Armageddon Science (28 page)

It’s arguable that the picture of scientists as emotionless, uncaring individuals reflects the strong correlation between being involved in science and being on the autistic spectrum. Once, autism was a label for the debilitating extreme. Thirty years ago, half the children diagnosed with autism couldn’t speak, and the majority were below average intelligence. Those with such devastating autism find it practically impossible to communicate, living in an isolated world of their own. However, by the 1990s it was realized that these individuals were the tip of an iceberg, and that many more people were at the high-functioning end of the spectrum.

Autism is largely a genetic condition—if one identical twin has autism, there is a better than 50 percent chance the other will too. Being on the autistic spectrum is also neurodevelopmental: some modules of the brain are formed differently during a baby’s early development. It is a real, physical condition. But we need to get away from the stereotype of low-functioning individuals or idiot savants like the character portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the movie
Rain Man
. They exist, but they are not the norm. Here is Hans Asperger, for whom a form of autism, Asperger’s syndrome, is named, commenting on the impact of autism:

According to brain expert Simon Baron-Cohen, “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.” Autism, which Baron-Cohen describes as having an extreme male brain, brings with it an urge to collect information, classify, and systematize that drives many on the high-functioning end of the spectrum into the sciences. Despite all the encouragement to take up math and sciences now given to girls, the ratio of males to females in the physical sciences is still nine to one. (It’s an interesting comparison that the ratio of males to females with high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome is ten to one.)

I am not suggesting that all scientists are on the autistic spectrum, or that having a mild case of the condition is a requirement to be an effective scientist. Yet it does seem that enough scientists have a toe in the water with a mild, high-functioning type of autism that one symptom of the condition could be responsible for the uncaring image that scientists have. As well as the single-mindedness Asperger mentions, autism is strongly associated with a lack of empathy.

This doesn’t have to be as bad as it sounds. It’s unfair to say that those with an extreme male brain are incapable of relationships; certainly those at the high-functioning end of the spectrum are capable. Such people can get a lot out of being with others. They are often embarrassingly loyal defenders of individuals and causes they support. Nor are they coldhearted, without a concern for others. The problem with the extreme male brain is its inability to read emotions and to empathize with another individual.

The result is often shock and distress on the part of the person on the autistic spectrum when hurt has been caused, in part because he can’t understand why his actions have upset anyone. “It’s not my fault!” is the frequent refrain in a relationship with such a person, genuinely bewildered as to why things have gone wrong and distressed at the problems he has caused.

When stereotyping the scientist, it is easy to attribute such a lack of empathy to coldness. We see an individual who is obsessed with rationality while putting other human beings at risk, just as Dr. McCoy is always needling the Vulcan Mr. Spock in
Star Trek
for his lack of empathy. But portraying scientists as cold is a misunderstanding of the condition. Whether or not on the autistic spectrum, scientists are no colder than anyone else, and they care as much about the implications of their work.

However much scientist care, we can never be absolutely certain that science won’t end the world, nor can we be sure that it won’t cause so much damage that human life in the future becomes much worse. Many aspects of science and technology now have the potential to cause devastation. We need to be grown up in the way we manage and respond to science. At the moment, the vast majority of people making significant decisions about our world do not have a good education in science. Until now it has been seen as good not to know anything about the scientific world. It has somehow been considered better, more intellectual, to focus on the arts.

To quote the British historian Lisa Jardine:

We can no longer afford to take the stance that an educated person doesn’t need to know about science. Science is largely responsible for keeping us alive, and has the potential for mass destruction. Every person who is making decisions in the modern world should ensure that he or she knows more about science. People need to have access to the right information to make sensible judgments about topics where science has a role to play—and that has become pretty well all of life. People need an education that includes a good understanding of science in all disciplines.

We also have to accept that there will always be rogue individuals. There will be people who lack the capability to make moral decisions, who consider their own fame and success more important than scientific values, or who are so obsessed with a particular technology or viewpoint that they will attempt to misuse technology, to throw science back in the face of civilization. This isn’t a reason to walk away from science. Just because fire can cause terrible damage is no reason not to have heat when it’s cold, or not to use it to cook our food.

On the whole, the scientific establishment is quite good at weeding out rogues in its midst, even though the process can be painfully slow. There is greater danger where such mavericks become well established with those in political power, so that the decisions are being made by those with little knowledge of science. The classic case was that of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Lysenko was a Russian biologist who rejected genetics in favor of the concept of acquired characteristics.

This was an idea advanced in the eighteenth century by French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His thinking was not unreasonable, though it has been proved false. He assumed that animals and plants acquired characteristics from the stresses and strains they were placed under during their life, and that these characteristics could then be passed on to future generations. So, for instance, it seemed to him reasonable to assume that the ancestors of the giraffe would have stretched and stretched to try to get to high-up, delicate leaves. The result, Lamarck thought, would be a gradual lengthening of the animal’s neck as a result of this repeated stretching. Subsequently, he thought, its children would tend to have rather longer necks than usual because the parents had, and so, gradually, the familiar giraffe neck would form.

Contrast this with the Darwinian idea that those giraffes that naturally had longer necks would tend to have a better chance of surviving, passing the tendency to have longer necks on to their offspring. In the conventional evolutionary approach, the animals that survive to breed are the ones that have randomly grown up with a longer neck. In the Lamarckian view, the necks actively stretched during a single animal’s lifetime.

