(2013) Taking a stand: Exploring the role of the scientist prior to the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, 1957 (original) (raw)

The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs: Vision, Rhetoric, Realities

BRILL eBooks, 2019

, in a moment of high drama in front of a packed audience at the Guildhall in London, Bertrand Russell read out a statement signed by eleven eminent scientists, including nine Nobel Prize winners, from different parts of the world, including Albert Einstein and Frédéric Joliot-Curie and one, Leopold Infeld, from the Eastern bloc (Poland). The scientists called for an end to the arms race and the cessation of nuclear weapons tests; their statement came in response to the development of the hydrogen bomb-a weapon that, in their view, placed the world in a new situation of "universal peril" and jeopardized the future of the human race. They emphasized too that the fallout created by ongoing nuclear weapons tests was already putting the world at grave risk of radiological poisoning. This statement, which came to be known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, appealed to "governments of the world" to seek "peaceful means" for resolving their differences and to develop "a new way of thinking." It concluded with a rallying call for scientists to "assemble in conference" to discuss the "tragic situation which confronts humanity," and to try to help avert nuclear war.1 Between 1955 and 1957 Russell, working closely with Joliot-Curie and British-based physicists Eric H.S. Burhop, Cecil F. Powell and Joseph Rotblat, sought to realize the idea for a conference.2 This took place two years later in July 1957 in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and involved twenty-two scientists, including four from the Soviet Union, and was financed by the Canadian-American businessman Cyrus S. Eaton.3 This meeting would become the inaugural Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs

Interrogating the Science and Nation Complex

Workshop titled THE NATION UNBOUND: INDIA IN THE 1940s

"If science in the 19th century was primarily epistemological, in the 20th century, it was about the social - 'While in the nineteenth century contest for cultural authority, when naturalistically inclined scientists had to show how and why their knowledge was the most reliable and powerful, in the twentieth century science was more closely involved with questions of social, economic, and material development and engineering'. Science and Technology had distinctly aligned itself with the state. Institutionalization of science was preoccupied with industry and emergent ideas of development, where the 'colonizer and the colonized together' would partake in imagining a distinct future for India, in the early decades. The swadeshi years provided impetus to ways of constructing an industrial nation, cementing science and nationalism together. Science and its institutions had to render themselves relevant to the nation. Ideological debates about science and the nation was more about ways of localizing science for production. Priorities of nationalist science and modes of institutionalization, coalesced into a set trajectory, in the 1940s, aided by a new scientific elite, which divested doing science in centralized organizational structures from the teaching of science in the universities. While this reinforced the interdependence of science and the state, redistribution of knowledge, like redistribution of resources fell outside the purview of the science and the nation complex. Alternative trajectories were discussed, but the authority of science in delivering goods for the nation was rarely questioned. The debates on the nature of science and technical education, models of institutions, nature of industrial research all assumed a single purpose of serving the nation well. Against this background, it is important to capture certain facets of dissent, which provide us with glimpses of alternative models to the dominant terms, that science and nation had come to set for themselves. Meghnad Saha and D D Kosambi, in their own ways, emerge as two distinct voices of political dissent. We will explore their concerns, in the particular context of their location in the science and the nation complex. More radical and militant critique of the science and the nation complex, however, came from the realm of the political – in challenging the nation or its rejection, as in the case of Periyar. Here, science was dislodged from the Brahmanical nationhood. It would help subvert the nation and aid in the emancipation of the oppressed, rendering itself universal, on a civilizational plane of history. "

Expert Advocacy: The Public Address of Scientists in a Post-Truth Society

2019

In this dissertation, using classical and contemporary rhetorical theory I examine the public advocacy efforts of American scientists as they respond to perceived threats by elected officials on the integrity of science and its role in policymaking. Through analyzing texts including presidential addresses by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, open letters by the Union of Concerned Scientists, Stand Up for Science rallies, and the evolution of the March for Science mission statement, I explicate the diverse ways in which scientists understand the relationship and obligation of scientists and science to society. The epistemic positionality of science and scientists manifests differently in the cases analyzed, and coincides with a wide range of rhetorical strategies built upon those differences, from economic prosperity, American exceptionalism and patriotism, and social and environmental justice framing, to war metaphors, parrhesia, eunoia, and transcendent and constitutive rhetorics. The different conceptualizations of the scientist and citizen subjectivities have shown a trend toward integration that demonstrates the emergence of what I call the scientist-citizen. As scientists increasingly reflect on their professional and social obligations in response to contemporary sociopolitical tensions, they find a rightful place not only in the lab but also in the public square.

Scientists must conquer reluctance to speak out

Nature, 2004

Sir-We read with some concern the views of M. J. Hsu and G. Agoramoorthy in Correspondence, that "Scientists and teachers should ignore politics" (Nature 431, 627; 2004). They argue that scientists help society most effectively through teaching and research, rather than by taking part in election campaigns. In the current political climate in the United States, this well-intentioned argument represents a grave threat to both science and society.

Lessons from the history of science

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 2011

raise a vital problem for the politics of science in today's liberal democracies: How to establish a reliable system of advice and communication between science and the public. The authors reveal social mechanisms that threaten to transform the communication of scientific knowledge into a question of marketing. Instead of evidence and argument, it is the success in selling scientific claims that decides their political impact. Merchants of Doubt has attracted great public attention because of its relevance to present debates about anthropogenic global warming. It is an interesting example of a trend in history of science to address problems of present political significance. The book links a set of case studies of scientific controversies in environmental politics to a narrative with moral and political implications. The cases cover roughly the second half of the 20 th century and range from DDT, Star Wars 1 and nuclear winter, through acid rain, the ozone hole, and cancer from smoking, to anthropogenic global warming. The authors describe how special political and economic interests can pervert public understanding of the issues by casting doubt on well-established scientific knowledge. In particular, they show how the profit interest of private enterprise can play on an ethos of balance in the mass media to confuse public opinion. Equal time to both parties in a conflict is an apparently sound liberal and democratic principle. But it can be practiced in a way that undermines the input of sound arguments and evidence in public discourse. The book, in fact, reveals a veritable conspiracy where a handful of prominent scientists, primarily physicists with a background in Cold War weapons' research, were recurrent actors. These scientists were politically on the right, and ''freedom'' was the catch-word that united the Cold War legacy with liberalist economic thinking and populist resentment against state