I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture of the Bhagavad Gita.
Additional. It's trying to persuade the prince that.
He should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi armed form and says, Now I am the commander, the destroyer of worlds.
I suppose we all thought that one way or another. That was a quote from the atomic physicist Robert Oppenheimer.
Nicknamed Father of the Atomic Bomb, for the role he played in helping the United States develop the first atomic bomb.
The clip reveals something of Oppenheimer's well-known moral struggle to come to terms with the consequences of his research.
It's an interesting contrast to another of his famous quotes. There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry.
The scientist is free and must be free to ask any questions.
This encapsulates a problem that's come to be known as the dual use dilemma.
Quite often, the same research that can be used to do good can also be used for much more malevolent purposes.
Whereas in the 20th century, atomic physics was at the heart of this dilemma.
Today, much of the debate is over developments in biological sciences.
My name is Chan Dima and I'm from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.
In this podcast, we'll be talking to scientists and scientific publishers who both have a role to play in tackling this.
Leland talked to Phil Willis, empty chair of the Science and Technology Committee in the House of Commons,
to hear his views on where politicians fit into all of this and to help me with this is Tom Douglas,
who is a Ph.D. student in bioethics at Oxford University.
Okay. Well, Tom,
can you start by giving me some examples from history of why this dual use dilemma has cropped up with a classic example from history comes from,
as you mentioned, 20th century nuclear physics. So a good example would be the Manhattan Project,
where the US government wanted to develop nuclear fission technology for both energy generation purposes and for weapons development.
And scientists that were involved in this project were quite aware that it had potentially devastating applications as well, as well as good ones.
Why is this issue of dual use of particular interest now?
I think one reason why it's come to our attention recently is because of some developments,
mostly in the life sciences areas where it's been particularly obvious that there are potential applications of this research to develop,
for example, biological weapons. This coincided with the September 11 attacks in the US,
which obviously raised awareness of the threat from terrorism and also with the anthrax letters attacks in the US.
As part of my research, I spoke to a number of scientific journal editors because there have been some suggestions that the Journal edited
is may be in a position to to perhaps screen the papers they receive based on possible concerns about misuse.
And some of us have suggested that journal editors should censor their journals in some way to ensure that they're
not publishing what could be interpreted as effectively instructions on how to build a biological weapon.
For example, one of the scientific journal editors that I spoke to was Professor Charles Payne from the University of Birmingham,
who's a professor of microbiology and also the editor of the Journal of Medical Microbiology.
A good example of that is the smallpox virus, which is fully understood, and we know all about its DNA sequence.
We know that it's a serious pathogen, but it's it's no longer available, if you like, on the open market.
So that could be recreated using DNA synthesis.
However, that's that's the theoretical answer in practice.
You also have to package that DNA to make a viable pathogen that will actually be infectious.
And and with that and other technical problems, this is not nearly as easy a task as it as it might seem.
So I don't think we're yet really close to even to doing that on a kind of bioterrorism scale.
It would still be a massive and difficult task.
The other angle on this is that one could, in theory, create a new pathogen, a kind of designer pathogen,
and put together a bunch of genes, which, in theory, from what we know already, would create a very serious novel pathogenic organism.
But again, I think we we really lack the understanding of how nature has done that job.
My feeling is we're a very long way, really, from being able to design from scratch the ideal pathogen and created in the laboratory.
Michael Calculate is an ethicist based in Canberra at the Australian National University.
He's really the first philosopher or ethicist to start looking at the tool used to limit.
MATTHEWS Now, it's clear that recent development and genetic make possible development of biological weapons, partly illustrated by CIA, quote,
saying that advances in biotechnology,
like genetic engineering now make it possible to create new diseases worse than any diseases previously known to humankind.
So that's one example. DNA Synthesis. Did you explore any other areas of science which raise similar issues over the potential for harm?
So one other area that's increasingly being discussed is neuroscience, which is currently a very hot scientific field.
It's advancing rapidly, and some of the technologies that neuroscientists are developing or attempting to develop, it could be used in unethical ways.
So one example would be a new imaging technology.
It seems possible that in the future this technology could be developed to the point that people interpreting
these brain scans can draw inferences about what the subjects were thinking or feeling at the time,
and their concerns that this could be used in ways that invade people's privacy.
So do you think scientists think enough about these issues?
I think scientists have been very good at starting to think about a lot of ethical issues that have been raised by their work in recent years.
This is particularly true in the life sciences, where there's been a kind of bioethics movement.
People working in stem cell research, for example, have started to think quite a lot about the issues.
But one issue that hasn't been thought about very much by either scientists or bioethicists is the issue of how scientific knowledge is used.
The questions have been more been asked about whether scientific knowledge is produced in ethical ways,
but not about whether it's actually ethical to produce certain kinds of knowledge that could be misused.
So Tom certainly thinks that scientists themselves have some responsibility for thinking about the consequences of their research.
That can this always be predicted? Should scientific research be policed?
And if so, who should do it?
And at what stage, before any resulting technologies are available on the market, before the research is published, or before it's even undertaken?
