Sir

Lewis Wolpert is characteristically thought-provoking in his Commentary “Is science dangerous?”1. But he misses the point.

Wolpert informs us that scientists have “specialized knowledge of how the world works that is not easily accessible to others”. In fact, scientists show us an aspect of how the world can be considered to work. This is related to a particular way of thinking that has sufficient common principles to allow for a community of thought and discussion. The great power of this method is its predictive capacity and its potential for application in everything from space rockets to genetically modified crops.

But the scientific method does not, as Wolpert believes, “tell us how the world is”. What gives scientists their special voice and power is not the ‘truth’ of their theories, but the application of these theories in technology.

Power is dangerous and therefore so, potentially, is science. Not because, as Wolpert scornfully suggests, our stupid culture is afraid of knowledge, but because scientists do not seem to be able to understand non-scientists. The understanding of scientists is limited to their particular approach to life. Or, to parody Wolpert, non-scientists have unspecialized knowledge of how the world works that is not available to scientists. Often the attempts of scientists to communicate to non-scientists only reinforce the divide: those who are interested in science enjoy the popularization; those who are not, do not.

Science, therefore, is dangerous because it is out of contact with much of its user base and, from some perspectives, is close to a tyranny. For too long scientists have patronized the non-scientific majority, and carried on with little concern for their reservations. The high-handed “It is essential to recognize” of Wolpert's article belongs in the past. Scientists are boxing themselves into a corner by their inability to see that other people have a legitimate right not to see the world scientifically, and by their poor social skills. In science it is a virtue to be somewhere between forceful, condescending and arrogant. When communicating science, it is a disaster.

From ‘mad cow disease’ to genetically modified food, scientists have been failing to convince. No longer able to understand the language and aspirations of their fellow humans, they are moving from the position of curious outgroup to vulnerable minority. Science is useful, and the world it reveals is amazing. But Wolpert and the rest of us must understand that scientists can no longer dictate to the world. It is essential to realize.

Pablo Jensen

Sir — Wolpert's Commentary1 seems quite naive. Take the key point of the supposedly ‘neutral’ knowledge provided by science. Wolpert says: “It is essential to recognize that reliable scientific knowledge has no moral or ethical value. Science tells us how the world is.” From this, all the rest of the article's argument follows — we can't discuss reality, we can only accept it.

This crucial idea is in itself dangerous. It should be obvious that all knowledge has been acquired and is therefore a mix of ‘reality’ and our own way of understanding — the glasses with which we observe, and distort, reality. These ‘glasses’ include reductionism (see ref. 2 for simple examples in biology), and the necessity of building stable entities that can resist controversies (‘black boxes’3,4) and rapidly circulate within scientific networks3.

To use a crude analogy, science summarizes reality as much as a football score sums up two hours of emotions, missed opportunities and referee's mistakes. Any fan knows that the score does not exhaust the game, it only allows us to build a league table. Similarly, science chooses to extract from reality those features that allow it to build theories, and this demands high technology and a specific social organization.

The knowledge provided by science stems from the way the world is, but also from the way science has chosen to deal with it. Science is interwoven with technology, and the argument that ‘science is pure, only its (technological) applications can be bad’ might not be convincing for much longer in these distrustful times.