Editorial

Mercury, May/June 1996 Table of Contents

(c) 1996 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

With his wrists locked tightly together, he could barely even swat the mosquitoes in his cell. Wang Juntao, physicist and political activist, had been arrested by the Chinese authorities for helping to organize the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. In jail, an unsterilized needle poisoned Wang with hepatitis B; for a year the prison guards denied him medical care. But as a result of appeals by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other scientific societies, and an invitation by the National Institutes of Health to bring Wang to the United States for medical treatment, the Chinese authorities finally released him after five years of captivity: April 23, 1994.

"It may only be realized after China becomes democratic that scientists in China have played such an important role," Wang wrote in the winter 1995 AAAS Science & Human Rights newsletter. And not only in China. The 1995 AAAS Directory of Persecuted Scientists documents the cases of 526 scientists, engineers, and health professionals in prisons the world over.

These scientists embody the "public persona" that National Science Foundation director Neal Lane has implored American scientists to adopt. As we talk to -- and listen to -- the public about the benefits of research, we need to speak of science not only as a provider of goods, but also as a moral pillar of society.

For many, this feels awkward. Studying the stars, a political act? Solving equations, an affirmation of human rights? Many shake their heads in wonder when they hear of Palestinian students who risked arrest by sneaking onto closed campuses to work in labs, or the Ph.D.s granted by University of Sarajevo in the depths of siege.

"Many scientists consider their job to be science, narrowly defined," wrote Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World, "and believe that engaging in politics or social criticism is not just a distraction from but antithetical to the scientific life." But why? The very process of science -- its skepticism, its openness, its self-criticism -- is, as Sagan put it, "a bulwark of a free society." Sagan argued that "the openness of science and democracy, their willingness to be judged by experiment, [are] closely allied ways of thinking." Science has dispelled superstitions, such as witchcraft, that used to turn people against one another; it has promoted a skepticism that spills into all areas of life; it has proven not only that people can work together across ethnic and cultural lines, but that they achieve more when they do so.

The Copernican Revolution and the Enlightenment, the philosophical movements that created liberal democracy, began with scientific advances. Today the social consciousness of science lives on in Scientific American, the Federation of American Scientists, Pugwash.

As a society evolves, so too must the role of science. Sagan characterized science as the uneasy cohabitation of skepticism and wonder. His and other discussions have focused on the skepticism. But Americans today are skeptical, to a fault; we have little faith in our collective ability, expressed through government, to improve our society. What our public life lacks is the wonder: the idea that together we can and will build a better society, that public policy is a set of experiments to this end, and that disagreements can channel rather than sap our energies. The slow retreat of Americans to our private spheres, our familiar enclaves, is ultimately as threatening to our science as direct oppression is to science in dictatorships, for science is a public pursuit.

To join the AAAS human-rights action network, send email to listserv@gwuvm.gwu.edu; write "subscribe AAASHRAN firstname lastname" in the body of the message.

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