 Oh God, we pray for this earthly city as we rejoice in her spacious beauty and her busy ways. Help us to make it a mighty common workshop and garden for our people where everyone will find a place and a task. Help us to make it a great house wherein all may live significantly, unafraid, guest, loving their lives in peace and rounding out their years in strength. Toward this end bless the deliberations of this Nobel conference. During these days take into your care all here present and all dear to us wherever they may be in your vast kingdom. Amen. Welcome to this, the first session in the Nobel conference series. This is our 21st Nobel conference. We're very pleased to welcome friends and guests from across the Midwest, across the country and from throughout the world. We talk today about the role and the impact of science and technology on our society. I suspect that science in many ways depends on math and numbers and I'm going to give you just a few numbers. We have delegates at this conference today from 72 sister colleges and universities from eight states. We also welcome representatives and delegates from 147 high schools representing six states and the Dominion of Canada. We are especially pleased today to have with us an international delegation from Tokyo, Japan and I would like to acknowledge their presence. I am pleased at this time to recognize Mr. and Mrs. Kaguro and their delegation from the Komi Corporation of Tokyo, Japan. Would you please stand? We have many other friends that will be introduced to you during the course of this conference. I would however like to make one final acknowledgement today. We meet today in the Lund Center. This conference is made possible also by a generous endowment provided for us by the Lund family. In institutions such as Gustavus as many things, it is a faculty, it is a student body, it is a program of study for teaching and learning, but it is also the friends who sustain us and so in a special way this morning I acknowledge the very special debt that this institution owes to Russell, Rhoda and Patricia Lund. Thank you very much for coming. We are glad that you are here. We have two beautiful days ahead of us intellectually and I'm told also weather wise. Thank you. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the 21st annual Nobel conference. Our theme this year is once again one which we believe to be of interest and great importance. The impact of science on society. What has been the impact of science and technology on our society? What is the impact of science and technology are exerting on our society now? What ought to be the impact? Someone has suggested that while technology offers solutions to our problems, it creates dilemmas for us in the process. Certainly the application of science and technology to society has generated controversy. In the course of the next two days we will explore some of those issues in many realms, the scientific, the ethical and the historical. To that end we have assembled a distinguished panel, Jay Robert Nelson, director, Institute of Religion Texas Medical Center and clinical professor of community medicine, Baylor College of Medicine. Merritt Rowe Smith, professor of the history of technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston Brill, vice president, research and development, Agrosetus Corporation. Daniel Kevles, professor of the history of science, California Institute of Technology. Salvador Luria, director of the Center for Cancer Research, Sedgwick Professor of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nobel Laureate, 1969. A word on format. Normally we will have a lecture and as time permits we will follow the lecture by responses from the other panelists whom I will invite to come up and sit at the tables in front of me. On page 11 of your program you will find question cards, which we invite you to take advantage of, write your questions down, hand them to ushers. The ushers will bring the questions up to the front as time permits, we might handle them in the response session, certainly we will consider them in the panel discussion that will ensue tomorrow afternoon at 3.30. It is now my pleasure to introduce to you David Johnson, dean of Davis Adolphus College. Dr. Byrne, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the faculty of this college I am pleased to begin the ceremonies in which we will confer the honorary doctorate, the doctor of science, honoris causa upon Salvador Luria. Dr. Luria now becomes the 65th Nobel Laureate to hold the honorary doctorate from Gustavus Adolphus. We are greatly pleased and honored to have him here. From Hyde Camp, chair of our department of biology will deliver the citation. Merrily Miller of the department of nursing and Alan Sputgerber of the department of chemistry will serve as lictors in this ceremony. On October 17, 1969 the headlines of the New York Times read the Mets win five to three take the series and a grateful city goes wild. Hanoi proposes the U.S. and the Viet Cong negotiate a loan. Nixon's draft lottery plan approved by the House panel and near the bottom of the page three Americans get the Nobel in medicine. Sharing the honor for 1969 were Max Delbrook, Alfred Hershey, and Salvador Edward Luria. Dr. Luria's credentials are extensive and far too lengthy to chronicle in detail at these proceedings. His professional career began as a research fellow in the Curie laboratories at the Institute of Radium in Paris from 1938 to 1940. Dr. Luria went on to research and teaching positions at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, the Carnegie Institution, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and finally in 1958 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He remains at MIT and is the Sedgwick Professor of Microbiology. Along the way he spent time as a Guggenheim fellow at Vanderbilt University and began collaboration with Max Delbrook and others on viral genetics. Later this collaboration was to continue at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in Long Island where the three individuals Luria, Delbrook, and Hershey became loosely known as the Faj Group. In addition to sparking their own creative talents to the point of performing critical experiments allowing for the mapping of genes, this group may have been the single most important motivation for inspiring legions of bacterial and viral geneticists. Their courses at Cold Spring Harbor contain most of today's leading viral and bacterial geneticists. Dr. Luria, as a prominent physician and biologist, is a man of many talents and even more visions. His autobiography and other books detail his path to scientific recognition and his all-encompassing views as a teacher and world citizen. Dr. Luria is a sculptor. He teaches world literature to his graduate students to ensure their involvement outside of science, and he would characterize himself perhaps as a humanist. He is without question among the world's preeminent scientists. His often controversial positions in the political arena and his concern for social involvement make him particularly suited for this year's Nobel conference. President Kendall, for reasons of the highest intellectual pursuits, for his dedicated social concerns, and