![]() ![]() Many uncertainties and errors are encountered along the way, more in some fields of science than in others.īut however broad the range of activities that we call scientific, they reflect a set of shared principles that emerged relatively late in the development of civilization. Instead, the scientific method encompasses any approaches that help it to uncover truths about nature. Though the special approach that scientists have evolved for understanding the external world is often called the scientific method, we must understand that this term does not refer to a rigidly defined set of procedures, guaranteed to yield correct answers: science is not a straightforward problem-solving machine. In particular, scientists attach great value to their self-correcting system and their autonomy in governing their affairs, and legislators often find it hard to see why these earlier traditions should persist when scientists have now become so dependent on government, and when their activities increasingly affect the rest of society. One source of these misunderstandings is that scientists absorb a special set of aims, assumptions, and values in the course of their apprenticeship, and these lead to views on the nature of their discipline, and its relation to society, that laypersons often find hard to understand. ![]() Examples include not only the popularity of astrology and of fundamentalist religions but also the persistence of self-help books, as substitutes for scientific medicine, on the best-seller lists. These concerns have encouraged resentment and misunderstandings-in their more extreme manifestations an antiscience movement-and even a broader flight from rationality. There are many concerns: the future of the global environment, changes too fast for us to adapt to, too much dependence on the scientists who alone understand this arcane material, and the propensity of science to focus on its own esoteric interests instead of on our most pressing social problems, though, in fact, many of these lie outside its scope. In the past two decades the public has become increasingly ambivalent about science and technology-interested in their advances, but also disturbed by finding that they create problems as well as benefits. His love for science shines through this description of how scientists think and work, how they choose problems, seek answers, deal with ambiguity in experimental results, maintain standards, and understand issues of credit, cooperation, and competition. Here he explains the assumptions and traditions that underlie the scientific enterprise. This article is adapted from a chapter of his unfinished book on the Baltimore/Dingell case. He wanted to know how an ordinary laboratory dispute could grow into a conflagration that damaged all involved and looked for answers in cultural differences between the world of science and the world of law and politics. Unlike many other distinguished scientists who weighed in with public pronouncements on the case, Davis correctly predicted that Imanishi-Kari would be cleared of misconduct if she was given a fair hearing. ![]() A few years before his death in 1994, Davis became interested in the “Baltimore Affair,” the decade-long investigation of escalating charges of scientific misconduct against Thereza Imanishi-Kari, involving a widely publicized conflict between her collaborator and defender, Nobel laureate David Baltimore and Congressman John Dingell. He thought deeply and spoke out on issues of scientific ethics and policy. He enjoyed the process of laboratory science and the opportunity to train young scientists. His seminal works include the use of penicillin for the selection of auxotrophic mutants and his U-tube experiment to prove that bacterial conjugation required direct contact between the two bacterial strains. He made major contributions to our understanding of amino acid biosynthesis, protein synthesis, and the mode of antibiotic action. ![]() Davis, Adele Lehman Professor at the Harvard Medical School, was a pioneer and a leader in the field of microbial physiology. ![]()
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