On the ambiguity of scientific progress: the responsibility to participate in the bioethical discussion
Gonzalo Herranz, department of Bioethics, Universidad de Navarra
III Federico Rubio Scientific conference
area of Cultural Services, City Council of El Puerto de Santa María, Puerto de Santa María.
Auditorio Monasterio San Miguel, Puerto de Santa María, June 8, 1995
The obligation to question the human effects of science
Confident acceptance and lucid criticism
The ethics of science, a problem for all of us
The reasons for the ambiguity of progress
Something to degree scroll in conclusion
Words of greeting and appreciation
The obligation to question the human effects of science
My purpose this afternoon is very simple. I want to plant in the minds of all of you an idea: that it is necessary to question ourselves about what scientific and technological advances mean for each one of us and for the society we want to forge. Only by asking ourselves certain questions can we be in a position to help science to be truly human and to help scientists to make science fit for man.
The first reaction of any of us upon hearing what I have just said is to think that this does not suit us. It seems that doing science is a matter to be left in the hands of the researchers themselves, who are the ones who really know about science. Or perhaps we can think that this is a matter for politicians, for the great of the earth: for those who govern the body politic, for intellectual and religious leaders, for national bioethics committees, for example. We are inclined to think that ordinary women and men have nothing to say about such complex matters as the politics of science: what do we know about how much to spend on research and development, what are the priority areas in which to invest money and talent, what to do with the gigantic pile of things that are known and unused, waiting for someone to think of what to do with them, and so on.
And yet, it happens that our way of life depends more and more on what is being researched in the laboratories of universities and large industries, or in the wards and operating rooms of hospitals. The inventions and applications of science follow us from early morning to late at night, and even while we sleep. We live in a culture dominated by technology, which has crept into our homes: what we eat, how we communicate with each other, the means of getting from here to there, how we are born and die, the food we eat, are all heavily determined by science and its practical applications. We sometimes sigh for a return to nature, but we do not like to escape from that capsule of science and technology that protects and dominates us.
And yet, it will be less and less excusable to stand aside and say: this does not suit me. We must weigh together the consequences for human dignity, for human values and rights, for the moral life of each individual and of society as a whole, of what we usually call the achievements of science and technological progress. That is to say, we should not avoid the question of calculating how much each of these advances benefits us, and how much it costs us in terms of freedom, dignity and respect for one another.
Confident acceptance and lucid criticism
This approach may seem, at first glance, a bit surprising, if not exaggerated. Everyone is happy with their cars, their appliances, their telephones, their medicines, their transplants. To question the benefits of science might seem like snobbery or result of a pessimistic and cowed view of the future. And yet, it is not. We need to have a habitually confident attitude towards progress, but we need to evaluate it with lucidity.
A critical attitude towards science does not preclude a positive and grateful adherence to it, by virtue of the immense benefits it has provided us. Moreover, out of justice, we are obliged to such adherence. I believe that we are an overwhelming majority, if not all of us, who have this logical, even enthusiastic, favorable disposition towards scientific progress. Science and its applications make us live very well and from astonishment to astonishment. A new computer model staff , whose performance we have to rub our eyes because we do not believe it; or the revolution that is being prepared thanks to the discoveries on superconductors, which is making researchers and captains of business sleepy; or the design of new intelligent vaccines through engineering Genetics, so astutely applied that one is left smiling for hours admiring how far human ingenuity is reaching: all these things make us vibrate and feel fortunate to have been born in time to witness so many wonders. One of the reasons for wanting to go on living and losing our fear of old age is the conviction that, just around the corner of the time in which we live, before the new millennium begins, we will find new wonders that science, that fairy godmother of our time, will have brought forth with her magic wand. There are very few who still have the nostalgia of the old days. There is a vast majority of us who look confidently ahead and who usually assume that typically progressive attitude of hoping that, despite the hardships, everything will be better, that the future will bring us many good things. reservation .
