Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [2]
It was a deliberate policy: whenever British scientists of the post-war era allowed television cameras into their laboratories, for example, the message was upbeat and optimistic, ‘very much the image of science that the high-ups in the Royal Society wanted to put across’, as Tim Boon, chief curator of London’s Science Museum, has put it. Television drama, on the other hand, free from the influence of senior scientists, showed a much more distrustful attitude. ‘You scientists,’ rages a character in a 1960s drama, ‘you kill half the world, and the other half can’t live without you.’
Once the scientists’ subservience was established, all they had to do was convince governments and the public that science had at its disposal a safe, efficient, controllable Method that, given enough resources, they could use to create a better world. It helped that science works so well. By 1957, 96 per cent of Americans said they agreed with the statement that ‘science and technology are making our lives healthier, easier and more comfortable’.
The scientists too allowed themselves to be fooled by the coverup. They became convinced that they were the heirs to a noble and dispassionate tradition, and that the brand values of science were carefully nurtured and passed down the scientific generations. According to the US Office of Technology Assessment, the average science professor trains around twenty PhD scientists. All are, almost unconsciously, taught to play by a set of rules that will perpetuate the myth of the responsible, level-headed, trustworthy scientist.
One of the few senior scientists to have dared to expose the spin was the British biologist and Nobel laureate Peter Medawar. Scientists, he admitted, ‘actively misrepresent’ themselves. The famed scientific routine of deductions based on experiments that were themselves based on logical hypotheses ‘are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us’, Medawar said. ‘The illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes.’
So what does go on behind the scenes? The most concise description was given by the Austrian-born physicist turned philosopher Paul Feyerabend. In 1975, Feyerabend published a book called Against Method in which he set out a shocking idea. When it comes to pushing at the frontiers of knowledge, there is only one rule, he said: Anything Goes. Science is anarchy.
Feyerabend was soon declared the ‘worst enemy of science’, and for good reason. His argument was deliberately provocative and mischievous, and he took it to the furthest extremes: witchcraft was just as valid a way of gathering knowledge, he once contended. But his point still stands. When we look behind the curtain, science is astonishing.
To make a breakthrough or to stay on top, scientists take drugs, they follow crazy dreams, they experiment on themselves and on one another, and occasionally they die in the process. They fight – sometimes physically, but mostly in intellectual battles. They try to entrap one another, standing in their colleagues’ way to block progress and maintain the lead. They break all the rules of polite society, trampling on the sacred, showing a total disregard for authority. They commit fraud or deceive or manipulate others in order to get to the truth about how the world works. They conjure up seemingly ridiculous ideas, then fight tooth and nail to show that the ideas are not only far from ridiculous, but exactly how things really are. Some challenge the interests of government and business, occasionally sacrificing their reputations for the greater good. Science is peppered with successes that defy rational explanation, and failures