The world was not destroyed when the Large Hadron Particle Collider was started up in Switzerland this past summer — yet some scientists had feared otherwise. A lawsuit filed March 21st sought a restraining order to prohibit the start-up, said the New York Times, for fear it “could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which . . . could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a ‘strangelet’ that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump . . .”
I couldn’t help wondering whether the international scientific community had the right to jeopardize the planet for the sake of research, no matter how heavy the odds against a disaster occurring. While I’m deeply pro-science and do not share the paranoia about scientific experimentation communicated by both religious mythologies and popular culture, there are times I find worrisome the lack of informed, democratic, ethical discussion about the progress of humanity on the scientific front. There is a great deal of hoopla about what we can do with science to transform our world, but little discussion, outside the corporate boardroom, of what we should do with that power.
I recently discussed my concerns with Bernard Bulkin, retired chief scientist at British Petroleum (BP), a man with considerable experience in both the lab
and the boardroom. A key developer of BP’s clean fuels strategy, he now works as a consultant and investor in various green technology enterprises. Bernie (who is my cousin by marriage) is active in a Liberal Judaism congregation in London, where he has lived for decades.
Lawrence Bush: In a fascinating book, Golems Among Us, Byron L. Sherwin distinguishes between the golem legend of Jewish tradition and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story by noting that the golem is created by a wise human being, Rabbi Judah Loew, for the sake of the greater good (protecting the Jewish community), while the Frankenstein monster is created by a hubristic egotist bent on establishing his scientific immortality and proving his God-like powers. Sherwin points to a strong humanistic strain within Judaism that urges human beings to exercise our powers to the fullest — but also urges that those powers be restrained by “knowing when to stop. . . . When we choose Frankenstein over Judah Loew,” he writes, “. . . it is time to stop creating.”
Today it seems that the only sources of “knowing when to stop” for scientists are peer review and the pressures of the marketplace. Yet science stands at the threshold of major breakthroughs that mess around with the very fundamentals of creation. Should there be sources of moral and ethical guidance for science other than the marketplace?
Bernard Bulkin: I am going to make a distinction between science and technology. Science is very much about using a specific methodology, the scientific method, to broaden and deepen our understanding of every aspect of the universe, from the smallest and most fundamental to the biggest and most complex. It is constrained not only by peer review and peer pressure, but by the methods of science itself.
Of course, the ethical question of what we should do versus what we can do has been with science for a long time — and has often been framed in relation to religion. Galileo, Bruno, Kepler and others were pressured not to do their science because of conflicts with the Catholic Church. Darwin certainly wrestled with the religious consequences of his work, and his wife pressured him on this score. Anthropologists (to the extent we consider this a science) have faced many serious ethical questions about their physical evidence and cultural observations. And in the 20th century, the rapid development of quantum theory and the understanding of radioactivity and the fundamen-tal transformational properties of matter and energy led to many ethical questions.
Some would say that in at least a few of these examples, science made the wrong choice in moving forward. I would disagree. The science that was done changed our understanding of the world. I think it is possible to argue that real human progress in alleviating suffering has resulted from science-led society. Scientific progress has made us aspirational as a society — we can understand more and, through our understanding, improve our society.
All that is prologue to what you are really pushing as an issue.
Genetics is a part of science that has advanced enormously in the past fifty years. People of my generation were taught classical Mendelian principles of genetics, plus some idea that there was a connection between these principles and Darwin’s principles — and that was about it. Molecular-level genetics changed everything. We found we could understand at the most fundamental level how inheritable characteristics were passed from generation to generation, how characteristics were copied, and how mistakes occurred.
The technology for applying this science is, in part, directed at curing disease. But part is also directed to creating specific sorts of offspring — and to exploring the creation of completely new life forms. Is this a good thing? That’s a decision society has to make, but it is not about science. Similarly, during the early development of the science of thermodynamics it was recognized that this fundamental science had applications to making more efficient cannons. Society had no place regulating the development of thermodynamics, but it had a big role to play in deciding about the manufacture and use of cannons. By the way, different societies will make different decisions, because the societies we have created in different parts of the world have different ideas of what is ethical, desirable, and useful.
Bush: I agree that science has been the major tool that has taken us out of helplessness and vulnerability and made “the good life” possible. But human beings have not really developed the social and political tools to match our scientific maturity. Sophisticated genetic science, for example, may enable us to prevent inherited disease, but it may also lead to gender selection, which is already creating an unnatural gender gap in China — or to Pierre Cardin designer children in America! How do we weigh the right of scientists and corporations to pursue such applications against questions of the larger social good?
