Authors: Bill Bryson
Collective human actions are ravaging the biosphere and threatening biodiversity. There have been five great extinctions in the geological past. Humans are now causing a sixth. The extinction rate is a thousand times higher than normal and is increasing. In the words of Robert May, my immediate predecessor as Royal Society President, ‘we are destroying the book of life before we have read it’. Our Earth harbours millions of species that have not yet even been identified – mainly insects and bacteria.
Biodiversity is often proclaimed as a crucial component of human well-being and economic growth. It manifestly is: we’re clearly harmed if fish
stocks dwindle to extinction; there are plants in the rainforest whose gene pool might be useful to us. But for many of us, these ‘instrumental’ and anthropocentric arguments aren’t the only compelling ones. Preserving the richness of our biosphere has value in its own right, over and above what it means to us humans.
Overall, our lives are getting safer and healthier. But in our ever more interconnected world, there are new threats whose consequences could be so widespread that even a tiny probability is disquieting. Infectious diseases are a resurgent hazard. In the coming decades there could be an ‘arms race’ between ever-improving preventative measures, and the growing virulence of the pathogens that could plague us – the latter augmented by risks of ‘bioerror’ or ‘bioterror’. The spread of epidemics is aggravated by rapid air travel, plus the huge concentrations of people in megacities with fragile infrastructures.
We’re all precariously dependent on elaborate networks – electricity grids, air-traffic control, the Internet, just-in-time delivery and so forth. It’s crucial to optimise the resilience of such systems against accidental malfunction – or against wilful disruption by individuals or small groups empowered by technology. The global village will have its village idiots.
Scientific and technical effort has never been applied optimally to human welfare. Some subjects have had the ‘inside track’ and gained disproportionate resources. Huge funds are still devoted to new weaponry. On the other hand, environmental protection, renewable energy, and so forth deserve more effort. Indeed, US President Barack Obama has urged that the development of clean carbon-free energy should have the priority accorded to the Apollo programme in the 1960s.
In confronting global societal challenge in the twenty-first century – these ‘threats without enemies’ – we can derive inspiration from some of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project to create the first
atomic bomb. Among them were some of the great intellects from the ‘heroic age’ of nuclear science – Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls, for instance. These individuals set us a fine example. Fate had assigned them a pivotal role in history. When war ended, they returned with relief to peacetime academic pursuits. But they didn’t say that they were ‘just scientists’ and that the use made of their work was up to politicians. They continued as engaged citizens – promoting efforts to control the power they had helped unleash. They maintained an informed commitment for the rest of their lives – none more than Joseph Rotblat, the founder of the Pugwash Conferences.
In his valedictory address as Royal Society President in 1995, Michael Atiyah reminded us that ‘the ivory tower is no longer a sanctuary’ and that scientists have a special responsibility. We feel there is something lacking in parents who don’t care what happens to their children in adulthood, even though this is largely beyond their control. Likewise, scientists shouldn’t be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas – their intellectual creations. They should try to foster benign spin-offs – and of course help to bring their work to market when appropriate. But they should campaign to resist, so far as they can, ethically dubious or threatening applications. And they should, as ‘citizen scientists’, be prepared to engage in public debate and discussion. The challenges of the twenty-first century are more complex and intractable than those of the nuclear age.
In the UK, an ongoing dialogue with parliamentarians on embryos and stem cells has led to a generally admired legal framework. On the other hand, the GM crops debate went wrong because scientists came in too late, when opinion was already polarised between eco-campaigners on the one side and commercial interests on the other. We have recently done better on nanotechnology, by raising the key concerns ‘upstream’ of any legislation or commercial developments. The Society can draw on collective expertise to clarify key issues – and perhaps identify them before others can.
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