Retorts

Ethics and Politicised Science

So, right out of the blue, I get a letter from a far-off part of the world, a cry for help:

"Please, expert, tell us why our experiments have gone wrong, not given us the expected answer. You were the expert so many years ago, you must surely know the answer and the reason."

And I do know the answer. In the old days I would have told them, without hesitation, for that's how science was. We helped one another, across the whole wide world. But these are the new days -- we've privatised science. It's an investment of public funds, expected to return a profit, but to whom?

The results are confidential, the outfit secretive. I'm not supposed to know what they've been doing since I left them because it's commercially sensitive. But of course I do know for scientists still talk to one another and still have more faith in one another than to desk-bound executives and their paper shuffling.

Like I said, I do know the answer. Not from my own work but from what others have done since. It has been kept secret from the world. It isn't published and probably isn't likely to be. There is a glimmer of a possible commercial use for the knowledge in some distant future if only someone could be found with the money to buy it. I don't have the money to develop or use it. Nor, I suspect, do my correspondents. They're academics, in a university.

I believe it should be public knowledge, as in the old days, but I don't own that knowledge. I got it illegally. If I "do a mole", someone else could lose their job for being the leak. Some members of society love having a witch hunt -- that's almost an essential part of politics as she is played.

Privacy concepts have fitted neatly with privatisation and commercial sensitivity to give us a situation not dissimilar from that of a totalitarian state.

"Scientists of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your minds."

I wish I didn't feel so wound up with that ethical urge of an old-fashioned scientist -- a collaborative inquirer. I keep thinking that this new-fangled secretive science is so wasteful, inefficient and dissatisfying for its practitioners. It's a waste of public money. It's a waste of creative minds.

But, meantime, what do I tell my correspondents? That they are wasting their time for it's all been done? That they should proceed for I can guarantee them a result? That they should employ me as a consultant to guide their steps?

I get even more depressed that the universities are threatened in the same way -- that their knowledge must be useful and saleable. What do you think?

(Name supplied)