Science Effecting Our Culture?

How does science affect our culture?

In this country, I feel that science has become an authority-holding machine for technological and political abuse upon the masses of increasingly less educated American people. Simultaneously, science is an art of methodical, careful observation and inquiry that lies within each and everyone of us, guiding us towards greater understanding of ourselves and our realities in the light of accurate and elegant truth.

I see science as a manic young adult, unable to center itself around a consistent set of codes and values. I feel that this may have a lot to do with the socio-economic system that we have created modern day, western science through and into; we have created a profit-driven, compete-or-die environment that encourages science without moral or ethical considerations. For example, in the case of 'pharming' genetically modified plants for the purpose of saving lives and helping poorer countries, while an apparently altruistic and well-intentioned investigation and technological solution, has serious implications with very seriously harmful effects on the future of our food supply and our own genetic material.

In the article Down on the Pharm, in the Guardian earlier this year, the science journal Nature Biotechnology offers it's observations of the trend made by scienctists with regards to genetically modified plants/foods, sayng, "It seems an industry in which the PhD is the intellectual norm is either incapable of learning a simple lesson from the past or cannot bring itself to act appropriately, despite what it has learned previously ... This position is not anti GM - we should be concerned about the presence of a potentially toxic substance in food plants. After all, is this really so different from a conventional [drugs] manufacturer packaging its pills in candy wrappers?"

This is exactly my concern, that the genetic material that was not intended for and was not tested for in human organisms or other living organisms, would inadvertently end up in places where it should not or was not expected to be. I feel that it is a struggled enough to seek out food that is not tainted with petrochemical pollution let alone food that has genetic-pollution! The risk of contamination is way too high and scientists have for too much power to be so arrogant as to equate proteins in genetically engineered food-products to that of proteins produced by own own bodies; Professor Julian Ma, the leading researcher in a genetic engineering project in south London that is attempting to engineer tobacco plants to produce a protein that is useful in making a cheaper version of an antiviral drug, displaying wonderful ignorance or arrogance or both, stating, "The advantages they [Genetically Engineered Plants] offer simply cannot be equaled by any other system. They provide the most promising opportunity open to us to supply low-cost drugs and vaccines to the developing world."

Interestingly, the article states that the same protein Ma is trying to engineer tobacco to generate, is already produced by algae. Algae is an extremely fast-growing, high-protein, high-nutrition, and water-cleaning living-food source that is very easy to grow. Here is a list of the potential uses of algae as taken from Wikipedia:

• fertilizer
• energy source
• pollution control
• nutrition
• bio-fuel - a much more viable source than any other veggie-fuel
  
• other uses, i.e. - green pigment, food stabilizer (carrageen), sewage treatment

I wonder why researchers like Ma, who are apparently so concerned with helping developing nations are not developing ways for them to produce massive amounts of algae for water-sewage treatment and nutritional resource?

I see Ma's assumption of his extremely detailed, specialized, and expensive science as extreme arrogance that is fueling ignorance of the simpler and already nature-based solutions available. Science influences our culture in many ways, often from an ivory tower. It is only when more people from all areas of society begin to engage in the scientific conversations and research that we can ensure a more coherent and integrated conversation, that balances the influence of profit and tenure-driven science.