Ethics, Invention and Discovery

Abstract

Kepler’s solution to the misery and confusion around him was to’ sink the anchor of his peaceful studies into the ground of eternity’. Should scientists and engineers be given the luxury of this kind of withdrawal from the world? Invention and discovery have transformed nature. To what extent do the agents who made these changes have to take responsibility for their creations? This question is cogently raised by novels like Frankenstein and Jurassic Park. In both cases, we have creators who are obsessed with inventing a way of bringing what was dead back to life. Dr. Frankenstein was initially obsessed with finding the secret to life; once he found it, instead of publishing it in a refereed journal, he decided to demonstrate his power by creating life. To Hammond, the entrepreneur in Jurassic Park, discoveries were incidental to the goal of cloning dinosaurs. Both were motivated by what Arnold Pacey has called ‘technological sweetness’ borrowing a phrase from Robert Oppenheimer, who “is famous for his statement that one invention used in the hydrogen bomb was ‘technically so sweet that you could not argue’ against its adoption” (Pacey, 1989, p. 81). Creating life, cloning dinosaurs—these are stupendous technological feats.