Redirecting the Technoscience Machine (from Fall 2011)

Many people in well-off, developed nations are afflicted with an acute myopia when it comes to their understanding of technoscience. Everyone knows, of course, that contemporary technoscientists continually produce discoveries and devices that lessen drudgery, limit suffering, and provide comfort and convenience to human lives. However, there is a pervasive failure to see science and technology as not merely contributing solutions to modern social problems but also being one of their most significant causes. Sal Restivo[1], channeling C. Wright Mills, utilizes the metaphor of the science machine. That most people tend to only see the internal mechanisms of this machine leaves them unaware of the fact that the ends to which many contemporary science machines are being directed are anything but objective and value neutral. Contemporary science too easily contributes to the making of social problems because too many people mistakenly believe it to be autonomous and self-correcting, abdicating their own share of responsibility and allowing others direct it for them. Most importantly, science machines are too often steered mainly towards developing profitable treatments of symptoms, and frequently symptoms brought on in part by contemporary technoscience itself, rather than addressing underlying causes.

The world of science is often popularly described as a marketplace for ideas. This economic metaphor conjures up an image of science seemingly guided and legitimated by some invisible hand of objectivity. Like markets, it is commonly assumed that science as an institution simply aggregates the activities of individual scientists to provide for an objectively “better” world. Unlike markets, however, scientists are assumed to be disinterested and not motivated by anything other than the desire to pursue unadulterated truth. Nonetheless, in the same way that any respectable scientist would aim to falsify an overly optimistic or unrealistic model of physical phenomena, it behooves social scientists to question such a rosy portrayal of scientific practice. Indeed, this has been the focus of the field of science and technology studies for decades.    

Like any human institution, science is rife with inequities of power and influence, and there are many socially-dependent reasons why some avenues of research flourish while others flounder. For instance, why does nanoscience garner so much research attention but “green” chemistry so little? The answer is likely not that funding providers have been thoroughly and unequivocally convinced by the weight of the available evidence; many of the over-hyped promises of nanoscience are not yet anywhere close to being fulfilled. Edward Woodhouse[2] points to a number of reasons. Pertinent to my argument is his observation of the degree of interdependence, double binds, of the chemistry discipline and industry and government with business. Clearly, there are significant barriers to shifting to a novel paradigm for defining “good” chemistry when the “needs” of the current industry shape the curriculum and the narrowness of the pedagogy inhibits the development of a more innovative chemical industry. All the while, business can shape the government’s opinion of which research will be the most profitable and productive, and the most productive research also generally happens to be whatever has the most government backing. Put simply, the trajectory of scientific research is often not directed by scientific motivations or concerns, rather it is generally biased towards maintaining the momentum of the status quo and the interests of industry.

The influence of business shapes research paradigms; focus is placed primarily on developments that can be easily marketable to private wants rather than public needs, an observation expanded upon by Woodhouse and Sarewitz[3]. Nanoscientists can promise new drug treatments and individual enhancements that will surely be expensive, although also likely beneficial, for those who can afford them. Yet, it seems that many nanomaterials will likely have toxic and/or carcinogenic effects themselves when released into the environment[4]. A world full of more benign, “green” chemicals, on the other hand, would seem to negate much of the need for some of those treatments, though only by threatening the bottom line of a pharmaceutical industry already adapted to the paradigm of symptom treatment. This illustrates the cruel joke too often played by some areas of contemporary science on the public at large. Technoscientists are busy at work to develop privately profitable treatments for the public health problems caused in part by the chemicals already developed and deployed by contemporary technoscience. It is a supply that succeeds in creating its own demand, and quite a lucrative process at that. Treating underlying causes rather than symptoms is a public good that often comes at private cost, while the current research support structure too frequently converts public tax dollars into private gain.  

It is not only in the competing paradigms of green chemistry and nanochemistry that this issue arises. Biotechnologists are genetically engineering crops to be more pest and disease resistant by tolerating or producing pesticides themselves, solving problems mostly created by moving to industrial monoculture in the first place. Yet, research into organic farming methods is poorly funded, and there are concerns that such genetic modifications and pesticide use are leading to a decline in the population of pollinating insects that are necessary for agriculture[5]. What might be the next step if biotech/agricultural research continues this dysfunctional trajectory? Genetically engineering pollinating insects to tolerate pesticides or engineering plants to not need pollinating insects at all? What unintended ecological consequences might those developments bring? The process seems to lead further and further to a point at which activities that could be relatively innocuous and straightforward, like maintaining one’s health or growing crops, are increasingly difficult without an ever expanding slew of expensive, invasive, and damaging chemicals and technologies. Goods that were once easily obtainable and cheap, though imperfect, have been transformed into specialized goods available to an ever more select few. However, the breakdown of natural processes into individual components that can each be provided by some new, specialized device or manufactured chemical obviously adds to standard economic measures of growth and progress; more holistic approaches, in comparison, are systematically devalued by such measures.

I could go on to note other examples such as how network technologies and psychiatric medicine are used to cope with the contemporary forms of isolation and alienation brought on by practices of sociality increasingly modeled after communication and transportation networks, but the underlying mechanism is the same.

If modern technoscience were to be likened to a machine; it would appear be a treadmill. As noted by Woodhouse[6], once technoscientists develop some new capacity it often becomes collectively unthinkable to forgo it. As result, the technoscience machine keeps increasing in speed, and members of technological civilization increasingly struggle to keep up. There are continually new band-aids and techno-fixes being introduced to treat the symptoms caused by previous generations of innovations, band-aids, and techno-fixes. Too little thought, energy, and research funding gets devoted to inquiring into how the dynamics of the science machine could be different: directed towards lessening the likelihood and damage of unintended consequences, removing or replacing irredeemable areas of technoscience, or addressing causes rather than merely treating symptoms.  
References
[1] Restivo, S. (1988). Modern science as a social problem. Social Problems, 35 (3), 206-225.

[2] Woodhouse, E. (2005). Nanoscience, green chemistry, and the privileged position of science. In S. Frickel, & K. Moore (Eds.), The new political sociology of science: Insitutions, networks, and power (pp. 148-181). Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.

[3] Woodhouse, E., and Sarewitz, D. (2007). Science policies for reducing societal inequities. Science and Public Policy, 34 (3), 139-150.

[4] Becker, H., Herzberg, F., Schulte, A., Kolossa-Gehring, M. (2010). The carcinogenic potential of nanomaterials, their release from products and options for regulating them. International Journal for Hygiene and Environmental Health. 214 (3), 231-238.

[5] Suryanarayanan, S., Kleinman, D.L. (2011). Disappearing bess and reluctant regulators. Perspectives in Science and Technology Online, Summer. Retrieved from http://www.issues.org/27.4/p_suryanarayanan.html

[6] Woodhouse, E. (2005). Nanoscience, green chemistry, and the privileged position of science. In S. Frickel, & K. Moore (Eds.), The new political sociology of science: Insitutions, networks, and power (pp. 148-181). Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.