Theme 2
Science & scientific research, application of science as technology & society
Is artifical intelligence hype or will it be transformative? The anser is neither and both.
Lastest part of the inter-termporal technical productive waves hitting the shore
The Enlightenment vision
Almost all the progress we enjoy today in science and the technology to which it has been applied has emerged from the efforts of scientists since the prublication of Francis Bacon’s landmark Novum Organum in 1620. Baconian experimental method is scientific method. However, the broader insights of the European Enlightenment are not as well reflected outside the physical sciences. That needs to change.
What is the role of the West in progress?
While the state of Western science in the 1500s was no further ahead than the science of other areas of civilisation, especially in the Muslim world and in China, all that changed with the increasing sophistication of observational astronomy and from 1620 with the adoption of Baconian method. Why did this development occur in Europe and why did European knowledge come so signficantly to outstrip that of other civilisations. And, as that technology has diffused across the world in the modern era, what does that mean today?
What is progress?
Progress, of course, is not a single dimension, nor is it linear as is often presumed. Progress in science tends to be accretive, but that does not mean each newly accreted layer is beneficial, and certainly not uniformly beneficial to all. We need to be clear about what re understand by progress, and avoid measuringy uni-dimensionally, as aggregate economic growth, for example. What are the options?
Loss of scientific hegemony: Winning through losing?
Much is made of the previously less developed regions catching up with the West in terms of wealth and consumption opportunities. Development theories have long expounded prospective theories of convergence. Yet Western politicans insist on portraying technological development as a zero-sum game. This has rapidly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Competition in science and technoogy development is healthy as long as the impacts are managed economically, politically, socially and environmentally. With one-sixth of the world’s population, you would expect China to have a material portion of the world’s ideas. Why has this competition come to be preceived so starkly as zero-sum, what does that mean and what can we do about it?
Can intelligence be artificial? What is AI
Almost all the progress we enjoy today in science and the technology to which it has been applied has emerged from the efforts of scientists since the prublication of Francis Bacon’s landmark Novum Organum in 1620. Baconian experimental method is scientific method. However, the broder insights of the European Enlightenment are not ass well reflected outside the physical sciences
Approaching synthetic general consciousness sensibly
ightenment vision
Almost all the progress we enjoy today in science and the technology to which it has been applied has emerged from the efforts of scientists since the prublication of Francis Bacon’s landmark Novum Organum in 1620. Baconian experimental method is scientific method. However, the broder insights of the European Enlightenment are not ass well reflected outside the physical sciences
Quantum what?
Almost all the progress we enjoy today in science and the technology to which it has been applied has emerged from the efforts of scientists since the prublication of Francis Bacon’s landmark Novum Organum in 1620. Baconian experimental method is scientific method. However, the broder insights of the European Enlightenment are not ass well reflected outside the physical sciences
Future shocked? The Toffler phenomenon
Almost all the progress we enjoy today in science and the technology to which it has been applied has emerged from the efforts of scientists since the prublication of Francis Bacon’s landmark Novum Organum in 1620. Baconian experimental method is scientific method. However, the broder insights of the European Enlightenment are not ass well reflected outside the physical sciences
Scientists are people too, you know: the process of science
The different types of scientist
Almost all the progress we enjoy today in science and the technology to which it has been applied has emerged from the efforts of scientists since the prublication of Francis Bacon’s landmark Novum Organum in 1620. Baconian experimental method is scientific method. However, the broder insights of the European Enlightenment are not as well reflected outside the physical sciences
Scientific inference
Almost all the progress we enjoy today in science and the technology to which it has been applied has emerged from the efforts of scientists since the prublication of Francis Bacon’s landmark Novum Organum in 1620. Baconian experimental method is scientific method. However, the broder insights of the European Enlightenment are not ass well reflected outside the physical sciences
Normal science and the meaning of science
Almost all the progress we enjoy today in science and the technology to which it has been applied has emerged from the efforts of scientists since the prublication of Francis Bacon’s landmark Novum Organum in 1620. Baconian experimental method is scientific method. However, the broder insights of the European Enlightenment are not ass well reflected outside the physical sciences
Personalities and controversies
While Newton claimed that he could see a long way because he was standing on the shoulders of giants, science is a winner-takes-all business. For those that get there first come honours, recognition and immortality. This is clearly the case with the description of the double-helix xtructure of DNA, the ‘building block’ of life and the transmitter of coupled genetic code, described by James Watson & Francis Crick in 1953. There names will last in pantheon of scientifc greats.
