Science, Censorship and Subsidy
John Perry

12 May 2007

我们今天的话题是科学和审查制度。天花的案例提供了一个有趣的研究案例。

Smallpox, once a main scourge of mankind, was eradicated through the efforts of the World Health Organization and others. Stocks of the virus were retained by the U.S. The U.S. and the Soviet Union retained stocks of the virus in Atlanta and Siberia.

然而，现在天花的基因组已经被测序并被公布在网上。In the words of Antointe Danchin, Director of the HKU-Pasteur Research Center in Hong Kong:

We thought we had eradicated smallpox, but now that its sequence is on ethe Web, it is more of a threat than ever, freely available for anyone to download and manipulate it. And the damage has been permanently done, all becasue of the vanity of soem irresponsible scientists...
("Not Every Truth is Good,"European Molecular Biology Organization Reports,2002)

乍一看，这似乎是一件可怕的事情。也许这个问题还有另一面。我不清楚丹钦阻止基因组测序的原因是什么;he notes that the reasons cited against his campaign were all-purpose homilies:

...knowledge should not and cannot be suppressed; nobody knows whether there are hidden pools of the virus; se should preserve our knowledge of biodiversity, and so on. My contention is simple: we should have destroyed the stocks of the virus, and w should not have sequenced its genome. It is a fallacy that all knowledge is good. The virus has only one host---man. It therefore cannot re-emerge and so surely it is more important to destroy it than to understand it. ... many species become extict every day without their genomes having been sequenced. Finally, there are more tan enough current and new diseases to absorb our research efforts once we have unequivocally abolished this one.

当然，可以想象的是，完成排序并在网上公布将会是一件好事。任何一位称职的哲学家都能提出一些设想。但压倒性的可能性是，这是一件坏事。它应该被预防吗?

Preventing the publication of the sequence on the web would have required censorship. And the question is always, who should be the censor? Ideally scientific organization would take on this duty, using persuasion and soft constraints, like treating scientists who do such things with contempt. But this doesn't seem to be happening.

这似乎只剩下政府了。我不喜欢政府审查事情的想法，但给政府权力窃听我们的电话，无限期监禁人民，入侵其他国家，所有这些都是为了减少恐怖主义的危险，但却不让政府权力在网上发布恐怖分子的虚拟手册，这似乎是自相矛盾的。

But earlier intervention seems appropriate. I don't know the details in this case, but I suspect the sequencing of the smallpox virus was in some way subsidized by governments, probably ours. President Bush, with respect to stem-cell research, invoked the principle that the government should not subsidize immoral research. Whatever the merits of his argument in the stem-cell case, the general principle seems correct. It should be invoked in more clear cut cases. As I write government money, taxpayer money, is being used to invent "improved" thermonuclear devices, and probably better land mines and all sorts of other nefarious weapons, that, if history is any guide, will end up in the "wrong-hands" (and, by my lights, starts off in the wrong-hands in any case).

To presever Millian principles of free-inquiry without acquiescing in insanity like publishing the smallpox sequence on the Web, we'll have to understand those principles and their conceptual limits better than we do. Plenty of work here for philosophers. For those interested, Philip Kitcher'sScience, Truth, and Democracy(2003) is an excellent place to begin.

Comments(5)

Guest's picture

Guest

Saturday, May 12, 2007 -- 5:00 PM

I'm all for publishing information. But some scie

I'm all for publishing information. But some scientists seem to think they have unlimited freedom to determine our future just because they have the technology. If you were my next door neighbor, I have the technology to blast the Ramones loud enough to rattle your windows. But my freedom to listen ends where your rights begin. Works both ways.

Guest's picture

Guest

Saturday, May 12, 2007 -- 5:00 PM

Censorship by goverments could only be tolerated i

Censorship by goverments could only be tolerated if the justification based upon public safety is clearly conveyed to public,and the act of goverment subject to a judicial control and annulment mechanism.

Guest's picture

Guest

Sunday, May 13, 2007 -- 5:00 PM

How much potential danger in some information wi

How much potential danger in some information will warrant its unavailability? The vast majority of information can be used for some nefarious purpose or
other, it seems to me.
Life is dangerous, full of risk and unexpected
consequences but if we expect to live life with any
courage and creativity--in the face of our ultimate
demise--which could happen at anytime it seems---then
we cannot obsess about the dangers of life--we must
not allow it to limit our resources and creativity
to a significant degree.
On the other hand, we must --in order to forget the
impending doom---in order to create a secure space for
current and future activity---we must minimuze risk.
We cannot forget our deaths if we cannot be assured that the obvious risks have been minimized (though, for instance, a car seatbelt doesn't seem to offer much
distance--between us and the 40 k traffic deaths on
the road each year).
The world remains a damned dangerous place== and to
paraphrase Jim Morrison, no one gets out of here alive.
We all share this fate---one way or another.
It seems we balance our desire to prolong our existence
with desire to take risks that makes this existence
fulfilling to us-- until the end. It is a tricky business.
Some traditions say that there is something
beyond personhood ----but even to discover what this
may be--requires a path of discovery necessitating a stable context. The zen master needs a meditation hall.

Guest's picture

Guest

Friday, May 25, 2007 -- 5:00 PM

So, what if manipulating this genome reveals the c

So, what if manipulating this genome reveals the cure to Cancer? Or AIDS? Without radiation treatments being available for Cancer patients, progress in Cancer treatment itself would have been tough going for a very long time. And radiation could possibly be considered under that umbrella of "not all knowledge is good": at least for me it could, but I've never been a big fan of bombs.
Regulating info is not solving the problem, it's attacking a symptom of the problem. Info is never bad. It's how that info is applied and who applies it that determines whether or not information is "evil or good."
The question shouldn't be if whether or not we should regulate, the question should be "Why are scientists using this for the wrong ends, and more importantly, how do we solve that issue?" This two part query is tough, so tough that very, very brilliant men and women have moved heaven and earth to try and solve the problems handed to us by such a query. And I can almost gaurantee that "silencing" the information was not among the possibilities. Because when we silence the "bad' scientists, how can we be sure we are not silencing the "good" scientists.
在我看来，在这种情况下，明智的做法应该是两害相权取其轻:一是“规范”监管，二是希望广大的人类，广大的科学家都是足够好的人，能够知道什么时候不应该做坏事。但要做最坏的打算，为我们已知的毒株开发更多的疫苗供应，同时探索我们不知道的毒株的疫苗。谁知道呢?也许在我们寻找更多疫苗的过程中，我们会找到治愈癌症的方法。

Guest's picture

Guest

Friday, June 15, 2007 -- 5:00 PM

这是一个很难的问题。I'm not sure that I agree with

这是一个很难的问题。我不确定我是否同意Info是中立的论点。我倾向于认为信息是好是坏，当然，取决于你用它做什么。中性意味着不好也不坏。
肯定没人能活着离开这里。但是越晚越好。