By way of another example, several years ago I read an article by a plastic surgeon suggesting that he could, within a decade, place functional wings on a human being’s back. We could fly without machinery. Such innovations would actually be illegal under present U.S. law, he said; apparently, there are real restrictions on what cosmetic surgeons are allowed to do. Now, I myself want people to be permitted to have wings — humanistic angels! — but then I think about how at least a third of the human race doesn’t have enough food or a safe place to live, and I think about a third of the human race flying while a third lies broken on the ground, and it feels to me that our species would be dividing into two, as in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. So I conclude, Fine, no wings until there’s more equity among human beings.
The question is, who should make that decision? Elected officials, who are subject to the popular fear of science and the pressures of fundamentalist preachers? Or the Boeing or United Airlines boardroom? What mechanisms would you like to see to guide the application of scientific prowess?
Bulkin: In principle, the only ethic for science is honesty. Propose theories, do experiments, test the statistical validity of the outcomes (science is often not about ‘finding out the truth’ as much as it is about establishing things to higher levels of statistical certainty). But like other things that are true ‘in principle,’ sometimes it is not so easy. Even the Ten Commandments have shades of gray.
When Einstein wrote to Roosevelt about the possibility of nuclear weapons, only a part of the science behind the project was completed. Oppenheimer, Teller, Von Neumann, Bethe, Feynman, and many others were scientists, not engineers, and while quite a bit of the work done there was about the practicality of making a nuclear weapon (and figuring out how to explode it without getting killed yourself), a lot of science was also done. This was the extreme case of scientific ethics put to the test. That the war was one of good versus evil was not in doubt. That science was put to work to create a weapon designed to kill on a massive scale is also not in doubt. Somehow, the overwhelming majority of people concluded that it was the right thing for science to do. Perhaps more controversially, the United States and England also realized that German scientists doing similar work were not war criminals. To me, this is a difficult but clear-cut example of society setting up an ethical standard for science.
Now let’s take another situation. The U.S. administration for the last eight years has attempted to impose its ethical standard on any science that does not suit its policy objectives. When climate scientists have produced work that the administration doesn’t like, their reports have been censored and altered and some scientists have been slandered as individuals. Government has been trying to set up controls on science, motivated not by the danger that science might get out of control, but by the fact that government’s own policy objectives fail to be supported by good science. To me that is the real danger, and I would want to be more mindful of how we ensure that the science can be published without interference than of how government (or another part of society) can regulate science.
Bush: So under some circumstances a democratic government can be an effective arbiter of what should and shouldn’t be done in science — or, at least, of what should and shouldn’t be implemented. But there are circumstances, as you note, when the government becomes biased. In the case of the Bush administration, fundamentalist Christianity has been permitted to interfere with scientific objectivity. There are also examples of governments with left-wing biases interfering with scientific research.
Religious ideologies aside, however, the U.S. government seems even more concerned with corporate profit margins than with the social good — in fact, it seems to conflate the two, as in the old motto, “What’s good for General Motors (or Halliburton) is good for America.” So when we leave it up to government to decide, aren’t we, in essence, leaving it up to corporate decision-makers?
Bulkin: I once saw BP’s chief executive, John Browne, after he had returned from a meeting with the head of Greenpeace. “I’ve just had a very interesting conversation,” he said to me. “He (the leader of Greenpeace) thinks that we are very powerful, and I told him that I don’t feel very powerful. Well, his logic was that government has given up more and more of its power as various things were privatized, and the power that they gave up must go somewhere, so I guess it went to us, the big corporations. Now, isn’t that an interesting idea, that there is a constant amount of power in the world, and if one entity has less, another must have more?”
Bush: I understand the chief exec of BP not feeling powerful, perhaps because no CEO really controls a large corporation — there aren’t enough hours in the day for anyone to exercise such control. Still, corporations certainly do make decisions about the implementation of science that affect millions of people — whether to pollute that river or not, whether to clone sheep en masse or not, whether to start up the Large Hadron Collider or not . . .
Bulkin: In my view, successful modern corporations operate, for the most part, based on the idea that what they are doing is an all-around good: good for employees (that is, safe, not endangering their health, providing them with income and fulfilling work), good for shareholders (many of whom are pension funds these days) by increasing capital and paying dividends, good for customers by providing them with products they want at a reasonable price, and good for the countries in which the corporation is operating (at the very least by paying taxes, and beyond that through other aspects of corporate responsibility).
