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E DIT O R I A L
Contributing to Society-I1 ver the past several years, scientists and engineers have been called upon with great regularity to become socially conscious, to bend their talents to the solution of society-wide problems such as urban blight, poverty, pollution, and transportation. At the same time, these voices call upon us to enter the political arena, adding our technical judgment to the political and social issues of the day. The movement toward social involvement of the technical man has even led, in the American Institute of Physics, to a profession-wide referendum concerning the use of the scientific society in social problems. Obviously, society feels the effect of scientists and engineers. Books document these effects; spokesmen herald our significance-or castigate us for not concerning ourselves about the impact of our inventions. But little has been said about how the technical man can validly exercise his social conscience or how he can affect the nature of the technology to be developed or the uses to which society will put technology. I t is clear, for example, that when the scientist or engineer leaves his specialty, he is just another member of society, even though he be an intelligent and educated one. Therefore, as we said last month, our major contribution to society should be made through our contributions to technology and, subsequently, the contribution of that technology should lead toward the solution of social problems. Quietly, without much fanfare, a few scientists are feeling around with an approach that may work. The American Chemical Society has a group, a subcommittee of our Committee on Chemistry and Public Affairs, working on a report designed to present the role of chemical knowledge in improving the quality of our environment. This project seeks to present to ourselves and to all others involved in the pollution arena what we know and what we know about how to learn more in this field. The basis for this approach is that technology is but one input to society. Society in general is unable to deal expertly with this input, while we in general are unable to deal expertly with making our input effective. Some mechanism is needed that can transcend our narrowness of view but can translate the main aspects of that view to the generalists representing society as a whole. This sort of approach is a far cry from the calls for technical people to “get involved”-at least in a personal sense it is. For the profession as a whole, however, it does mean “getting involved,” and in a constructive way. Perhaps we can generalize from this to say that the way for us to exercise our professional responsibilities to society is through group action to make our expertise available in an organized way, while our individual contributions are to support those efforts with know-how and with pride.
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