And yet, there is no shortage of reasons to think that not everything is rosy. That same progress, so effective and surprising, gives us a few scares from time to time. Our usual justified confidence in scientific progress is weakened and sometimes shaken by news that startles us. Much of this alarming information is published only in scientific journals, which are usually read by a very small audience. But there is also no shortage of news in the newspapers that we all read about the unsafety of such types of nuclear power plants; or about the contamination of food by additives and preservatives that damage our cells or cause cancer; or about the criticisms that, from environmentalist sectors, remind us that environmental degradation follows like a shadow on the body to any more active use of natural resources. The growth of issue of those who in the advanced countries give their vote to the Greens comes to mean that increases the issue of those who are quite scandalized by the price that we are paying for the technological progress.
It is of little importance that from time to time, something goes wrong, that an unforeseen accident occurs. Such mishaps usually serve as a warning to take the necessary precautions to avoid them in the future. It is in the nature of man to learn certain things only after making a mistake, to correct himself as a lesson.
The ethics of science, a problem for all of us
The problems that should concern us, it seems to me, are made of other materials. They are problems that affect us very closely, but which we must face, not with suspicion and distrust, but by means of a serene study and a well-considered criticism. These problems arise from the possibility, immediate and tangible, that we now have at our fingertips, of manipulating man himself with the instruments that scientific progress has given us.
There is, indeed, reason for reasonable concern. Let an episode serve as an example. It may seem dramatic, but it is very real. I have recently denounced, with great energy, the perverse use of psychiatry in the Bosnian war. I cannot but say it once again. Psychiatry, that particularly sensitive and humane branch of medicine, has been turned into a weapon of war. Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, has employee the knowledge he has as a psychiatrist of the terrible trauma that rape is for women, to turn rape into a means of intimidation and aggression. Rape, within its cruelty and violence, was until now something casual, asystematic, one more element of the victor's booty. In Bosnia it has become a systematic, scientifically programmed activity of high performing: concentration camps have been created, staffed by detachments of Serbian soldiers whose function is to rape. The psychological cruelty of rape has been refined by having husbands, brothers or fathers present. For a few years, rape was the most effective deterrent weapon to liberate enemy territory.
Scientific knowledge can be used ambiguously: the psychiatrist can, thanks to his science, heal the wounds in the soul of the raped woman, but he can also use this same science to do much more harm, to multiply personal tragedies, to unleash immense amounts of pain among enemies. Science and its applications are ambiguous: they can create well-being and enrich human relationships, but they can also unleash pain and degradation.
Similar things happen, for example, with assisted human reproduction. Everyone knows it: today it is possible to produce human beings on laboratory to destine them to live, placing them in a woman's uterus, or to sacrifice them for the sake of research; to select them by applying gene probes and to accept those who pass the quality tests to which we submit them, or to discard those who are marked as undesirable, somehow imperfect, or simply of dubious quality. But to select for acceptance or rejection is a tremendous power of man over man, in which some attribute to themselves an omnipotent, tyrannical power over others.
Science tends to give us incredible power. It sample what happens in any general practitioner's office. The diagnosis and treatment of patients - we could even speak of their fate staff- do not depend exclusively on how buoyant the Economics of the health systems are, nor on how big and ultra-modern the technological equipment of the big hospitals is. A general practitioner in a small town can change people's way of life. Let us take an example: a man who, if he had employment, would live happily, working and earning a living, falls, in times of unemployment, into a tremendously problematic status : things to which, under normal conditions, he would not have paid attention, become obsessive, they make him feel unwell. His anxiety is somatized. He presents symptoms for which no organic base is found, he dramatizes them, they become something that seems very serious, to the point that it creates in the doctor the alarm that something very serious can be behind all this. Different things can then happen.
A first general practitioner to whom our patient goes can grasp his problem in all its complex magnitude, and realize that he is the victim of a complex psychosocial status , difficult to fix, but which, if not solved or overcome, will render insufficient or inoperative the merely medical care that can be provided to him. This physician will try to find a solution to his patient's real problem: he will mobilize on his financial aid, will try to help him find a work space, and, in the meantime, will support him with his hope.
