Scientific Advance: Friend or Foe?

Scientific Advance: Friend or Foe?

Scientists and non-scientists see the advances of technology in different ways. Scientists, like J. Michael Bishop, look at the possibilities technology offers while non-scientists, like Jeremy Rifkin and Mary Shelley, look at the potential chaos that could be caused by it.

J. Michael Bishop is a professor of microbiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is also winner of the Nobel Prize. He wrote, "Enemies of Promise" because he wanted to dispel the misconceptions that many people have about science, since he feels that these could have serious consequences for all Americans.

Jeremy Rifkin is a well-known social activist who organized the 1968 March on the Pentagon and brought public attention to alleged U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. He is president of the nonprofit Foundation on Economic Trends. He is both criticized and admired for his condemnation on Biotechnology.

Mary Shelley was the daughter of 2 influential people and became an influential writer herself in the early 1800s. Mary Shelley created a monstrous, powerful myth, which she used to warn ambitious scientists of the potential dangers contained in their creations. Her creation, Frankenstein, will forever be known as the monster that was created by Victor Frankenstein. The monster, a creature without a name of its own, that took the identity of its maker.

Bishop argues that "Resistance to science is born out of fear." He blames ignorance of breeding this fear, and he blames ignorance of being, "our deepest malady" (241). Rifkin and Shelley on the other hand, accuse science of having the potential to evolve into something grotesque, monstrous and frightening. Bishop would say that this fear is born of ignorance while Rifkin and Shelley would argue it to stem from the potentiality of catastrophe, from the inability of man to predict the adaptability of nature, from the inability of man to anticipate the benefits that are likely to result from such experiments, and from the danger of acquiring knowledge and becoming greater than "his" (man's) nature will allow (321).

J Michael Bishop in "Enemies of Promise" argues that we live in an age of scientific triumph in which science is mistrusted and under attack. He claims that some of the opposition to science comes from familiar sources. Some of these stem from religious fanatics who constantly push for creationism education in the public arena. These groups have a theological foundation to their opposition to the advances of science.