Social Responsibility of Scientists - Initial Student Reactions

Last Thursday two classes of students at PHELMA completed the exercise on selected extracts from Gerard Toulouse's - 'Scientific revolutions and moral revaluations'.

After listening to their classmates' analyses, they were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with Prof. Toulouse. In general, a third of each class agreed with the ideas in the extracts. Here is a summary of the three principal opposing points of view:

1) We are engineers not researchers, so the responsibility described by Toulouse does not apply to us. There is pure science and applied science, and engineering is applied science. Even though we use the scientific method we do not consider it "science". Science, for us, is uniquely research.

2) It is impossible to know what is right or wrong, good or bad, as everyone values differently. Therefore, it is impossible to judge whether what we are doing in science is ethically good or bad.

3) It is impossible to predict how the results of research could be misused. In fact, all inventions can be used for good or evil. If we yielded to the fear of grave misuse, there would be no research done at all. Students cited the public suspicion of nanotechnology in Grenoble. They contrasted the benefits such as finding a cure for blindness as a opposed to public misconceptions, such as the development of nanochips for government spying on citizens.

In the next lesson, this Thursday, students will elaborate and defend their points of view in the form of comments to this post. Gerard Toulouse will be kindly invited to view the comments and contribute.

Student Responses:

Anonymous said:

Toulouse (2006) quite exaggerates when he says: "Scientists have a duty of alert, because they are best placed to alert society to the possibly harmful consequences of their activities, discoveries and inventions[..]this continuing responsibility implies a duty of discernment and vigilance, sustained on the long term." I find that it is just too easy to always refer to misuse of new technology when talking about research.

For the most part, researchers are not looking for the answer to a question, but they are looking for the question itself. They try to discover new phenomenon, that means they sometimes have no idea of what they are going to discover.

However, I don't completely reject this idea of responsibility. Not every scientist should be responsible for his discovery, but it is the scientific community.

I am convinced that average citizen doesn't have the right amount of education /culture to understand and accept new technologies. They fear novelty and their first reaction is rejection, which inhibits possible applications of a scientific discovery.

I believe that scientists are responsible to their community. This is why they regularly meet to present the progress of their research. A closer collaboration may be salutary for preventing misuse of inventions, like by sharing their ideas in scientific newspapers, in a short way by communicating.


Laureline & Maxime said:

Every day in the national newspapers, national companies are involved in trials for having behaved in their own interest without taking into account the possible consequences for the whole society. We disagree with the first point.

Indeed, obeying blindly orders in a company may be very dangerous. Let us take the example of Monsanto in Argentina. Ten years ago, the firm developed a new GMO corn plant which was designed to resist to a very powerful weedkiller "Roundup" also produced by the same company. This seemed firstly to be a good point for the local farmers, because it helped to develop the economy, but in reality they were totally dependent on Monsanto. Furthermore, the consequences for the local ecosystems were disastrous.

We think that each engineer at Monsanto may be responsible and could have said "NO!" Nevertheless, we agree with the third point. Every theoretical discovery may be turned into a good or a bad technology. A well-known example is the use of the nuclear energy at the beginning of the 20th century. When Einstein wrote the equations, he did not think that it would be used in the atomic bomb. After the Hiroshima and Nagaski events, he wrote with Russel the Manifesto, in which they denounced the use of the nuclear energy in such an intention.


Coline said:

I agree with Prof.Toulouse about a duty of whistle blowing. It would be irresponsible to say nothing about a potential danger of a discovery.

However, I have some reservations. Firstly, I believe that there are morals and values inherent to science. Researchers are impassioned by their work, and they see science as an hope for mankind. We perfectly know that in France for example, salary is not the motivation for public researchers, since they are poorly paid.

Secondly, I would like to point out that whistle blowing can create fear, lead to moratoria and stop every research activity in a certain field; it is the case for steam-cell and GMOs. The public is only informed by the media, and therefore the message that they get is truncated by excessive simplifications and the temptation to create controversy. That is why we can understand the reluctance of scientists to give information about potential dangers. If we consider the example of GMOs, the FAO lists a lot of benefits that we could get from them, such as using less land for agriculture, or reducing the use of pests, which are health-threatenning and so on.

