Dangerous Scientists

Scientific leaders in both the U.S. and Britain are worried by the public's low opinion of scientists. At last week's Minneapolis meeting of the American Chemical Society, Charles Allen Thomas, president of Monsanto Chemical Co., told his colleagues:

"Science is suffering from sterility--from an inability to beget sufficient heirs --because few people actually understand what we do ... Teen-agers in New England told a survey-taker a few years ago that they regarded the 'scientist as cold, calculating, and without social interest or moral standards--an occupation fit for "queer geniuses." '

"[Students'] minds, and those of their parents, have been poisoned by the insidious cloud of anti-intellectualism which hangs over this country like a great shroud . . . Somehow, science has become identified in the minds of a great many people as a sort of super 'Svengali,' responsible for all our dilemmas."

In Britain's Political Quarterly, Dr. Jacob Bronowski, of the British National Coal Board, tries to explain why scientists are viewed with suspicion by most nonscientists. "The scientist," says Bronowski, "is not only disliked, but also distrusted." Governments treat the scientist as "indispensable, but unreliable, a hangdog hangman who has the bad manners to be good at war work and the impertinence to find it distasteful. The public thinks that he has no conscience, and his security officer fears that he has two consciences . . . He is unhappy between his scientific creed and his social loyalty: between, that is, the long and triumphant tradition of open publication, and a society which still hopes to survive by the peasant adage, 'Least said, soonest mended.' "

The public "puts its fear of the scientist into robust terms--he is going to blow man off the earth, or (in alternate weeks) he is going to overpopulate it."

Steeped in the common-sense science of the Victorian Age, the public thinks of scientists as dangerous warlocks. "The popular picture of the scientist," says Bronowski, "lends itself to the basic totalitarian tricks which exploit the insecurity of the ignorant: an awe of the specialist, a hidden hatred of him, and a cleft between his way of thinking and theirs."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.