Science and Society

...Science, says Piel, is a progressive enterprise of marvelous potentiality...

...He thus analyzes the technology of aid to underdeveloped areas, the problems of national security versus individual freedom, the exploitation of natural resources, and the rational applications of Keynesian economics...

...Science works, he maintains, "in the cause of man," and this book contains what might be called the position papers of the publishers of Scientific American in the form of essays and addresses presented during the years from 1950 to 1961...

...Its benefits can liberate man from disease, illiteracy, poverty, hard labor, and social oppression...

...Perhaps this is because these men are themselves engaged in the processes they describe...

...Piel, unlike his Nineteenth Century forerunners, is not a scientist...

...Piel usually comes up with the right answers to questions dictated by the concerns of his audience...

...He boasts that this profession also serves to help scientists communicate among themselves and to convince humanists that science, too, can serve as a moral guide to behavior...

...As popular addresses to university convocations, women's clubs, undergraduate assemblies, or committees of Congress, Piel's words do not so much instruct as they mirror the level of knowledge of his hearers and articulate their wonder and insecurity...

...While I am not demanding that one be a flower in order to understand the history of botany, I do suggest that there is a certain precision, sophistication, and hesitancy in the public utterances of a Loren Eisely, a Julian Huxley, and a C. P. Snow that is lacking in Piel's statements...

...But sins are committed in its name...

...Reviewed by Edward Lurie IN THE confident philosophy of progress of the Nineteenth Century, nature, viewed as a beneficient denmother, had only to be flattered and understood to bring her treasures pouring forth in man's service...

...If he serves an American penchant for immediate evaluations and answers to complex questions, this urge is in itself a survival from an age where science was more amenable to public understanding...

...Man stilly wants to understand, perhaps if only to recognize the forces that conspire to maim and kill him, but more hopefully to control the dynamos his intellect has fashioned...

...Government security programs that restrict individual freedom, the influence of subsidized applied research as it affects the university and its scientists, the false identification of science with technology, the emphasis upon military needs at the expense of peaceful applications of knowledge— all these and similar signposts of our age are examined and criticized in Piel's forthright and lucid style...

...Yet Piel is so well-intentioned in imparting his information and communicating his concerns, and so much a model for others of his occupation, that his work must be ranked as valuable...

...This Isaac Newton in the guise of a kindly Mary Worth needed helpers, men who knew the secrets of science and could communicate them for the instruction of others...

...Convinced that "there is a deep connection between science and the social order of self-governing democracy," Piel's essays make instructive reading because they represent, in microcosm, the enthusiasm and the pessimism of a sensitive American writing within a decade that witnessed ever greater displays of the power of science both to destroy and to liberate man...

...His is a new profession, that of a writer and publicist whose efforts at popularizing science and its consequences are undertaken so that "the . . . citizenry of our democratic society . . . be especially informed . . . about the work of science if it is to make wise judgments in public affairs...

...Gerard Piel is one such man...

...If one had to choose the best in this book, I would pick the notable description of the case of Robert Oppenheimer, the portrayal of Atomic Energy Commission security procedures, and the incisive assessment of the National Defense Education Act...

...Piel thus reflects the perplexity and the anxiety of his culture as more sputniks dot the sky, devices that do not speak English or honor John Locke...

...Now, science has not only grown more complex, but its applications— fission and fusion, megatons and strontium 90—have terrifying social consequences...

...Thomas Henry Huxley, Alexander von Humboldt, Louis Agassiz, and Benjamin Silliman were all scientists animated by this spirit...

...If the new profession of responsible science-writing is to bridge, in America, the partly Snowfilled gap between intellect and understanding, it would seem that greater rationality, more intensive treatment of complicated material, and less willingness to j u m p in where others fear to tread, are called for...

...The problem for the future, as Piel is aware, is the achievement of responsible public education in science in a world where the theories and problems that generate this requirement grow every day more intricate and thus further separated from common comprehension...