Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [112]
Even the fights, the injuries and the injustices have their purpose. If you want to rise to the top, you and your scientific insight have to be bomb-proof. Any big new idea and its proponent both have to survive so much violence, and unseat such strongly rooted predecessors, that, if they make it through to widespread acceptance, we can be as sure as is possible that they are correct. Most of us are the unwitting beneficiaries of this gladiatorial process. That is why we unhesitatingly board aeroplanes or take aspirin: science is trustworthy. But few of us are aware of the cost at which that trust is achieved. The strange thing is that the scientists would rather you remained in the dark.
When James Watson published an autobiography in 1968, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, his co-recipients of the 1962 Nobel Prize, were furious. According to Matt Ridley, that was because The Double Helix took readers into ‘the messy, competitive, error-strewn, naughty, human business of grappling with ignorance, rather than to describe science as a stately march towards discovery by paragons’.
This same issue was explored by Peter Medawar throughout his writings. ‘It is a layman’s illusion,’ he said, ‘that scientists caper from pinnacle to pinnacle of achievement and that we exercise a Method that preserves us from error.’ But, for all his brand-busting honesty, Medawar was in no doubt about science’s ability to reach those pinnacles:
In terms of the fulfilment of declared intentions, science is incomparably the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged upon. Visit and land on the moon? A fait accompli. Abolish smallpox? A pleasure. Extend our human lifespan by at least a quarter? Yes, assuredly, but that will take a little bit longer.
Medawar was being unduly conservative with that last statement. Over the past two hundred years, human life expectancy has doubled in the developed world, thanks to advances in our understanding of healthcare and nutrition. Can we prolong it still further? Quite possibly. Cambridge University’s Richard Smith, an expert on population dynamics, points out that each time a natural limit has been suggested, it has been exceeded. In the 1920s, life expectancy in the United States was around fifty-seven years, and the best estimates were that this could be extended by around seven years at most. In 1990, the experts said that, without major breakthroughs in slowing down the rate of ageing, average life expectancy could not exceed eighty-five years. Only six years later, Japanese women left that upper limit behind. Smith wryly notes that the United Nations has now abandoned the practice of estimating upper limits on life expectancy.
Not that these successes of science are problem-free. In a world with a population of seven billion and rising, all kinds of issues, such as food production, housing and healthcare, pose unprecedented challenges. Nonetheless, this is the world that science has created – the world we asked science to create – and the secret anarchists have risen to the occasion. Whether these successes can continue, whether science can solve the next set of problems, will depend on whether we are willing to let the anarchy come out into the open. Science has achieved much during