I am a little afraid to speak about this subject because of the language.
The language of ideas - in any language - has words that are reasonably complicated and there is not the crutch,
the help of mathematical equations and structural formulas.
So please, I have tried to put some of the text on the screen here, but please be patient, just float along on a language,
and I will make the text of the lecture available to you on a presentation on the web.
Also, if I could, no pictures, it’s distracting to me, not to you I'm sure, you are all used to this,
but no photographs during the lecture, after the lecture I will be glad to jump up and down for you!
Okay, think of the last 200 years.
Incredible things were given to us by other human beings, transforming nature, in art, in music, in social structures.
Who will question the value of war and peace?
Of a ceramic by Hamada Shoji or a Beethoven quartet.
Or the end of slavery and the empowerment of women.
But if one gathers enough courage to weigh the incommensurate, and thinks in some way, which I really don’t like to,
of the greatest gain in our understanding of the world within us and around us in these last two centuries,
I think one cannot avoid singling out science.
The achievements of science and technology are of value to humanity and material and in spiritual ways.
My own chemistry has so much to be proud of apart, but I think an important one in the extension of life expectancy,
from 40 to 70 years, in most parts of the world.
In enabling birth control, in synthetic fertilisers to feed twice as many people as could have been fed before.
In chemotherapy for cancer and a greater colour palette for all.
Science is democratising in the deepest sense of the word,
it makes a way available to a wider range of people the necessities and comforts
that in a previous age were reserved for a privileged few.
The achievement is also spiritual, I am not talking about the capability of listening wherever you are in the world
to Bob Marley and the Wailers, or a … on a CD, I speak of the direct spiritual knowledge that comes,
that is gained of how genetic information is transmitted or how stars are born.
And knowledge that may not be of material value is not patentable but still makes the human spirit soar.
Given this incredible gain in our knowledge and the ever so clear material improvements in our lifespan and comfort
and that of much of - not nearly all but all as you saw of the world as well, it remains clear that,
as we stand at the beginning of the 21st century, that first of all, people are now happier than they were say 100 years ago.
And second, they do not necessarily praise the achievements of science and technology with enthusiasm,
but they actually question them.
They are ambivalent about them.
Now, to push these concerns aside as the remnants of superstition as unthinking,
as uninformed antiintellectual opposition that could be made a way just by education, I think that’s to miss the point.
Real smart normal thinking and feeling people are concerned about where science is going and what it is doing to people’s lives.
The concern is often couched in ecological, environmental and ethical terms.
So genetic engineering or cloning are one lightning rod, so our reactions against the seed crop which cannot be replanted.
Or about nuclear energy.
There is a message for us as scientists in this seemingly ambivalent to irrational, to me nicely so, I like it.
The response of the public to the amelioration of the human condition and to the enrichment of knowledge that science has brought.
It’s a message that I think science has to learn from, as it progresses at a very different pace,
once its exponential growth has seized and it has seized in most of the world.
Exponential growth is a recipe for disaster, that’s all it is.
As it expands into the new millennium, I think science will change.
I think it can change, it did change.
I want you to think about a time when there were no blacks and Jews or women in science.
It wasn’t that long ago.
Science is not immutable, it is a socially adaptable and intellectually adaptable system.
I think science must change in this century and I think it will change despite our feeling uncomfortable about it in some way,
so that every action of science is accompanied by some ethical, environmental,
I guess impact assessment on the part of scientists and on the part of the institutions that support them.
Not by some constructed them but by us, in a marriage of necessity and of choice for the new millennium.
Now, I want to examine in this talk one small aspect of this conjunction.
And it happens to be one that is important to me.
This is the link between science and ethics.
And I’ll do so in my own weird philosophical and poetic way.
I want to think with you, without forcing my peculiar way on you,
about the potential of the process of science for constructing ethics.
Here I actually follow similar consideration by an interesting man,
Jacob Bronowski, who was a landsman of mine in more ways than one.
And he was much less tentative than I will be.
He said simply, as you can see here:
“The practice of science compels the practitioner to form for himself a fundamental set of universal values.”
And when asked the question ‘Can ethics grow out of science?’, which he answered here.
Now, that very question, ‘Can ethics grow out of science?’, seems ludicrous to two communities of people, of scientists.
Those who believe that science is ethically neutral, and those who believe that scientists are inherently ethical.
Let me fight with these as provocatively as I can.
To claim that science is ethically neutral, typical statement.
I just worry about the technology of cloning, someone else has to decide whether that’s good for people.
That kind of position puts scientists squarely in the company of those people who don’t want to control guns everywhere.
They say guns don’t kill, people do.
