TECHNOLOGY AND CULT URE Book Reviews 149 knowledge” (p. 134). Neither they, nor any of the policy analysts, university administrators, or government officials they talked with, seem to have given any thought to what such a shift in orientation might mean for the quality and character of university science. Back at the turn of the last century, in The Higher Learning in America, Thorstein Veblen warned of the dangers to American universities of embracing what he called the “pecuniary culture”— turning trustees into boards of directors, presidents into “captains of erudition,” and education into industrial training. With the dramatic increase in federal funding of university science following the Second World War, such fears about business domination of higher education pretty much vanished, though the occasional scholar like Robert Nisbet could not help wondering if the “higher capitalism” of government science was any improvement. The troubling undercur rent of this book’s message is made all too clear in revealing passages like the one where the authors note that one of the reasons Baylor Medical Center has been so effective at getting down to business is that “it has no history or philosophy departments to challenge whether academic freedom would be compromised by commercial ization” (p. 86). That the absence of such a challenge to the selling of the American university should be cited as an advantage is an affront to the very notion of what a university is and should be. There are still those of us who believe it should stand for something more than just another good investment opportunity. Stuart W. Leslie Dr. Leslie teaches in the Department of History of Science at Johns Hopkins University. The Health and Safety of Workers: Case Studies in the Politics ofProfessional Responsibility. Edited by Ronald Bayer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. ix + 308; notes, index. $29.95. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This disturbing, disquietening book chronicles, in the form of detailed case studies of the lead, coal mining, and asbestos industries, the attempts to regulate the hazards associated with their operations. The reason for the feeling of disturbance is not that the hazards were unrecognized. Most people knew that lead was dangerous. What is so disquietening is, as the authors document so thoroughly as to make incontrovertible, the confidence with which many professionals either denied that there were any such hazards or claimed that the hazards were negligible in relation to the benefits. (Not that the benefits necessarily went to the workers in those industries.) Perhaps the authors are not always conscious enough of the difficulty of obtaining adequate evidence. What was not known 150 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE during the period covered by the survey, and is still not known today, is how much exposure to or intake of lead for how long from which source is safe. Even now, the fact that lead in drinking water is much more likely to be a serious environmental hazard than lead from gasoline comes as a shock to most people. The principal moral drawn in The Health and Safety of Workers is that professional employees cannot be relied on to behave professionally. That is, they do not follow the codes associated with their profession, whether it be the Hippocratic oath to be obeyed by physicians or the rules laid down by the engineering institutions. The authors conclude from this that professionals must be made acutely aware of the political and moral obligations of their work. This recommendation is insufficient. Professionals may be expected by the public to behave as independent advisers, but in practice they behave more nearly like any other employee. They have to: otherwise they lose theirjob and cannot readily get another. Even independent advisers have been known to give an answer that will secure them additional contracts with the organization that briefs them rather than the reply that a proper assessment of the evidence requires. So is it reasonable to demand that professionals, who are employees in industry and government, be trusted, in that 19th-century expression, to hold the ring? The book demonstrates that the principle of government regula tion is by itself insufficient. The only way of dealing with the problem is to ensure...