LAUSR

Responsible science has three components: doing science, the validity of the discoveries themselves, and the consequences of these discoveries. These three components are nondissociable, because science does not exist by and for itself: it exists within a societal context. Society and Science always interact with each other. Doing science has direct societal consequences, which can be positive, including novel therapeutic solutions and general advancement of knowledge, and negative, including using planet resources, producing waste, and contributing to global warming (with travel, for example). I shall not develop the latter components here; I shall develop the validity of the discoveries and their consequences in the present context of the immediacy of information and “selfie” science. An idealistic and naive depiction of a scientist is someone concerned only with the internal content of their scientific work and not with their external repercussions. A scientist is but one part of the complex organism that is human society. Except for the now rare cases when a scientist is wealthy, a scientist cannot do any work without support from society. Since state funding comes from taxes, any money given to science is money that taxpayers cannot spend for themselves. As scientists, the least we can do is to provide feedback to society and convince it that the money spent will provide for the benefit of all. This is the second level of socially responsible science: our production must be valid. After all, if a business makes deficient products, it will not survive long. What would happen, were taxpayers convinced that science is not producing what is being promised? The second level of responsibility to consider is when the results produced by the scientist can affect the society. It can be for the better good, as designing vaccines against viruses. Or it could have deleterious consequences. Leó Szilárd and Enrico Fermi, among others, made atomic fission possible, leading to nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The knowledge of the potential destructive power of the discovery did not prevent them from continuing their research. It is tempting to say that scientists should not continue along a path such as this if they foresee negative impacts, or at the very least oppose the misuse of their work. This is also a naive statement. The state of society at any given time point imposes constraints on scientists, voluntarily or not. Pre-World War II Germany and Italy drove Leó Szilárd and Enrico Fermi to seek refuge in the United States, with the intuition that given the state of knowledge in nuclear physics at that time, Germany and USSR would also try to build fission bombs. Who is then responsible of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Leó Szilárd wrote the letter signed by Albert Einstein, which practically launched the Manhattan project. But in 1945, the same Leó Szilárd drafted the petition advocating to warn Japan about a possible use of a fission bomb. Instead, the Interim Committee decided for bombing Japanese cities without warning. Who is socially (and morally) accountable? The results, the A-bomb, and the Cold War, are as much the fruit of a chain of scientific discoveries, scientists competing against each other to be the first to do controlled fission, as the evolution of society in time. This leads to the “moral blindness” surrounding some experiments. I shall not dwell on that, as “moral” is time-, society-, and person-dependent. Claude Bernard argued that vivisection was justified, even when causing suffering to animals, if it was done to ultimately help humans. What was morally acceptable before is not anymore. The morality of some “scientists” may not be that of their society. The United States Army commissioned Harold Hodge to investigate what radioactive contamination was doing to humans following plutonium injections in unaware individuals. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was only stopped in 1972, and just because of a leak to the press. Depending on financial aspects and personal beliefs, some groups did (and still do) experiments which would be deemed unacceptable by most (but again based on the moral state of the society we live in). The latter examples are one extreme of the spectrum, where the application of discoveries can directly lead to the suffering and death of many. Before the generalization of Internet use, science was not accessible to everyone. It entered our general society only when journalists would select a particular topic to cover. In other words, scientists were mostly accountable to their own community and funding agencies. Things changed progressively as scientists started to communicate their results to a much broader audience. The development of the Internet and social media, and more generally the immediacy of access to information, considerably accelerated the diffusion of scientific results as well as of misinformation to society. As we switch to “science in the age of selfies” (Geman and Geman, 2016), one could think that exposing ourselves to the public eye would be beneficial to both science and society. Did such immediacy produce selfregulation and socially responsible science? How can we define responsible science in the present state of the society? Responsibilities are shared by the