The Real Responsibilities of the Scientist
Jacob Bronowski (1956)
We live in times of very difficult decisions
for scientists, for statesmen, and for the lay public. Many of these decisions
are forced on us by new scientific discoveries, and the difficulties in making
them are created by the distance between the scientist and the public. (Indeed,
there is a frightening distance even between scientists in one field and those
in another.) This sense of distance is, I think, a grave threat to the survival
of the kind of society in which science can flourish at all.
People hate scientists,
There is no use in beating about the bush here. The scientist is in danger of
becoming the scapegoat for the helplessness which the public feels. And if an
immense revulsion of public feeling does lead to the destruction of the
scientific tradition, then the world may again enter a dark age as it did after
the Goths destroyed
That is the danger which faces us,
because people hate scientists. But even if this danger does not materialize,
something as terrible can happen - and is happening. This is that 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.
My purpose is not to underline these
obvious dangers, which we may hide from ourselves but which in our hearts we
all know to exist. My purpose is to try to give a picture, as I see it of the
real responsibilities of scientists, government, and public, in order that,
beginning from this diagnosis, we may begin to cure the great and threatening
division between them.
The Abuse of Science
What the lay public does when it
hates the scientist is what it does also when it hates policemen and ministers
of state and all symbols of authority. It tries to shift the responsibility for
decisions from its own shoulders to the shoulders of other people. “They have
done this,” it says. And ‘They’ is always the law, the government — or in this
case, the scientist.
You must allow me here to make a
digression which is not strictly part of my theme, but which I think needs
saying. It is this: that we must not forget that scientists do bear a heavy
responsibility. I am of course about to explain that really the public and
governments bear the main responsibility. But this does not shift from us, the
scientists, the grave onus of having acquiesced in the
abuse of science. We have contrived weapons and policies with our public
conscience, which each of us individually would never have undertaken with his
private conscience. Men are only murderers in large groups. They do not individually
go out and strangle their neighbour. And scientists are only murderers in large
groups - collectively. For scientists are very ordinary human beings. Any
collection of people in any laboratory contains good and bad people with consciences
and without, and what we have allowed to happen is the conquest of science by
the minority without conscience which exists in every group.
It is sad that scientists have been
exceptionally corruptible. Look into your own experience. Most of us have come
from poor parents. We have worked our own way up. The practice of science has
enabled us to earn salaries which would be unthinkable to us if we had stayed peddling
whatever our fathers peddled. Quite suddenly, the possession of a special skill
has opened to us a blue door in the antechambers of prime ministers. We sit at
conference tables, we have become important people. because
we happen to be able to be murderers. And therefore scientists have been bought
with large salaries and fellowships and rewards quite inappropriate to their
merits, because a policy was furthered by their techniques. The scientist has
proved to be the easiest of all men to blind with the attractions of public
life.
Having said this I now propose to
slop abusing the scientist. I think it is right that we should all make this
confession of guilt - I have been as guilty as anyone else - but this is all
spilt milk, this is all water over the dam. We must now look toward what we can
do to remedy what has happened. And it cannot be remedied by a gigantic strike
of scientists who will suddenly refuse to have anything to do with commercial
or war research, because the society of scientists contains too many fallible
human beings to make this practicable.
When the public dreams of such a
strike, when it says: “scientists ought not to have invented this or disclosed
that secret,” it is already demanding something of the individual scientist
which lies beyond his personal responsibility.
The voters of
The individual scientist is not the
keeper of the public conscience, because that is not what he was chosen for. The population at large. through
its deputed ministers, has chosen scientists to execute certain public orders
which are thought to represent the public will. And you cannot ask the scientist
to be executioner of this will, and judge as well. If you have given a body of
scientists this particular hangman’s task, you cannot ask them also to form a
collective opposition to it. The collective responsibility belongs to the lay
public and through that, to those who were elected by that public to carry it
out.
Thus when Einstein on August 2.
1939. wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in order to draw his attention to
the possibility of an atomic bomb, he was acting with
exemplary correctness. He was disclosing to the elected head of government a
matter of public importance on which the decision was not his, the writer’s,
but was the President’s to make.
We must explain to people that they
are asking of scientists quite the wrong collective decision when they say,
“you should not have invented this.” or “you should not have disclosed that.”
This is asking us all to betray the public in the same way as Dr. Klaus Fuchs
did, by asking scientists to make decisions which are for the nation to make.
The only man whoever, on his own responsibility, was willing to shoulder public
responsibility in this way, was Dr. Fuchs. But so far from being hailed as the
only sane scientist, he was treated as quite the opposite – as of course he
was, since scientists have no right to betray the will of the nation. Yet Fuchs
did just what the public asks of every scientist - he decided what to do with a
scientific invention.
