Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [8]
But all depends, I think, on the purpose of the collection. If its objective is to find out, if it has acquired human parts post mortem—especially with the prior consent of those to whom the parts once belonged—then little harm has been done, and perhaps in the long run some significant human good. But I am not sure the scientists are entirely free of the motives of those New Guinea cannibals; are they not at least saying, “I live with these heads every day. They don’t bother me. Why should you be so squeamish?”?
LEONARDO AND VESALIUS were reduced to bribery and stealth in order to perform the first systematic dissections of human beings in Europe, although there had been a flourishing and competent school of anatomy in ancient Greece. The first person to locate, on the basis of neuroanatomy, human intelligence in the head was Herophilus of Chalcedon, who flourished around 300 B.C. He was also the first to distinguish the motor from the sensory nerves, and performed the most thorough study of brain anatomy attempted until the Renaissance. Undoubtedly there were those who objected to his gruesome experimental predilections. There is a lurking fear, made explicit in the Faust legend, that some things are not “meant” to be known, that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make. And in our own age, the development of nuclear weapons may, if we are unlucky or unwise, turn out to be a case of precisely this sort. But in the case of experiments on the brain, our fears are less intellectual. They run deeper into our evolutionary past. They call up images of the wild boars and highwaymen who would terrorize travelers and rural populations in ancient Greece, by Procrustean mutilation or other savagery, until some hero—Theseus or Hercules—would effortlessly dispatch them. These fears have served an adaptive and useful function in the past. But I believe they are mostly emotional baggage in the present. I was interested, as a scientist who has written about the brain, to find such revulsions hiding in me, to be revealed for my inspection in Broca’s collection. These fears are worth fighting.
All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe—both the outside and the inside universe—without studying it. The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern—if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table—we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us. That is an idea, I sometimes fancy, that may be sitting there still, sluggish with formalin, in Broca