A second general practitioner is aware of his patient's problem, but feels that he has no time and no desire to help him solve it. He thinks that his role is limited to classifying the patient's condition and prescribing anxiolytics and tranquilizers to make life less bitter and more bearable, as he thinks that psychopharmacological gratification financial aid will help him endure difficult situations.
We can go on imagining. A third doctor, with a very special character, takes our patient for a lazy, a maula. And, then, he will be able to dismiss him from his enquiry with a scolding and a recommendation that it would be better for him to stop being a social parasite and start working.
We see how the destiny of the same person is largely determined by the doctor's ideas about people, about illness, about the role of character and effort in life, and whether it is possible to substitute with pharmaceutical products the effort to face the difficulties of life. It is possible for the physician not only to treat illnesses, but also to decide the future of his patients: he can provide social financial aid , he can simply prescribe, he can give an ill-considered attention , he can favor social parasitism.
A few decades ago none of this was possible: there were no psychotropic drugs, no social services, no access to medical care for all. Scientific progress, it is clear, is a vehicle of formidable power and enormous versatility. Depending on who gets behind the wheel of the machine, it will go one way or another. And, on its course, it may respect man and serve him, or it may run him over and leave him dead in the gutter. Progress, with all its wonders, is blind. Rather, it is ambiguous: it is an instrument and a cause of countless benefits, but it can also be a cause of domination and destruction.
The reasons for the ambiguity of progress
We must ask ourselves why this is so, why progress is ambiguous. Last year, at a medical congress held in a Scandinavian country, a Lutheran theologian was invited to offer the participants some ethical considerations on a fascinating topic : the prenatal treatment of fetuses with alterations of the development nervous system. He began his lecture by recalling some words spoken by President Kennedy: "If anyone asks why we want to go to the moon, the answer is simple: because we can. No other answer is needed. These words, in the eyes of our theologian, represent the culmination of a process that began 300 years earlier when Francis Bacon declared that human reason, thanks to the new logic, had come of age. Reason was emancipated to undertake on its own the improvement of the world and the deployment of its power over nature. For Bacon, the fall of Adam had meant the loss of both his state of innocence and his dominion over creation. The life of mankind since then, thought the chancellor of James I of England, is the story of attempts to repair those two tremendous losses: the loss of innocence through religion, the loss of mastery of the world with the financial aid of the sciences and the crafts.
But Bacon's optimistic forecasts have result failed. There is ample evidence of this: the most eloquent is the dominance of some men over nuclear energy. It should be emphasized: the problem is not so much that the liberation of atomic energy has been achieved. What is worrying is that only a few men are the masters of status. We have nothing to do with it. It is true that, thank God, the cold war is over and the prospects for peace, though always fragile, are now better than ever. The vast majority of us live happily oblivious to the threat of nuclear holocaust. It only takes a few seconds of reflection to conclude that the answer to the question, "If someone were to ask why we stockpile nuclear weapons," cannot be, "Because we can. No other explanation is needed. Many explanations are needed.
This, and many other situations (giving children to postmenopausal women, systematically eliminating victims of genetic diseases, administering growth hormone to make children grow above normal, improving the performance of athletes through dangerous forms of doping, transplanting heads onto animals for the mere sake of demonstrating that it is possible to do so, or measuring resistance to physical abuse of animals and human beings) show us clearly that the technological imperative - it is moral - is to make the human race more competitive, transplanting heads from one animal to another for the mere purpose of demonstrating that it is possible to do so, or measuring the resistance to physical abuse of animals and human beings) show us clearly that the technological imperative - it is morally licit to do what it is physically possible to do - is a source of misfortunes, even if we try to disguise it under the guise of scientific progress.
It is not necessary to insist on topic and to make an inventory of threats unfortunately linked to progress. It seems to me preferable that we stop for a moment to consider the causes of this status and the remedies that we can apply to it. Science is blind to ethical values. The natural sciences cannot be the foundation on which an Ethics or even a Biosociology can be built: the apple tree cannot bear strawberries.
