From "Blinded by Science: Research and the perils of ignorance"

Sir John Maddox, a noted chemist and former editor of the prestigious journal Nature, once stated: “The questions we do not yet have the wit to ask will be a growing preoccupation of science in the next fifty years.”

A thought-provoking statement, to be sure. And one that neatly sums up all that is both wondrous and dangerous about science. Wondrous, because science is a journey without end—and an unpredictable one at that. Dangerous, because this means we are always operating at a certain level of ignorance. Science is not a game of absolutes. And humans tend not to deal well with shades of gray.

On a personal level, science means the world to me. It is, after all, how I discovered nature. As a boy, I simply explored the world and wondered at the diversity of it all—the beaches, insects, mountains, forests, fish, and ponds. All evoked wonder and curiosity, inspiring me to learn more and providing the first hint of a career in science. As a man, I became fascinated with genetics and was moved to dig deeper, exploring the roots of our identity, our origins, and our migrations. On a much larger scale, science has fundamentally changed the planet and how we see it. Indeed, science, and the application of it through technology, have created a kind of world about which I could never have dreamed when I was growing up.

As powerful and as useful as it is, science is one-dimensional. It is elegant but imperfect. It offers us a way of thinking and a logical method of observation and repetition that give us insight into the world around us. But because of its reductionist nature, science can never provide us with a complete understanding of how the world works. One of the hallmarks of science is that experiments must be repeatable. So when performing experiments, we remove all confounding factors that could influence or confuse the results. But nature doesn’t work that way. Nature does not operate in a vacuum. Interconnections among the various parts of the natural world are what actually drive it. When we pull it apart, we lose context—and that can mean everything.

Recognizing the limitations of science, however, does not negate its value. Nor should it push one to extremes. It doesn’t mean that we are somehow ignorant of the world or that science can’t be trusted. The great strength of science is that it gives us the capacity to probe nature and learn its secrets. Through science we have learned to split atoms and release energy, read DNA, and synthesize genes. And we learn more every day. But we also should not blindly accept every new discovery as gospel or every new technology as a savior. This is especially important to remember in new, revolutionary areas where experiments and observations constantly cause reevaluation, even rejection, of hot ideas.

Our species is really quite special. We’ve learned so much and come so far in such a short time. So far, in fact, that it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of hubris—of thinking that we really understand this world and that we can fix any problem that might come up. That’s a dangerous assumption.

I have a great deal of faith in humanity’s capacity to solve problems. I’ve witnessed it firsthand throughout my life, from antibiotics that brought me back from near death when I was a boy with pneumonia to the space race that led to astounding leaps forward in computer technology, telecommunications, and genetic engineering. But as a society and as a species, we’ve become so used to science and technology that we’ve forgotten that these are just ways of understanding and manipulating the world. They do not solve problems on their own. And as many problems as they do help resolve, they also create them anew.

As you will read for yourself in these essays, science changes. Assumptions are challenged, hypotheses disproved. But the beauty of science is that when we’re presented with new information, it allows us to change our minds. It gives us a rational explanation as to why the world doesn’t work the way we previously thought it did. Certainly, these new answers always bring up more questions. But no one ever said that life was easy—or easy to understand.

Science proceeds not in a beeline, but at a stagger, stumbling home in the darkness after a night at the pub, drunk on its own discoveries. Tomorrow, it may find that many of its hypotheses were dead wrong. But tonight it will celebrate all it has learned and raise a toast to the questions it does not yet have the wit to ask.

The beauty and the horror of science

At an international biotechnology conference in Vancouver, Canada, an industry spokesperson made reference to the hundreds of protestors outside and suggested that biotechnologists had obviously done a poor job convincing the public about the benefits and safety of their products. Thus, she trivialized the opponents’ concerns as based on ignorance and not deserving serious attention.

It’s unfortunate that GMO (genetically modified organism) has been used to refer to foods created by inserting genes from one species into another. I say “unfortunate” because for the past ten millennia human beings have been genetically modifying plants and animals by selection and breeding. All of the food we eat was once wild and, whether it’s corn, rice, or chickens, we have dramatically increased yields and changed characteristics by genetic modification. Even more remarkable, the array of dog breeds—from Chihuahuas to Great Danes— were all derived by breeding from tamed wolves.

Critics of biotech food have labeled them “Frankenfoods”— an allusion to the famous story by Mary Shelley. We often forget that Frankenstein was the doctor/scientist, not the monster he created. The story is an apt allegory for the powers we have come to apply with biotechnology.

Victor Frankenstein was involved in experiments to find the secret of life. We watch in horror as he is driven by his curiosity to solve the mystery. Yet, one of the enchanting attributes of scientists is that capacity for enthusiasm and single-minded focus. As Theodore Roszak has written:

It is both a beautiful and a terrible aspect of our humanity, this capacity to be carried away by an idea. For all the best reasons, Victor Frankenstein wished to create a new and better human type. What he knew was the secret of the creature’s physical assemblage; he knew how to manipulate the material parts of nature to achieve an astonishing result. What he did not know was the secret of personality in nature. Yet he raced ahead, eager to play God, without knowing God’s most divine mystery.

One of the most horrifying things I have ever witnessed was an experiment in which a cat was decerebrated, that is, it had all of its brain scraped out. It was still alive, and when an electrode was inserted into a certain part of its brain stem, the cat began to walk on a treadmill. It was a macabre experiment, but the scientist’s enthusiasm in concluding that the nerves controlling a cat’s walking ability must reside in the spine blinded him to the horror of what he was doing.

I spent twenty-five years running a genetics lab, studying how genes control an organism’s development and behavior. The great joy of the lab for me was the excitement and exhilaration of research and the moments of sheer ecstasy when we gained a new discovery or insight. Yet when we wrote experiments up for publication, all of that joy and emotion were expunged. We would never get a work published if we included a description of the “breathtaking beauty of the vivid scarlet sheen of exquisitely arranged rows of ommatidia” of a fly’s eye or the exhilaration upon recovering a mutation inducing paralysis at different temperatures. Yet that’s why we were hooked on the work.

The reason we can’t express emotion is because science’s great boast is objectivity. Ever since Descartes and Newton, we have tried to separate ourselves from the object of study, tried to focus on a part of nature, measuring or describing it in mathematical or chemical terms. In the process, we have acquired profound understanding of some of the most basic parts of the cosmos—subatomic particles, atoms, genes, and cells. But by focusing on the parts, we frequently lose sight of the whole—of patterns and rhythms that make the quest interesting in the first place. And that’s often what the public senses is wrong with scientists.

So even though she may have had the best of intentions, when that biotechnologist in Vancouver trivialized legitimate concerns as being merely ignorant, she revealed the very attributes that the public fears about science—the single-mindedness that can turn a scientist into a Frankenstein.