Why We Fight - For Science

A couple of nights ago, on the edge of the meadow at Piedmont Park, over a convivial dinner that included an appropriate amount of beer and wine, the conversation turned to science - more precisely to how to promote interest in science to the public at large. What, in conventional circles, would have been an unusual dinner-time topic, was an unexceptional one with this group, since we were members of the Atlanta Science Tavern, and we are given to talk about science every chance we get.

Enamored with science. but, somewhat blinded by our adoration, we are sometimes puzzled that others don't share our enthusiasm for the object of our affection. So, when we get together, we often wonder, "how can we encourage our friends to better support and appreciate science?"

A common answer to this question begins with a recitation of the connections between important developments in the history of science and the benefits that have accrued to modern society as a result: the double helix of DNA and cancer-fighting medical diagnosis; quantum physics and high-performance computer chips; genetic engineering and increases in agricultural productivity; Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic waves and near-instantaneous global communications; Newton's orbital mechanics and hurricane tracking. The list goes on and on. It is extraordinarily convincing.

[So as not to whitewash the matter, I readily acknowledge that science has been implicated in its share of failures and catastrophes. On balance, I believe that science comes out ahead in the cost-benefit tally, but some, notably Theodore Kaczynski - better known as the Unabomber - have constructed serious arguments to the contrary. Should, for example, the most dire predictions for global warming be borne out, Ted may well be proven right for his skepticism about technology being an unequivocal force for good, although he should never be excused for the psychotic tactics he used in trying to disrupt its advance.]

Although this kind of utilitarian argument for science is persuasive, I find it, in some respects, disingenuous and, in others, incomplete. It is less than forthright in that it fosters a misconception about why people undertake scientific careers. No doubt there are those who do so motivated primarily by their interest in benefiting mankind, but, in my experience, scientists are, more often than not, driven by an unabashedly self-centered desire to better understand the world in which they live. Public service, although a welcome side effect, is not preeminent among their personal goals. In addition, although arguing for science based on its practical applications may be the strongest hand we have to play in general, the fact of the matter is that many significant fields of scientific research have no chance of bearing technological fruit.



On the morning of the day of the informal Science Tavern dinner the New York Times had published a front-page article announcing the successful reconstruction of a skeleton nicknamed Ardi, the fossil remains of 4.4 million-year-old hominid, and a member of a likely bipedal species which may turn out to be a direct ancestor of our own. To say the least, it would be quite a stretch to come up with a justification for supporting such a masterwork in paleoanthropology based on its potential contribution to our practical technological progress.



I am no stranger, personally, to the rather quixotic pursuits that are part and parcel of basic research. As a graduate student in the late 1970s I worked with a group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) studying neutrino interactions. Neutrinos are subatomic particles notorious for having little or nothing to do with the real world. Cruising at near the speed of light, they would hardly notice planets placed in their path; the Greta Garbo of elementary particles, after all is said and done, they want to be alone. Consequently, they are seldom considered to be of much practical use, although a once-secret patent was issued for the far-fetched scheme of employing neutrinos to communicate with deep-ocean submarines. Why would anyone pay to study them?

Likewise, what is true about neutrino research in particular is true about the enterprise of elementary particle physics more generally; outside the realm of speculative science-fiction, it is hard to imagine how the knowledge revealed in the course of these investigations into the fundamental structure of matter could lead to anything of practical value. But the value, practical or not, of such basic research is a question we cannot avoid. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a Europe-based successor to the accelerator at Fermilab, and the most ambitious instrument yet devised to advance our understanding of the submicroscopic workings of the universe, is scheduled to begin full-fledged operation within a year, at a cost of almost $6 billion. How do we begin to justify such an extravagant expense, given that there is no reasonable prospect of deriving practical benefits from the results that the experiments that will be performed there will produce?

A very similar question had been posed to post-war American researchers, during an era when that country, which had placed a high-stakes wager on the success of the Manhattan Project and had won, was eager to fund the research efforts of the generation of scientists who had participated in the development of the atomic bomb. Robert R. Wilson was not only one of the best of that wartime cohort of physicists, he was also a sculptor, an architect, and the driving force behind the development and construction of Fermilab, as well as its director for a number years, including the brief period that I worked there.

In 1969 Wilson was called before a joint congressional committee on atomic energy to give an accounting as to why the public should continue funding the building of his giant proton accelerator, which, when completed, would measure almost 4 miles in circumference and cost over $250 million, at a time, it should be recalled, when $250 million was a significant line-item in the federal budget.

It was the height of the cold war, and any relationship to military purposes could have been offered by Wilson as an explanation and would have been accepted on the spot. But Wilson, who had been deeply affected by the regret he felt for his work on the atomic bomb and had distanced himself from the defense establishment as a result, did not take this easy way out. Instead, declining to use "national security" as a justification, he said this of his Fermilab project:

It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

Promoting public appreciation of science in this way is much more challenging than appealing to concrete interests based on the expectations of advances, for example, in nutrition or healthcare or transportation or power production or consumer electronics or, in Wilson's case, national defense. But the fact of the matter is that it is the only honest way to argue for public support for many areas of basic research, and often more accurately reflects the motives of those engaged in scientific endeavors. In addition, it serves to reframe the debate about what genuinely constitutes the public interest and expands the conventional definition beyond concrete practical concerns. Ultimately the triumph of our civilization is not only the elevation of our comfort and our security, but also of our culture.

