What responsibility to scientists and inventors bear for their discoveries and inventions? From Julien Charles at off-guardian.org:
Our incurious faith in infallible science
In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Cat’s Cradle, the deadpan realist from the Midwest–the 20th century’s Mark Twain–delivers an instructive review of the way in which Americans hold scientists in exceedingly high esteem—and the perils therein.
One of his characters is scientist Felix Hoenikker. Hoenikker is a partial reflection of Robert Oppenheimer, who led the team that invented the atomic bomb, but was later distraught by the use of his invention to exterminate whole urban populations in Japan.
At the successful detonation of the bomb Little Boy in New Mexico, he recalled a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna tells Arjuna, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
After Oppenheimer witnessed the fruit of his labor in Nagasaki, he became an advocate for the banning of nuclear weapons, but was, to put it mildly, a day late and a dollar short.
After materializing in Washington to air his views on nukes, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, the fanatical anti-communist and inspiration behind the Cold War, said of the man who might have done more to enable American military hegemony than anyone, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in my office ever again.”
Vonnegut’s Hoenikker is comparable. Consumed by his task, he is somewhat near-sighted and does not at first perceive the larger interest of humanity that might be imperiled by his work and invents a solution that freezes anything it touches: Ice Nine.
Once he contemplates the staggering potential of his brainchild, he attempts to hide Ice Nine, and is increasingly troubled by the implications of his invention. His children discover his creation later and cannot resist the power it offers. The world is destroyed.
Vonnegut seems to suggest some scientists are perhaps morally naive regarding the possible uses of their work—as in most any innovative profession—and that their moral faculty emerges too late to mitigate their achievements, particularly after their inventions have fallen into the corrupt clutches of bought politicians or pharmaceutical executives beholden to an ever-needful bottom line.
