Also see the archival
list of the Essays on Science and Society.
ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY:
The Impact of Society on Science
Sydney
Brenner
Sydney Brenner After earning
his doctorate from Oxford in 1952, Sydney Brenner worked in the MRC
Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge until 1987, serving as
its director until 1992. During these years he collaborated in the
discovery of the triplet code messenger RNA, established the
importance of C. elegans in the analysis of complex
biological processes, and in the 1980s turned to the study of
vertebrate genomics. He is currently director of the Molecular
Science Institute in Berkeley, CA.
At 72 I am almost half the age of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science and belong to the
generation that made the 20th-century revolution in biology. We have
lived through a century of momentous changes, both in science and
society, and more is still to come.
In the grim days of the Cold War, with the threat of global
nuclear war hanging over us, who could have imagined that Communism
would undergo a total collapse, that the Soviet Union would
disintegrate, and that Russia would rapidly become a poor country
controlled by gangsters. Our world now has an immediacy of contact
never experienced before. Technology has brought all of humanity
together, and nearly everything can be watched live--war in the
Middle East, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and people dying of
starvation and disease in Africa. Whereas it once took days or weeks
for news to travel and a year for an influenza epidemic to spread,
news can now be transmitted instantaneously and a new virus can
spread all over the world in 24 hours.
All around I see evidence of the impact of science on society.
This is so obvious and so well known that little more remains to be
said about it. Science and the technologies it has spawned form the
basis of all human activity, from the houses that we live in, the
food that we eat, the cars that we drive, to the electronic gadgetry
in almost every home that we use to remain informed and entertained.
Yet, despite these technological innovations, the paradoxes that
I noticed when I was young are still with us: In advanced societies
an increasing proportion of national wealth is now spent on health
and recreation and large sums of money are devoted to military
enterprises, while in the underdeveloped world famine and pointless
wars still exact a terrible toll of human lives, malnutrition and
disease are still rife, and even the basic necessities of life such
as food and shelter cannot be provided for all. There is no doubt
that great advances could be made in the treatment of malaria and
other parasitic diseases that afflict more than half of the world's
population, but the people who have these diseases also have another
called MDD--money deficiency disease. There are many problems that
science and technology, by themselves, are unable to solve given the
economic structure of the world that we live in. So when we speak of
the impact of science on society we are speaking about the more
advanced countries, and when we speculate on the future, it usually
concerns the same areas of the world.
Following the advent of molecular biology
came the technologies and their applications. For many years it was
widely held that molecular biology was a completely useless subject,
a "fundamental" science of no interest to those working on practical
matters. Then suddenly it came to be viewed as dangerous, and
genetic engineering was considered an almost Satanic activity.
Biological scientists became suspect and trust in this science
diminished, as fantastical scenarios were played out to an
increasingly terrified public. Our times are characterized by a view
that we can accomplish everything in this generation, especially if
we can find and apply the right technology. Thus when a newspaper
journalist accused me of being one of the scientists who is going to
make people in a test tube, I had to reply that I could think of a
much more pleasant and cheaper way of making people than genetic
engineering. The fixation on technology gives us a slanted view of
human existence. For example, immortality may be a futile notion,
yet some believe that through the use of high technology it might
nevertheless be brought off.
The history of the last 25 years teaches us the profound lesson
that it is necessary for scientists to communicate to society at
large not only the content, use, and misuse of scientific
discoveries, but also what their work tells us about the intrinsic
limitations of our bodies and minds. This is not an easy task,
especially in a science whose content becomes more complicated every
day.
I do not know whether I want to speculate on what impact science
will have on society in the next 150 years. I wish I could say that
we will banish hunger and war, and I wish I could reassure readers
that we will still have a planet to live on. As everybody knows,
this does not depend on science alone but on economic forces and
political wills, something that scientists do not control.
However, there is another subject that is not often discussed in
this context: the impact of society on science, the inverse of the
general theme of this essay series. Much like the evidence for the
impact of science on society, the evidence for the impact of society
on science is all around for everyone to see, mainly in the form of
the large (but never sufficient) funding that science enjoys in the
more advanced countries. Society and its arm of action, government,
understands that science has developed powerful methods for solving
a large number of problems. What distinguishes science from all
other kinds of problem-solving activities is the demand that the
answers it discovers work in the real world. It is why rulers gave
up slaughtering animals to examine their entrails: Magic does not
exist in any world at all. However, in stimulating and supporting
science, society, as the paymaster, has taken a much shorter term
view of research than most scientists would like. There has been
much discussion about the different kinds of science. We call one
pure, another applied, and a possible third, strategic--it could
also be called "apploid"--that is pure but destined to become
applied. Then there is mission-directed as opposed to
curiosity-driven research, a distinction that I find particularly
obnoxious because one can almost see the word "idle" in front of
curiosity. Actually, the answer to the question of which type of
science to fund is quite simple: Since all science is problem
driven, it should be judged by the quality of the problems posed,
and the quality of the solutions provided.
Governments support research because its findings contribute
greatly to social ends such as the health and wealth of citizens,
causes that get politicians re-elected and for which people pay
taxes. Of course governments indulge in other activities that cost
much more than scientific research, and one can always find military
expenditures that could keep a lot of labs going for a long time.
The increased funding for scientific research in recent years,
especially in the health fields, has resulted in a great expansion
of the number of scientists and thus in increased competition for
academic and research funds. We have established an elaborate system
of peer reviews to deal with this competition, and a similar process
is in force for the publication of scientific results. All of this
has subtle consequences for the scientific enterprise. If you know
what sort of research is wanted by a committee you write your grant
to satisfy these expectations, and if you know what the oligarchy
believes is the correct view of a subject, you give your paper that
slant. Ironically, all of this was originally introduced to ensure
fairness and to eliminate the older system where powerful people got
all the money, appointed who they liked to their laboratories, and
published only papers written by their friends. Both the old feudal
system and the new bureaucracy have consequences for scientific
innovation; the former narrowed its pursuit to only a few, while the
latter discourages its pursuit by all. But there are also more
insidious effects because in most countries research and education
are now linked almost exclusively to universities: Postdocs learn
from professors, students learn from postdocs, and the art of
surviving is very quickly transmitted. It is only through the use of
subterfuge such as applying for money for work already done that
innovative research can be freely pursued.
We need to take these matters seriously, otherwise science will
lose the independence of thought required for innovation that it has
cherished for centuries. In my own subjects, genetics and molecular
biology, research has become so directed toward medical problems and
the needs of the pharmaceutical companies that most people do not
recognize that the most challenging intellectual problem of all
time, the reconstruction of our biological past, can now be tackled
with some hope of success. I hope it is not too much to ask that
rich societies provide more support for this and other fundamental
fields of biology. We need to assure the future of biological
research and prevent it from becoming stilted and boring. We can
only do this by attracting new young minds to our science and offer
them problems as challenging as those that excited my generation.
The author is at the Molecular Sciences Institute, Inc., 2168
Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704, USA.