Considering all these facts, what about a duty of whistle blowing, but only within the scientific community? Maybe the decisions about science should be taken by commissions of scientists; that is to say, between people who can put the potential dangers into their context. Of course, I am not implying that the public should not get any information, which would be disinformation, and in a way a kind of totalitarism.


Damien, Clément and Ludovic said:

First of all, we totally disagree with the first argument. This is because engineers are the ones who decide if they will apply science in a good or in the bad way not researchers. Besides, engineers are directly involved in the design of a product for its commercialization.

One example of the influence of science on the future of the planet is biofuels. Once presented as the solution to global warming, they are now known to be deleterious. In Borneo for instance, the Indonesian government wants to destroy a part of the rainforest covering 10,000 square kilometers to grow palm oil (http://www.planete-urgence.com/).

How did that happen ? When it was presented to decision makers, probably the advantages were exaggerated and the drawbacks were not sufficiently explained. Proof of this can be found in a scientific article explaining that biofuels are good for the future of the planet (see Hourcade, 2008). As a result, biofuels were chosen by countries such as Brazil as a new major part of their economy.

For us the responsibility of scientists is to be able to explain clearly and entirely the consequences of an action to decision makers, without being blinded by the search for financial support.

References:

Jean Charles Hourcade, 2008 : “Biofuels and the Environment-Development Gordian Knot: Insight on the Brazilian Exception” http://www.centre-cired.fr/spip.php?article684


Alexandre & Matthias said:

Comment on no. 2)

It is surely a fact, and we support it, that knowing what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, is the basis for an ethical judgement. Although there certainly exist different values (or different priorities of values) that may lead to different judgements of individuals (depending on social and religous background etc), big efforts towards finding a common understanding have been undertaken since first societies were formed.

In the context of globalization, more and more approaches to agree upon a universal code have been and are made, such as - in a wider understanding - The Charter of Human Rights (UN 1948). Furthermore, more or less binding and specific codes are nowadays already implemented in different companies, laboratories, associations or even countries. For exemple, in the French CNRS, the COMETS (the ethics committee) oversee every scientific project to ensure its accord with a previously agreed, internal charter of ethics. On a larger scale, a universal code of ethics for sciences has been proposed by Professor Sir David King who stated that: "...if every scientist followed [it], we would improve the quality of science." (BBC News).


Stéphanie and Antoine said:

We have read all the principal points of view and we want to discuss some of them.

We do not totally agree with the first one “We are engineers not researchers, so the responsibility described by Toulouse does not apply to us”.

In fact, we think that researchers are responsible only for the direct effects of new discoveries. Moreover, according to us, they have the power and the duty to warn society against the harmful dangers of products but they can't prevent people using them.

On the contrary, firms and engineers are responsible for the use of products and have to decide whether a product is good or evil. Thus, ethics is a crucial point for firms. For example, when a new material is discovered, researchers have to know and warn of the real impacts of it, whereas firms and engineers have to judge whether the use is ethical or not . Therefore, there is a double responsibility in sciences: on the one hand researchers and on the other hand both firms and engineers.

Our point of view is commonplace in most fields of science but in some cases such as medicine, ethics has a more important role in experiments.

Intrinsic Value

Treebeard by Tom Loback

Aims

Reading a text out loud: sentence stress, intonation and eye contact; the second conditional - If I were you, I would be...; empathy for animals and plants; understanding the debate surrounding the intrinsic value of all life forms.

Introduction

In the previous section we looked at the notion of the instrumental value of nature as an argument to protect biodiversity. In this section we look at 'intrinsic value': that all of nature has worth irrespective of how useful it is to people (ten Have, 2006).

According to Meffe(2003) the word 'value' is related to the noun form of the word 'good'. Good is the same as 'interest'. Now, the interests/goods/values of an organism are the things it requires to attain its goals. The basic goals of any animal or plant is survival and reproduction. So the interests/goods/values of a gold crest (Europe's smallest bird) are to live in conifer forests, because this is where it finds its food and its nest sites. So, to say the gold crest has intrinsic value is to say that it has its own interests.