Here's what Michael Salkeld thinks. Well, everyone's responsible, including ordinary voters.
Those more directly involved scientists should be taking more use, dangers and consideration when they're deciding what research to do,
when they're deciding whether or not to disseminate potentially dangerous research findings.
There's a role for research institutions. They should be providing more in the way of ethics, education to scientists.
And they need to be implementing more in the way of oversight mechanisms, i.e., you know,
looking at what research is taking place and looking at the dual use dangers associated with that research.
There's a role for journals to be screening submitted articles for tool use.
So Salga thinks that there are cases where it would be justifiable to censor research.
Although he accepts it would be difficult. And there are many other possible approaches like regulating trade, for example.
But Charles Penn is sceptical about whether censorship would do any good.
Well, I think at the moment it's very difficult to envisage practical interventions that would fulfil the need to
be cautious about the possibilities while at the same time not inhibiting legitimate biomedical research.
I can't really see ways at the moment that we could sensibly restrict access to the available technologies
without really tying the hands of people who are following legitimate lines of medical research.
And would you think that scientific articles or parts of them should ever be held back from publication because of concerns about misuse?
I think one can imagine rare examples where that might be advisable.
For example, in determining complete genome sequences of some of the more severe or serious pathogens.
There have been questions asked by scientists, in fact, as to whether it was responsible to to publish these.
An example of that would be the plague organism, for example,
where the complete genome sequence was determined just within the last five or six years.
And scientists involved in that have have told me that, you know, they did wonder.
They gave it some consideration.
I think one of the problems, though, is that the publication is actually the final stage in quite a long process of of scientific activity.
Science, as we know it in the biomedical community is a communal activity.
It's a community activity. We are all interdependent.
There's an awful lot known in the community about what we're each doing.
We talk about it with collaborators and colleagues long before it's published.
So putting a restriction at the level of publication in many ways, the what you might say is the genie is already out of the bottle.
So what role did policy makers play in all of this?
Phil Willis, the chairman of the Innovation University Science and Skill Select Committee and soon to be the science and technology side,
Phil Willis MP thinks they have the hardest job at all.
I went to talk to him in his Westminster office.
What role do you think policymakers have, if any, in ensuring that science is not used for unethical purposes?
I think for scientists it's relatively easy because they simply follow the scientific research,
and the whole ethics of being a scientist is, in fact, to try to draw your science to its logical end point.
I think for ethicists, the issue is easy because, again, the subject might be complex.
Their role is to weigh up the ethics for and against elements of science.
For policymakers, it's dreadfully difficult.
And we saw that, of course, in the United States with George Bush and the stem cell agenda,
and we're seeing it in the UK, but particularly in Europe, over the GM agenda.
So my my simple view is that policymakers have a duty to the public to actually ensure that there is a body of research which has been
properly peer tested and which can be put openly and without comment before the public as the basis for forming policy judgements.
And where that doesn't happen. You will get that policy and I think a distortion of science.
So you're saying really that you don't think policy makers have any role where the research is actually done and the results disseminated?
U.S. policymakers have have a role to play further down the line.
I think increasingly down the line, I think they have a role to play.
But when we're talking about pure science, I think the least that scientists are affected by policy, the better.
I think the boundaries are best set by committees outside the House rather than by politicians.
One of the issues that there's a lot of debate around at the moment is the idea of DNA synthesis and
the possibility that terrorists might eventually be able to recreate pathogens in the laboratory.
So that's an issue. But there's a lot of debate about whether we should restrict either what research is done or restrict what's published.
Do you think that perhaps in instances like that, there's ever a case for scientific censorship?
I don't. I think that once you actually censor science, you're going down a very slippery slope in an opposite direction.
And the fact that we saw pre a 2008 in the United States deliberate attempts by the Bush administration to censor science and individual scientists
and indeed to remove grants from them if they were overstepping the mark is something that I think we should deliberately avoid in this country.
If you go back to the whole issue of of DNA streams and the way in which you can actually build out, for instance, dangerous pathogens.
Most of that science is already out there. It's already available, you know, on the Internet, the idea that you can put a lid on it and say,
oh, well, we'll all obey the rules by now is just absolute madness.
Obama recently said that he wanted America to be the first in as many areas of
science as possible and where they weren't first to be the country of choice.
And that must be UK's position, you know as well.
And once you start saying we are going to restrict certain elements of science for political reasons,
then I genuinely think you will undermine science itself.
Because if you start with a belief that science is inherently evil and cannot be controlled,
well, you really go back to, you know, the horror movies rather than a sensible debate.
I think that what I've learned from this podcast is that there is no simple solution to tackling the dual use nature of scientific research.
We're all responsible in our own way for understanding the potential consequences of
scientific research and taking appropriate action depending on what our role is in society.
Although most of the people we've talked to have different opinions on what we should be doing about the dual use dilemma.
They do all agree that there is a real risk that if we try and hold back scientific research, we could lose out on all the benefits that it can bring.
And Ireland with an interesting quote from the French physicist and psychologist Gustav Labonte.
Science has promised us truth. It has never promised us either peace or happiness.