The Negative Impact On Society

Throughout the years there has been an ongoing debate about whether or not a scientist has a moral obligation to end his or her research if it could potentially impact society negatively. However, one should take into account when debating this issue that an invention’s negative impact on society is not the fault of the developer. Arthur Galston is quoted “Nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result in benefits for mankind. Any discovery, I believe, is morally neutral and it can be turned either to constructive ends or destructive ends. That’s not the fault of science“ (Pearce). Accordingly, scientists should not have moral obligations to end their research because many inventions have unintentional negative consequences, assigning

This notion has been proven numerous times. One example is Arthur Galston, a plant psychologist and bioethicist, who developed a chemical that allowed farmers to control the growth of soybeans. Low doses of the chemical would increase the rate at which the soybeans grew; however, overexposure to the chemical would result in the death of the plant. Other researchers later converted the chemical into Agent Orange. After the United States government made the decision in 1961 to disperse Agent Orange in the Vietnam War to defoliate the environment, Galston protested the decision, insisting there could be consequences to those in contact with the chemical. However, the government ignored his warnings until scientists discovered enough evidence to solidify his suspicions, and the United States halted the dispersion in 1971. Agent Orange inevitably resulted in over 500,000 birth defects and 400,000 deaths of starvation, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other medical conditions (Pearce). Another example is Fritz Harbor, a Nobel Prize winning Jewish scientist, who developed a chemical to be used as a cheap nitrogen fertilizer, insecticide, and disinfectant. During World War II, Germany used the chemical, referred to as Zyklon B, as the preferred method of execution in concentration camps (Listverse). A final example is in 1903, when Wilbur and Orville Wright designed the first aircraft, and in 1917, when Ernest Rutherford split the nucleus of an atom. Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of the ability to split an atomic nucleus paved the way for the hydrogen bomb to be created, and the Wright Brother’s aeronautical design led to the creation of the Boeing B-29, the plane that dropped the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August of 1945 (History.com). None of the men could have imagined the negative consequences their