Abstract
CHEMISTS, like members of other professional classes, remind themselves from time to time that their vision should extend beyond their professional interests and services into the wider field of the community at large, so that they may hring their specialised knowledge to bear on the problems which their own actions have raised. Not that scientific people are insensible to their duties as intelligent citizens—far from it; but they tend rather to measure their own success or failure in adding to the general store of knowledge, or power, or well-being through spectacles which leave out of focus important considerations none the less real because they are awkward. The physician strives to save life and prolong it; if he succeeds, we applaud him as indeed we should, for has he not contributed to human happiness? But is it, or is it not, the business of the medical man also to see that the effect of an increase in the expectation of life on, say, the vigour of the governing class, or the chance of employment, or the support of the aged, or the use of leisure, is properly examined? And if he takes up the study himself, since it is clearly impossible for him to refuse medical aid to the sufferer, is he in any better position than his patient to help in the development of a scheme of education and social order suited to the new conditions which he has created ?
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Chemistry and Citizenship. Nature 136, 83–85 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136083a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136083a0