Referring to the Nobel prize winning physicist Ernst Shrodinger, Rolston (2006) argues that all organisms practise a kind of conservation biology; that is, they protect and conserve their own life. This is their prime concern, and it has been going on since life emerged over 3.5 billion years ago! He asserts that implicit in the idea of life is the notion of continuation or survival. In other words all living things have one thing in common, they all value being alive over being dead.

Understanding that all living things have this interest in common helps us identify with them; this leads to a mutual respect. I remember Brian Edwards, the former host of the New Zealand Saturday morning radio show 'Top of the Morning' reporting a listener's views on the the brutal culling of the brush tailed possum. Damaging as they were to the New Zealand native forest they were still in the end, not unlike us, "...just trying to survive."

The feeling that we should respect possums not only comes from our ability to empathise with them, but also our imaginations. We are capable of projecting ourselves into the skin of animals, and imagining what it must be like to be them. The following extracts do just that.

Listening

Go to Harper Audio. Find Part 1. Listen to J.R.R.Tolkien reading selections from The Two Towers, the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here the two hobbits, Pippen and Merry are being questioned by the ent Treebeard (see Figure 1 at the top of this post). Move the slider bar to minute 3:07 and listen to minute 4:05. While you listen identify which words Tolkien stresses. The text is provided below:

'An Ent? said Merry. 'What's that? But what do you call yourself? What's your real name? 'Hoo now!' replied Treebeard. Hoo! Now that would be telling! Not so hasty. And I am doing the asking. you are in my country. What are you, I wonder? I cannot place you. You do not seem to come in the old lists that I learned when I was young. That was a long, long time ago and they may have made new lists. Let me see! Let me see! How did it go?

Learn now the lore of Living Creatures!

First name the four, the free peoples:

Eldest of all, the elf-children;

Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses;

Ent the earthborn, old as mountains

Man the mortal, master of horses:

Learn now the lore of Living Creatures!

From The Two Towers by J.R.R.Tolkien p.453

Answers

Reading a text out loud - Sentence stress

Stress in English falls on the key words in the sentence. These words are called content words, and carry most of the meaning. If you were only to say these words the listener would be able to grasp the general meaning. The other words are not stressed, they are called structure ( also called function words), and they make the sentence grammatically correct. If you eliminated these words you could still understand the sentence (Beare, 2009). Here is a list of the types of content and structure words adapted from Beare (2009).

Content words:

Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Please note, that we do not systematically stress each one of these types of words but principally those which convey the most meaning.

Structure words:

Determiners (a, the, this, that, some, any, a few etc.), auxiliary verbs (do, does, can, have, etc.), prepositions (after, before, in, on, above, etc.), conjunctions (because, as, while, and, etc.) and pronouns (he, her, they, etc.).

Eye contact with the listeners is made to enhance understanding or put emphasis on certain words or phrases that speak about extraordinary or particularly interesting information.

Timing and Rhythm

English is known as a 'stressed timed language'. That means that the time between stressed words is kept more or less the same. This creates a rhythm of:

stressed-unstressed-stressed-unstressed, stressed etc: / - / - /

Consider the following lines from E.E.Cummings' poem, 'somewhere i have never traveled'. The words in bold are verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. When they are removed from the text, notice that the essential meaning is still preserved.

or if your wish be to close me, i and my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending;

wish be close

life shut beautifully

suddenly

heart flower imagines

snow carefully descending

The poem was featured in Woody Allen's movie Hannah and Her Sisters. You can go to Youtube and watch the clip. At the conclusion of the character Lee reads stanzas 3 and 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TSf8hsJTps

You will find that if you place stress in the correct places, and use correct eye contact while reading you will quite simply be better understood and appreciated by native speakers.

Reading Seminar

In small groups of 2 or 3 read one of the extracts and answer the questions together. Then split up and form a group with two other students who have read different extracts. In your groups exchange the information.