By contrast, I believe and there is a philosophical tradition to back this up, that in any action by a human being,
the instrument of that action, a gun, a molecule synthesised, yes,
even a mathematical equation or a poem, must be accompanied, must be accompanied by a moral judgement.
The judgement minimally is ‘Will the use of that instrument by me or by others, that’s the difficult part, hurt people or not?’
The invention or implementation of a tool without consideration of the consequences of its use by the inventor
is deeply incomplete, I would say.
Now, as for the claim that scientists are born with ethics,
well, that’s as likely as they are being born with aesthetics or with logic.
The latter one is not true, all of us find out around the second referee’s reports on our papers.
Still, let’s see if there’s something about science that might make an ethical human being out of a scientist.
So let’s think first about what science is.
We scientists are people who have opted to engage in a remarkable and devolving social system for gathering reliable knowledge.
Notice I don’t say truth.
I’ll come back to that.
That knowledge being of great spiritual and practical value.
The critical components can be listed in any way, I’ve listed one selection here.
First there are normal, curious people, just happens that some of them like mathematics but that’s not necessary.
Second there are people who are not afraid to get their hands dirty.
At least some subcommunity, not necessarily me, do experiments.
Third there is an open system for dissemination of what one finds
and with it a communal urge that turns into an addiction for doing just that.
And fourth there is a frequent dipping back and forth between the approximations to reality
that are probed by our fallible senses and by our instruments.
And flights of absolutely imaginative fancy and theory and in hypothesis building.
Just one cut through science, so is there anything in the stratus of science that can enhance the ethics
brought to it by scientists or that can possibly engender an ethical outlook?
As what I’ve said makes clear, I do not come to this because I think that scientists are better than other people.
And especially I don’t think Nobel laureates are better than other people.
Far from it.
Nor do I dare presume that a relatively late social invention in the history of humanity,
science could provide a broad rational for a human quality as fundamental as ethics.
Or is ethics itself a social invention?
I think it is.
If so, it is older than science but not older than curiosity, which is at the basis of science.
Ethics is important when goods collide, it’s no problem deciding between something bad and something good.
Where ethics really comes is when you have two good things to decide with,
and you must decide between them because it has consequences.
When goods collide, where do we get our criteria for deciding among them?
From the usual sources, like them or not, our socialisation at home and in our schools,
that is from our parents and teachers, perhaps from our genes,
though I don’t think so as not as much as E. O. Wilson would like to have us believe.
From churches and religions, from reading, novels are especially strong moral instruments, not a tad diminished by deconstruction.
By the time science enters your moral consciousness, I'm talking to the young people here.
You are usually a pretty well defined moral human being.
So can science add to that or does it add to that?
Two of the things that I mentioned about science here,
that open system for dissemination of what one finds and this struggle between experiment and theory
and necessity to dip back into experiment, two of these depend on texts and talks and conversations
and these acts of communication inevitably confront scientists with ethical choices to be faced, to be evaded, to be negotiated.
Let me expand, publications are an important part of the system.
And with it is the potential of replication.
How reproducible scientific findings are and whether the reality of reproducibility is essential to other people believing,
that’s a matter of contention.
Could it be that the primary emotional motivation for a scientist who does not falsify a measurement is simply fear,
rather than some psycho-ethical drive to report facts honestly?
Perhaps, it may be painful for most of us, never ourselves, to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
I'm quoting T. S. Eliot from Murder in the Cathedral.
But I accept the way we are, fear is okay.
Or to put it another way, more positively, as Bronowski did, the habit of truth is formed in many ways.
Ethics is like a limb that needs exercise to function, ethics is not formed just by thinking about something in your mind,
it comes from interaction with other human beings.
The importance of publication is that it provides exposure to potential testing.
Time and time again, fraud is really unimportant in science, there is a lot of prurient interest in fraud,
with the same origins as our interest in the sexual misdeeds of our priests.
That’s why I didn’t use the word truth, because the priests of truth have a longer way to fall,
and people like sometimes to see people fall.
But fraud is unimportant for two other reasons, most of it has to do with the psychopathology of the perpetrators of fraud.
Part of that psychology is that their sense of fear, of being proven wrong, is somehow abrogated.
And the second thing is they never forge the dull things in life.
They only forge the interesting things.
And then the normal workings of the system that people are more eager to prove other people wrong
than they are to prove other people right, ensure that science progresses as it does.
It’s okay, if it’s not done for quite what you think are the best reasons.
So the system works, but what about the individual scientist, motivated by loss of reputation if proven deceptive.
Is he or she likely to become more ethical?
A cynical viewpoint is that he or she will learn to sanitise, embroider and manicure,
just enough to be able to get away with it and then to pile on the hype.
