“History is the error we are forever correcting.”
When Pandora’s curiosity got the best of her, she opened the forbidden box, unknowingly allowing hunger, pestilence, sickness, poverty, crime, and vice to escape into the world. Only one thing remained—hope. When Pandora opened the box again, hope also entered the world, with a lot of catching up to do.
Today, although the terms have changed, the concepts remain the same. Now the evils released from Pandora’s box have more specific names like pests, vermin, bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, toxins, cancer, heart disease, and pain—all of which have inflicted suffering or limited lives. And so we fought back; our hope for a better world provided by scientific and medical advances. But our choice to push back against these evils means that we have chosen to engage in a kind of war. And, as in all wars, there have been casualties. Every advance has come with a price. Our task has been to figure out whether the price is too high. Sometimes, as has been the case for vaccines, antibiotics, and sanitation programs, the price has been small. Other times, such as for trans fats, lobotomies, and megavitamins, the price has been great. In each of these cases, the calculations have been easy. Many times, however, as has been the case for opiates and synthetic fertilizers, the calculations have been much tougher, where gains in the short term might be overwhelmed by losses in the long term.
In the end, although we hold on to the hope of a better life through science, we need to approach all scientific advances cautiously and with eyes wide open—and to make sure that we learn from our mistakes and aren’t simply paralyzed by them.