for his championship of the involvement of scientists in humanistic endeavors, I have the great privilege to present to you upon the recommendation of the faculty of Gustavus Adolphus College, Dr. Salvador Edward Luria for the degree of Doctor of Science Honoris Causa. On the recommendation of the faculty and with the approval of the Board of Trustees, and by virtue of the authority vested in this institution by the State of Minnesota, it gives me great pleasure to confer upon you, Salvador Luria, the degree Doctor of Science Honoris Causa, with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities thereto appertaining. Mr. President, members of the faculty, students, and guests, I want to start this talk with an apology because of a bad condition. I cannot stand for an hour or even for the short of time for this lecture. I don't want to scare you with a full hour, but therefore I asked for the first of the privileges that has just conferred upon me. Now it's time to lecture from the sitting position. I had given for this lecture a different title and then as I prepared, my subject became broader and the title changed. It became somewhat more cryptic, but I managed to inform the college authorities of the change of title so that it appears on the program as it is printed and the title is The Single Artificer, which is a suspect a little bit confusing or cryptic, so some of you may think it refers to the creator, but it doesn't. The title comes from one of the best known poems by the American writer, American poet Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West. The poem begins with a line of great poetic power. She sang beyond the genius of the sea, followed by lovely lines that contrast human voice with the voice of the ocean. Meaning, the poet tells us, comes into nature by and only by the activity of the human spirit. The noise of the sea becomes something more than just noise because we hear it and we interpret it. Likewise, I would add, plants and animals and the heavenly bodies acquire significance for us because human understanding imposes upon them an order that is a pattern of relations. Later in Stevens' poem, the title appears, she was the single artificer of the world in which she sang. The concept is now more precisely expressed. Creation is the result of human activity, of human performance. Order in the world emerges from active human involvement from the unraveling of hidden relations between objects and events. Thus, is the music revealed that is hidden underneath the noise of nature and thus is the story concealed in the straight of rocks and the layer of fossil bones becomes manifest. This is the creation of which I wish to entertain you today, the adventure of the human spirit. An adventure whose essence is communication, shared knowledge and shared emotion. This venture was made possible by the unique qualities of human nature, by the evolution of human brain, human language and human consciousness out of our animal past. It is this adventure that gives meaning and even purpose to individual human beings, a purpose here and now, not a purpose there and beyond, a purpose distinct from the pursuit of personal success as well as from the pursuit of personal salvation. Because its meaning comes from the participation in a collective enterprise, not from the preparation for a personal afterlife. The central feature of the adventure that I wish to explore is understanding. The search for meaning in the structures, events and relationships that we encounter and perceive. Understanding is not a simple or unique operation and the paths that lead to understanding can be diverse. We seek understanding through science, we seek explanations for the regularities of the material world, we seek understanding through art which reveals to us forms and designs and abstractions that stir and focus our emotions because they resonate with hidden harmonies in our souls and make them shareable. And we seek understanding through history and philosophy which explore our human past and our thinking processes. Within each of these realms, science, art and humanities, there are different modes of understanding, different devices, each with a long history and each with a distinct entitlement within the traditional thought. I call these modes the rational, the irrational and the un-rational modes which differ in their methods, appeals and contributions. All paths to understanding, science, art and humanities, however, are in various major combinations of these three modes. The rational mode searches for order, structure and predictability. It does so by reasoning as in philosophy and mathematics or by experimentation as in modern natural science. In so doing, it seeks to weed out the irrational and to be on guard against mixing rational and un-rational. The un-rational mode is the search for emotional experience, either creative or responsive experience and is preeminently aesthetic and artistic. It does not seek order and responsibility and reproducibility but rather intensity and uniqueness of experience. It seeks to respond to our quest for emotional fulfillment by revealing associations, stirring feelings and awakening resonances whose content cannot be rationalized or put into words. This is the true of music or poetry and of all those natural and artificial phenomena that convey satisfying or provocative relations of form or color or pattern. It is the un-rational element of art that Herbert Marcuse extolled when he claimed that art can communicate the truth in objectivity not accessible to ordinary language and ordinary experience. It all depends of course what one chooses to call truth and objectivity. Marcuse wished to assign the value of objectivity to inner experiences that cannot be put into words and cannot therefore be communicated to others. But it seems hardly appropriate to conclude the such subjective experiences provided access to any higher objectivity at all, that the un-rational is a higher form of rationality. The danger of this confusion is that it tends to legitimize all sorts of spurious, solipsistic beliefs provided they are coupled with strong emotional feelings. In the hands of some psychiatrists like Clang, the subjectivity of the psychotic becomes the only valid reality. This brings me to the irrational mode, the assertion of personal or sectarian pet theories and explanation, either for natural phenomena or for emotional reactions. At some times, the irrational mode serves a useful purpose by stimulating the search for a more effective solution. For example, in the Middle Ages, alchemy, the search for transmutation of elements became the basis for modern chemistry. Science itself uses the irrational mode when scientists adapt in an almost perverse way to invent fantastic explanations as foils against which to test their constructs. It is interesting to recall that Newton, for example, besides being the greatest scientist of his time, was also something of a religious crank speculating about biblical hermeneutics and astral conjunctions. Can we exclude that his theological and astrological musings might have contributed in a dialectical manner to his greatest scientific insights? Astrology was, in fact, the source of understanding in pre-modern