ANY student setting out on an academic career in science is likely to become increasingly separated from the humanities and social studies. Even educators who advocate that scientists should be given a rounded education seem to think of these 鈥渟oft鈥� subjects as sugar-coating for the bitter pill of technical training. But this is not good enough. Now more than ever, scientists need to know a lot more about the political, economic and cultural dimensions of the world if they are to tackle its problems, even if this means they learn a little less science.
There is something fundamentally incoherent about Britain鈥檚 science education policy. Last December The Times Higher Education Supplement reported that 20 per cent of all science graduates from Britain鈥檚 鈥渙ld鈥� universities were jobless, up from 10 per cent five years ago. Yet the science minister and the other champions of the recent national science week, alias SET95, claim that not enough students are pursuing scientific degrees.
A similarly incoherent vision can be found throughout the developed world. Just ten years ago, when the Cold War was starting to wind down, the UN estimated that 20 per cent of the world鈥檚 scientists were engaged in research related to defence. In the US and Britain it was more like 30 per cent. But now, in the post-Cold War era, policy makers lack the guts to question why nations still require so many people to pursue a degree in science. Rather, they seem satisfied with the politically safe stance of looking for new markets in which the surplus of scientists might ply their trade.
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From this standpoint, the UN Population Conference, held in Cairo last September, was a godsend. 鈥淥verpopulation鈥� is clearly a problem that is unlikely to disappear overnight, and so there should be plenty of work for scientists. But what kind of work? And will it really contribute to a solution?
The consensus of learned opinion tends to diagnose the problem of 鈥渙verpopulation鈥� in a way that reinforces the division of labour between the arts and the sciences. On the one hand, there is the long-term problem of poverty in most of Africa and much of Asia and Latin America, which stems from a history of exploitation by the developed world, abetted by local Third World elites. This is portrayed as a problem of geopolitics, not science. On the other hand, there is the more immediate problem of Third World populations growing at ecologically unsustainable rates. This is portrayed primarily as a technical problem of devising and acquainting people with the techniques of birth control, while at the same time finding more scientific ways of producing food.
The politically correct thing to say about all this is that we need to move on both fronts at once. The arts-trained people should be tackling the long-term geopolitical issues, while the scientists deal with the more pressing life-and-death matters through their technology transfers.
Few political planners seem to entertain the possibility that the short-term and long-term strategies may work at cross-purposes, given the klnd of education that scientists receive. In particular, scientists are trained to think that any problems can be solved if only they can find the appropriate 鈥渕agic bullet鈥� 鈥� some invention that, when widely distributed, will make the problem disappear without leaving more problems in its wake.
The magic bullet mentality is fallacious. Every new bullet eventually becomes a bargaining chip strengthening the hand of one or another party in local Third World power struggles. And each time, the scientific community is horrified that something as well-intended as contraceptives can be converted into a tool of domination. While scientists cannot be expected to become politicians or even political economists, they should have enough understanding of the ways of the world not always to be so surprised when short-term fixes turn into long-term messes.
But the fallacious magic bullet mentality is all too pervasive. Scientific projects designed with the long term in mind are often framed as aiming for a 鈥渕agic target鈥�, an underlying causal mechanism 鈥� some gene or bacillus 鈥� that, once found, can be treated, cured or eliminated at a stroke. Here, too, the limited horizons of the scientific mind can play into unscrupulous hands. A striking case in point is the 鈥渨ar on cancer鈥� that the US has been waging since 1971. Among the biggest financial supporters of this campaign have been the manufacturers of such carcinogenic products as some chemical additives and tobacco. Has a sense of humanity overtaken their sense of profit? Not exactly. Rather, these industries have discovered that predicating social policy on knowledge of ultimate causes is one of the surest ways of preventing such policy from ever being made.
Why do scientists fall so easily into the trap of thinking in terms of magic bullets shooting at magic targets? The problem here is that students are consistently taught to think about science as quite different 鈥� and perhaps even independent 鈥� from the rest of society. Among the worst offenders are the potted histories of science that are supposed to inspire students to pursue scientific careers. In elementary school, they tell of the ability of one genius 鈥� an Edison or an Einstein 鈥� to change the world simply by developing a Good Thing. By the time students reach university, a slightly more complex story is told, whereby the 鈥済iants鈥� stand upon one another鈥檚 shoulders in a fixed sequence: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, and so on. In neither case are students told about the individual and institutional 鈥渕iddlemen鈥� who were involved in translating the original idea into a variety of applications that reached far beyond what the original scientist had in mind. A classic example is the wireless, which required the shipping interests of a Marconi, although James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz often receive credit for its 鈥渢heoretical basis鈥�.
Bringing this sense of history into play requires that students learn about the larger social dimensions of the scientific enterprise 鈥� that science is, indeed, an 鈥渆nterprise鈥� in the full sense of the word. Admittedly, this would paint a messier and more ambivalent picture. Showing how relativity theory led to the atomic bomb is both intellectually and morally more demanding than telling cosy tales about Einstein scribbling down formulae while watching trams from a Swiss caf茅.
Nevertheless, more serious stories can be told in just as colourful a fashion as the average tale of political intrigue. James Watson鈥檚 famous book The Double Helix is such an example. And if our society is committed to training more scientists in the coming years, they should be taught to participate more effectively in the larger geopolitical networks of which their work will necessarily be a part. In addition, this broadened educational horizon will enable scientists to adapt more easily to the vicissitudes of the job market, which are likely to continue into the next century. At present, science education is ill-equipped to address the full range of problems that 鈥渙verpopulation鈥� and 鈥渃ancer鈥� represent.