In my opinion, in order to give an explanation of the blindness of scientific progress to moral values or disvalues, we can start from Bacon's phrase quoted above. He speaks of the twofold loss of Paradise: the loss of innocence and the loss of dominion over nature. Each has its specific remedy: one, religion, the other, science. But it is evident that he and those who succeeded him in the cultivation and application of the sciences were more concerned with regaining mastery over things, which is where material progress has come from, than with restoring order within their consciousness and recognising that there are things that come first and others that come later. Scientists have been so absorbed by their workof dismantling, analysing and recombining, that they have not had time to spend on reconquering innocence, starting with their own. That is, by neglecting the primary task of learning to do no harm, which means innocence, the capacity for moral judgement of many cultivators of science has atrophied. But then, in direct proportion to this neglect, the adventure of mastering nature ceases to be an unequivocal advantage and becomes ambiguous, a tree that bears both sweet and bitter fruit.
It is not easy to convince very intelligent colleagues that the natural sciences without the guideof Ethics are lost, without orientation; that the scientist, if he does not want to go astray, must insistently ask himself about the ultimate meaning of the things he does and applies. Many of them declare that their creed is science, but their faith seems to be no more enlightened than that of the charcoal-burner. They are naively persuaded that, in the twentieth century, science has won the day over religion in every field in which they have clashed. If it is a matter of working wonders, they tell us, there are so many diseases conquered; there is the genuine multiplication of the loaves of bread that is the green revolution; there is the miracle of information technology. If the purposeof religion is to bring all men together in a communion and fuse them into a unity, there are, among so many products of progress, the news or travel agencies that have turned the world into a handkerchief, or Coca-Cola, or billions of television viewers watching the Olympic Games. What is really important, however, is to know whether science is better than religion in preparing us to lead an intense and abundant moral life, not relegated to the back of the mind, but present in every moment in which we relate to things or people.
One can answer this question about the relative capacity of Science or Religion to elevate us morally by saying that, fortunately, things are changing for the better, since, in recent years, Ethics and its representatives -theologians, philosophers and Bioethics professionals- have burst with great force into the laboratories of Universities and Industries, in hospitals and Sociology offices, in Ministries and in the Foundations that finance research. This is true. But, I insist, Ethics continues to be the great absentee. Concern for it is neither sufficiently strong nor extensive. And this is not a specifically Spanish phenomenon: it is a universal lack, although unevenly distributed.
I will adduce a couple of examples, with the purpose to put in the flesh the sensitivity of all.
a) The first refers to the need to think stubbornly about whether something that looks very tempting is really progress or mere caprice. This is a story I read recently when discussing the very interesting topic of who owns medical technology. Rogers tells in his book The Diffusion of Innovations what happened among a community of Lapps in northern Finland when the first snow tractor appeared among them. The Economics and the social structure of that group was centered on reindeer herding, which provided them with food, clothing and transportation. The Lapps considered themselves reindeer herders. They lived in close contact with these semi-domesticated animals and treated them with the care they had inherited from their grandparents. It was an egalitarian society, in which every family owned the same issue reindeer. In 1961 the schoolteacher bought the first snow tractor: he was single and liked to go out sightseeing. But before long, he was being asked for the tractor to fetch and carry firewood and other goods. A trip to the nearest town was a matter of three days on a reindeer sled: with the tractor it was reduced to five hours. Not ten years had passed, and everyone, every family, had their snow tractor. The machine had become a necessity. No one moved from place to place on skis or sleds to take care of the reindeer anymore. Unfortunately, these animals never got used to the tractor, its noise, its speed. Many ran away frightened, and became wild, many died from neglect, and fertility decreased. In addition, many families had to sell many reindeer to buy gasoline and to pay for tractor repairs. And because fewer reindeer were born each year, their Economics went down. While many people had to give up reindeer herding, a few people built up large reindeer herds.