Lamarck had merely devised a theory, but in Stalin’s USSR, Lysenko was able to impose his ideas on the agricultural community, resulting in disastrous decisions that had a direct impact on the food-growing capability of the Soviet Union. For example, Lysenko believed that as a result of acquired characteristics, it was possible to improve wheat yields vastly by putting the plants into stressful conditions; in fact, the result was just poor crops.

Lysenko’s iron hand on the scientific establishment meant that right through to the 1970s, Russian biological sciences were well behind their Western counterparts. They failed to pick up on the advances in genetics that were transforming biology elsewhere, seeing this as false, capitalist science. If Lysenko had simply been a scientist with wacky ideas, his theories would have been tested against reality, the scientific establishment would have sidelined him, and the genetic explanation would have triumphed much sooner—but this rogue scientist’s links to those in political power overrode any scientific sensibilities.

Some would also say that Edward Teller’s role as champion of the hydrogen bomb was another example of a rogue scientist who made dangerous advances because of his influence in political circles, rather than for any great scientific value in his theories. It’s certainly true that many other scientists were deeply unhappy about the deployment of thermonuclear weapons, seeing them as a step too far, an argument that Teller never really had to refute because of his connections with those in political power. (Teller would later play a similar role in the development of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative for a missile defense shield.)

Some scientists might be clearly identifiable as taking a wrong tack because they are inherently “bad.” Others are guilty of nothing more than being human. Human beings make mistakes. There will be errors of judgment and accidents. The possibility of accidents occurring is generally not a good argument to avoid taking action—otherwise we would all sit at home under the table all day, as there is risk in stepping out of the house. However, those whose actions can have an impact out of all proportion to their personal scale do need extraordinary checks on their behavior.

We can never totally eliminate risk, but we can put procedures and controls in place to minimize that risk. As accidents at nuclear plants have shown, there is always a human tendency to assume things will work out okay, and so to circumvent safety systems that are tedious to operate. What’s more, there is plenty of evidence that big business will try to reduce the impact of safety systems on their profits by keeping safety efforts to a minimum, and avoiding official monitoring (inevitably described as government bureaucracy) wherever possible.

There is no doubt that we need to keep up the pressure on those responsible for potentially deadly science and technology to ensure that all sensible safety measures are taken. It will never be a matter of 100 percent certainty. We can’t be sure all life on Earth won’t be wiped out by a meteor collision or a gamma ray burst. But we can keep a handle on the dangers we do have the ability to influence.

Once again, what’s important is that we improve the understanding of science and scientists among the population as a whole, so that the voting public can make the decisions that control science wisely, rather than be inspired by bogeymen and half-truths. Just to show how it’s possible for decisions to be made based on rumor and fear rather than a sensible understanding of the facts, take the example of the scare that arose around the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccination a few years ago. This was a classic case of the sort of reaction to science I call a bogeyman. This is a reaction to something that doesn’t really exist.

When a bogeyman comes along, all balance goes out of the window. Perhaps the strongest bogeyman card anyone can play is danger to our children. When children are put at risk, our sense of balance and fairness is abandoned, thrown away in a moment in response to the natural parental concern for our offspring. Sadly, the media quite often raise the public’s awareness of a bogeyman with insufficient evidence—and the inevitable response comes because we don’t wait for detailed confirmation in dealing with a bogeyman, but go straight into panic mode. It’s a scientific version of the lynch mob.

The MMR scare was started in 1998 by British doctor Andrew Wakefield. For nearly ten years following the release of his research, the suggestion that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine could cause autism in children frightened and confused the public. Millions of children missed out on vaccinations and were put at risk. Yet all this fuss was based on a flawed study of twelve individuals made by one semi-amateur.

Rather than listen to the wide range of experts who had undertaken vastly larger, more conclusive studies demonstrating the safety of MMR, the public was sparked into fear by the way the media picked up on the scaremongering of one man, producing stories based on little more than anecdote. And once a bogeyman has been raised, it is very difficult to keep it down. Ten years after the original publicity there were still occasional bursts of MMR panic in the media, despite outbreaks of measles among those not inoculated, causing serious illness and at least one death.

Part of the problem is that those who work in the news media, unlike scientists, are unwilling to reveal their mistakes. Science often advances by learning from error. But when contrary results show that a scare story was based on false evidence, as happened with the MMR panic, this is not reported with the same depth as the original story—if it is covered at all. What typically happens is that someone announces some research before a peer-reviewed paper comes out. The media pick up on this and make a big splash, terrifying everyone. Then either the paper isn’t published, or later work shows that the original tentative findings were wrong. And the media respond with silence. We don’t get to hear of the new research. We certainly don’t hear “Sorry, we scared you unnecessarily; we got it wrong.” The reality is just ignored.

The general public needs to better understand not only scientific theories, but the basic principles of science, including that beloved one of the bogeyman hunter, “‘Data’ is not the plural of ‘anecdote.’” Just because we’ve heard something in a bar, or have heard the subjective experience of one individual, does not mean that we can make any useful initial judgments. There
is
smoke without fire. Arguably, anyone making important decisions about science and technology that can influence all our lives should be able to demonstrate that she is not susceptible to bogeymen, and that she understands the basics of science well enough to be able to make an informed decision.