The Movie "Moon" and the Morality of the Scapegoat Bargain

[If] the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which [proposed] utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far‑off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? - William James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life

In his 1891 address before the Yale Philosophical Club William James pondered the origins of our "moral perceptions" and concluded that some are likely "brain-born" and that their violation elicits an autonomic sense of revulsion in us. He uses as an illustration the scheme above in which one "certain lost soul" is forced to suffer so that, somehow, the rest of humanity might live lives of unimagined happiness.

Of course the notion of the scapegoat, traditionally one punished to purchase the redemption of a community of believers, was not new with James. The scapegoat ritual described in Leviticus has been our prototype for centuries, but the practice of animal and human sacrifice in any one of a number of ancient cultures could serve just as well as an example. What James has done in his taut rendition is to both universalize the scapegoat bargain and simultaneously magnify its moral dimension. The benefits are not restricted to the members of a particular religious group, but extend to all mankind. And the price paid by the victim is not a quick and certain death but a life of unending torture.

James was not the first modern writer to confront the essential moral questions raised by the scapegoat bargain. In his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, published 10 years before James's Yale address, Fyodor Dostoyevsky explores a similar arrangement in a passage concerning the parable of the Grand Inquisitor.

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature ... and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?

Almost one hundred years later, Ursula K. Le Guin, first crediting James and later acknowledging Dostoyevsky as a likely influence, published her short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, in which she explores the same moral dilemma within the confines of a small universe of her own devising.*

Although these ancient and contemporary conceptions of the scapegoat bargain differ in many respects, they are similar in that they are all metaphysical in nature. In other words, there is no physical mechanism that connects the suffering of the selected victim with the benefits others derive. In the Old Testament the connection is presumed to originate as part of the covenant between God and his chosen people. In Karamazov it emerges, by fiat, from the very "fabric of human destiny".

Nonetheless, the question could be posed: Might it be possible to reformulate this metaphysical arrangement in plausibly realistic terms? With his science fiction film, Moon, writer-director Duncan Jones has done just this.

The utopia of the near-future world that Jones imagines in Moon is, unlike its 19th-century forerunners, not one predicated on the possibility of human moral perfectibility. Instead it is founded concretely upon the availability of an inexhaustible source of clean energy, an isotope of the element helium, He3, which is used to fuel thermonuclear reactors across the face of the globe. In Moon, limitless, inexpensive, carbon-free electrical power has, it appears, eliminated the contention for resources that has historically been the root of human conflict and, in turn, ushered in a golden age of plenty, for rich and poor nations alike.

Troubling moral complications arise in this brave new energy-rich world because, it turns out, precious He3 must be scraped from the surface of the far-side of the Moon - James's "far-off edge of things" - by means of a vast mining operation which, in spite of advances in technology, is not entirely automated. This exquisitely engineered, thoroughly computerized He3 factory has one flaw, and that flaw is that it requires the services of a single human being to keep the extraction bulldozers running smoothly and thus insure an uninterrupted flow of utopia-sustaining fuel to planet Earth, a quarter of a million miles away.

For Moon this lone individual - James's "certain lost soul" - is astronaut Sam Bell, who, when he is introduced to us, is desperate to soon conclude his 3-year tour of duty on this lonely lunar outpost. At first glance Sam, dispirited and disheveled, strikes us more like a beaten-down refugee than a right-stuff-bearing spaceman. Separation from his wife and young daughter, not to mention utter isolation from other members of his species has taken an enormous emotional toll on Sam. We pause to wonder how any "modern" corporation could be so morally bankrupt as to contract for the kind of labor that would result, inevitably, in such severe psychological decline. Little do we know that the crimes inflicted by his employer on Sam - and, shall we say, others very much like him - are far worse than we even dare to imagine.

As the startling moral transgressions that underlie the scapegoat bargain in Moon are revealed, we come to appreciate how masterfully Jones and screenwriter Nathan Parker have taken the metaphysical problem outlined by James and Dostoyevsky and created a convincingly naturalist realization. Not only does Moon succeed in its own right - as a character study and as a suspense-thriller - it also succeeds as an exemplary work of science fiction in that it grabs hold of a profound, but abstract, philosophical question and recasts it as a flesh-and-blood human tale, brought to life by plausible speculation that ventures just beyond the limits defined by our current scientific capabilities.

* See this blog post, The Scapegoat in Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ursula K. Le Guin, and William James?, by Horace Jeffery Hodges for an insightful discussion of the treatments by these three authors.

Is "Flat" Science "Real" Science?

