Times of Triumph, Times of Doubt: Science and the Battle for Public Trust

  • Elof Axel Carlson
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press: 2006. 227 pp. $39 0879698055 | ISBN: 0-879-69805-5

Scientific research and the associated technical applications have transformed our lifespan and way of life, at least in the West. Public health has been enhanced greatly by good sanitation and by the provision of clean water and adequate food. Immunization and the use of antibiotics have banished diseases that just a few decades ago haunted our grandparents. Neonatal mortality has been dramatically reduced. The benefits arising from biomedicine alone are enormous, and other disciplines have also led to improvements, such as greater opportunities to travel and to communicate. So why do many people view science and innovations with anxiety and concern?

In the balance: the intensive use of pesticides has benefited agriculture but caused wider environmental damage. Credit: F. WHITNEY/GETTY IMAGES

Elof Axel Carlson is a geneticist by training who has taught biology to non-science students for many years. In his thought-provoking book Times of Triumph, Times of Doubt, he asks why many of his young students who have turned away from careers in science feel that “science has let them down through its bad outcomes”. In making his analysis he includes in the scientific community not only researchers but also those responsible for the commercialization and regulation of science, such as business executives, ethicists, theologians, legislators, lawyers and journalists.

Carlson has selected a number of areas in which there has been either public controversy or actual harm associated with the application of scientific ideas, and considers how the unfortunate outcome arose, in the hope that the risk of similar outcomes might in future be reduced. He casts his net wide in selecting incidents from which science emerges with less than a perfect reputation. Some are very recent, whereas others began in the nineteenth century. They include eugenics, weapons of mass destruction (in particular the atomic bomb), pesticides, methods of assisted reproduction, and the oversight of procedures for the introduction of new medicines.

It may come as a surprise to many younger readers of this book to find that the scientific community is held responsible for the worst excesses of the Holocaust, but some of the ideas of genetic superiority had their origins in academic genetic research. By a nice twist of history, one of the major centres of this activity was Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, where the publishers of this book are based. The laboratory is now distinguished for its research in molecular genetics. But in the early twentieth century, its director, Charles Davenport, developed policies for eugenic protection and the enhancement of our species. Europeans have no cause for complacency because other groups developed similar ideas in Britain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland. Germany may be the only country that systematically murdered its citizens, but in other countries people were sterilized without consent as a result of policies that had no sound scientific justification and would be judged ethically unacceptable today.

However, the misuse of pesticides seems to me to be a far more representative example of the way knowledge has been used without due care. The intensive use of chemicals that became available in large quantities after the Second World War made it possible for the first time to eliminate insects and weeds. There were medical benefits in some cases, for example in the control of malaria. However, the widespread and sometimes careless use of chemicals in agriculture and domestic gardens damaged the ecosystem and put people's health at risk.

This danger was first made clear to the public by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962), in which she described the changes in the natural world brought about by the use of chemicals. Since then, in part as a result of Carson's book, there has been a very slow change in our priorities, although many people argue that much more needs to be done to restore an ecosystem in which humans and other species are in a stable relationship. In a few years it may seem obvious to everyone that our pollution of the atmosphere by the consumption of hydrocarbon energy sources was even more reckless than our use of pesticides.

The use of new knowledge, then, is a double-edged sword. Pesticides led to real benefits, but their careless use was harmful. This is surely the situation in many cases, such as atomic energy and dynamite. It was even the case when a sharp stone was first stuck on a stick to make an axe that could be used to kill animals or chop sticks for firewood, or to kill people.

Carlson ends the book with the interesting suggestion that legal proceedings should be possible in cases of science or technology being misused. He draws on a comparison with the Wall Street crash in 1929, which led to greater regulation of the financial world. In some of the scientific cases he discusses, surely legal redress would already be available if inaccurate information was provided. However, this would not be the position at present if someone merely argued a case in a book or scientific paper, as was the case in the development of eugenic policies.

Everyone in the scientific community has a responsibility to assess the value of our work realistically and to broadcast both the risks and the benefits, argues Carlson. In determining our attitude to scientific and technological advances, perhaps even more important than the effect of any failures is our tendency to take new things for granted very rapidly. Research has contributed a great deal to our way of life, and none of the sceptics would wish to go back even to the nineteenth century. But it can also do great harm. Let us have ambitious research, but cautious application.