The Private Conscience
Very well. We will agree that the scientist is
not the keeper of the nation’s policy. Then what is he the keeper of? He is the
keeper of his own private conscience. His responsibility is not to be seduced
as a person. He has the right to act individually as a conscientious objector.
Indeed, I believe he has the duty to act as a conscientious objector. I would
like to repeat this point. It is in this country an offense to betray the armed
forces or to seduce their members from their allegiance. It is not an offense
to refuse to be a soldier. And I believe that this is exactly like the position
of the scientist. He has no business to act as if he commands the army, but he
has a business to settle with his own conscience; the serious business whether
he personally will engage in forms of research of which he does not morally approve.
My claim then is that the individual
scientist should exercise his own personal conscience. This is his duty. What
is the duty of governments in this respect? It is to make it possible for him
to exercise his conscience. The responsibility of governments in this is to create
the conditions in which a scientist can say: No! to
projects in which he does not want to take part. He must even be able to give
advice which is distasteful to those in authority, and still must not be
hounded out of public life or prevented from making a living.
In all countries the serious threat
to scientists who have once touched the fringes of secret subjects is that they
are then caught in something from which they can never escape again. They do not
get a passport, in case somebody captures them. They cannot get a job because,
if they do not want to do this, then they are too dangerous or awkward to be trusted
with anything else. This is what we must prevent governments from doing, and this
can only be prevented by the opinion of quite ordinary citizens. This is the
duty which citizens owe to scientists, to insist that governments shall make it
possible for scientists to be conscientious objectors if they wish.
I have explored this subject in
general terms, and I would now like to be specific. I would like to tell you
precisely what I think is the responsibility of the public, of the scientists,
and of governments.
The responsibility of the public is
to make the decisions of policy on which their future depends, and make them
themselves. And in a democracy the apparatus for this is to elect those people
in whose judgment you have confidence - and to elect them on the issues which
in fact face the world. Now you can only elect such people, you can only put
pressure on them about public issues, if you are well informed. The greatest
lack of public opinion today is lack of information about what is possible and
not possible in science. This sets my teeth on edge every time I read a scientific
newsflash. I will quote one of many instances which I find distasteful: the use
of the phrase ‘cobalt bomb.’ This is a technical term for a piece of medical
equipment, but has suddenly become transformed into something to describe how a
hydrogen bomb might be clothed. As a result, of the fifty million people in
this country, forty-nine million and nine hundred odd thousand have heard “the
worth ‘cobalt bomb.’ but are helplessly confused between radioactive treatment
and something that you blow people up with. The public must be well informed;
and the public gets not only the government it deserves, but the newspapers it
deserves.
If this is once granted, the next
step I think is simple. If it is once granted that we believe in democratic
election, and that in our generation this can only be carried out by a public
informed on the scientific issues on which the fate of nations hangs, then the
duty of the scientist is clear. The duty of the scientist is to create the
public opinion for right policies, and this he can only create if the public
shares his knowledge.
My generation has a heavy task here,
because it ought to spend the bulk of its time - alas - not in laboratories at all,
but in explaining to the voting public what is going on in the laboratories.
What are the choices which face us’? What could be done with antibiotics, with
new materials, with coal (if you like), and with alternative forms of energy?
These are urgent questions and yet, however many times we raise them, the
layman still does not understand the scale of the changes which our work is
making, and on which the answers must hang.
There is a slightly irreverent story
about this. At the time the Smyth Report was published in
And the public does not grasp it. To
say ten to the sixth to anybody, however educated, is still to invite the
reproof today that one is stressing mere numerical details. One of our tasks,
as scientists, must be to educate people in the scale of things.
While I am telling improper stories -
improper only in the amusing sense - I will tell you that everybody who works in
industrial research has this trouble all the time, when he discusses the
economics of new processes. We put forward the result of research, or we simply
estimate what would happen if a piece of research proved successful. And at
once we get back a balance sheet from the finance department which says: the
current process makes a profit of 2/2d a ton, and what you have in mind might
make a loss of 8d a ton; it is therefore not worth pursuing. This, if you
please, is the comment on a piece of research which, if it works on the full scale
might cut costs by a factor of five. But no accountant understands a factor of
five: he budgets in shillings and pence, and what is liable to loss is to him
as good as lost. One cannot explain a factor of five, or a factor of a million,
to people who have not been brought up in a scientific tradition. This is what
I mean when I say that the scientist has a duty to become a teacher to the
public in understanding the pace, the nature, the scale of the changes which
are possible in our lifetime.
