viceroys of dominant religious organizations. “Look at the evidence”---that was the value-free cry. “Don’t look at doctrine. And don’t ask us about the purpose or the end product. We’re just trying to find out how things really are.”

This particular war between science and religious doctrines is never over, as everyone knows, and so Galileo morphs into Darwin, the Monkey Trial and Intelligent Design. That’s part of what keeps science and its supporters so defensive when anybody questioning anything about science or how it’s being done.

Science should not have to answer for how its appropriated and perversely misused. Darwin’s theory of evolution was used to support claims that robber barons were acting for the good of the species by exploiting the poor, that science was mocking religion and that everything humanity does is right because it’s all the progress of evolution.

Scientists don’t always know how their knowledge will be used. Even many inventors had no idea what their inventions would be used for. Thomas Edison thought that the phonograph would be great for preserving oratory. Alexander Graham Bell thought people would use the telephone to listen to opera from far away. Marconi believed he had invented a wireless telegraph, and the capability of his radio to broadcast sound was a nuisance and defect. When Louis Lumiere invented a prototype for motion pictures, the cinematograph, he believed it was “a scientific curiosity with no commercial possibilities.”

But if your science is designing weapons, you cannot be shocked and dismayed when your science kills people.

The truth is that science never was value-free. It mostly served the state, very often in researching and designing weapons and defenses. Later it served both states and corporations in dominating trade and looting distant lands and slaughtering their populations, with methods and technologies for navigation, transportation and of course, killing. Most advances in science and technology since the 19th century were accomplished for industry and war departments.

As for disinterested search for the truth, anyone who observes how science actually works knows that scientists often resist new theories, interpretations and even evidence, to protect their own reputations and turf. That may simply be human, but the holier than thou platitudes of scientists, obviously false, combined with a defensiveness bordering on paranoia against anything that even questions reductionist dogma, often has them attacking allies as enemies, making them even more vulnerable to those who truly threaten the foundations of science.

But the worst effect of Big Science and its hypocrisy is that it won’t take responsibility for its actions. The reductionist quest makes that possible, if reductionism is taken to be the whole of science---the only way to knowledge. Then science cuts itself off from the very world it is supposed to be revealing. It refuses to see that the interrelationships are as important than the parts, and that in context, they can be---as they are now---more important.

Big Science can be Big Science because it sees things only through a microscope. The microscope of reductionism and narrow expertise sees no world around it, and it does not see time. It does not, most crucially, see the future.

It does not take into consideration the future effects of its present actions. It does not look at the web of relationships that define life and reality.

This is at the heart of the terrible conflicts many of the Los Alamos scientists felt. They were excited by the work, and each small discovery. They cheered when the Bomb worked. But they knew that they cheered partly because they weren’t going to lose their jobs, or suffer a decline in reputation, because they’d spent millions of dollars on a dud. Instead they were going to be declared heroes and geniuses.

Many of the same scientists who cheered wildly when they heard about Hiroshima quickly signed a petition stating that the Bomb should never be used against people again. Many felt it was wrong to ever use it, especially after the threat many had signed up to counter---that Germany would get the Bomb---was gone before their first test.

But the military was paying for their research, was paying their salaries, and they left the decision of what to do with their science to their bosses.

My purpose here is not to get into an argument about whether dropping the Bomb on Hiroshima was justified or not. My purpose here is to say that this was a defining moment for science in our time. It showed that the detachment of scientists from the effects of their work could end human civilization, essentially in one bright afternoon.

Now we're seeing that the effects of all that science for the past two centuries is poisoning us, killing most of the higher life forms on the planet, and possibly sending a great deal of the planet into a state only a dinosaur might recognize, at least briefly.

But science itself since Hiroshima has found it necessary to look beyond reductionism and the value-free myth. Quantum physics alone has shattered the illusion of reality as mechanistic, whether that mechanism is likened to a clock, a telephone system or a computer.

Matter itself may be a series of relationships. The elements of the world that we know sustains us physically is certainly dependent on interrelationships. One of the most important is one of the simplest: what happens in the future depends in large part on what is done in the present. Science may need a new conceptual framework, a new definition of itself, so science acknowledges that interrelationships are vital, values them, and acts accordingly.

As part of the process of getting to that new framework, Big Science needs to examine itself, and then look around at what it has done and what it is not doing. And what it should be doing, right now, for the future, if there is to be any.