In an article titled What would be better not to discover (EL PAÍS, June 17, 2023) Antonio Muñoz Molina warns about the dire consequences of some scientific and technological findings. Literally it is, logically, excellent, but scientifically it contains aspects that must be considered. Muñoz Molina tells that he spoke with a pilot who flew over Hiroshima after the bombing and drew some conclusions that moved me.
I was born four Augusts after that atrocity and, throughout my professional career, I have met seven participants in the Manhattan project with whom I have talked about the matter for not very long periods of time, except for two, with whom I spent hours. The depth, the silences and the wanderings of those gazes can justify the writer’s fears. He also relies on the fact that ancient myths and tales warn that human curiosity can sometimes be catastrophic, because there is knowledge and techniques that have more destructive than beneficial effects. I agree, except for one nuance that I believe to be essential: not some potentially harmful knowledge, but all. All. That is the nuance.
The vast majority of the physicists and engineers who participated in the Manhattan project were pacifists, progressives, and none of them believed that the bomb was going to be dropped against the civilian population. Some of them, when they caught a glimpse of the intentions of the military and President Truman, paid for their opposition with more than reprisals.
Think of the man who made the most decisive discovery that he shouldn’t have, the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford. He was prompted by the contemplation of two images. One was an X-ray of a hand with a coin and a ring showing the bones and tendons clearly. The other was from the same hand, but made with the new phenomenon of radioactivity. A real botch that was worthless, but… what was the nature of that radiation? The previous one was of atomic origin and this one, apparently, nuclear. And Rutherford discovered just that: the existence and basic properties of the nucleus of atoms predicted by Leucippus and Democritus, extolled so accurately and beautifully by Tito Lucrecio Caro in the thousands of verses of his De rerum Nature.
When faced with an unknown phenomenon, what is done is to investigate without any motivation or technological expectation. I think it is interesting to know what Rutherford was radically opposed to, as some do now, for example, with artificial intelligence, thus bringing us closer to the thesis of Muñoz’s article. to aviation. Rutherford said that airplanes would be used inevitably in wars to machine-gun poor soldiers. He was right, but he did not intuit that aviation was going to mark the evolution of humanity in some aspects and not necessarily for the worse. What is most remarkable is that his prediction and fight against aviation were absolutely irrelevant. On the other hand, there is no hospital that does not have a nuclear medicine service in which the atomic nucleus does not offer fascinating images of the interior of the human body and its physiology, which make medical diagnoses precise and treatments against terrible diseases extremely effective.
We scientists belong to the world in times of peace and to our countries in times of war. This terrible sentence is not mine, but Fritz Haber’s, a chemist who synthesized ammonium, thereby giving way to fertilizers that alleviated the hunger of millions of people, and during our first apocalypse what he produced was the devastating gas from the trenches.
Think of any scientific or technical advance since we discovered how to start a fire. If you don’t want to peer into such a vast distance, let’s think of the 20th century and its viruses, transistors, artificial satellites, radars, genetic manipulation, microchips… It is clear, after the pandemic we have suffered, that a massive and even global extermination of viruses is much more viable, cheaper and efficient than an outrage of nuclear bombings that no one will think of initiating. Yes, nobody.
On the opposite side, I maintain that the same prevention must be taken, on occasions, with certain modern beliefs that use science tortiously. Swiss and German state researchers recently developed GM rice that could flood vast areas of the planet with vitamin A where the normally poor people were endemicly deficient.
The ill-fated discoverers gave up patenting the procedure. That was considered by the Greenpeace organization a Trojan horse for multinationals to do business and the campaign against golden rice was fierce. The European authorities ignored the matter and did not support the scientists: there was no question of taking on environmentalists. Until the tremendous open letter from 109 Nobel laureates in science supported by tens of thousands of scientists. I reproduce only two sentences and the final apostille:
“We accuse Greenpeace of misrepresenting the risks, benefits and impacts of GM foods, because they are as safe as any other, if not safer, according to all scientific evidence. The World Health Organization estimates that 250 million people suffer from a shortage of vitamin A. Among them there are between 250,000 and 500,000 children under the age of five who are blinded each year by this deficiency. Half of them die within twelve months of losing their sight.”
The final sentence is the one that should not be forgotten: “How many poor people have to die in the world for us to consider this a crime against humanity?”. Better not to make accounts of victims of horrors.
Yes, the terrible punishments that can come from Pandora’s box have many facets, including favoring climate change by forcing the largest European industrial power to burn the worst coal, brown lignite, razing, if necessary, wind turbines and, of course, the damn (although declared green by the European Parliament) nuclear energy.
Scientists need not fear the potential consequences of their findings for one reason: it’s useless. Those who manage their discoveries are politicians with powerful instruments that, in the best of cases, we have all made available to them: jurisprudence, international negotiation capacity and the armed forces.
Prometheus, Pandora and the gods involved are more than the myth and tale that Muñoz Molina tells: they exist and we are all. We are the ones who must decide, without intimidation or regret, what to do with genetic engineering, the conquest of space, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, intelligent and nanometric-scale robotics, brain-computer-machine neural interfaces, virtual reality and everything that the lush and fascinating forest of science and technology offers.
This evening I will remember the four John, Henry, Rudolph, and, above all, Lise. Yes, to the endearing Lise Meitner, the so-called Jewish mother of the atomic bomb who never practiced Judaism, she was never a mother and gave up collaborating on the Manhattan project, but she was the one who discovered nuclear fission.
While the splendid thermonuclear cauldron that is our Sun calmly hides, I will think of many others who have made it possible for more than ninety percent of the eight billion people that we are to survive no matter how excruciating the inequalities between us. These and the possibility that we become extinct will be the sole responsibility of ourselves. Science, all science, will only encourage us to evolve freely, placidly and in a balanced way if we are sensible. The only decisive thing that we should not have discovered is war.
You can follow SUBJECT in Facebook, Twitter and instagramor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