science day by exploring ancient beliefs in the connection between planetary emotions and the course of human affairs. Astrology helped to search for regular patterns in both domains, even though many centuries later, materialist thinkers such as Lucris, many centuries earlier, materialist thinkers such as Lucris had already dismissed this kind of stipulation as soft-headed. Present-day astrology, however, is something very different. It does not even claim to provide shortcuts to understanding. As we can see almost every day in the papers in the United States, astrology is a commercial catering to ignorance and self-delusion and the confusion of reality with wishful thinking. What could possibly be the link within the position of planets at the time of one's birth and the event one encounters on a certain day of the week or of the month? And yet, each week, millions of Americans purchase astrological magazines and millions, presumably, consult their daily horoscope before making their decisions, perhaps even decisions that affect their own future and the future of our nation. On a par with astrology, and possibly even less respectable because they tend to discredit serious science, as pseudosciences like extrasensory perceptions and parapsychology and telepathy is surprisingly enough still prosper even in certain academic surroundings. By strange perversions, certain professionally trained scientists manage to persuade themselves that they can predict, and even will, which cards shall appear next to another in a properly shuffled deck, or make objects bend at a distance, or transmit thoughts by means that do not obey the inverse square law, truly the lasers of the mind. I always wonder why, if they possess such gifts, they have not made a killing on the stock market. These examples of irrational thinking are clearly outside the process of understanding. More instructive is the field of religion, which involves an interesting mixture of rational, unrational, and irrational elements. Historically, the function of religion has been the provision of comfort to human beings, seeking for meaning in their life, struggling against the sense of utility and the terror of death. What existentialist philosophers call the absurd feature of human destiny, the tension between human consciousness and the awareness of personal transience. The unrational aesthetic contribution of religion is to fight despair by inventing for life a presumption of metaphysical significance, either the gift of election stemming from special creation, or the promise of salvation in the form of an ultimate purpose, such as reward of the death and immortality of the soul. Religion offers both an excuse and a purpose for human existence. Even in its most ascetic form, it provides emotional comfort by immersing the individual into communal rights and offering the support of shared experiences. And yet, in attempting to invent meaning and purpose for human life within the universe, most religions, having the course of history, invented explanations for the universe itself as experienced by human being. They have created the mixture of the irrational, the unrational, and irrational, a mixture of threatening rules, comforting vision, and common sense directives for everyday life. Within Christianity, the exercise Credo Quia Absurdum was applied not only to the idea of God and His work, but also to a cosmology and a natural history taken for granted because backed by authority. In so doing, religion claiming to be the expounder of powers beyond human understanding also became the tool of the controlling powers within society. Not surprisingly, when modern science arose, the pseudonscience of religions refused to give ground. Its scientific pretenses had become part of the power structure, an entitlement that gave its custodians social and political power. The earth had to continue to be the center of the universe if Pope and emperor and kings and landlords had to continue in power in the name of God. And today in the United States, we see creation science, the literal interpretation of biblical chronology used as a weapon in political life, as well as an intrusion in the educational process. Two state legislatures and two governors have already enthusiastically adopted creation science as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. These legislators apparently failed to see the incompatibility between the timetable of Genesis and the age of the petroleum deposit whose exploitation they had been elected to protect. Federal courts have made short shifts of such aberration in the two cases in question, but with all respect due to the judiciary, I am not convinced of the wisdom of depending on it to set things right, once creation scientists should begin to rank evolution theory as one of their targets along abortion and homosexuality. Before the rise of modern science, the deliberate pursuit of rationality in the intellectual sphere was prerogative of geometry and philosophy and history. The ancient philosopher is not disdain to allow irrational beliefs to enter their work when dealing with natural phenomena that they could not explain. They were more concerned with the human mind and the human condition that with lightning and earthquakes. And they profited from the unrational, the aesthetic response elicited by the artistry of Plato and Lucrez and the robust texture of Aristotelian discourse. What the humanities did was to provide an alternate, more rational comfort than that of religion, a more objective sense of human life, a promise that understanding of the human conditions, if not of human purpose, was at least potentially approachable by observing human thoughts and actions. Dispelling the terror of natural forces as symbolized in the ancient gods, philosophers provided understanding, if not hope. With the rise of Christianity in the western world, the Augustinian dichotomy between salvation and domination became central to the societal view of human predicament. But when the promise of salvation came to be seen as questionable, when the traditional institution warranted by theology started to crumble, personal despair in modern times became a widespread emotion of humankind. Existential despair grew on the ashes of 18th century optimism when the era of revolution ended and in a world of fraternity, not in a world of fraternity, but in a world of individualism and metaphysical nationalism. One of the most terrifying visions of human despair and futility that literature can convey is Samuel Beckett's story, The Lost Ones, presumably an allegory of the human condition. A throne of individuals is imprisoned in an immense cavern. They have no implements but a set of tall ladders. One by one, without any organized plan, the lost ones climb without ladder whenever a ladder becomes available, even struggling for possession of a ladder and seek to find escape by digging in tunnels none of which has ever led to a breakthrough. The lost ones never cooperate. The exploration done by one of them never has any meaning for the others. All efforts yield nothing and mean nothing. The picture of life that Beckett gives that in that story is one of solipsistic futility. Such a perseverance despite futility is even less