It is clear. What is presented as a technological advantage can result in great harm: its costs outweigh the benefits. Technology, turned into an indispensable necessity, can betray us. When the Lapps exchanged skis and sledges for snow tractors, they exchanged their eyes for their tails: in reality they abandoned their primitive but sufficient autonomy of transport and energy, to become dependent on external sources of gasoline. This, in turn, brought about a change in social values. Before, socially exemplary people were those who had very select and well-cared herds. Later, the category came to depend on having a more modern and sophisticated tractor model .
What interests us about the story is this: that the Lapps, like us, did not have procedure to calculate the consequences of moving from reindeer to tractors. They could not imagine the consequences of social, economic, ecological and moral imbalance that the adoption of the tractor would bring. Nobody thought of the possibility of resisting or somehow controlling the introduction of the tractor.
Do we think about things like this? New technologies are constantly being introduced. But we spend little time and effort weighing up the medium- and long-term consequences. Many entrepreneurs want to robotize their factories and production lines: they say that it is easier to get along with docile machines than with unruly workers. The machines do not protest, even if they are made to work day and night shifts, nor do they demand higher wages, nor do they form unions. But the consequence of the decline of work jobs is cumulative: although there are signs of hope that technological progress is capable of creating much new employment, the tangible result is to create a mass of working population that suffers both the trauma of not working and the humiliation of not being qualified for the new jobs.
Technology cannot be separated from the social, economic and moral values of the society that produces and adopts it. It brings us advantages, but creates dependencies. It is ambiguous.
b) Many weeks, in the British Medical Journal, a article of the Scientifically Speaking series that signature Bernard Dixon appears. The article that appeared in a recent issue commented on an International Symposium held in Zurich on Biosafety. The Symposium brought together scientists and philosophers to study together some issues of public interest, the kind that too easily escape the attention of "narrow-minded experts".
The Symposium, in Dixon's opinion, was a resounding failure. The philosophers talked about Philosophy, without landing on ground familiar to biologists, while the latter, with their infinite capacity for small details, talked about the contamination of bioreactor tanks, safety measures in laboratories experimenting with recombinant DNA, and so on. But, apparently, the desired meeting did not take place, nor did they get to discuss the ethical aspects of the problem, which was the purpose that had inspired the meeting.
Now comes the example: Dixon tells of the astonishment provoked by the communication of a German group that has elucidated the factors that govern the virulence of Escherichia coli. In a fascinating work , they have revealed how these germs, ordinary and peaceful inhabitants of our organism and that of many other animals, become rabidly aggressive and cause very serious diseases when certain gene-mediated pathogenicity factors coincide. Researchers at group in Würzburg have been able to clone some of these genes and have succeeded, thanks to the precise tools available to molecular biologists today, in converting previously tame and harmless strains of E. coli into aggressive and virulent ones at their laboratory. It seems to be working like a charm. The way is open for the men of laboratory to transform innocent bacteria into terribly aggressive germs and even, by adding deadly toxin-producing genes, into terrible biological weapons.
Well, what surprised Dixon is that, in the face of this astonishing, and alarming, finding, no one in Zurich sounded the alarm. We are faced with an extraordinary omission: not a word, either in the course of the Symposium discussions or in the published conference proceedings , about the possible consequences of work of this subject for the odious official document of war. No one there seemed concerned about a threat, in comparison to which the bombs loaded with Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague-producing agent, that the biological warfare laboratories prepared in the 1960s are amateurishly botched. The atmosphere of international détente that we are now happily experiencing may alleviate many of our fears and alarms. May it last and consolidate and culminate in the destruction of those aberrant products of the scientific research that are both conventional and chemical, biological or thermonuclear weapons.
The indifference of these scientists - all of them academics, pure academics, not in the pay of industry or politics - to the consequences of their programs of study; their almost one-dimensional field of vision and their determination to extend knowledge, disregarding its consequences for man, is a sample of the tremendous and alarming dissociation that exists between the capacity to dominate nature that the magicians of manipulation have Genetics (today with bacteria, tomorrow with man) and their rudimentary concern to recover innocence, to limit their capacity to do harm. This example sample, moreover, shows how frequent is among scientists the forgetfulness, probably unintentional, of ethical values. This is what the researcher incurs, attentive only to the problems that can be solved at the table of his laboratory.
