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Saturday, November 29, 2003 Science and Individuality Back in the old days (and by old, I mean the 1600s and 1700s) science was done mostly by the nobility. Exactly how many Sirs and Lords do you hear during a course of science history? A lot. Perhaps the large outgrowth in science during that time was a result of a bunch of rich men with nothing else to do. Or maybe they were the only ones with the resources to pursue their hobby. But one thing's certain--the peasants didn't dabble in astronomy and physics and biology. They were too busy trying to make a living. These days, scientific knowledge has certainly filtered down to the masses. Most people know that the earth resembles a sphere rather than a pancake. People know that we all come from gametes from each parent and not from some will of a divine being or spontaneous generation or even tiny homunculuses curled up at the head of a sperm. But are most of us enlightened and curious? I would argue that for the average person, no. Today, science is a matter of fact and "common sense". It's something to be taken for granted. It is no longer a hobby for people with too much free time on their hands. Science has become a job. People no longer ooh and aah when scientists tease apart some unknown mechanism of nature. People expect the pharmaceutical industry to churn out the miracle drug to cure all ills. People no longer thank the doctor when he cures a patient; they file lawsuits when the patient can't be cured. The general public thinks that simply throwing money at cancer or AIDS research and making smart people work on the problem will cure the diseases as a matter of course. Everything is expected just as a new car is churned out of a factory or the garbage man arriving every Thursday to pick up the trash. Two paths are beginning to emerge--but will one subsume the other? One path probably started all the way back to the discovery of the structure of DNA and the amino acid code for proteins. Back to the mid to late twentieth century, a graduate student could base his entire thesis on just sequencing a gene. Now, entire genomes can be sequenced in a day, and genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics have become hot subjects. The second path is that of the individual and the idea--only these once central tenants of science are slowly weakening under the industrialization of nature. Collaboration is of course and more grants are coming out encouraging people to work together to think about the same problem at the same time and at the same place. Collaboration is far from bad, but one has to take care not to be swept away by the enticing potentials of bioinformatics and information retrieval which can eventually be mechanized and become as routine as turning on the computer to check e-mail. Can the brains of scientists be bottled in a tonic? Will the scientist become as common place and as boring as an accountant? What can't be mechanized is thought and ideas and originality. Science is the bridge between creativity and the purely automatic. If we cut out the ideas in favor for the information--we will no longer wonder how anything works. We will only look at arrays, punch buttons, enter variables in some program. One side needs the other and vice versa. And it will be a sad thing if the every day person comes to think of doing science as easy as swiping a card in a machine. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 8:22 AM : ]
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