meaningful and less inspiring than the myth of Sisyphus in which action, however futile, was a perennial challenge to fate rather than the performance of a meaningless task. What Beckett does is to raise the question of personal meaning and personal salvation and finding none sinks into utter despair. But what he fails to convey or rather conveys by contrast is that meaning and salvations are not personal categories. They can come only from participation in shares activity in the collective enterprise. They come from commitments to shared values, communalities, morality and justice. The optimism of ancient and 18th century philosophers came from divisions of societies dedicated to communal values. The sense of personal meaning comes from our shared response to the partner known to Sophocles tragedies, to Whitman's and Shakespeare's verses and also from our sharing with others, past and present, the understanding of geometry and natural science and the enjoyment of art and companionship. The artist and the scholars of the past, whose work has meaning for us, saw human life as an adventure, not the Augustinian adventure of preparation for an afterlife, but the adventure of understanding, expressing and delighting in the world in which we live. Meaning and salvation come to us because we are adventures, not lonely adventures in search of a personal Shangri-La, but adventure searching for shared experience, shared with family, within community, within humanity as a whole. And the lasting part of the shared experience is the contribution which each of us can make to the collective adventure. Here, I wish to limit my comments to the contribution of a certain subset of adventures, those whom people think of as scientists, who try to discover and clarify reproducible patterns in the natural events and activities which they choose to explore. Modern science, starting in the 16th century when Galileo, Descartes and Newton introduced the experimental methods of exploration and verification, set itself a new task profoundly different from the geometry and the philosophy of the ancients. All was understanding of a new kind to explain phenomena and events in terms of experimentally testable hypothesis rather than of ideal concepts. The first trial was the explanation of planetary motion by Newton using Galileo's experimental method coupled with Descartes' analytical geometry and Kepler's discoveries. In place of the ideal circles and geometric speculations, Newton's mechanics introduced measurement and reduction to simple generalizable statements dealing with forces, objects and their motion. Science, as it grows in the end, is found on two main tenets. First, that the human mind processes are in principle congruent with the structure of the natural world. This is crude science from science, although of course not from philosophy, any distinction between physical and metaphysical reality. The second standard of modern science is that no explanation should be taken as even tentatively correct unless it has been submitted to adequate tests that this test whose result could actually or potentially disprove the explanation once and for all. An expressive way to put this is to say that modern science, in fact, science altogether, is perennially engulfed against wishful thinking. Wishful thinking has to be examined and dispelled not only in its crudest form such as the belief in the efficiency of prayer in cozy brain or the belief that a horseshoe on the wall can bring good luck but also in a more subtle way when it takes the form of unexamined intuitive common sense assumptions. Einstein's crucial contribution to physics, for example, was to catch within the edifice of Newtonian physics the little hidden common sense belief that simultaneity between two events could be established beyond any limit, a perfectly reasonable assumption yet as it turned out an unjustified one. More generally, the path of modern science has consisted in going beyond the intuitive level of explanation. Science proceeds by challenging intuition and advances by further and more subtle re-examination of assumption. It does not perversely question the edifice it has built but when difficulties arise it reviews its hypotheses in search of hidden flaws. This is what happened when the science of electromagnetic waves caused Einstein to explore critically the hidden assumption of Newtonian theory. And in both Newtonian and Einsteinian advances, the effectiveness of the new solutions was coupled with a kind of aesthetic beauty, a layer of unrational pleasure in patterns and order and confidence in the ability of the human mind to expand beyond the limitation of our sense-limited intuitions. In the natural sciences, the impulse to research is less influenced by the social context than in the social sciences even though the course of scientific discovery is inevitably influenced by demands for new technologies and by availability of funds for research. But once the science develops into a consistent, solid body of knowledge, its structure and direction reflect mainly the internal dynamics of the subjects matter itself. Science explores problems that arise in the course of their work and seem soluble at a given time with the means at hand, whether the means happen to be Cartesian geometry for Newton or fruit flies or bacteria for 20th century geneticists or synchrotrons or linear accelerators for physicists. In the words of Peter Medawar, science is the art of the soluble. Disapparent opportunistic course of natural science protects it but only to a certain extent from the biases and turmoil of social pressure. But such a comforting sense of shelter, the illusion of pursuing an intellectual activity not driven by practical goals, does not hide the fact that all findings of science, all advances in scientific knowledge are potentially the sources of power over natural phenomena and can have tremendous impact on human affairs and not only on human understanding. Even if the content of science may be value free, the very existence of science depends on a society permeated with values, in fact, with contradictory sense of values. When in the earliest days of scientific revolution one of his greatest proponents, Francis Bacon wrote the faithful words, Knowledge is Power, he thought of the newly emerging science in terms of power, both abstract power over the forces of nature as well as political power in the society of which he was one of the rulers. The ambiguity of his statement must not have been as evident in the early 17th century as it is in the nuclear age. The tie between understanding and power between science and technology and a hyphenation used by college presidents in search of subsidies tend to obscure the profound difference between science, the understanding of natural phenomena and technology. Science is in principle indifferent to technological application. In fact, the landing of an astronaut on the moon or of a space vehicle on Mars had, for example, little to do with science. Thus exploits even used the minimum of science, Newton laws, transistors, physics and thermodynamics. The rest was technology, superbly sophisticated technology, but not science. I remember how scandalized Jerry Peele, the publisher of Scientific