[km2000]

January 27, 2009

Essay

Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy


By DENNIS OVERBYE

All right, I was weeping too.

To be honest, the restoration of science was the least of it, but when Barack Obama proclaimed during his Inaugural Address that he would “restore science to its rightful place,” you could feel a dark cloud lifting like a sigh from the shoulders of the scientific community in this country.

When the new president went on vowing to harness the sun, the wind and the soil, and to “wield technology’s wonders,” I felt the glow of a spring sunrise washing my cheeks, and I could almost imagine I heard the music of swords being hammered into plowshares.

Wow. My first reaction was to worry that scientists were now in the awkward position of being expected to save the world. As they say, be careful what you wish for.

My second reaction was to wonder what the “rightful place” of science in our society really is.

The answer, I would argue, is On a Pedestal — but not for the reasons you might think.

Forget about penicillin, digital computers and even the Big Bang, passing fads all of them.

The knock on science from its cultural and religious critics is that it is arrogant and materialistic. It tells us wondrous things about nature and how to manipulate it, but not what we should do with this knowledge and power. The Big Bang doesn’t tell us how to live, or whether God loves us, or whether there is any God at all. It provides scant counsel on same-sex marriage or eating meat. It is silent on the desirability of mutual assured destruction as a strategy for deterring nuclear war.

Einstein seemed to echo this thought when he said, “I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.” Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.

Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.

So the story goes.

But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.

It requires no metaphysical commitment to a God or any conception of human origin or nature to join in this game, just the hypothesis that nature can be interrogated and that nature is the final arbiter. Jews, Catholics, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists and Hindus have all been working side by side building the Large Hadron Collider and its detectors these last few years.

And indeed there is no leader, no grand plan, for this hive. It is in many ways utopian anarchy, a virtual community that lives as much on the Internet and in airport coffee shops as in any one place or time. Or at least it is as utopian as any community largely dependent on government and corporate financing can be.

Arguably science is the most successful human activity of all time. Which is not to say that life within it is always utopian, as several of my colleagues have pointed out in articles about pharmaceutical industry payments to medical researchers.

But nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant. There is always room for more data to argue over.

So if you’re going to get gooey about something, that’s not so bad.

It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.

Today that dynamic is most clearly and perhaps crucially tested in China. As I pondered Mr. Obama’s words, I thought of Xu Liangying, an elderly Chinese physicist and Einstein scholar I met a couple of years ago, who has spent most of his life under house arrest for upholding Einstein’s maxim that there is no science without freedom of speech.

The converse might also be true. The habit of questioning that you learn in physics is invaluable in the rest of society. As Fang Lizhi, Dr. Xu’s fellow dissident whose writings helped spark the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and who now teaches at the University of Arizona, said in 1985, “Physics is more than a basis for technology; it is a cornerstone of modern thought.”

If we are not practicing good science, we probably aren’t practicing good democracy. And vice versa.

Science and democracy have been the watchwords of Chinese political aspirations for more than a century. When the Communist Party took power it sought to appropriate at least the scientific side of the equation. Here, for example, is what Hu Yaobang, the party’s general secretary, said in 1980. “Science is what it is simply because it can break down fetishes and superstitions and is bold in explorations and because it opposes following the beaten path and dares to destroy outmoded conventions and bad customs.”

Brave words that have yet to be allowed to come true in China. Mr. Hu was purged, and in fact it was to mourn his death that students first began assembling in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Dr. Fang got in trouble initially because he favored the Big Bang, but that was against Marxist orthodoxy that the universe was infinitely unfolding. Marxism, it might be remembered, was once promoted as a scientific theory, but some subjects were off-limits.

But once you can’t talk about one subject, the origin of the universe, for example, sooner or later other subjects are going to be off-limits, like global warming, birth control and abortion, or evolution, the subject of yet another dustup in Texas last week.

There is no democracy in China, and some would argue that despite that nation’s vast resources and potential, there will not be vigorous science there either until the Chinese leaders take seriously what Mao proclaimed back in 1955 and then cynically withdrew: Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.

In the meantime I look forward to Mr. Obama’s cultivation of our own wild and beautiful garden.


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

[layevymed]

Science is the exploration of the "why" behind every "what".

It is what I love and live on. What I crave every time I hear something or learn something.

