Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [82]
Vaccine fiascoes notwithstanding, our society often does a good job converting science into social good. Markets and entrepreneurship, for example, are powerful institutions that often help turn science into goods that enhance our lives. Think of a development such as lasers. When lasers were first invented, many people regarded them as toys with few apparent uses. But etrepreneurs figured out ingenious ways of using lasers to do everything from playing movies (DVDs) to correcting vision by laser eye surgery. As a society we’re very, very good at taking science and using it to develop new products for delivery to market.
But while we’re good at delivering science to market, we have a more mixed record when it comes to delivering science through public policy. In a market, everyone can decide for themselves whether they want to use a product. If laser eye surgery makes you squeamish, no one’s making you get it. But policy decisions are often collective decisions, like whether child vaccination should be mandatory. Such decisions can’t be made individually, as in a market, but require broad agreement to be effective. And when scientists discover something with dramatic policy implications—say, that human carbon dioxide emissions are leading to a warming of the global climate—then in many ways they’re treated as just another interest group trying to lobby the government. But science isn’t just an interest group. It’s a way of understanding the world. Ideally, our institutions for governance would incorporate in public policy the knowledge gained by science—as imperfect, uncertain, and provisional as that knowledge is—as well as possible. But in today’s democracies, that’s not what happens. This is the problem of science in democracy.
I don’t have solutions to the vaccine problem or, more broadly, to the problem of science in democracy. I’m describing these problems because they’re concrete examples of critical flaws in the role science currently plays in our society. Any fix to these and similar problems will require big changes in the role of science in society. Most of the time such changes occur only very slowly, and so it’s tempting to take that role for granted, to view it as a natural state of affairs. But, in fact, the current state of affairs is not natural at all: the role of science has been radically different in different societies and at different times—just think, for example, of all the societies in which scientific thought has been entirely suppressed. Historically, big changes in the role of science have often been driven by new technologies and the new institutions they enable. Think of the printing press’s role as an enabler of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. We can change the role of science in society if we change the institutional answers we give to fundamental questions such as “Who funds science?” or “How is science incorporated into government policy?” or even “Who can be a scientist?”
As a concrete example of the way institutions impact the role of science, let’s return to the market system. The importance of the market to the role of science is vividly illustrated by what happened when the market was suppressed in the Soviet Union. Although the Soviet Union had one of the best scientific research systems in the world, without a market system it was mostly unable to make scientific innovations available to its citizens. Another example of the power of institutions is the way the introduction of compulsory schooling has increased general scientific literacy. Although it’s conventional wisdom in many circles to complain about standards of scientific literacy, by historical standards we live in an enlightened age. Both the market and schools act as bridging institutions, connecting science to society in a way that brings many social benefits. As a final example, this time a negative example, consider the suppression of science by the early Christian Church. This