American was when in a letter to the New York Times, I stated that there was more scientific value in a recent report on blue-green algae than in the entire planetary exploration. What I meant was that scientific value, like artistic and literary value is the contribution to understanding and should be measured by the amount of breadth of the new understanding it generates. The planetary exploration achieved very little in terms of scientific understanding, relatively little, a few facts of interest to geologists and astronomers, but no new synthesis about the universe or the origin of life. Planetary exploration fulfilled an emotional wish of humankind to spring free from earthbound limitations. It enlarged the feeling of power over the forces of nature and it caught the imagination of the television public as a great musical comedy or a great football game. But it also added incentive to the fantasies of space wars, not only in the mind of filmmakers, but also in those of our political leaders. Science generates sources of power by making technologies possible. How the technologies are used, how they are employed, their use or absence of use and the purposes of such use is not in the hands of the scientists. They are in the hands of society that is of those groups of individuals who have or seek the decision-making power in social affairs. In the case of the atom bomb, the physicists had turned over to government their skills in service of a grand new technology and it was the government that made the decision to use the bomb that is society has represented more or less distantly by elected officials more familiar with the manipulations of power than with the process of understanding. Technology can be constructive or destructive depending on how it is used. For a few centuries we have reveled in optimism. For large segments of humankind, technology has meant steam power and electricity and cheap goods and cleaner and healthier life. It was easy to ignore or to gloss over the negative effects such as instability of employment, disruption of communal structures or colonial exploitation. Today in a world living under an apparently permanent threat of nuclear war a simple belief in a beneficial technology has given place to widespread skepticism. Each scientific advance that can generate new technology is seen by some as a potential danger. Take as an example my own field that of molecular biology. It has generated technologies with vast possibilities in the applied world. Genetic engineering, the methodology for reshuffling genes within and between organisms promises new understanding of life processes as well as new approaches to medicine and agriculture. We visualize a whole range of applications from production of cheap hormones to corrections of certain congenital defects into production of superior food plants. This is wonderful just as the electrical motor and the cotton gene were wonderful one century ago. Yet, even before the first applications of genetic engineering become visible we hear voices, some of them serious and thoughtful voices warning us of dangers ahead of possible accidents of environmental catastrophes of corruption of scientists if they become drawn into the service of industrial enterprises. And the consequences of genetic technology we are told by some may be more subtle than the construction of bombs or the alteration of physical quality of life. They may intrude into social relation at the level of mutual respect and social justice as when eugenicists five decades ago preached the superiority of one group, human group over another or the inevitability of behavioral differences between sexes. The misgivings extend not only to technology but to science itself. Since science is the source of technology and technology can generate potentially dangerous applications we hear critics say shouldn't science itself be limited or constrained or even stopped in its path. Isn't scientific research an altogether evil pursuit of power? Before we dismiss this criticism and misgivings too lightly we should realize that behind criticism of science as an enterprise there is often a protest against the structure and functioning of society a revolution against injustice. There is a revolution against social systems in which the fruits of science like those of labor are directed to selfish gain or private profit. Every environmentalist, every critic of technology is consciously or unconsciously something over radical that is a person who questions the power relation within societies. The central question radicals ask is who in society makes the decision and in whose interest? Who calls the game and how is the deck stacked? Sorting out rational and irrational elements in scientific research may to some extent protect the scientific enterprise from its radical critics. For example, the science of genetics has been the object of suspicion on the part of critics who see it as a source of racism and sexism. What this critic's fault however is not the solid content of genetics but the superstructure of distortions advocated by a few socially biased geneticists. The closer science moves to the problem of society the more aware it should scientists be not only of their own or personal or class or sex biases but also the impact that discovery has upon society. For scientists to dismiss lightly the question of responsibility for the impact of science on society and to claim the ultimate innocence of their trade leaves them in an ambiguous position somewhere between that of philosophers and poets on one hand and the handgun manufacturers on the other. How elaborate must the feedback loop or responsibility be before its signals become irrelevant noise? Can we press any computer key indifferently without wondering whether one of them may activate an electric chair or a nuclear warhead? Here is where awareness of the forces of operating society becomes important. The ivory tower has windows to look out from as well as doors for delivery of power and what we see encourages or rather compels our participation. But what form should such participation take? Certainly we recognize the importance for scientists to inform the public of the advances of science so that the elected official will be chosen with better understanding of the landscape of available knowledge and we recognize the importance of scientists acting as advisor to such officials in the formulation of policy. But beyond such formal corporate service by scientists there remains a serious question of responsibility as the generators of knowledge that can be converted into technology scientists must realize that their role in society is different from that of other workers whose toil does not affect the rules of the game, the power relations. Those workers whose toil uses technology but does not generate new and powerful technologies. As moral individuals, scientists cannot ignore the consequences of discovery when it is applied into the real world of social and economic relations and yet science itself provides no guide. It deals with how come not with what for. It deals with good or bad theories with good and bad experiments but not with good or bad action. That is domain of morality. And personal morality, the rules