Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the military (or forces of destruction more generally): from the horrific
effects of poison gas (and other gifts of the chemical industries), through
the atomic bomb (and other gifts of physics and engineering), through
the Nazi nightmare of racial purification (and other gifts of anthropol-
ogy and the biosciences), through the indigestible fact that close to three-
quarters of the spending on scientific research during the cold war was
devoted to military ends. The industries and sciences of Thanatos had a
glorious century. We should never forget that what is now nostalgically
seen as the golden age of science—the one before capitalism supposedly
despoiled the life sciences—was really the age of the cold war.
Today, it seems implausible to maintain any longer that accumulating
knowledge per se automatically leads to beneficial results, or given its
fragmentation, that knowledge furthers our general self-understanding.
Nor—and this is where Weber helps us avoid the fatuous denunciatory
cant so widespread at present—can we unambiguously maintain that the
opposite is the case.
It is striking that in 1958 when Hannah Arendt published
The Human
Condition
, the science she chose as exemplary was physics. In the same
year, C. P. Snow in
The Two Cultures
had done the same thing. Four
years later in the topic's second edition, however, Snow replaced physics
with molecular biology. He was prescient. The immense achievements of
molecular biology and biochemistry during the 1960s and 1970s—the
discovery of the fundamental principles and mechanisms of the genetic
code and its operation—will surely stand as a monumental threshold in
the history of science. Nevertheless, with the invention of recombinant
DNA technology and the ascendancy of a new type of industry—the
biotechnology industry—another blow was dealt to those who wanted
to believe that the production of truth about life must remain pure of
worldly taint. It has been shown over the last few decades that there can
be no life sciences without substantial amounts of money. During the
cold war, this money came from nation-states. Although there is still a
substantial contribution to the life sciences from the State, there is an
even greater flow of funds from the huge multinational pharmaceutical
industries and the fleet-footed and highly mobile purveyors of venture
capital. Please note that I am not claiming that this situation is intrinsi-
cally either horrific or terrific; I have no regrets for the passing of the
cold war, or for much of what nationalistic science produced in the twen-