Now, each person in the group should have a speaking role. Divide the text you have been given into parts, and assign a part to a student. Identify the sentence stress, practise reading your passage out loud with your partner. Present your extract to the rest of the class in the following way:

Introduction: Explain briefly what your text is about. You could simply paraphrase the introduction to each extract if you like.

Vocabulary: Put on the board the vocabulary list and any other new words you have encounterd and give definitions.

Reading: Each student in the group should read part of the extract to the class using the speaking techniques above. The key words are coloured in blue.

Analysis: Answer the questions relating to your extract for the class

Extract 1

Siddhartha is the story of the son of a Brahmin. He leaves his home to seek enlightenment by himself, though accompanied by his loyal friend Govinda. The scene, you are about to read, finds him with a group of wandering ascetics called the Samanas. They practise extreme poverty and the mortification of the flesh as techniques to attain nirvana.

Instructed by the eldest of the Samanas, Siddhartha practiced the eradication of ego, practiced samadhi according to new Samana rules. A heron flew over the bamboo forest - and Siddhartha received the heron into his soul, flew over forests and mountains, was a heron, ate fish, felt the pangs of heron hunger, spoke in heron squawks, died a heron death. A dead jackal lay on the sandy bank - and Siddhartha's soul slipped into the corpse, was dead jackal, lay on the beach, grew bloated, stank, decayed, was torn apart by hyenas and flayed by vultures, became a skeleton, became dust, blew into the fields. And Siddhartha's soul returned -it had died, had decayed, become dust, it has tasted the bleak euphoria of the cyclical journey, and then, freshly thirsty, it waited, crouching like a hunter for the gap in the cycle where escape was possible, where the end of causality began, an eternity free of sorrow. He killed off his senses, he slipped from his Self to enter a thousand new shapes - was an animal, was cadaver, was stone, was wood, was water - and each time he awakened he found himself once more. The sun would be shining , or else the moon , and he was once more a Self oscillating in the cycle; he felt thirst, overcame the thirst, felt new thirst .

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse p.14 . Translation by Susan Bernofsky

Extract 2

White Fang by Jack London is the story of the life of a wolf. It is set in the far north of nineteen century Canada. This extract describes the young wolf's first experience of live food.

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Born to be a hunter of meat (though he did not know it), he blundered upon meat just outside his own cavedoor on his own foray into the world. It was by sheer blundering that he chanced upon the shrewdly hidden ptarmigan nest. He fell into it. He had essayed to walk along the trunk of fallen pine. The rotten bark gave way under his feet, and with a despairing yelp he pitched down the rounded crescent, smashed through the leafage and stalks of a small bush, and [found himself] in the heart of the bush, on the ground ... in the midst of seven ptarmigan chicks.

They made noises and at first he was frightened at them. Then moved. He placed his paw on one, and its movements were accelerated. This was a source of enjoyment to him. He smelled it. He picked it up in his mouth. It struggled and tickled his tongue. At the same time he was made aware of the sensation of hunger. There was a crunching of fragile bones, and warm blood ran in his mouth. The taste of it was good. This was meat, the same as his mother gave him, only it was alive between his teeth and therefore better. So he ate the ptarmigan. Nor did he stop till he had devoured the whole brood. Then he licked his chops in quite the same way his mother did, and began to crawl out of the bush.

White Fang by Jack London p.72

Extract 3

The following extracts come from part two of the trilogy The Lord of the Rings, called The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien. Here the two hobbits (hobbits are small human like creatures) have been sent to the forests to encourage the ents (ents are tree like creatures, see Tom Loback's illustration above) to join a fight against the forces of Saruman. Read the following passages which include a description of the ent Treebeard, and the elves attempts to communicate with the trees and ent drink.