of behavior between individuals in day-by-day interactions does not clearly prescribe the rules of responsibility with regards to relation within society at large at the economic and political levels. Are scientists as individuals committed to worry whether technology is used to exploit colonial peoples or to protect their own country from the dangers of socialism? In thousands of years of western philosophy no one has come up with any better prescription than the golden rule irrespective of how different philosophers have tried to justify it. But what does, what direction does the golden rule provide in a world of complex and economic relations? Economic realities introduce conflict between personal morality and social ethics conflict that underlie the entire history of human society and become more acute in individualistic societies. Attempts to resolve such opposition on a philosophical plan have obscured the essential conflict between the virtuous driving of the individual and the drive to survive and prosper in a society where the supply of rewards is insufficient to satisfy all ones let alone all desires. Isaiah Berlin has expressed his dilemma in a provocative form in terms of a Christian and the pagan ethical system one personal the other communal struggling with one another within society. Again, the ethicist Alasdair McIntyre has suggested our ethics is incoherent because it is a mosaic of ethical fragments of the past relics of principles that were functional in earlier societies but with different forms of communal organization but have become now dysfunctional. According to McIntyre, principles like the golden rule could be socially operational only in societies such as the hypothetical Polish of Aristotle in which citizens identify at least formally with the communal system of virtues but in individualist modern society personal and communal system of virtues are not congruent with each other individualism conflicts with virtues life. To put it in McIntyre's own world politics becomes civil war carried out with other means. What does this mean in terms of personal responsibility of scientists? Should we accept passively the divergence between personal morality and the chaotic values of our complex world? What philosophers tell us is simply that the practice of the golden rule cannot be expected to prevail automatically in the affairs of society. If it is to become operative it must like any other goal be actively worked for. It must be an existentially chosen actively nurtured prescription for relations among citizen justice for relations between individuals. In other words, it must become a political goal. Inefficient ethics of society can come into being only when the choices become political commitment and individual commitments become collective commitments. The hope for a more just society where the output of science and all understanding may be used for purposes collective agreed upon a society with true political legitimacy must first become a political commitment on the part of individuals to make it become so. Such an effort commitment to active political participation applies to scientists as much as to everybody else. More so perhaps because as I said earlier scientists are collectively the source of so much power which underlies modern technological society. Scientists less than other groups in society can look down on political life within difference or contempt. Whatever their personal choices may be whatever side they choose their voice needs to be heard. When intellectuals the purveyor of understanding exiled themselves from the arena of social struggle and seek refuge in the ivory tower they lose a significant part of their humanity. In the third canto of the inferno Dante relegates the soul of the uncommitted who lived deserving neither blame nor praise to limbo where the punishment is to be forever among others like themselves. They have lived passively doing their chores but contributing nothing to the collective process of guiding and perfecting the community. Dante the political poet calls on us to be the artificers of the world in which we live in not only by understanding it as in Wallace Stevens poem but by a commitment to active participation. There is nothing new in this way of looking at politics as social morality in action. Rousseau and other philosophers have seen the impossibility of a moral life lived without active concern for the legitimacy of the surrounding society. If personal morality and social organization will become more congruent they will not do so automatically in any historical process, in any automatic historical process. They will converge only as a result of deliberate active personal collective activity. It is not as easy a task to serve as political activists or at least as committed citizens as it is to follow the pursuit of science and understanding in libraries and laboratories. And it has little promise of short-range success and reward. But I believe it can provide comfort against despair and reinforcement through shared commitment. After all, if the goal is respectable if we believe that what we do can change the world in which we live the activity itself is rewarding. The climate is as meaningful as the summit to which it stands. Thank you, Professor Luria, for your stimulating remarks. Would the other panelists please come forward and take their seats? We will discuss the wide-ranging remarks which Professor Luria has just given us. Professor Luria's remarks have taken us into the realm of the political, the scientific, the historical, the ethical. I think our panelists are uniquely prepared to make responses to what he had to say. Might I ask one of the participants to lead off with some comments? Well, I think rather than making a response, I'll ask another question. I'll ask a question. Dr. Luria, do you think that the scientists generally are more individualistic now or less socially responsible as a group than they were, say, in the 1960s or even before that? And if so, what's going to change the attitudes? Would it be more of the arts, more of the humanities in the scientist's training? I would say that by and large, the involvement of scientists in general affairs tends to be somewhat lower than that over the scores. Certainly, I have the fortune of living with the psychologists for the past 41 years. And I noticed that there is a tendency among psychologists, social scientists in general, because they deal with human problems to be interested in all aspects of humanity, including the social ones, whereas very often scientists, because of the operation of their work, tend to be more concentrated in the kind of things that can be put into a specific paradigm. Like, for example, you can make a hypothesis and test it. In the world of politics, what I was trying to say, you cannot operate like that. In society, you have to operate by commitment. You have to choose what you like, what you believe, whether this is monetarism or socialism, and then act upon it without any way or any expectation of testing by experiment, whether you're right or wrong. And that's something that I suspect has always made scientists somewhat outside of the general field of involvement. On the other hand, after the atom bomb