What is Socially Relevant Science?

Abstract

Interest in the effect on society of scientific discoveries can be traced back to the beginnings of the modern sciences. It is plain to see that for reasons of legitimizing science alone, this question was not only of interest to the early scientists. Affirmative answers to the question of the practical virtues of science helped the first generation of scientists—and of course present-day scientists as well—achieve social recognition and, not least, the resources required by a high-quality scientific practice, characterized by division of labour and, thus, increasingly expensive. There have continually been voices, on the other hand, that censure the humanities and social sciences in particular, not only due to their lack of usefulness, but rather also because they are held to be a danger to society. In this connection, one need only recall, for instance, the worldwide fear of the ideas of Marxism; the frequently criticized influence of the Frankfurt School on the politics of the 1970s in West Germany; or the influence, lamented in many quarters, of neo-liberal economic models on the economic system of developing societies in particular. Reservations and fears about the social consequences of new findings and technologies in the natural sciences are not making themselves heard for the first time nowadays. This is also true of the promises being made; to the effect that humanity will come to enjoy enormous progress by means of science and technology. Convincing arguments can be made, however, that the public discussion of the sciences’ social role has reached a new, modern phase. The first controlled laboratory experiment in genetic engineering took place in 1972; the first human being conceived outside a woman’s body was born in 1978; and just very recently, in April 2008, the first human–animal hybrid embryo—a being immediately dubbed a “chimera” by the media—was produced by scientists in a laboratory at Newcastle University in England, However, the current controversial discussion of embryonic stem cells, neurogenetics, xenotransplantations, reproductive cloning, and the convergence of nanotechnologies, information technologies, biotechnologies and cognitive sciences also makes clear that the question of the social prerequisites and consequences of (natural-) scientific knowledge, expanding unchecked under new types of preconditions, urgently needs to be placed on the agenda of day-to-day social and political activity. And, not infrequently, this discussion culminates in the call for oversight and conscious guidance of knowledge. The question is no longer that we do not know enough, but rather that we know too much, and we then have to wonder whether we indeed want to turn all of our discoveries into practical applications. A half-century ago, in one of the classic dichotomies of writing about science, Charles P. Snow ([1959] 1964) likewise gives the carriers of literary, or traditional, knowledge extremely poor marks for being the epitome of modern luddites. For Snow, however, this is not primarily a matter of trivializing traditional literary knowledge, which he of course then goes on to do; rather, he sees his thesis as an urgent call to action for society finally to place naturalscientific and technical knowledge, and thereby its scientists—those who, as C.P. Snow sees it, have the future in their bones—at its centre. In the mid-seventies, in a radical reversal of C. P. Snow’s thesis of the dilemma of the two scientific cultures as a variant of the widespread and often resentful contrast between knowledge and ignorance, Erich Fromm provides Soc (2009) 46:262–266 DOI 10.1007/s12115-009-9196-7