Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.
From John Charles Polanyi
Individual scientists like myself - and many more conspicuous - pointed to the dangers of radioactive fallout over Canada if we were to launch nuclear weapons to intercept incoming bombers.
Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.
Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.
It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.
Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.
In the late 1950s a major topic under discussion was whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons.
Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.
What makes the Universal Declaration an epochal document is first of all its global impetus and secondly the breadth of its claims, a commitment to a new social contract, binding on all the Governments of the world.
The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.
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