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CORRESPONDENCE Come Down from Your Ivory Tower The question of why science has been receiving diminishing taxpayer support was raised in your July editorial. You indicated that military, religious, and cultural activities and “...sometimes the glorification of a monarch” all have achieved significant taxpayer support. The question then is why shouldn’t science. I think that the answer lies in the nature of science and scientists and in the public’s perception of both. Wars returned slaves, riches, and other tangibles. Religious fervor brought edifices and peace of mind; even the WPA generated frescos for the public to enjoy. And monarchs engendered fear. The question then is what does society perceive as the product of science. Certainly they don’t place much value on our journal articles. What they do see is the beauty of science filtered through the engineering and commercial process. Frequently the externalities that are generated in these “refinement” processes are perceived as outweighing the benefits. Thus, scientists are perceived not as those who generate knowledge and its beauty, but as those who generate a mysterious combination of potions and poisons, odors and disquiet. The fact that so much science is manifest in military applications has, I believe, upset many people. The difference between our ability to gain funding and that of the military and religious organizations seems to me to lie largely in the apolitical nature of scientists. Let me give you an example. One of the earliest conferences on genetic engineering, held at MIT, generated a good deal of student protest. During an intermission one of the women working in the field said to me “I don’t see what they are afruid of“. I tried to explain that they were afraid because they didn’t know what scientists were doing beyond tinkering with vital life processes. I suggested to the scientist that she and her colleagues really ought to take pains to tell the public what they were up to. Her comment was “Didn’t it ever occur to you that we do science because we don’t want anything to do with them. You tell them. You’re a journalist; that’s your job”. For whatever reason scientists, unlike Socrates, don’t seem very high on discoursing with the public in the marketplace. In that respect they are like artists who also have been known to starve while their work was gaining recognition. What then is the answer? Certainly one answer is for scientists and their organizations to undertake a more
serious public relations activity. Effective public relations is difficult and expensive, but as the saying goes, if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. We have made progress, of course. One cannot help but applaud the recent proliferation of popular periodicals that treat science. One of the major confusions, however, is the difference between science-the seeking after knowledge-and technology-its application. People are really rather neutral to science. They do not particularly love it, nor are they particularly afraid of it. It is technology that has that blessing and that curse. Unfortunately, the public and our politicians have never seemed to disentangle the concept of science qua science from the concept of technology qua technology. This then seems to me to be the dilemma. Science does not impinge directly on the public. It is not visible to them. Even if it were it would not be comprehensible to them. In those respects science suffers even more than do the fine arts, music, drama, and the other humanizing activities. The confusion began in the age of Sputnik when we were led to believe the Russians had more engineers than we had. Illogically we set about making more scientists. The public has thus been confused into thinking that science is technology and that science is, therefore, responsible for dioxin, bombs, and deformed babies. But one can’t help but recall Pogo’s classic comment “I have met the enemy and it is us”. It is not science that produces either the good or the bad that we sense, it is people in their roles as technologists, businessmen, politicians, consumers, and the like. Here I am reminded of what one of the Library of Congress’ researchers told me: “You see a lot more scientists than you do engineers in Washington. Scientists are dreamers so they’ll promise anything. Engineers promise only what they can deliver. Scientists are much like politicians”. This, then, is a plea for scientists to tell about what they do, tell it as it is, to claim only what they can claim, and to deny clearly those things that are unfairly blamed on them. We do hope that our professional societies will help in this, but individual scientists themselves really have to come down from their ivory towers if they expect to gain public support. B. J . Luberoff
Editor, CHEMTECH Summit, New Jersey 07901
OO1-4842184 /0117-0O50$01.50/0 0 1984 American Chemical Societv