They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. It belonged to a Man-like, almost Troll-like, figure, at least fourteen foot high, very sturdy, with a tall head, and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, whether that it was its hide, was difficult to say...The lower part of the long face was convered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends. But at that moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to describe his first impression. 'One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and, long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like the sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on ripples of a very deep lake.' (p.452)

Some of my kin look just like trees now, and need something great to rouse them; and they speak only in whispers. But some of my trees are limb-lithe, and many can talk to me. Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learning their tree-talk. They always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did. (p.457)

The drink was like water, indeed very like the taste of the draughts they had drunk from entwash near the borders of the forest, and yet there was some scent or savour in it which they could not describe: it was faint, but it reminded them of the smell of a distant wood borne from afar by a cool breeze at night. The effect of the draught began at the toes, and rose steadily through every limb, bringing refreshment and vigour as it coursed upwards, right to the tips of the hair. Indeed the hobbits felt that the hair on their heads was actually standing up, waving and curling and growing. (p.460)

From J.R.R.Tolkien - The Two Towers - Book II of The Lord of the Rings

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Questions for Extract 1

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Vocabulary
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From the context try to work out the meaning of the following words; if you can't use a dictionary - Merriam-Websters- Online Dictionary:

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soul, pangs, jackal, bloated, stank, decayed, dust, crouching, bleak, sorrow

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1)Retell in your own words (i.e. paraphrase) Siddhartha's mystical experience as heron and dead jackal.

2) Leading ethicist Margaret Somerville believes the human spirit seeks transcendence; that is, it yearns to be part of something greater. In what way is Siddhartha doing this?

3) The repeated process of his soul leaving his body and living the lives of animals and other entities is described as a 'bleak euphoria'. Try explain how it can be both depressive and joyful at the same time.

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Questions for Extract 2
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Vocabulary *

From the context try to work out the meaning of the following words; if you can't use a dictionary - Merriam-Websters- Online Dictionary:

blundered, foray, sheer, blundering, chanced, shrewdly, ptarmigan, essayed, rotten, bark, gave way, yelp, pitched down, crescent, leafage, stalks, chicks, paw, struggled, brood, chops, crawl.

1) Retell in your own words (i.e. paraphrase) the young wolf's first experience of eating live food.

2) Environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III says all animals have interest (concerns or goods). What interests of both the ptarmigan and wolf are expressed in this extract?

3) Explain the writer's choice of the word 'chops' in the last paragraph.

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Questions for Extract 3

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Vocabulary

From the context try to work out the meaning of the following words; if you can't use a dictionary - Merriam-Websters- Online Dictionary:

sturdy, hardly, clad, bark, hides, weeping, bushy, twiggy, mossy, well, shimmering, ripples, to rouse, kin, limb-lithe, draughts, scent, faint, borne

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1) Retell in your own words (i.e. paraphrase) the hobbits' description of the Ent, the Elves attempts to communicate with the trees and finally the taste and effect of the Ent water.

2) Has your attitude towards trees been changed by this reading? Explain your answer.

3) Describe the effect of the ent drink on the hobbits. What does the writer want you to feel?

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Answers (to come)

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Essay Question

In no more than 250 words compare and contrast the three extracts.

Sample Essay (to come)

Critique

In groups of 2-3 discuss the following question:

Do you think the writers succeed in making you feel what it is like to be a tree or a living or dead thing for that matter? Explain your answers.

Evaluation

Without talking to your neighbour write a few words describing what you have learnt through your reading; in other words, have your opinons about Nature changed or have they been confirmed? Submit your comment as comment to this post.

References

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Beare, K. (2009) 'Intonation and Stress - Key to Understanding and Being Understood' <http://esl.about.com/od/speakingadvanced/a/timestress.htm>

Hesse, H. () Siddhartha

London, J.() White Fang

Meffe, (2003)

M.I.T Sentence Stress and Rhythm <http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-223Fall-2004/267AAF2D-FF3C-4FF2-B5AB-0C51DA5D56AC/0/sent_stres_n_rym.pdf>

ten Have, H. (2006)

Rolston, H. (2006)

Schrodinger, E.(194-) What is Life?

Tolkien, J.R.R.() The Two Towers

Images courtesy of Flickr

TREEBEARD - illustration by Tom Loback by Tom Loback

Links to related Nature Art & Language lessons:

Empathy and the Girl with Pearl Earring

Siddhartha: Reading a Novel - study guide and links to the complete text