THE story of science in Nazi Germany is fraught with disagreement over the ethical conduct of those involved. Take Werner Heisenberg, who headed the atomic bomb programme. Was he a hero who knew how to build the bomb but soft-pedalled the research to deprive Hitler of this first great weapon of mass destruction? Or was he a failure who after the war saw an opportunity to appropriate moral superiority? The historical facts can take us only so far. In the final analysis we are left with the unknown and unknowable state of Heisenberg鈥檚 conscience.
The relationship between science and conscience presents similar difficulties when we analyse the actions of scientists in any era. Science, particularly pure research, is often said to be fundamentally value-free and apolitical. According to this view, scientists cannot be blamed for the way others use their discoveries.
This tendency to put science into a cocoon of responsibility-free purity was particularly strong during the interwar period in Germany, where scientists of most kinds were civil servants. After 1945, it became a significant alibi for other professionals, who claimed to have remained aloof from the regime while accepting the benefits it offered.
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Telling the story of science under the Third Reich inevitably involves exploring the culpability not only of disgusting figures like Josef Mengele, who engaged in pointless and cruel experiments on humans (hardly science), but also the thousands of scientists in wide-ranging disciplines who sustained a regime bent on violent and illegal conquest, mass slave labour and, ultimately, genocide. This brings us to an unavoidable question: how should scientists respond to pressure from forces that seek to undermine their integrity both as professionals and as human beings?
Reflecting on this while researching my new book, Hitler鈥檚 快猫短视频s, I was reminded of a comment made 50 years ago by George Orwell. Writing about journalistic and broadcasting ethics, Orwell remarked that what undermines the integrity of journalism is not so much the bad behaviour of individuals who lie or plagiarise when they know they shouldn鈥檛, but the potential for corruption implicit in the way the media is concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer proprietors.
A similar thing happens in science. The circumstances that erode the integrity of well-ordered science and that work to undermine freedom, pluralism and the serendipity of discovery are not so much the bad actions of individuals as the stranglehold of the proprietorship of science itself. This was all too obvious under Hitler, when the regime intervened to control funding and appointments on the basis of their usefulness to the aims of National Socialism. But the same tendency has been evident under our more or less democratic systems throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.
快猫短视频s are increasingly dependent on their paymasters for opportunities and appointments, and to be published. What is more, the proprietors of science 鈥� governments, health authorities, commercial interests and the military 鈥� end up owning the knowledge they acquire, through intellectual property rights and patenting. The ownership principle is the most insidious feature of the corruption of science, and has been increasingly dominating science since the end of the second world war.
We saw it during the cold war in the form of the military-industrial complex. But there was no let-up after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there has been a huge boost in the privatisation of knowledge in the 1990s, especially in biology. Following 9/11, things threaten to become worse, as science in the US comes to be measured according to whether it is for or against the security of the American homeland in the war on terrorism.
What can scientists do? The scope for action under Hitler was extremely limited, and the consequences were dangerous. During the cold war, and with the advent of Big Science, scientists felt increasingly powerless as they resigned themselves to being cogs in a very large machine. The difference today is that scientists can use websites, email and the media to organise themselves into influential groups of whistle-blowers and pressure groups.
When Joseph Rotblat resigned from the Los Alamos atom bomb team in 1944 after discovering that the Nazi bomb was a damp squib, he was forced by his military managers into silence. His colleagues did not ask why he had left. Half a century later, when Jeffrey Wigand exposed the tobacco industry鈥檚 efforts to downplay the effects of smoking on health, he could employ the full force of the media.
The silence and indifference of scientists have enabled their paymasters to undermine the integrity of science with impunity. By communicating and organising themselves, scientists must now wrest back the initiative and protect the freedom and integrity of science itself.