Sometimes science challenges one or all of these goods. There is probably no more famous or pertinent example of this than DDT, the insecticide whose creator, Paul Muller, received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to human health. DDT saved millions of lives from
malaria, typhus, and even starvation due to insect destruction of food. Was not the company who produced it, Geigy, doing a great good for humankind? It was — but then Rachel Carson produced a synthesis of a large volume of scientific research that showed the negative consequences of DDT use. I well remember the outrage of the corporate chemical community against Rachel Carson in the early 1960s. The establishment, represented by the American Chemical Society, questioned everything about her methods and conclusions. But the establishment was wrong in refusing to believe in science that ‘attacked’ their business (and not just DDT, but the whole pesticides industry).
Yet the lesson was learned, at least in part. Some years later, when Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina brought forth their understanding of the role of chlorfluorocarbons (CFCs) in the destruction of the ozone layer, there were some howls from corporate producers about the consequences of replacing these useful chemicals, but they were muted compared to the DDT episode. Companies just got on with the phase-out of CFCs and the creation of replacements. There was a difference — Rowland and Molina were very respected members of the chemical research community, so the challenge to the establishment came from within, whereas Rachel Carson was very much an outsider, more an author than an active scientist.
The worst example of corporate denial of scientific reality was with tobacco. I don’t think the tobacco companies ever fooled themselves into thinking that their product was good for their customers. The epidemiological evidence against them was overwhelming, and they did not behave ethically in the face of that evidence. The price they have paid for that is high, though perhaps not high enough.
How do we allocate responsibility for behavior in the face of adverse scientific evidence between corporations and government? Personally, I opt for a model in which corporations are themselves fully accountable for knowing the science about their products and processes and for acting responsibly in the face of that knowledge. But most countries do not follow that model. Instead, their governments set up regulators and draw lines that companies must not cross.
Even under those circumstances, we see companies behaving in different ways. For example, when it comes to emissions to air, or water, or land, some companies say, We always obey the law. You tell us what is legal, and we will live within that, and if we don’t, you can punish us appropriately. Other companies take the view, We need to continuously reduce our emissions. The law sets the maximum we can emit, but we set our own corporate limits, which may be well below that. I would always be proud to work for a company in the latter group, but I can’t argue persuasively that the former approach is wrong.
The Large Hadron Collider is an exotic example of a problem faced by science over the decades, and it is addressed by what is known as the precautionary principle. There are many statements of this, but a good place to start is the one that was adopted at the Rio Conference in 1992: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
Another version of this was stated at a conference in Wisconsin, the Wingspread meeting, and goes as follows: “When an activity raises threats to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken, even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context, the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof (of the safety of the activity).” This latter version is interesting because it deals with the issue of shifting the burden of proof.
Bush: I am reminded of the Jewish principle of s’yag l’torah, placing a fence around the Torah, which mandates extra caution about violating commandments. The origin of this principle is a text about preserving life by placing parapets on rooftops. So there is a fundamental Jewish ‘precautionary principle.’
Bulkin: I support strong application of the precautionary principle. However — and this is a big however — there are people who raise issues in our society for reasons that have nothing to do with damage to the environment or to health (of humans, animals, or plants); rather they are raising them to call attention to themselves, or to support a political or religious agenda. Often these stand out because at their root there is a fallacious syllogism, but not always. So the application of the precautionary principle to new activities is not so straightforward. Ultimately someone has to make judgments, and these are not easy.
Bush: There’s a certain fear in the Jewish tradition about human arrogance colliding with the precautionary principle. One legend, for example, portrays the generation of Enosh, a grandson of Adam and Eve, building a golem, and it comes to life thanks to the machinations of Satan, who causes the humans to think that they have the power to bestow life. Entranced by their ‘power,’ they start exploiting the planet and building idols that are four thou-
sand miles tall. As a result of their tampering, the legend goes, humanity suffers an enormous flood. Sounds a bit like modern America!
Bulkin: Enough with golems, don’t you think?
Bush: Fair enough. Butis there, in fact, any content to your Jewish identity that informs your thinking about social responsibility as a scientist?
Bulkin: I now spend most of my scientific time working on environmental issues, and we often talk about such issues in my Jewish community. There is a lot about the environment in Torah, and much more in the writings that came after. Social action is a cornerstone of our religious practice, as is trying to set our religious practice in modern society. So I am very conscious that what I do scientifically is supported by what I do religiously, and vice versa (though less so).
At another level, we can make a useful separation of science and religion. The late Stephen Jay Gould, who was my high school classmate, probably put this best when he wrote: “The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: What is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry. To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.”
For a secular Jew, of course, “how to go to heaven” is not a concern, and essentially reduces religion to fantasy. My goal is not to dismiss religion that way, but to cultivate it as a humanistic enterprise, concerned more with “how to create heaven on earth” -— including how to cultivate ethical discussion about scientific innovation! 
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