A more charitable viewpoint is that we learn that the data are not only not to be trusted, but that they are mute,
the data by themselves are nothing.
And they are inherently conservative and that a human being must interpret them,
yes, tell a story about them and that it’s okay, within a self-correcting system such as science,
to risk an imaginative ornate hypothesis which doesn’t end run around Ockham’s Razor.
Something salutary takes place in the writing of an experimental part of a paper for the person who writes it.
I have trouble in picking one of my own because I'm a theoretician but once in a while
I write a paper together with some experimentalists, so I'm responsible for it.
And here it goes, there’s a reference here,
in a 25mL reaction flask was placed 0.050g (0.094mmol) each of Cp2 *Th(12CH3)2 and Cp2 *Th(13CH3)2.
The vessel was evacuated and then 10ml of Et2O was condensed into the flask at -78.C.
The suspension was stirred at this temperature until all of the material had dissolved.
Basta.
You see a report of what was done.
Almost an iambic pentameter, without trying.
Not the average run but the best that was done to be sure.
It’s there, this experimental part of a paper, why is it there?
It’s there for historical reasons, as evidence that it was done, that it can be done with details reproducible by anyone.
Well, maybe.
But why give the evidence?
Isn’t there trust in the community?
Aren’t we all ethical, aren’t we all gentlemen?
Well, 38% of us in the United States in chemistry are gentle women.
Inciting another’s experimental or theoretical work, there is a similar wrestling match on.
To cite is an act of trust, which can be also viewed as an act of mistrust,
because if the material in a citation turns out to be wrong, you are a little bit protected if someone else did it.
This is the essential tension of which Thomas Cohan wrote between trusting and not trusting.
I think the writing of an experimental paper, of an experimental part of a paper, or reading it in someone else’s text,
not once but many times, is an ethically productive action in which both subconsciously and overtly,
the issues of trust and mistrust are negotiated by chemists - the important word here is ‘negotiated’.
The web of habitual description and of citation, subconsciously and explicitly,
forces the creator to confront another human being or a community of human beings.
It is an inherently social web built out of real and imagined interactions,
that’s where ethics comes from, from interactions, from talking to other people.
I see two other places, let’s talk about first time narratives where in an interesting way ethics,
and now I'm going to get more poetic about this, that emerges from normative science.
The first is the responsibility that’s taught to us by what I call ‘first time representations’.
Let me give you a case study, or what I remember.
I remember the day, for instance, when Fred Hawthorn, who is now at UCLA, about to leave there, in 1961,
when I was a graduate student, and I remember it to this day, came by the Lipscomb laboratory
- and Prof. Lipscomb can confirm this - came one day to Harvard, when I was a graduate student,
and told us how he had made this molecule as a potassium salt.
B12H12(2-), a molecule that has a direct beeline into our soul, it’s shaped like a platonic solid, it’s beautiful.
Nothing like it had been made before.
He described, Hawthorn did, its properties with evident and appropriate excitement.
Hawthorn knew instinctively that there was a story to be told around B12H12 (2-) and that it sufficed to tell it straight.
“Das Ding an sich” was indeed beautiful enough and it was sacred,
even as it came into his profane hands, in another day, another time.
Fred Hawthorn, who is a religious man, would have said it was given to him by the grace of God.
In 1961 he had to say it was serendipity.
The sacralisation of the chance.
There was no more question of Hawthorn making up a lie, a fib around B12H12(2-),
than of Haydn writing a dissonant section in one of his piano trios.
When you see something for a first time, you don’t know what it is,
when you describe it for the first time, language may fail you.
You grope for meaning but there is no lie.
If only we were given more such moments!
Okay, the second thing that you want to talk to you about is this ‘honesty’,
this singular object, mysteriously in the title of the presentation.
A second experience is one that is shared by scientists and poets, something is seen,
something is described, now, not for the first time.
But for the umpteenth, but one has thought and concentrated and looked and established a bond with what is being described.
Let me give you an example.
So love has fled, it hurts to remember what was good.
It has happened to others, but that thought doesn’t seem to comfort at all.
It happens when there’s somewhere in southern France, in the Luberon in Provence,
and in winter one walks out into a vineyard in the morning and it’s sad to face that beauty alone.
But then there’s a great cluster one sees on the vines and that cluster is like no other cluster.
It must be described, there is a bond between the poet and those grapes.
Here’s the poem, I apologize some of you in the back will not see it so I’ll read it.
I describe, and I am not sad for a moment.
Elsewhere there’s a molecule that I see in a journal.
I talk about it to one of my graduate students,
it has at its centre a ring which you can see with two thins and two nitrogen’s in it and they are strikingly different.
