Science is powerful and makes changes to our lives everyday. I was thinking it was time science started changing more subtle things for the better. That is how it started.
It started off with a paper published in an obscure journal entitled Physical Effects and was hardly commented on. Indeed so few read it, even its author felt its only saving grace was that it meant he could add one more recent publication to his CV. And it was also one less paper required yearly by his university from their academic staff. He did no follow up research on the field and moved instead into the much more popular field of biomedical research. Of course no one, not least the author, could have guessed that a major discovery had been stumbled on that would not only rock political and scientific circles, but also change society fundamentally and irreversibly.
In his article on neuroscience he had simply pointed out that development in understanding the plasticity of adult human brains to change had been initially driven by a discovery in the 1980’s, as a result of experiments on monkeys. When amputation had been undertaken of limbs of monkeys it had been possible to show that the part of the brain, in the motor cortex, responsible for that limb soon moved on to monitor information from an adjacent site on the remaining body. This research of the 1980’s raised considerable hope. The article proposed that perhaps the understanding of a parallel plasticity of the human brain would enable recovery from serious debilitating diseases - even perhaps severing of the spinal cord. He closed his article with a dig at animal rights activists who had managed to close one of the most productive experimental centers on the Silver Spring monkeys at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He commented that the progress in this field had been seriously impacted as a result. In fact much of the experimentation on humans had been disastrous in this field as a result of incomplete testing on animals. Of course, his article had gotten things completely back to front, but it was undoubtedly the beginning. An economic magazine published an article on the woes of Enron and pointed out unethical practices that had foreshadowed the huge disaster. In a throwaway comment the writer had said that it would seem the means determined the end and not vice a versa! A clever play on words which was picked up by a researcher who had read the first article and wondered if there was a principle of sorts behind both.
He himself had been investigating the results of data obtained form German concentration camps - a highly controversial set of experiments on human inmates that drove the frontiers of science forward but left ethics completely at the starting post. He discovered that developments built on the back of this research had all ended badly. From water treatments used to torture inmates, to operations conducted on twins, it seemed that the lack of morals in obtaining the results coloured the eventual use of the science. Quoting from the earlier two papers, this researcher postulated that it would seem when progress is on the back of immoral actions, the end was invariably bad in the long term. Sometimes the mills ground slowly but the end result seemed universally contaminated. This article was greeted with utmost skepticism and it was not until the Rwanda massacres and the huge oil spills of the coast off Spain were traced back to their root causes that the tide turned. Soon everyone began to accept the, “means determines the ends” principle, as it was called.
It began to colour the actions of terrorist organizations, who, until this principle was clearly elucidated, felt that the quickest road to change was surely by violence. It seemed almost perverse that just as terrorism was reaching a crescendo in world politics, with corruption among world leaders rife, a principle so clean and pure and devastating would be discovered. For if the means coloured the ends what place had bombs and killings, for surely they became the death knell of the objectives of the organization for which they acted. There was that memorable scene in the United Nations where the PLO representative burst into tears at yet another bus bomb exploding in Israel, during a press conference, and pronounced that it was not the number of Jews killed he lamented but the damage done in the action to the aspirations of a Palestinian State. Shortly after, a leaked memorandum from the Israeli cabinet had condemned in the strongest possible terms the recent taking of innocent Palestinian lives by Israeli security forces in the West Bank, not for humanitarian reasons, but on the purely pragmatic grounds that it would negatively affect the State of Israel and cited the worrying implications of the M.D.E. (Means Determines Ends) principle. If, as it appeared, science research was coloured by the lack of ethics, then politics probably played by the same rules. So playing foul might have devastating consequences. It seemed to some as if justice had become personified in the new principle, which joined Conservation of Momentum, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in its more prosaic title, “Unethical Methodology Dominates Consequences.”
The media tried desperately to downplay and undercut the new findings, driven as they were by very suspect and highly unethical practices. As in Animal Farm they tried to rename the new principle ‘Demonstrated Unethical Methodology Dominates Consequences”. By this they sought to imply that only where unethical practices were actually discovered did the principle hold. It then seemed horribly cruel that this renaming of the principle by newspapers across the world coincided with a huge scandal in the media world. As one wit put it, this principle did not take kindly to interference, corruption, misinterpretation or vested interests. It seemed to have always been in play, like gravity, but its discovery appeared to underscore its virulent consequences in ways that made everyone wonder why it had taken so long to learn of its existence. Hypocritical attempts by some politicians to hijack the new principle foundered, as unsuccessful as the media’s attempt to re-name it.
In a strange way it was as if the rules of life had suddenly come into focus and however much the cheaters tried and the liars prefabricated, one by one they fell victim to the remorseless law. When it found its way into the education system there was hell to pay. For no sooner had young minds grasped the principle than they pointed out the unjust nature of human society - where large portions starved - as being undoubtedly a negative means which would impact negatively on everyone eventually. From economics to society to parenting, people paid attention to the necessity of protecting their acts from negative means. It took, however, two generations to actually inculcate the principle properly. But the change was dramatic and society itself was shocked by the speed. The older generations felt judged by the continual discovery of wrongs done with horrific consequences for today’s generations. The younger generation felt as if they were walking an unnatural moral tight rope from which they fell repeatedly.
It took the next generation to truly feel comfortable and reassured by the principle rather than threatened by it. However, it was leadership that was changed forever. Desire for power was recognized as a dangerous illness and noble souls who hated positions of authority were elected into leadership positions. They suffered dreadful moral dilemmas but were rewarded by the act of service they made in taking on the unwanted burden. Motives were questioned and examined in detail and often endeavours completely abandoned mid development because of some major moral flaw at their foundation. The M.D.E. principle made such sacrifices the cheaper option. Discovering and righting a wrong drew a collective sigh of relief from society and spurred on the search for a better civilization. Many commentators mentioned the strange historical parallel that just as humans evolved from monkeys, perhaps human society had evolved on the discovery of the dangers of our own inhumanity, and the first published evidence in that early paper chronicling the Silver Springs Monkey experiments had been the fulcrum.
Intriguing and profound
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