Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [119]
p. 3 ‘The Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science,’ warned Winston Churchill: Speech at Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946, published in Maxims and Reflections (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1947), p. 164.
p. 3 Another of Churchill’s pronouncements: Address to the Royal College of Surgeons, 10 July 1951, collected in Stemming the Tide: Speeches 1951 and 1952 (Cassell, 1953), p. 91. It is interesting that Churchill’s pre-war pronouncements about science come across as much more positive. ‘The scientific utilisation, by liquefaction, pulverisation and other processes, of our vast and magnificent deposits of coal, constitutes a national object of prime importance,’ he said in a Parliamentary debate in April 1928. Talking about Fritz Haber’s invention of an ammonia synthesis method in 1918 (the invention was crucial for the production of explosives and fertilisers), Churchill said, ‘It is a remarkable fact, and shows on what obscure and accidental incidents the fortunes of possibly the whole world may turn in these days of scientific discovery.’
p. 4 Churchill would also have known of Allied scientists testing nerve gas and mustard gas on their own soldiers: R. Evans, ‘Military Scientists Tested Mustard Gas on Indians’, Guardian, 1 September 2007, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/sep/01/india.military
p. 4 As the renowned biologist Jacob Bronowski put it just a few years after Hiroshima: J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science (Heinemann, 1951), p. 145. It is also worth noting that Bronowski repeatedly warned his colleagues of the consequences of the public’s distrust of science. In 1956 he wrote, ‘People hate scientists … the scientist is forced, by the hatred of public opinion, to side with established authority and government. He becomes a prisoner of the hatred of the lay public, and by that becomes the tool of authority.’ (J. Bronowski, ‘The Real Responsibilities of the Scientist’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1956, p. 10.)
p. 4 ‘very much the image of science that the high-ups in the Royal Society wanted to put across’: T. Boon speaking in Mad and Bad: 60 Years of Science on TV, Pioneer Productions for BBC, first broadcast 15 December 2010. Timothy Boon’s book Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television (Wallflower, 2007) is a treasure trove of material on British science’s relationship with the BBC in the post-war period. Boon cites various memos and communications where science establishment figures try to influence broadcast subjects away from the ‘perils and dilemmas’ angle that so obviously interested the journalists of the time: ‘Can we sometimes forget war and atomic weapons, industrial advance or productivity … and say something more of the history and growth of science, of the great solution wrought by the introduction of the experimental method …?’ Or, ‘The evil wrought by science springs, not from any intrinsic evil in science itself, but from its misuse by men who do not really understand what science is …’
p. 4 ‘You scientists, you kill half the world, and the other half can’t live without you’: This is from Episode 6 of A for Andromeda, which was written by Fred Hoyle and John Elliott and first broadcast in 1962. Hoyle was, in fact, a great scientist as well as a great science fiction writer, but he was not one to toe the party line. That may account for his being passed over for the 1983 Nobel Prize. As one obituarist put it, ‘why Hoyle was not included in this award remains a mystery hidden in the confidential documents of the Royal Swedish Academy’ (obituary available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2001/aug/23/guardianobituaries.spaceexploration).
p. 5 By 1957, 96 per cent of Americans said they agreed with the statement: Quoted in ‘Public Attitude Toward