and so on, many physicists have realized what their involvement already was, whether they liked it or not, and they became very active. Biologists have not yet because most of the applications of biology until now have really been extremely positive and they continue to be. And that's why I emphasize the fact that it's been about biology to begin to hear critiques worrying about where the future may take us. Professor Kavlis, do you have some remarks to make? I did. I wanted to interrupt. I'll set mine aside for a moment because I want to follow up on this question. With regard to biologists and their sense of social responsibility, there was a magnificent display of social responsibility on the part of molecular biologists and so on in the Asilomar Conference of 1975, I think there was before, in which for those of you who don't know about it, this was at the dawn of the era of recombinant DNA. And the people at Stanford and elsewhere who knew that this technique was becoming possible, in which you take the genes of one organism, splice them away, and insert them into the genome of another, to put it simply. That this might loose upon the world new organisms that might be uncontrollable and might wreak havoc. As a result, a conference was held at the Asilomar in California in the mid-1970s in which the biologists who knew about these things were coming basically said, wait a minute, let's stop before we proceed with this science. Shouldn't we examine not only its technical implications but also our moral responsibilities with regard to taking this kind of risk for the rest of the world. In the end, it was decided, as a result of technical discussion and investigation, that the risk could be taken, that the risk was really very minimal, that it could be taken and to date, despite the fact that there has been enormous work in recombinant DNA all over the world or have been so far as anybody knows, no adverse consequences. Now, the question that arises in my mind is this and is stimulated by Dr. Brill's comments and your response. In the early 1970s and certainly before then, biologists could take the position of moral responsibility in a pretty uniform way, partly because they had the precedent of nuclear scientists with Hiroshima but also because biologists were pretty much still, especially molecular biologists, in the Ivory Tower at that time. Since then, however, molecular biology, molecular genetics has gone far beyond and outside the Ivory Tower and it's now become biotechnical industry as anybody who reads not only the stock pages but the financial pages but the front pages of newspapers know the biotechnology business has become enormously important financially and many biologists have taken on financial commitments and opportunities. Now, given that trend in molecular biology which seems to be spreading to all sorts of other areas of biology as well, do you think that we can expect biologists to exercise and display the same degree of social responsibility or not? That is, to what degree is the commercialization of biology affecting them? I don't know, it seems to me difficult to think about biologists as a collective thing. I find that I don't see any reason why the fact that biology has now become involved in novel areas of application with different range of financial rewards and so on opportunities is going to change the basic situation that biologists like chemists like most physicists and so on live in a world which is different from the world in which what I call the political decisions are made. I think that by political I don't mean only, for example, to talk to the public and to discuss in public the possible as at the Asilomar conference. I think also the fact, I'm putting it in harsh words now, I think there is a need in any society for the intellectual to boil over any sign of injustice. It seems to me the revulsion against injustice is what is called, and nobody is more responsible for that than the people who have the privilege of living with intellectual pursuits. Dr. Nelson, would you like to get into this? I would like to add a comment and a question to that of Dr. Kevlus here and Dr. Luria, with regard to the nature of experimental science itself as a non-scientist. I nevertheless here said quite often that the new interest in immediate commercialization and profit-taking on not only genetic science but others related to it is actually having very detrimental effects upon the integrity and the purity of scientific research itself with regard to the publication of results, the intense competition among scientists to gain a particular achievement so that they can most quickly capitalize upon it and so on. I wonder how much truth there is from your perspective in that kind of observation about the state of research science itself in as much as you have said, and I quote here, that in principle science is indifferent to technological implication or application. Let me put it this way about ten years ago I wrote for a magazine called Focus which had the privilege of collapsing two issues after the one in which my article appeared. An article about... that was really... well, an article that was about the fact of explaining why scientists don't cheat but of course the editor of the magazine without asking me put on the title why do scientists cheat? What I mean is that I think these... there are two aspects to your question. You mentioned integrity and you mentioned competition. Competition, absolutely. But I think any human activity which is moving forward actively is bound to involve competitive people who are active, desirous to get results and so on. Integrity is very different. I think that contrary to what newspaper and science writers love to put in the newspaper I think to scrutinize all activity science and the specific biological science biomedical sciences have been the highest integrity of all the professions. I had once a... somebody who came to see me informally we had a couple of drinks together at the bar and it happened to be an FBI agent and he told me, you know doctor we could send two-thirds of the Congress to jail tomorrow. Well, you could not send any reasonable number of scientists not only to jail but also to disprove their... In fact, this is a profession in which for better or for worse integrity is self-built. It's built in. If you cheat on something that anybody will read in three months, six months they will have caught you. If you care to invent a completely irrelevant paper on some irrelevant minor subspecies of a species of algae that nobody is working on very well you may get it published but I doubt it even today. Even that will be sent to a good archeologist who is going to say this is bunk. I think that it's a profession whose integrity I stand for any time with respect to that of lawyers of real estate agents or car salesmen. Professor Luria, we have a question from the audience that deals with some of the concepts you were exploring. Let me read it to you. You stated that creation and order results from human activity. That is music from the noise of nature. Wouldn't it be more correct to say that human activity uncovers the order inherent in the universe? I would like to see that. You're speaking so close to the