Prominent Speakers Captivate Audience

At Science World – The Fisher Scientific Laboratory Experience visitors were treated to two thought provoking seminars from Lord Professor Robert Winston and Professor David Bellamy.

Speaking to a packed auditorium, Professor Winston questioned how scientists engage with the general public, particularly in relation to ethical issues. “It is very clear in a modern society, (that) we have to be much more responsive and recognise that the adverse effects of the things that we do does impact on society as much as us and therefore the ethical responsibility is something that we need to think about afresh.”

“In my view there needs to be a contract between the people who invent the technology and society. The plea is really for scientific responsibility… and for people to be more aware of the ethical implications of the science that they do. They also need to be more aware of a need for dialogue with the public, not merely to communicate, but to listen to their anxieties and respond better to them.” He pointed out that since mankind first began to use tools, advances in technology which have brought intended benefits to specific areas of application, might also prove in time to be beneficial to totally different market sectors, which could result in good or more questionable outcomes.

As an example he considered the development of lasers, which accelerated advances in medicine and then also played a positive role in the development of DVD’s. Equally, he pointed out, some facilities where lasers are being used for attempts at nuclear fusion, might really have been designed for nuclear weapons. He argued that: “every technology has a downside that might not be recognised at the time,” and that control of such technological advances “should not be left to Government who might have other agendas.”

Recognising the increasing momentum of new discoveries and changes that impact directly on today’s society, he points out that this inevitable trend also probably supplies the best solutions to deal with consequences arising from applications of new research or inventions: “Although we should try to be more aware of these downsides.. I think, so far in the history of mankind we have managed to improve our lot and by using
advances in technology have managed to control the worst aspects of it.”

He also noted that sometimes too much emphasis is placed on promising developments rather than on what is potentially achievable today: “We hugely hyped up the human genome when it was published 8 or 9 years ago, - but it has not been of much value yet and the idea that this is the most important biological invention –well it may be true, but it’s yet to be demonstrated how valuable it will be.”

“In fact, I think the ability to make a transgenic animal is much more important,.. because it helps us understand how genes function and this is particularly important now in the field of epigenetics.”

Summing up Professor Winston added “We can’t predict where we are going – what we can do is try to anticipate some of the bad effects and make certain that society is on board with that – this is the important message for today’s society.”