SIR MARTIN REES is president of the Royal Society and a professor of cosmology and astrophysics and master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of, among many other books, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity’s Survival.
Public opinion surveys (at least in the United Kingdom), while revealing a generally positive attitude toward science, also suggest a widespread worry that it may be “running out of control.” This idea is a dangerous one because it could be self-fulfilling.
In the twenty-first century, technology will change the world faster than everthe global environment, our lifestyles, even human nature itself. We are far more empowered by science than any previous generation was. Science offers immense potential, especially for the developing world, but there could be catastrophic downsides. We are living in the first century in which the greatest risks will come from human actions rather than from nature.
Almost any scientific discovery has a potential for evil as well as for good; its applications can be channeled either way, depending on our personal and political choices. We can’t accept the benefits without also confronting the risks. The decisions we make, individually and collectively, will determine whether the outcomes of twenty-first-century sciences are benign or devastating.
But there’s a real danger that rather than campaigning energetically for optimum policies, we will be lulled into inaction by fatalismby a belief that science is advancing so fast and is so strongly influenced by commercial and political pressures that nothing we do will make any difference.
The present sharing of resources and effort among the various sciences results from a complicated tension between many extraneous factors, and the balance is suboptimal. This seems so whether we judge in purely intellectual terms or take account of likely benefit to human welfare. Some research has had the inside track and gained disproportionate resources; others, such as studies of the environment, renewable energy sources, biodiversity, and the like, deserve more effort. Within medical research, for example, the focus is disproportionately on cancer and cardiovascular studies, ailments that loom largest in prosperous countries, rather than on the infectious diseases endemic in the tropics.
Choices on how science is applied should be the outcome of debate extending way beyond the scientific community. Far more research and development can be done than we actually want or can afford to do, and there are many applications of science that we should deliberately eschew.
Even if all the world’s scientific academies agreed that a specific type of research had a particularly disquieting net downside, and all countries in unison imposed a ban, what are the chances that it could be effectively enforced? In view of the failure to control drug smuggling or homicides, it is unrealistic to expect that when the genie is out of the bottle we can ever be fully secure against the misuse of science. And in our ever more interconnected world, commercial pressures are harder and harder to regulate. The challenges and difficulties of “controlling” science in this century will be daunting.
Cynics would go further and say that anything that is scientifically and technically possible will be donesomewhere, sometimedespite ethical and prudential objections and whatever the regulatory regime. Whether this idea is true or false, it’s an exceedingly dangerous one, because it engenders a despairing pessimism and demotivates efforts to secure a safer and fairer world. The future will best be safeguardedand science has the best chance of being applied optimallythrough the efforts of people who are not fatalistic.