“Scientist” is a job. It is the task of the scientist to probe into the unknown for new knowledge and to reexamine the known for discrepancies and knowledge gaps so that as they share their findings with the world, we become collectively more knowledgeable. With this ever-growing body of reliable knowledge, we are better positioned to solve the problems that constantly beset us. But let’s not confuse the job with the person. As with any job, we hope that the person doing the job carries out their tasks with conscientiousness, integrity, and enough good sense to do the job without causing unnecessary harm to others. These are some moral values that we expect of any jobholder, but especially for the scientist whose job it is to seek the Truth with a capital “T’. Therefore, although morality is not part of the scientist’s job scope, the scientist can only carry out their purpose by being a moral person, or at least, a person of good faith.
Unfortunately, scientists have a bad rep. For all the good they and their discoveries have done for for everyone whose job title doesn’t end in “ist”, us normal folk perceive a knowledge gap between us and them. “They” speak in a weird jargon and after trying to explain themselves several times in different ways, we still have no clue what they’re going on about. No one in normal conversation speaks about “quantum mechanics”, or “string theory”. Most people speak in Language, not Math — for which we have developed a phobia since childhood. Science nerds are reputed to be bookish, introverted and eccentric, essentially unrelatable. It is within this this perceived knowledge gap that unfortunate stereotypes of who scientists are arise.
IRL, we wouldn’t know a scientist if we sat at the bar with one and we ordered an H2O while they ordered an H2O too. But based on the stories we’ve been told about scientists, we think we could spot one a mile away. They’re the wild-haired ones, sporting lab coats, animatedly gesticulating while spouting gibberish. Think Rick, who was inspired by Doc Brown, who was probably inspired by Einstein, whose theories led to humankind’s most massive weapon of mass destruction to date, the nuclear bomb. All that knowledge and all you could do with it was to invent a thing that can kill the most people in the shortest time possible? That doesn’t seem moral.
Questions of a scientist’s morality go further back in history. Scientific discoveries offered a credible way to challenge the established world order. Galileo’s observations that displaced the Earth from the centre of the universe upset centuries of belief that it was, perpetuated by religion that didn’t know any better. The powers that were regarded this discovery as a challenge — not to knowledge specifically — but to their hold on power over the people. After all, if they were wrong about our most fundamental place in the cosmos, what else could they be wrong about? They imagined panic and chaos and rioting in the streets, so they called question to Galileo’s morals by branding him an heretic thus suppressing the man and his new, dangerous ideas at least for a while longer. Darwin and his Theory of Evolution met the same fate and for the same reasons. Go against religion, get accused of violating God-given law. Your ideas are wrong not because they are demonstrably wrong but because you are a bad person.
In more contemporary times, pop culture has entertained audiences with stories of scientific creations going against the laws of nature, creating monsters that wreak havoc on the human world. Perhaps it was Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein” that set the popular trope of the mad scientist, so justified by their good intentions, so obsessed with their act of discovery or creation that nothing else matters. Lately, the idea of scientists being forced by corporate interests and profit has inspired apocalyptic visons of a world overrun by mindless zombies, intelligent apes or heavily-armed automata. Still, if only it were true that our paranoia over scientists was just a product of our hyperactive imaginations.
Scientists IRL have not been doing themselves any favours. Sometimes, being human makes scientists desperate to prove their theories right, even if it means falsifying data and dabbling in fields of research currently deemed illegal, such as the South Korean scientist (I forget the name… Soo*?) messing about with cloning experiments on which there is a moratorium. Also, the media keeps reporting how different scientists at different times offer conflicting advice about what foods are safe and unsafe to consume, and different interest groups offer differing opinions over what can be considered good or false advice recommended by scientists — such as climate change and the previous global pandemic. It is common knowledge now that corporations financially support scientific think-tanks that in turn offer reports to the public claiming that their products are safe or even healthy to consume. For example, the sugar and tobacco industries have made counter-claims backed by scientific research (that they paid for) against other independent studies claiming that consumption of such products have a negative impact on human health. And there is constant criticism of cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies conducting experiments on animal subjects that are cruel and inhumane. Like in every profession, questionable motivations drive questionable practices within the scientific community.
So can the scientific community be trusted as a whole? Let’s just say it’s not an exact science. Scientists work in the realms of the unknown, which necessitates a fairly large margin of error. To reduce the risk of people acting on too little knowledge, the community has its checks and balances, primarily the peer review in which different scientists independently and repeatedly test claims made by their colleagues, looking for potential errors in the latter’s assumptions, methodology, data collection and reasoning behind conclusions. Which is how the above abuses were discovered and brought to light. Ideally, the knowledge scientists release to the public would be knowledge confirmed as correct by the entire community and veracity is not based on a single scientist’s claim alone. And even then, we still have to accept a narrow margin of error. Perhaps in the future, a new scientist with a fresh idea and improved testing methods could still challenge established theory and provide a new perspective — maybe even proving what we once took to be truth as wrong, ushering a new paradigm for us to apprehend the universe with. Yes, science is often wrong, but it is also self-correcting. It’s not a question of morals for the most part. Rather, it is the nature of good faith in questioning that eventually makes what is wrong right.
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*Nope, it’s Hwang Woo-suk
Inspired by Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘A’ Level H1 General Paper (Paper 1) 2020 Question #6