This one is a kind of strange pyramid, this one is approximately a tetrahedron.
As a great American philosopher, Yul Bryner, said “It is a puzzlement”.
Could one possibly, also could it be due to all the stuff that’s hanging around?
So you make all the stuff in the theory, you can do these things, you make them all the same,
and it still keeps this strange geometry.
You begin to think:
What if it went from one of these, like this one which is like that one, to this one, to its partner?
What kind of energy would be involved?
So Pradeep Gutta, whose name you see worked out part of the international structure of science,
an Indian graduate student, post-doc, and I calculate this and we reasoned this out.
It is our métier to figure these things out.
And we find that it goes in one way and not in another.
What science and poetry share, even though they parted company it seems centuries ago,
is an honesty to the singular determinate object.
We tend to think science is after universals, as Gunther Stent has called it – “The infinitely paraphrasable”.
E=MC2, the same in every language, the directions for an aspirin factory, in Japanese the same as those in Portuguese.
But science is not one thing, and maybe chemistry is different.
We build shaped motion and reaction on specific variably persistent groups of atom, trends matter, general theories less.
And individual molecules examined up close, most of all.
Craving understanding we circle around the object of our affections in love with particularity,
the thinness of this powder, just this shade of turquoise.
We study it and we establish a bond with it.
Here is what William Blake, who had no place for science, he didn’t like it.
He said:
“He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars”.
But I will read you a poem by Archie Ammons, or at least a part of it, it’s the second part I will read.
Does the ethical bent in the language sought, in the precision of the language,
in what comes from establishing a bond with a molecule, with a specific molecule,
or with a specific leaf here, or a specific grape cluster, does that bond make scientists and poets better human beings?
No, no more than it improves those who professionally lead the considered life, philosophers.
“The ethical impulse is strong inherently human, it can be suppressed, most alarmingly by crowds and power”,
to quote the title of a book by Elias Canetti.
And remarkably enough it can be suppressed by the flush of first creation.
That first thing that I said I'm thinking about not ordinary scientists, I'm thinking about the sanest of our profession.
And their attitudes to the hydrogen bomb, I'm thinking of Bethe and Sakharov.
And in poetry there are analogues of this.
Ethical thinking can be awakened, it needs to be a reawakened
by thinking about whether a molecule can harm by advances and reproductive technology and, not just in science,
by just what one can do, the vilest that one can do to someone by writing a historical play or in whether a poem hurts a lover.
Even a soap opera can teach ethics, we should be grateful for these little or big prods to ethical choice.
Now I'm coming to an end, just two minutes.
The first fruitful intersection of art and science, here, this is something back to our cultural roots.
I want to go back to the tree in the Garden of Eden, of our primeval narrative.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
I take the etz hadaat tov vera, as it’s called in Hebrew, as the Tree of Ethics, which is not a word in ancient Hebrew.
And it’s also the first link between science, narrative and ethics.
Let me bypass the question of why God, why a just god would put ethics out of reach.
He did.
Continuing in this respectful and slightly unrespectful reading, just not necessarily an original one.
Is not Adam and Eve’s transgression implicit in the tale?
Serpent or no serpent, without that transgression there would be no story of human kind.
We’d still be between the four rivers east of Eden.
Even before eating of the fruit of the tree and the Rabbi’s debate whether the fruit was fig or wheat or grapes,
no apple in sight, no pomegranate in sight, Eve makes a decision.
Here is what it says and I'd like you to go back.
I apologise for not putting it up in the original Hebrew, but I did find a German quotation last night here.
And Eve says, what the bible says is “When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and the delight for the eyes
and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate.”
The science in my reading of this verse, which is not the usual one, is manifold.
The science is there in the knowledge that the tree conveys, of what?
Of the wondrous mundane, of the way the tree works - that you’ve heard about in various lectures, not necessarily of the tree –
from its cells that you’ve heard about.
How they are the same and not the same as our cells, from its remarkable physiology, how it gets water to its defence mechanisms.
That tree doesn’t have an immune system exactly, it can’t run away from its predators like we do.
These are waiting, these mundane and beautiful things for you young people to discover.
But the verse speaks of other things of what is hidden and what is revealed, what will be created.
And very, very directly to me the verse speaks of experiment.
For this is what Eve hazarded, didn’t she?
There was a choice, she saw, she thought and she acted.
I would not expect anything of anyone else.
She acted on beauty, for wisdom, Kant would have approved.
Eve did what had to be done, not to end but to begin a story.
Our story, in which curious human beings have the choice every day between Good and Evil.
Thank you.
(Applause).