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Personalities and controversies; science is a human institution.
While Newton claimed that he could see a long way because he was standing on the shoulders of giants, science is a winner-takes-all business. For those that get there first come honours, recognition and immortality. This is clearly the case with the description of the double-helix structure of DNA, the ‘building block’ of life and the transmitter of coupled genetic code, described by James Watson & Francis Crick in 1953. There names will last in pantheon of scientifc greats. Less so, Maurice Wilkins, who was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. However, the recognition these three received has not been without controversy.
Contemporaneous to the research at Cambidge by Crick and Watson, chemist Rosalind Franklin was working in biophysics research for the Medical Research Council at KCL using X-ray diffraction crystallography the under laboratory director, renowned physicist John Randall. While Maurice Wilkins was on holiday from KCL laboratory in 1950, work that Wilkins had been undertaking in DNA structure was reassigned by Randall to Franklin along with Franklin’s research assistant Raymond Gosling and supervision of Gosling’s PhD. Unsurprisingly, the created friction between Franklin and Wilkins.
Using Franklin’s superior x-ray diffraction crystallography techniques, Franklin and Gosling made considerable but laborious progress, leading Franklin to conclude that DNA may have a helical structure. However, the evidence at that point was conflicting. In May 1952, Gosling produced the famous photo no.51.
Franklin was due to leave KCL to move to UCL Birkbeck. Gosling’s research and supervision were to be transferred back to Wilkins. At Randall’s direction and at Franklin’s suggestion that he do so (according to Gosling’s subsequent account), Gosling shared his findings with Wilkins.
In turn, suspecting its signficance, Wilkins shared the work with Crick at Cambridge, hoping to complete description of the DNA structure collaboratively before Linus Pauling at CalTech, who was also working on the problem, successfully identified the correct structure. Pauling and a colleague had published a paper proposing a triple helix structure that had been shown to be inoperable.
Crick immediately recognised the implications of the image based on earlier publications by his collaborator, Watson, as confirmatory evidence of their hypothesised anti-parallel double-helix structure of intertwined sugar-phosphate chains, supported by data they had previously obtained from Franklin and Gosling’s research via an MRC research report. Watson’s and Crick’s conclusions on structure were announced by their laboratory director, Sir Lawrence Bragg, at a Solvay conference in Belgium 8 April 1953 and published in Nature in publiched their findings in Nature two weeks later.
Watson’s and Crick’s modelling depended in part on Franklin’s data and was confirmed by Gosling’s image which validated their anti-parallel double-helix model. Watson later acknolwedged that he and Crick would not have identified the structure without Franklin’s (unpublished) work. Franklin had identified all the pieces but did not put them in the correct structure. It was Watson and Crick’s hypothesis of the anti-parallel structure that led to them to define the structure correctly, validated by Franklin’s earlier data.
Franklin maintained friendships with Crick and his wife, including period of convalescence at their home following operations to remove ovarian cancers. Franklin died in April 1958 from complications associated with ovarian and metastisised cancers.
In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Having died, Franklin was not considered for the Prize. In and interview in 2003, Watson expressed the belief that, had she still been alive, Franklin would have shared the Prize.
Following the publication in 1975 of a biography by Franklin’s friend, Anne Sayre, the role of Franklin’s contemporaneous work in crystallography at KCL contributing to the identification of the DNA structure became a rallying point for feminist and other claims of misogyny and gender-based discrimination in science. Franklin was even described as the Sylvia Plath of micro-biology.
While there are other plausible explanations for Watson and Crick not crediting Franklin and, also, Gosling more directly for their contribution to Watson’s and Crick’s findings, it is similarly plausible that there was an element of misogyny involved and certainly the difficult relationship of Franklin and Wilkins appears to have been contributory. Of course, this is far from the only instance of the ubiquitous and iniquitous disease of men (and also women) claiming credit for and failing to acknowledge the work of others, either in science or in other fields. We allow it far too often and challenge it far too rarely. These failures are corrosive to meritocratic progression and to work-place fulfilment (or fulfilment in other institutional setting where it arises).
Science is not the only winner-takes-all business.