June 2005

Obligations of Science and Society

Thousands of new doctorates were conferred in the past few weeks, so it is a good time to ask what the responsibility of these new Ph.Ds is in a society that seems uncertain of the value of the education it just provided.

I have often raised the issue of the academy's structural inability to translate health research into practice. It is a problem that faces scholars in other fields, as well, due in large part to the perverse incentives of grant-making and tenure. People with the power of the purse or the power to promote faculty will expend much capital to discover new knowledge but almost nothing to put it to use.

At the same time, there is growing recognition among the general public that the research in which it has invested is not delivering its full benefit to society. And the somewhat casual response of academics from all disciplines is fueling a profound challenge to publicly supported research and learning -- and the research enterprise in general.

Every day we hear news about cutbacks in public support for higher education and for scientific research. We read about communities that eschew the scientific basis of knowledge of the physical world and of others that restrict scholarly exploration on topics that trespass on their ideology. David Keene, of the American Conservative Union, called American universities “the last privileged sanctuary in America for liberal collectivism.”

We are in an odd and self-destructive cycle. Researchers are now documenting the gaps between knowledge and practice in medicine, in education and environmental protection because they assume that doing so will attract money to close them. But many in the public view this documentation as confirmation that such efforts are wasteful and unnecessary; that the academy sponsors learning for the sake of learning, and those engaged in research are woolly-headed academics living off the fat of taxpayers' generosity.

The casual dismissal of the mutual obligations of scientists and society spells danger. When scientists fail to make plain to the public their purposes, methods and aims; when they take refuge in complexity and technical language, when they are contemptuous of the public's impatience with uncertainty, then the public that we expect to cherish learning and science will be easily convinced that research is self-referential, isolated in the academy, irrelevant to their own lives and threatening to their faith.

The duty of today's scientists, then, is to explain what it is we contribute. If our work is to mean anything in the larger society, then we have to be willing — individually or through our associations — to go to town hall meetings, Rotary Clubs and even houses of worship to explain what science is, how it makes its contributions and why it is worthy of public support.

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