I once attended a week-long meeting in Heidelberg. The topic was Science and Society and the organizer was Sheila Jasanoff, an academic whose work focuses on the social and political influences on scientific research. Most of the attendants were academics in the life sciences from the U.S. and Europe, and as a PhD student I was one of the younger participants.
I didn’t like how the organizers didn’t just assume that scientists are influenced by societal, economic and political pressures, but that their loyalties are primarily to those forces rather than to a dispassionate search for truth. The whole idea of the existence of truth beyond social constructs was suspect to them.
One area of science that the organizers thought was particularly dangerous was biotechnology. At some point I was sufficiently enraged by their apparent antipathy to quote a few passages from an essay by Freeman Dyson, who had a strong contrarian streak himself.
I see a close analogy between John von Neumann’s blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto […] It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations […] I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized. The first step in this direction was already taken recently, when genetically modified tropical fish with new and brilliant colors appeared in pet stores. For biotechnology to become domesticated, the next step is to become user-friendly.
[…]
The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games, designed like computer games for children down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. These games will be messy and possibly dangerous. Rules and regulations will be needed to make sure that our kids do not endanger themselves and others. The dangers of biotechnology are real and serious.
I can still remember the satisfying gasps this elicited.
Dyson wrote this almost 20 years ago, and his prediction of biotech becoming as commonplace as personal computers has not come to pass. I don’t think it ever will, and the reason is that biotech is simply not entertaining enough. Playing around with a computer, it’s possible to get interesting results within hours and sometimes within seconds. Even if the tools were broadly available, to hatch a dinosaur egg would take months, and most kids don’t have this sort of patients. I predict that for the foreseeable future, biotech will remain the domain of the salaried professional scientist, influenced by, but not subordinate to, the pressures of society.
Nehaveigur 