Government and
I have detailed the duties of the
public and of the scientist. What are the duties of government? The duties of
government are to give its public the opportunity to learn, and therefore to
give scientists the opportunity to teach. And I have already suggested that
these duties are twofold. One is to give scientists freedom to live their own
lives if they do not want to go on with research projects which seem to them
without conscience. The other is the duty to allow scientists to speak freely
on subjects of world importance.
As for the second, everyone who has
ever been connected with the atomic energy projects knows how it is met today.
We spend our time waiting for some American journalist to publish some piece of
information which we know to be accurate, so that we may then quote it as being
the opinion of the New York Times. I am being frank about this: I do it all the
time. I read what the greatest indiscreet senator said to the small indiscreet reporters,
and I know that nine statements are nonsense and one statement is accurate.
Then I quote the one that is accurate - but not as my opinion.
Of course it is natural that
governments resist the explosive opinions a of
scientists. All governments. all
societies are resistant to change. Rather over two thousand years ago. Plato
was anxious to exile poets from his society: and in our lifetime, for the same
reason, governments are, in effect, anxious to exile or at least silence
scientists. They are anxious to exile all dissidents, because dissidents are
the people who will change society.
There is a simple difference between
governments and scientists. Governments believe that society ought to stay the
way it is for good – and particularly, that there ought to be no more
elections. Scientists believe that society ought to be stable, but this does
not mean the same thing to them as being static. We scientists want to see an
evolving society, because when the physical world is evolving (and we are helping
to evolve it) the forms of society and government cannot be kept the same.
The Moral Contract
Having described the duties of the
public, of scientists, and of governments, let me now underline what I have
said by describing what happens in all three cases if these duties are not
kept. If governments do not allow scientists freedom of conscience, to work at
what they like and to refuse to work at what they do not like, and to speak
freely about why they do so, then you get the gravest of all disasters - the
disaster of state intolerance. This is a disaster because it saps both sides of
the moral contract. For there is a moral contract between society and its individuals
which allows the individual to be a dissident; and if the state breaks this
moral contract, then it leaves the individual no alternative but to become a
terrorist. I do not know whether the great state trials in
The great sin of the public is
acquiescence in this secrecy. I am horrified by the feeling that I get, from
such trifling things as American advertisements, that people really enjoy the
sense that they are not to be trusted. There is an advertisement running in the
New Yorker at the moment (I think for a clothing firm) which shows a man who
has just got out of an airplane. He has a face like a prizefighter,
he is well-dressed and wears what in
And the third in our scheme, the
scientist, must preserve the tradition of quarrelling, of questioning, and of
dissent on which science (and I believe all post-Renaissance civilization) has
been built. He must do this for two reasons. First, there is the mundane reason
which is obvious in the failure of German research after Hitler took power. It
is this: that you do not get good science as soon as you have reduced the scientists
to yes-men. It is the nature of scientists to be thoroughly contrary people - let
us own up to that. It is the nature of science as an activity to doubt your
word and mine. As soon as you get a science, such as atomic energy research in
totalitarian
This does not happen in English
laboratories yet. Mr. Churchill begins by saying that he is satisfied with
existing explosives, but after the comma he does give scientists the
opportunity to be dissatisfied. This tradition, this independence and
tolerance, is I believe the base of all our values; and this is what we as
scientists must preserve.
The Duty of Heresy
I have given you the simple
practical grounds for allowing scientists to be awkward, but I believe also
that imaginatively and intellectually this is equally
important. The sense of intellectual heresy is the lifeblood of our
civilization. And the heresy of scientists cannot be confined to their science,
I have said that the duty of the
scientist is today publicly to become a teacher. Let me end by saying something
of what he is to teach. There is, of course, the scientific method. There are
things about the scale and order of size, of which I have spoken. There are the
possibilities which are open to us in controlling nature and ourselves.
Above all. he can teach men
to ask whether the distance between promise and achievement in our age need be quite
so large: whether there must be such a gap between what society is capable of
doing and what it does. All this, every scientist can teach.
But every scientist can also teach
something deeper. He can teach men to resist all forms of acquiescence, of
indifference, and all imposition of secrecy and denial. We must resist the attitude
of officials, that there ought to be a good reason why something should be
published before you allow it. We must teach even officials that there will have
to be a very good reason indeed before anyone is silenced by secrecy.
Mr. Gordon Dean, former chairman of
the American Atomic Energy Commission, has just been complaining against secrecy
on practical grounds. He says that the commercial reactors which are being built
in