Crisis in Science

 

Crisis in Science: Scientists’ Responsibility for the Survival of the Human Species

By Andreas Toupadakis, PhD

While millions of people around the world are fighting increased battles with cancer in physical and emotional pain, science is still being glorified for scientific progress. It is no secret that in hundreds of thousands of lives around the world every day, there is a lot of indignation and despair because of what the wrong practice of science has done to people.

The truth is that humanity will very soon have to ask itself the following question, if it is not already too late: Can it be that by trying to improve and lengthen our lives without being in harmony with natural laws, we are not only losing our lives but also our earth?

The human race has only one or perhaps two generations to rescue itself, according to the “2003 State of the World” report by the Washington-based World Watch Institute. According to the report “…Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 370.9 parts per million, the highest level for 420,000 years and probably for 20m years. Toxic chemicals are being released in increasing quantities, and global production of hazardous waste has reached more than 300m tones a year. There is only a vague idea of what damage this does to humans and natural systems.”

The report also says, “Bird extinctions are running at some 50 times the natural rate due to habitat loss and other consequences of human activity. Each day 5,500 children die from diseases linked to polluted food, air, and water, and the global rate of ice melt has more than doubled since 1988.” And these trends have only increased since this report was first published.

Michael N. Nagler, Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley correctly states in his new book Is There No Other Way? that “Science has every right to confine its attention to the physical, i.e. the outside world. It has no right to say, when it has done so, that it has given us the whole story.”

It is almost impossible to convince the unaware citizen of the violence of science. The late Anthony Standen puts it this way:

    “Science has achieved so many things, and has been right so many times, that it is hard to believe that it can be wrong in anything, particularly for a layman, who does not have enough knowledge of the subject to be able to argue back.”

The magnitude of death that the wrong practice of science has brought on all of us is unbelievable. Silent Spring, the forty-year-old classic book in the environmental field by Rachel Carson, gave us a glimpse of the crime of science. It exposes the thoughtlessness of public institutions in spraying deadly chemicals like DDT on millions of acres of agricultural land. Also “Trade Secrets, a Moyer’s Report” on PBS revealed an unbelievable story involving many large American and European chemical industries. The following is from that report:

    “The chemical industry long kept secret vital information about the potential health effects of some of its manufacturing processes and some of its products. When challenged by citizens’ initiatives to reveal those secrets, it mounted extensive – and expensive – campaigns to defeat them.”

Whether the propellants or other ingredients in products we use today are safe or not is simply unknown. In some cases consumers cannot even find out what the ingredients are because they are considered trade secrets. The chemical industry contributes millions of dollars to help elect senators, congressmen, and presidents.

Could it be possible that science as a total has done more harm than good? People are burying their loved ones at an unbelievable rate, but they fail to understand why this is happening. What is the terrible truth? Scientists today have created powerful drugs to heal cancer, for example, but we know by the number of funerals in our communities that the success rate is not very high. They never mention to people what else they are producing at the same time they are making these drugs. They do not admit, thus they cannot explain that during the process of making the drugs, they also unavoidably produce deadly pollution. It is ironic that while human beings try to save their lives, they are further endangering their own families and even themselves by doing so. In other words, even if the sick person is healed, there is a high probability that he will again become sick from some other disease because of the pollution created while the pharmaceutical industry was making the medicine.

Science claims that research is done out of concern for humanity’s needs and pain. Is this true? The citizens never asked for most of the materials that industry has produced. It is no secret that the chemical industry is one of the most profitable industries in the world, assisting other industries like the medical industry to gain astronomical profits out of the pain of the unfortunate people. In our industrial age, many large wars are fought for oil because for the most part, oil is the starting material of the chemical industry.

It is a well kept secret in the scientific community that no one knows how the body reacts to the hundreds of thousands of new chemicals that scientists have created, which never existed before in our environment. We know that there are chemicals, whether natural or man-made, that are deadly in a very small concentration. When we take medicine into our body, do we know what happens when it combines with so many other new chemicals in our food, water and air? There is an infinite number of combinations that can occur. All these chemicals can create new compounds in our bodies, and no one can ever know their effect on our health. All these facts are never mentioned.

The truth is that herbal medicine served the native people of every culture of the earth for thousands of years for FREE. When man started to make his own medicine with profit in mind, people started to die because of new diseases. Is there no other way? Greed and fear become barriers to our imagination in finding ways to use science without hurting nature, and ourselves.

Eminent scientists have the impudence to give lectures with titles like, “Biodiversity is threatened” when at the same time their very work is what threatens biodiversity. They will not admit their contradiction.

Life on our planet is threatened with extinction, not by the work of the farmers, shepherds, or the fishermen, the house builders or the clothes makers, but by the work of those who practice science for great profits, power, and prestige. How can we protect biodiversity when at the same time we are destroying it? This question needs an answer for the sake of our loved ones who are dying every day by the millions because of the unethical practice of science and technology.

Militarism has exploited science and many times scientists are the pillars of great deceptions. Fortunately, scientists of conscience have several times exposed the scientists of deception. In his commentary titled, “Media Are Sadly Misguided in Missile-Defense Tests,” in the Aug. 26, 2001 issue of The New York Times, Thomas A. Halsted writes:

    “For years, the Pentagon and its Ballistic Missile Defense Organization have engaged in a continuing effort to delude the public and Congress into believing the United States is well on its way to developing a workable defense against ballistic missiles.”

MIT scientist-professor Ted Postol spoke about this fraud on the CBS program “60 MINUTES II” in an interview, saying:

    “When I talk fraud, I’m being careful about the use of the word. I’m not saying there are people who have made a mistake, and I disagree with them. . . . I’m saying that there are people who know that this system will not work and are trying to cover it up. That’s what I’m saying here. So I am making a serious charge; I know that.”

Many of our scientists have reached a point of great immorality and absurdity. Large multinational corporations send their scientists to different countries to talk to the native people about medicinal herbs. They take that information back to their labs and make the same or similar chemicals to the ones in these plants. Then they patent those drugs in order to gather astronomical profits by selling them to the people of the world who are in pain. They even have the audacity to buy the politicians to make laws so that the native population does not have the right to use and grow these same plants which they had been growing for thousands of years.

Furthermore, scientists have created seeds that cannot reproduce themselves, and all this in the name of profit, under the pretext of serving humanity. Not many scientists would criticize this evil because most of them depend on a corporate paycheck. Science could benefit humanity only if it were practiced for serving others, not when it is practiced in secrecy and for profit and prestige.

As Gandhi said, “Science without humanity is a blunder that leads to violence.”

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