The Scientist Demanding Wisdom: The "Bridge to the Future" by Van Rensselaer Potter

I began as a chemist, then chose biochemistry, then the biochemistry of cancer, then the biochemistry of one kind of cancer, and am presently interested in special aspects of that biochemistry. It is only recently--the last 10 years--that I have taken the time to look around me.

--V. R. Potter, Bioethics: Bridge to the Future (1971)

In 1970s America, the temple of science and super-specialized technology, the biochemist Van Rensselaer Potter warned of the need to withdraw from the frantic pace of advances in knowledge: as knowledge goes deeper, it loses its ability to see itself as part of a wider context.The need "to look around" itself to understand the relationships between, say, a particular type of cancer and the problems of the ecosystem, becomes the symptom of a more general need, the need to understand where our knowledge comes from and where it is leading. Rather than leading us back to the ascetic surroundings of the laboratory, such considerations invite us on a longer journey, towards a consideration of the real responsibilities of knowledge, which is in itself a form of power.

Potter calls this journey "bioethics," ¹ a new discipline, whose newness is precisely that "looking around oneself" which leads to the self-observation of specialist knowledge, to the meeting--and at times the confrontation--between different knowledges, such as scientific and humanistic learning. Potter tries to build the foundations for a bridge between science and thought, perhaps the "emergency bridge" that Heidegger (1954) wrote about. If for Heidegger science "does not think" and "cannot think," Potter's text assumes that the bridge between science and thought can be built, and moreover that it must be, if we want to have a future. It may be admitted that it is, in a certain sense, an emergency bridge, since Potter's text, from beginning to end, emphasizes the urgency of the problem, but certainly not a hopeless bridge, as it appears from Heidegger's point of view, since the thought to which science is linked is not about the ontological question, but remains on this side of any ontological dimension, and struggles only with man. That bridge assumes a precise significance in our world: its construction appears today, even more than in the 1970s, to be a responsibility which we cannot ignore, and which forces us to reconsider the face both of science and of ethics.

Potter's text represents an attempt at what we could define as an extension of interrogatives: from those questions posed by specialist knowledge, to those that remain behind such knowledge and that revolve around the role of science, and to those that reexamine the relationship between ethics and science, to the point of putting into question the very face of ethics. The scientist Aldo Leopold (1949), whom Potter considered the forerunner of bioethics and to whose memory he dedicates his text, had already indicated a change of direction for ethics, a change from anthropocentrism to what we could call geocentrism--an ethic in which the earth is no longer considered as property, like the slaves of Odysseus, but in which it becomes the object of care and responsibility.

Leopold, Potter, and others challenge us to face the reality of the danger which today our planet is in: the continuous repeated theft by the new "Prometheus irresistibly unbound" of science and technology (Jonas 1979). This act of theft has put resources that seemed inexhaustible into crisis, blocking the mechanism of nature's continual recharging. Potter the oncologist argues that no real progress is possible if we do not pass from the study of cancer in man to the consideration of that cancer of the earth represented by scientific-technological man: a thought which assumes a double movement, of going from the ills of man to the ills of the earth and...