But there are episodes that lead us to suspect that there is not only indifference or carelessness in the face of Ethics: there is also hostility against it. For reasons that are not easy to prove, many leaders of the medical-pharmaceutical industry, many directors of research institutes, not a few officials of Ministries or international Health Agencies neglect, I do not know whether deliberately or not, to consider the ethical implications of the findings of scientists. They say, and in this they are right, that nothing that is not scientifically validated, nothing for which we do not have controlled and contrasted evidence, can be applied in the name of science. But they are wrong when they say that Ethics is something indeterminate, debatable and uncertain, and that it cannot, therefore, be the object of a recommendation. Sometimes there is such an obsession to exclude all ethical considerations, such a prejudice in favor of neutralism, not to say ethical nihilism, that those who direct scientific policy prevent themselves from arriving at sensible biological conclusions.
Something to degree scroll in conclusion
I said at the beginning that the purpose of this lecture was to invite everyone to take an interest in the ethical implications of scientific advances. It will logically fall to the young people of today to observe the wonders - and also the risks - of these advances in the middle of the 21st century, when the knowledge of the molecular materials of which the fabric of the human body is made will be incredibly richer and when the capacity to dominate the mood, the opinions and the spiritual and less spiritual desires of man will have multiplied to an unsuspected degree.
People's lives will be increasingly influenced by scientific and technological advances. Judging them is, therefore, an obligation for everyone, and one of the obligations we cannot neglect. It seems more comfortable for people - and much more irresponsible - to entrust the solution of moral problems to experts. Some people think that just as a plumber is called in to repair a faulty faucet, we could entrust the solution of ethical problems to experts. But, in the end, there can be no experts in ethics. Some of us dedicate ourselves to read and reflect, to talk and write about what is written about the history of our ethical notions and their philosophical and theological foundations, about the solutions that some propose for such complicated ethical problems, and so on.
But ethical decisions must be made by each individual. No one can ethically mortgage his or her responsibility and make moral decisions, blindly trusting in the committee received. The Founder of the University where work, Blessed Josemaría Escrivá, insisted that spiritual advisors, experts in moral questions, must inform and advise, but they must respect the conscience of those they guide and cannot usurp their freedom.
The same as in the spiritual life, happens in the world of public ethics and bioethics. One cannot transfer one's responsibility staff to the experts. All of us, if we are truly responsible, have to go through the sometimes difficult process of taking sides, of deciding the dilemmas that present themselves to us, of being an active agent in the fields of ethical tension, which is where the destiny of humanity is being decided day by day. To put it another way: when it comes to making moral decisions, to making ethical judgments, we are all equal, we are all equally expert, each one of us bears the decisive responsibility of understanding and judging.
We have it, first of all, at a sociological and political level. In a democratic state, we can intervene - in the very modest but invaluable measure marked by the principle of "one man, one vote" - in the decisions that mark the course of science and the applications of technology. In contemporary democracies, bioethical issues (health care costs, legislation on scientific technology, family and human reproduction, abortion and euthanasia, regulation of the practice of medicine) are becoming one of the most significant chapters in electoral programs. It is not enough to say to someone else: go to position and decide for me. We are all involved, through our non-transferable corporeality, in decision making.
In his speech of acceptance of award Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, Joseph Brodsky affirmed that the subdivision of society between a leading class , the intelligentsia, and everyone else is unacceptable. This status is comparable to the subdivision of society into rich and poor, into masters and servants. There are, no doubt, still physical reasons, cultural circumstances that favor the existence and perpetuation of social inequality. But, by nature, we are all installed on a plane of absolute intellectual equality, which makes each of us a potential enjoyer of literature. "While a piece of music," Brodsky said, "still allows one to choose between the passive role of occasional student and the active role of performer, a literary work, on the contrary, forces one to play the role of performer.... A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but a conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, that excludes all others.... And as long as that conversation is being had, the writer is equal to the reader, and vice versa, whether the author is one of the greats or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. What is read remains with the person for the rest of his life in the form of a memory, nebulous or precise. And, sooner or later, for better or for worse, it conditions the person's behavior". So much for quotation of Brodsky's speech .
