TY - JOUR
T1 - The Pumpkin or the Tiger? Michael Polanyi, Frederick Soddy, and Anticipating Emerging Technologies
AU - Guston, David
N1 - Funding Information:
two major efforts at synthetic biology in the US – the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, funded by the National Science Foundation, nor the Venter Institute, performing privately funded synthetic biology research – has created robust capacities for anticipatory governance. And while beginning to take questions of governance seriously, geoengineering advocates convened a major discussion at the Asilomar conference center in California, invoking by their very location a major episode in the history of genetic engineering best remembered as an effort in autonomy that Polanyi might have appreciated.
Funding Information:
Marshall, Daniel Sarewitz and Gregg Zachary for their assistance. In addition to support from the University of Washington Graduate Nano-ethics Symposium, work on this paper was supported by US National Science Foundation cooperative agreement #0531194 and #0937591. Any opinions, findings and conclusions are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
PY - 2012/9
Y1 - 2012/9
N2 - Imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle that works like the board game in the movie "Jumanji": When you finish, whatever the puzzle portrays becomes real. The children playing "Jumanji" learn to prepare for the reality that emerges from the next throw of the dice. But how would this work for the puzzle of scientific research? How do you prepare for unlocking the secrets of the atom, or assembling from the bottom-up nanotechnologies with unforeseen properties - especially when completion of such puzzles lies decades after the first scattered pieces are tentatively assembled? In the inaugural issue of this journal, Michael Polanyi argued that because the progress of science is unpredictable, society must only move forward with solving the puzzle until the picture completes itself. Decades earlier, Frederick Soddy argued that once the potential for danger reveals itself, one must reorient the whole of one's work to avoid it. While both scientists stake out extreme positions, Soddy's approach - together with the action taken by the like-minded Leo Szilard - provides a foundation for the anticipatory governance of emerging technologies. This paper narrates the intertwining stories of Polanyi, Soddy and Szilard, revealing how anticipation influenced governance in the case of atomic weapons and how Polanyi's claim in "The Republic of Science" of an unpredictable and hence ungovernable science is faulty on multiple levels.
AB - Imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle that works like the board game in the movie "Jumanji": When you finish, whatever the puzzle portrays becomes real. The children playing "Jumanji" learn to prepare for the reality that emerges from the next throw of the dice. But how would this work for the puzzle of scientific research? How do you prepare for unlocking the secrets of the atom, or assembling from the bottom-up nanotechnologies with unforeseen properties - especially when completion of such puzzles lies decades after the first scattered pieces are tentatively assembled? In the inaugural issue of this journal, Michael Polanyi argued that because the progress of science is unpredictable, society must only move forward with solving the puzzle until the picture completes itself. Decades earlier, Frederick Soddy argued that once the potential for danger reveals itself, one must reorient the whole of one's work to avoid it. While both scientists stake out extreme positions, Soddy's approach - together with the action taken by the like-minded Leo Szilard - provides a foundation for the anticipatory governance of emerging technologies. This paper narrates the intertwining stories of Polanyi, Soddy and Szilard, revealing how anticipation influenced governance in the case of atomic weapons and how Polanyi's claim in "The Republic of Science" of an unpredictable and hence ungovernable science is faulty on multiple levels.
KW - Anticipatory governance
KW - Atomic bomb
KW - Emerging technologies
KW - Frederick Soddy
KW - H.G. Wells
KW - Leo Szilard
KW - Michael Polanyi
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84866762107&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/s11024-012-9204-8
DO - 10.1007/s11024-012-9204-8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84866762107
SN - 0026-4695
VL - 50
SP - 363
EP - 379
JO - Minerva
JF - Minerva
IS - 3
ER -