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TOWARDS A DEMOCRATIC STRATEGY FOR SCIENCE The New Politics of Science David Dickson In the immediate postwar period, the single issue that lay heaviest on the conscience and consciousness of the scientific community was its contribution, whether explicit or implicit, to the most horrendous weapon ever conceived, developed, or used-the atomic bomb. Few challenged the escalating budget for science at the time, particularly since, coming primarily from public sources, the funds could be justified as social expenditures relatively untainted by the search for private profit. Where protest movements did spring up, as around the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, the Federation of American Scientists, and the journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, these tended to focus on the moral schizophrenia that the bomb had created within the scientific community that was projected onto broader debates about the impact of science and society.l Accepting the responsibility for creating the knowledge that had made the bomb possible, these groups tended to characterize critical political questions about science in terms of the balance between the "uses" (such as nuclear power) and the "abuses" (such as nuclear weapons) to which scientific knowledge could be put. Thus the period in which science saw rapidly increased funding, due partly to its contribution to long-term military technology, was only one in which criticism of the implications of this trend, from both within and outside the scientific community, tended to focus on ways of bringing the military uses of science under civilian control. Many of those closely involved in the Manhattan Project, for example, subsequently devoted almost equal efforts to furthering diplomatic initiatives aimed at placing controls on nuclear energy under the Atoms for Peace banner.2 In the late 1960s the focus and style of the critique shifted. The use during the Vietnam War of a wide variety of new chemical and electronic weapons, as well as scientific experts in fields that ranged from agriculture to sociology, meant that the taint of collaboration with the military was no longer restricted to nuclear scientists, but affected virtually all disciplines of science. Furthermore, growing awareness of the environmental and occupational health problems asso- TOWARDS A DEMOCRATIC STRATEGY FOR SCIENCE / 473 ciated with science-based industrial processes made it impossible to maintain a clear distinction between the military (Le., "bad") and civilian (Le., "good") applications of science. A new generation of critics, taking their lead from the civil rights and free speech movements in the United States, the student revolts in Paris and elsewhere in Europe, made sharp attacks on the political uses of scientific rationality. Groups such as Science for the People demonstrated how social and political values saturate the scientific laboratory and even, in cases such as sociobiology and the claimed links between genes and social behaviour, the ideas and theories claimed to belong to science itself.3 Despite the importance of both the analytical and political work carried out on such topics, however, the agenda of the radical science movement has frequently remained restricted to those issues which gave it its initial impetus in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The result was a critical approach that had much to say about the need for the control of the potential health hazards of recombinant DNA research or chemical carcinogens, but less about the increased private control of scientific knowledge resulting from changes in patent laws, attempts to use controls on the dissemination of scientific knowledge as an instrument of foreign policy and capitalist expansion, the use of scientific arguments to legitimize the molding of the regulation of technology into a form compatible with the political needs of the nation's industrial leaders, or several other key issues in what I have described as the new politics of science. This is the task that now lies ahead. Building on the work of the two generations of earlier critics, it is now both possible and necessary to move forward to address the key political issues that are likely to be expressed through science and science policy for the remainder of the decade, if not the century. To put it schematically, the first postwar generation of science critics demonstrated the need to develop a political debate around the applications of science; the second generation shifted focus to the other end of the spectrum, namely the conditions under which science is produced. The new task is to integrate these two perspectives into a single critique of the whole spectrum, from the most fundamental science through to its most sophisticated high...

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