We must persuade ourselves that in the times in which it has fallen to us to live, we must assume our share of responsibility. As moral subjects, none of us is worth less than a Member of Parliament, a Minister or the King himself. But the Deputies that we elect dictate laws to us without having been subjected to the moral discussion that would make them genuinely representative. Do the Spanish people have a defined idea about what a 'pre-embryo' is and whether it is legitimate to deprive the human embryo of its human condition at less than 14 days of age? What decision will be made in Spain about our participation in the project "Genoma", what biological and medical uses will be authorized or prohibited of the enormous information that the map of human genes and, in due course, the sequencing of the human genome will provide us with?
Out there, it is said that people have to be if not erudite, at least knowledgeable, in DNA, they have to know what the programs of study and researches that scientists do in their laboratories mean for each one and for society. Only with knowledge is it possible to judge in conscience. Nothing good will come out of abstention. There are people who think that it is not within their reach to achieve an adequate knowledge of the very complex biological sciences; or that the biological sciences are something very solid and goal, in which it is not possible to discuss as one discusses religion or politics, areas in which it is said that everyone can give their opinion as they wish.
This idea of the immutability, of the solidity, of the almost absolute objectivity of the natural sciences is a widespread error, because it creates a diffuse social tendency to abstention that leads people to abdicate to the experts. And this error is not only widespread among ordinary people. It is an equally widespread error among teachers. Lewis Thomas has argued that our ignorance of the sciences, the preliminary nature of our knowledge of any district of them, should be the subject of specific courses that would cure us of the risk of pedantry and make us humble people, persuaded that "there are more than seven times seven kinds of ambiguity in science, which are waiting to be analyzed."
As is proper to Ethics, I end by making some recommendations, giving some advice as a remedy for the disease of indifference or ignorance.
Let's assume our responsibility staff, each one of us our own. Let us take an interest in bioethics, since many decisive things are at stake for us. Let us discuss with each other the news in the newspaper, after reflecting a little on what we have read and what lies behind it. Let us draw each other's attention and let us practice that very human official document of contrasting opinions on problems in which serious aspects of our future are at stake.
No one has spoken more forcefully or with more lucidity than John Paul II. In point 15 of his letter Redemptor hominis we find these words, which will help us to reach the desirable balance between trust and judicious criticism in the face of progress and the research of the sciences:
"The question that must first be asked concerns an essential, basic question: does this progress, whose author and maker is man, make man's life on earth, in all its aspects, more human; does it make it more worthy of man? There is no doubt that, in many respects, it does. However, this question must be asked stubbornly with regard to what is truly essential: whether man, as man, in the context of this progress, really becomes better, that is, more spiritually mature, more aware of the dignity of his humanity, more manager, more open to others, particularly to the neediest and the weakest, more available to give and lend financial aid to all". So much for John Paul II's quotation .
We see, in the light of this illuminating text, that we must be concerned, because there are certain fruits of progress that can be poisonous, that can do harm to man. Scientific progress is ambiguous, it lacks the capacity for ethical self-regulation. It has to be guided. Someone has to take it by the hand. And I have the impression that, although some scientists are very interested in the ethical implications of their work research, especially in the field of biomedicine, this attitude does not seem to be sufficiently strong or widespread among scientists.
Therefore, we must all, without distinction, help in this task. We have the obligation to question ourselves tenaciously, obstinately, about the human significance of the progress of science, about its ultimate meaning and its relationship with the really important things. The ambiguity of progress is, at final, a stimulus that will always keep us on our guard and enrich our intelligence and our moral sensitivity.
Thank you very much.