In his informative - and entertaining - talk at the May meeting of the Atlanta Science Tavern, entitled Artificial evolution: a guide for hobbyists, Ichiro Matsumura, Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Emory University School of Medicine, began by reviewing the historical patterns of general scientific progress and proceeded to focus on his research efforts which attempt to explain how complex biochemical pathways of cells originate and adapt. He concluded his presentation by discussing the emerging community of unorthodox "scientists", well outside the academic and corporate mainstream, who are pursuing experiments similar to his own, but in kitchens and basements, far removed from the luster - and expense - of state-of-the-art university laboratories.

So, in some ways Ichiro's talk was a presentation of his recent discoveries about how complex cellular processes evolve, but in other ways it was a call for science to return, at least in part, to its table-top roots. Apparently, these days an amateur with a few hundred dollars and kitchen counter space to spare can purchase the materials and equipment necessary and, in short order, alter the genetic makeup of commonly available bacteria. For Ichiro this represents a "flattening" of the scientific enterprise, a welcome alternative to the "hierarchical" restrictions of conventional science that require not only professional credentials, but large sums of money, often acquired only after running the exhausting grant application gauntlet of established funding agencies.

I share Ichiro's excitement for the opportunity that these low-cost-of-entry home laboratories have created for more people to become involved in science-oriented hobbies. Like him, I think that, within the constraints demanded by public safety, this kind of experimentation should be encouraged. Also, like Ichiro, I believe that the spread of these do-it-yourself labs is inevitable. With increasing economies of scale, the costs will only drop and, with Internet resources, the essential technical information will only become more available. The genie is out of the bottle, as they say.

Where I believe I disagree with Ichiro has to do with whether this new field of DIY genetic engineering, "flat" as it is, constitutes "real" science and whether the hierarchy problem of modern science is, in some fundamental way, avoidable.

Now, although I am not prepared here to define science in any comprehensive sense, I do think that a case can be made that hobbyism, for lack of a better word, is not science. Another way of stating my position is to say, "a laboratory does not a scientist make." By making this distinction I do not intend to demean hobbyists or, conversely, to put scientists on a pedestal, but to point out what I believe is a critical feature of the scientific enterprise, and that is the obligation to communicate the details and results of one's investigations so that they can be subjected to public scrutiny and, where appropriate, correction, and so that they may also serve as a basis for further investigation.

Consider, for historical comparison, the too-much-maligned alchemists of the middle-ages. They were hobbyists extraordinaire and, in a very real sense the proto-scientists who laid the groundwork for the science of experimental chemistry that was to follow. I doubt that they lacked the brains or the temperament to be real scientists. What I do think that they lacked, in particular, were a reliable postal system and other ready means to publicize the results of their laboratory work.

The advent of the printing press and of the establishment of a network of roads and public services that made possible the routine delivery of mail over long distances addressed these deficiencies, to some extent. But these innovations were not in themselves sufficient to transform hobbyism into the science that we know today. For this to happen, "natural philosophers" who were involved in the publication of books and the exchange of letters had also to form organizations to distribute and discuss the results of their scientific investigations. In this regard, one could argue that the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 marked the beginning of what we would call modern science. It also likely marked the beginning of the kind of hierarchy problem for science that Ichiro referred to in his talk (not to be confused with the hierarchy problem that besets physics today.)

I imagine that in the 17th century the number of reports and opinions about scientific matters - even concerning a relatively specialized area of research - far exceeded what any individual could consistently review. In a world awash in scientific findings how does one begin to decide whom to trust without resorting to expert opinion? Although our democratic inclinations tend to imbue us with a reflexive disdain for "elites", we have no choice other than to rely on people whose experience and judgment are widely recognized. Once experts are designated, either, in the 17th century, as celebrated fellows of the Royal Society, or, today, as the anonymous peers who enact the review process characteristic of the contemporary funding and publication of science, a hierarchy is created.

Of course such stratification of scientific authority is not without its perils. It brings to mind the age-old conundrum, captured by the Roman poet Juvenal with the query, "who will guard the guards themselves?" A delicate - and unavoidable - balance must be maintained between what, on one extreme, would result in lifeless orthodoxy and, on the other, in intellectual chaos. This is, in some sense, the sociological challenge of modern science, to effectively filter the vast amount of new information that is generated while not censoring well-considered novel contributions that threaten the established order. It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it.

So, once again, let's hear it for those folks who are enthusiastically working away in their at-home laboratories modifying bacterial genes. Like the alchemists before them, they are involved in a personal process of discovering fascinating new things about the nature of the world. But, until their private investigations become public ones and they engage in the kind of dialog that leads to the dissemination and review of their discoveries, they will remain hobbyists, not scientists. And, like it or not, when they choose to cross the divide which demands that they publish their findings and subject them to the criticism of their peers, gatekeepers will, of necessity, arise to manage the, otherwise, overwhelming flow of information. The problem of hierarchy will be born anew. There's no way around it.