Sir, - I'm still trying to work out whether your reporter Joe Humphreys (May 20th) was being ironic, factual or critical in his report on the talk by Professor Lewis Wolpert entitled "Is Science Dangerous ? "
In a series of selective quotes, your reporter managed to highlight the dangers of science and scientists, despite Professor Wolpert's obvious intention to state the opposite! For example: "all science goes against common sense", according to Prof Wolpert, who then used as an example "the hostility to vaccination during the last century, until the public had acquired sufficient understanding of vaccination that it became accepted . . . as part of common sense ".
We were offered further gems of wisdom such as "science is all about understanding; technology is all about making things, and it is with technology that ethical issues arise"! So, given the current nuclear game being played out by India and Pakistan, are we still required to believe that a genius like Einstein could prove that he had a genie in the bottle but that the child in him couldn't resist the temptation to see what it looked like ? Wasn't it Einstein who said that "the environment is everything that isn't me" ? The idea that scientists and their collective knowledge can operate in a detached environment from the rest of humanity is highly dangerous particularly when the professor is further quoted as stating that "scientists should only be asked to make ethical decisions, as ordinary citizens".
The notion that scientific work should be undertaken within a moral vacuum is surely questionable and indeed such practices in the past contributed to great human suffering. One of the principals upon which modern science is based is through limiting error and with effective methodologies we are then enabled to make accurate predictions. Through refined trial and error, science has made quantum leaps of progress in modern times. Nevertheless, scientists should also be held accountable for the by-products of such experimental trial and error and without such accountability within the system it is questionable whether experiment should proceed. Prof Wolpert's own example of 277 trials before the successful cloning of the sheep known as Dolly is a case in point. The article finished on another memorable quote that "while scientists were blamed for such things as spoiling the environment, it was only because of science that we knew of such risks as global warming and BSE ..."! Hmmm, this seems like where I came in! - Yours, etc., Dr Vincent Kenny,
Knocklyon, Dublin 16.