Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant physicist who reluctantly headed Adolf Hitler's atomic weapons research team, said later that the worst thing about the bomb was "the realization that it was all so unavoidable." If he had backed out, Heisenberg believed, someone else would have continued the work, and if that someone else had backed out, another would come along to take his place, and another and another and so on until doomsday. Heisenberg knew well that, aside from its own methodical pace, research has no brakes.
Today, inevitable science again threatens, and we the people are trying to stay ahead of the curve. The Bush administration will decide soon whether the federal government will fund stem-cell research, and there are parallel debates regarding genome research and genetically engineered foods. Bush also inherited the Clinton administration's struggle to muzzle development of encryption technology. The recent death of a young woman during a Johns Hopkins asthma experiment has raised the possibility of stricter federal oversight on research involving humans. And in late July, the House passed a bill banning any human cloning research, federally funded or not, anywhere in the United States.
Cloning and encryption and all the other wonders of modern science are quickly evolving beyond the ability of any one person to understand their basic principles, much less their possible consequences. So, with little to go on, we have had to decide: Do we trust that science, taken to its logical ends, will fulfill its promise of progress? Or do we put our faith in the old systems of ethics and morals that require asking not merely can we, but should we? Since the advent of the atomic bomb, we have leaned toward the latter, which means somehow controlling the pace of research. One can argue late into the night about whether a free society ought to regulate the exchange of ideas that is at the heart of the scientific method. The more practical question is whether such regulation is even possible.
We are not the first to try. At the dawn of the age of science, research was regulated by decree. In 1616, the Catholic Church outlawed Copernicus' mathematical proof that the Earth revolved around the sun. Soon after, when Galileo began publicly endorsing the Copernican view, the Pope sicced the Inquisition on him. The scientist lived out his days under house arrest, free to observe the heliocentric heavens but barred from explaining them to anyone. Science, in large part a process of communication among colleagues, was, for the moment, regulated.
Even as it was silencing Galileo, though, the Vatican's monopoly on belief was waning. Two centuries later, when Darwin proposed that people were just fancy monkeys, religious leaders and social conservatives railed, but related research proceeded. Until World War II, the Western world had little interest in regulating science. Why would it? Science meant progress, giving us everything from the telegraph to structural steel to antiseptic surgery.
And in any case, the Inquisition was gone. No subsequent entity had reached the degree of social control required to manipulate scientific progress. When Alfred Nobel foresaw Armageddon in his 1866 invention of dynamite, all he could do was establish a peace prize, knowing that no one had the power to ban explosives research.
That all changed when the Atomic Age bloomed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the scientific method's horrifying flaw - the possible becomes the necessary - was laid bare. By then, governments were powerful enough and science was dangerous enough for regulation to be a realistic option. Though some countries - including Portugal and West Germany - made freedom of research a constitutional guarantee, most of the world began restricting scientists' goals and methods, with varying degrees of effectiveness and international coordination.
The first serious attempts at research regulation in the United States had come slightly earlier, during the New Deal. In 1938, Congress gave new powers to the Food and Drug Administration - originally created to protect consumers from patent medicines - making it responsible for regulating the safety of all pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and food additives. The FDA determines the direction, pace and scale of vast amounts of research. It is a full-coverage, perfectly invasive regime, and even its supporters acknowledge it is tragically inefficient. But it works.