microphone I couldn't hear you. I think as always you can never write something or say something that somebody else can say better. In fact I have never I must say I have I wrote a few sonnets my life but Shakespeare always did it better before me. Let's comment on this however. I think that that is a very subtle point the difference whether it uncovers the order or whether it provides it. The point in the idea of order as formulated by Wallace Stevens in several poems and by many others is actually that there is until the human consciousness operates on reality there is no such thing as an order because order only exists if it is recognized. Now maybe God if he has he exists in a form that has consciousness of everything that exists in the universe then that order would already exist but apart for God man, human species the only one that creates order by acting and by observing and by studying so that I think is the distinction it's not that order is there meaningful order it's only meaningful for us because we put things together I recommend to anybody who has not read the idea of order at Key West to read it, it's a marvelous poem. Just a brief observation I think that the the issue really has to be understood to be moot whether order exists in the universe or whether we impose order in the universe there's no way to tell there's no way at all Well I am a a Popperian Realist as I am doubtful of positivistic escapes Professor Smith would you care to comment on Professor Leroy's remarks? Well I thought that the really interesting points that was made in this talk is the emphasis that Professor Leroy placed on the idea of science or the enterprise of science is a social process a process that involves politics deeply involves politics and it seems to me that the question arises in my mind that my interest lies more in the area of technology and I certainly know that technology is highly political if you talk about the golden rule being actively worked for getting people involved pursuing political goals it seems that it's possible that the enterprise of science could become more disorderly in a political sense than orderly Any comments about that? I guess I can put it even more frankly I can imagine that you have plenty of colleagues who say Luria don't get the people involved with science they're going to start messing around with things and before you know we'll have even less control over what we're doing There is a man named Jeremy Rifkin who is already thinking that I'm not saying that I think that let's put it this way I think that there are two ways of avoiding trouble one is to face it and the other one is to put one's head in the sand and stay there hoping it will get away it won't I think there is a fact that science is too important to continue to be protected and neglected benignly by society I think we are too important not sort of to be active part of the process and I think by becoming involved see for example I see a great advantage in biologists going in and creating their own industrial companies and so on not only because of course it's nice to know that our students can make money but also because I think this is going to give a sort of a certain shelter of the sense being in the hands of the five or six multinational corporation that run the country and or science being closed in the laboratories I think that it puts a buffer between there is a matter of initiative here in a sense I consider biotechnology I didn't want to go I had a remark and that but then it disappeared biotechnology in a sense is creating a buffer between Monsanto dog chemical and science it's creating a place where people who are not under this terms rule I have worked enough for large companies to consult them to know how much nicer life is in small biotechnical companies in which initiative is still close to the basic research would you agree Dan which comment I had an observation not so much a question that your this immediately recent exchange suggests I might make right now you mentioned in your talk that science is fundamentally value free I mean it describes the way the world is not the way the world ought to be but I think that from the point of view of our discussion at the moment it's worth observing that the doing of science itself is not value free it constitutes a deep assertion of a whole cluster of values one could mention many of them I will only point to for example belief in intellectual freedom which is fundamental to the doing of science the belief in a necessity for rational knowledge however any historical moment happens to define rationality I would disagree with you about alchemists I don't think they were irrational in their own context it also however involves the assertion of social values as well that is especially these days clearly involves demand for investment of enormous resources nowadays public resources it involves a constraint on methods you can't do just whatever you please in the doing of science take the simple case of human experimentation there are severe restraints justifiably placed on those things knowledge itself in short does not transcend all other values then in contemporary science many values express themselves in its social organization and management the basic conclusion that I would draw from these observations by way of clarification of the argument you've been making is that science is no longer at all autonomous in itself that is in the doing of science it involves money resources it is fundamentally an integral part of a larger society and it would be misleading I think to speak of it it is misleading to speak of it as something that science does and then society uses it's much more interactive activity now between science and the larger society because science is itself a part integrally of the larger society I would agree completely I would say what I meant is that the content of science is value free but that the process of doing science is anything but value free you choose for example I wrote in my own autobiography that one of the reasons I went I wanted to go into science looking back here and myself a slightly psychoanalytic eye was that I wanted to escape from the world the social world in which I had been raised and I was impressed how my young friends who are sons of scientists or families of scientists seem to be so much happier and really that was my first motivation so you see it's anything but value free but what if you're a good scientist the way you proceed in the operation of science depends on the content and the it's really there is a duality the content of science does not dictate values but the way science is performed is permeated with the same values and hence you have to expect some kind of governance and regulation imposed on science from the out of the outside society it's inevitable it might not be in politics then so you can take part in that I would like to thank Professor Luria for a very provocative paper and our panelists for their responsiveness we have truly begun the process of the conversation which will ensue over the next two days we will reconvene here at 130 for a lecture from Professor Daniel Kevles entitled genetic progress and religious authority historical reflections thank you very much