In disproportionate numbers, scientists are found in the ranks of social critics (or, less charitably, ‘dissidents’), challenging the policies and myths of their own nations. The heroic names of the physicists Andrei Sakharov’ in the former USSR, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard in the United States, and Fang Li-zhu in China spring readily enough to mind, the first and last risking their lives. Especially in the aftermath of the invention of nuclear weapons, scientists have been portrayed as ethical cretins. This is an injustice, considering all those who, sometimes at considerable personal peril, have spoken out against their own countries’ misapplications of science and technology.
[* As a much-decorated ‘Hero’ of the Soviet Union, and privy to its nuclear secrets, Sakharov in the Cold War year 1968 boldly wrote – in a book published in the West and widely distributed in samizdal in the USSR – ‘Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of peoples by the mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demogogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships.’ He was thinking of both East and West. I would add that free thought is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for democracy.]
For example, the chemist Linus Pauling (1901-94) was, more than any other person, responsible for the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which halted above-ground explosions of nuclear weapons by the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. He mounted a blistering campaign of moral outrage and scientific data, made more credible by the fact that he was a Nobel laureate. In the American press, he was generally vilified for his troubles, and in the 1950s the State Department cancelled his passport because he had been insufficiently anti-communist. His Nobel Prize was awarded for the application of quantum mechanical insights – resonances, and what is called hybridization of orbitals – to explain the nature of the chemical bond that joins atoms together into molecules. These ideas are now the bread and butter of modern chemistry. But in the Soviet Union, Pauling’s work on structural chemistry was denounced as incompatible with dialectical materialism and declared off-limits to Soviet chemists.
Undaunted by this criticism East and West – indeed, not even slowed down – he went on to do monumental work on how anaesthetics work, identified the cause of sickle cell anaemia (a single nucleotide substitution in DNA), and showed how the evolutionary history of life might be read by comparing the DNAs of various organisms. He was hot on the trail of the structure of DNA; Watson and Crick were consciously rushing to get there before Pauling. The verdict on his assessment of Vitamin C is apparently still out. ‘That man is a real genius’ was Albert Einstein’s assessment.
In all this time he continued to work for peace and amity. When Ann and I once asked Pauling about the roots of his dedication to social issues, he gave a memorable reply: ‘I did it to be worthy of the respect of my wife,’ Helen Ava Pauling. He won a second Nobel Prize, this one in peace, for his work on the nuclear test ban, becoming the only person in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes.
There were some who saw Pauling as a troublemaker. Those unhappy about social change may be tempted to view science itself with suspicion. Technology is safe, they tend to think, readily guided and controlled by industry and government. But pure science, science for its own sake, science as curiosity, science that might lead anywhere and challenge anything, that’s another story. Certain areas of pure science are the unique pathway to future technologies – true enough – but the attitudes of science, if applied broadly, can be perceived as dangerous. Through salaries, social pressures, and the distribution of prestige and awards, societies try to herd scientists into some reasonably safe middle ground – between too little long-term technological progress and too much short-term social criticism.
Unlike Pauling, many scientists consider their job to be science, narrowly defined, and believe that engaging in politics or social criticism is not just a distraction from but antithetical to the scientific life. As mentioned earlier, during the Manhattan Project, the successful World War Two US effort to build nuclear weapons before the Nazis did, certain participating scientists began to have reservations, the more so when it became clear how immensely powerful these weapons were. Some, such as Leo Szilard, James Franck, Harold Urey and Robert R. Wilson, tried to call the attention of political leaders and the public (especially after the Nazis were defeated) to the dangers of the forthcoming arms race, which they foresaw very well, with the Soviet Union. Others argued that policy matters were outside their jurisdiction. ‘I was put on Earth to make certain discoveries,’ said Enrico Fermi, ‘and what the political leaders do with them is not my business.’ But even so, Fermi was so appalled by the dangers of the thermonuclear weapon Edward Teller was advocating that he co-authored a famous document urging the United States not to build it, calling it ‘evil’.
Jeremy Stone, the president of the Federation of American Scientists, has described Teller – whose efforts to justify thermonuclear weapons I described in a previous chapter – in these words:
Edward Teller . . . insisted, at first for personal intellectual reasons and later for geopolitical reasons, that a hydrogen bomb be built. Using tactics of exaggeration and even smear, he successfully manipulated the policy-making process for five decades, denouncing all manner of arms control measures and promoting arms-race-escalating programs of many kinds.
The Soviet Union, hearing of his H-bomb project, built its own H-bomb. As a direct consequence of the unusual personality of this particular individual and of the power of the H-bomb, the world may have risked a level of annihilation that might not otherwise have transpired, or might have come later and under better political controls.
If so, no scientist has ever had more influence on the risks that humanity has run than Edward Teller, and Teller’s general behavior throughout the arms race was reprehensible . . .
Edward Teller’s fixation on the H-bomb may have led him to do more to imperil life on this planet than any other individual in our species . . .
Compared to Teller, the leaders of Western atomic science were frequently babes in the political woods – their leadership having been determined by their professional skills rather than by, in this case, their political skills.
My purpose here is not to castigate a scientist for succumbing to very human passions, but to reiterate that new imperative: the unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern by the scientific community, as well as the most broadly based public education into the importance of science and democracy.
25
Real Patriots Ask Questions*
[* Written with Ann Druyan.]
It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1950
It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal irresponsibility are much more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is error-correcting machinery in politics. The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in funding for Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms freely available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi Germany from invading the Rhineland was an experiment. Communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China was an experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experiment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science and technology and next to nothing on defence – and finding that their economies boomed – was an experiment. Handguns are available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common in Seattle and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless, to a certain and often useful degree, such ideas can be tested. The great waste would be to ignore the results of social experiments because they seem to be ideologically unpalatable.