Science is also the mirror that when held up to the general public, lets them know plain and simple how little they know about their own world. And whet people do not know, they fear.

People then make up stories, some fearsome, some comforting, to explain what they do not know in terms their own mind can comprehend. Boats fall off the edge of the earth and the stars are either holes in a celestial blanket OR manifestations of the gods themselves as they watch over us. We get patron saints, benefactors, prophets. Jesus and Mohamed.

We get the universe to obey a giant anthropomorphic regal Deity that tells everything how to work based on a knowledge that "he" possesses.

And then man starts making up explanations for all the little things. From gravity to evolution. They use this omnipotent benefactor as the ineffable incontrovertible truth and virtue that proves their story as absolute and unquestionable.

And then along comes science. Bot the complicated and the simple. Things that explain what is happening and are hard to refute on any logical grounds. Science peels back the Dietal membrane enveloping all that people feel comfortable hiding underneath it. It exposes pieces that were erroneously associated to a divine guidance and in our own weakness of faith, we are unable to accept this as it brings into question all the other things that it now covers, whether they truly belong there or not.


As many have experienced. Logic never truly wins over emotion. Logic needs to use emotion to become the truth in someones heart and mind. We are more amenable to being sold to than taught. Comforted rather than educated. "Protected" rather than enlightened.

Until we, as a species, evolve beyond some of the mechanisms that kept us alive in the wild, the "something feels funny" that told us subconsciously to start running before we even saw the wolves. Until we can shed, or at least separate that from our logical being, we will always have the tenacious and inarguable position of "just because" to deal with.

And science, as well as those that follow it, will always bear this intangible aura of fear and malevolence in never truly earned.

[jyhugikuhih]

Excellent article Zippy.

One thing I'd add, is that to restore scientific inquiry, thought, and innovation to its rightful place in our society, patent laws and intellectual property protections need to be rethought to allow broader adoption, experimentation, and combination.

Basic sciences like math and physics cannot be patented. The tendency in the biological and life sciences toward patents is a very grave sign for the future of these sectors.
Jeffrey A. Tucker reviews Against Intellectual Monopoly Alexandre, "a company CEO of a biotech firm" comments elsewhere:
The average cost of bringing a new drug to market is 800 million $, and is expected to reach 1.4 billion $ within 10 years. Without patents, the logic tells us that no one would put that king of money to get a new drug approved if they would not be guaranteed a monopoly over it for a period of time. But lets dig a little deeper. According to the FDA's own numbers, the number a "me-too" drugs comprise 80% of all approved drugs on the market. For those who don't know, a me-too drug is a drug that does the exact same thing as another, except that it's a little bit different, just enough so that it's not covered by the existing patents.

When a company develops a new drug, say viagra, it can generate profits of many billions of dollars. When other companies see these huge profits, they want a slice of the pie, so they invent nearly identical drugs that does the same thing, except a little differently and call it "cialis". But here is the catch, since that new drug is slightly different, it too must be approved independently to the FDA, costing another 800 million $. Without patents, the second company could simply copy the first drug and get a slice of the profits instantly, saving society 800 million $ in R&D costs.

When the FDA says that 80% of new drugs approved are "me-too" drugs, then what it really means is that there is a 640 millions dollar cost overrun for each new drug. The immediate effect of eliminating patent law in the pharmaceutical industry would be to reduce the cost of introducing a new drug to market down to 160 million $ from 800 million $.

As for the long term effect... well, need I mention the 50 most promising compounds that I as well as no other company are allowed to research into because the patent holders demand unreasonable royalties. These compounds simply go unstudied. Patent in the pharmaceutical sciences are probably accountable for a 10 year dip in life expectancy compared to what it could be if people had the freedom to research and market products according to their own reason and choice (as opposed to which patent the government approved or not). If one thinks about it honestly, it seems preposterous for government to prohibit certain chemical or physical configurations simply because the original innovator pays the government a protection fee.

If Obama's starry-eyed left-leaning boosters want him to socialize something, they should keep him away from the banks and the auto industry and health care, and instead urge him to socialize all scientific and inventive knowledge into the free public domain and turn the patent office into an empowering clearinghouse for knowledge instead of a protection racket for entrenched moneyed interests.

*****

Patent system 'stifling science', BBC News 24 September 2008