In Defense of Science

Spurred on by World War II, then the cold war, then Sputnik, U.S. science rose to an unprecedented level of prestige in the 1960s. Yet even as it is gaining its greatest triumphs--the moon, the green revolution, the ability to control and even change the processes of life--science and scientists have come under increasing attack. Some more reasonable critics argue that the antiscience barrage promises more good than harm for a field that has been enjoying too high a priority for too long. Science Writer Lawrence Lessing, a member of FORTUNE'S board of editors, does not agree. In the magazine's March issue, he argues that if the current "senseless war" on science and its kindred discipline, technology, continues much longer, the U.S. will be a considerably worse place in which to live.

Seamless Web. Lessing acknowledges that the "apocalyptic mood has been stirred by some very palpable social miscarriages of science and technology"--notably the Indochina war and the environmental crisis. Still, he cannot accept "the proposition that America needs less growth, less knowledge, less skill, less progress." Scientists and engineers, he says, "are increasingly cast as the villains of this emotional drama. But it should be obvious that science by its nature and structure can offer society only options." Lessing points out that the traditional role of scientists is advisory, and as often as not their advice is ignored. "The height of the new folly," he says, "is the rising call upon scientists and technicians to foresee all the consequences of their actions and to make a moral commitment to suppress work on any discovery that might some day be dangerous, which is to demand that they be not only scientists but certified clairvoyants and saints."

There is also danger in the notion that society can choose what it wants of science and destroy what it feels is valueless or threatening. "Science is indivisible," Lessing states, "a seamless web of accumulated knowledge, and to destroy a part would rip the whole fabric. Every discovery or invention of man has this dual aspect"--a potential for both benefit and harm. He warns that it does no good to try to retreat to an earlier century, and he quotes Konrad Lorenz, the famed naturalist and animal behaviorist, who has been warning hostile student audiences that if they tear down knowledge to start afresh, they will backslide 200,000 years. "Watch out!" Lorenz cautions the students. "If you make a clean sweep of things, you won't go back to the Stone Age, because you're already there, but to well before the Stone Age."

Nonetheless, inflation, recession and other assorted ills have meant that in the past four years total federal expenditures on U.S. research and development in science and technology have declined in real dollars by more than 20%. "If the decline continues," Lessing predicts, "it will have a delayed, disastrous effect on the economy." Already, he reports, the U.S. lags be hind in a variety of fields. Japan and Europe are far ahead in establishing fast, new train networks and Mexico City has completed a subway system "that is both a great feat of engineering and a work of art." In high-energy physics, Italian scientists using a colliding-beam electron accelerator have come upon "what may be a new phenomenon in the creation of matter from energy, which seems to go beyond present physical theory." France, the Soviet Union and Switzerland are all at work testing the discovery on similar accelerators, but the U.S. has only one such machine, and it is not yet fully ready for operation.

In plasma physics, after a significant 1968 Soviet breakthrough in the containment of thermo nuclear power, U.S. scientists ran confirming experiments that suggested that "this almost limitless, pollutionless source of energy may be nearer than was once expected. But the U.S. effort is having funded at a level, cut back again this year, that could put off this development as much as 25 to 50 years." In the life sciences, research funds are still lagging some 20%, or at least $250 million per year, behind research capacity.

More than Primitive. Implicit in Lessing's analysis is the belief that man can use increasingly sophisticated science to solve his problems and, at the same time, ensure that science does not turn on its master and destroy him. He suggests that society has little choice other than to press on vigorously in scientific research; he rejects the notion that the only options are to abandon science and become primitive, or continue it and be destroyed. Lessing echoes the warning of Biochemist Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences: "If we forswear more science and technology, there can be no cleaning up cities, no progress in mass transportation, no salvage of our once beautiful landscape and no control of overpopulation. Those who scoff at technological solutions to these problems have no alternative solutions."

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