Table Of ContentOther Titles of Interest
BERNHARD, C. G. et al.
Science, Technology and Society in the Time of Alfred Nobel
COGGIN, P. A.
Technology and Man
DANZIN, A.
Science and the Second Renaissance of Europe
ENCEL, S. & RONAYNE, J.
Science, Technology and the Public Policy
FELD, B. T.
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness:
Essays on the Problems of Science and World Affairs
GOLDSMITH, M.
Science, Technology and Global Problems:
Issues of Development. Towards a New Role for Science and Technology
GVISHIANI, J.
Science, Technology and Global Problems
RADHAKRISHNA, S.
Science, Technology and Global Problems:
Views from the Developing World
SEGERSTEDT, T.
Ethics for Science Policy
STANDKE, K. H.
Science, Technology and Society:
Needs, Challenges and Limitations
STARR & RITTERBUSH
Science, Technology and the Human Prospect
THOMAS, D. B.
Science, Technology and Global Problems:
Integration of Science and Technology with Development
UNITED NATIONS OFFICE FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Science, Technology and Global Problems
URQUIDI, V. L.
Science, Technology and Global Problems:
Science and Technology in Development Planning
Progress in Science
and Its Social Conditions
NOBEL SYMPOSIUM 58
HELD AT LIDINGÖ, SWEDEN, 15-19 AUGUST 1983
Editor
TORD GANELIUS
Published for
THE NOBEL FOUNDATION
by
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Copyright © 1986 The Nobel Foundation
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First edition 1986
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Nobel Symposium (58th : 1983 : Lidingö, Sweden)
Progress in science and its social conditions.
1. Science—Social aspects—congresses. 2. Creative
ability in science—Congresses. 3. Research—Social
aspects—Congresses. 4. Science and state—Congresses.
5. Research—Moral and religious aspects—Congresses.
6. Science and ethics—Congresses. I. Ganelius,
Tord H., 1925- II. Nobelstiftelsen. III. Title.
Q175.4.N63 1983 303.4'83 85-6255
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Nobel Symposium (58 : 1983 : Lidingö)
Progress in science and its social conditions
Nobel Symposium 58, held at Lidingö, Sweden,
15-19 August 1983.
1. Research
I. Title II. Ganelius, Tord III. Nobelstiftelsen
507'.2 Q180.A1
ISBN 0-08-031281-0
Printed in Great Britain by A. Wheaton & Co. Ltd., Exeter
Introduction
TORD GANELIUS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
The Nobel Symposium "Progress in Science and its Social Conditions" was arranged by the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences and held at Lidingö, outside Stockholm, from August 15 to August 19,
1983. It formed a continuation of, and a complement to, a previous Nobel Symposium "Ethics for
Science Policy" arranged by the Academy in 1978.
In the earlier symposium, interest was quite naturally focused on the scientist's responsibil-
ity for the all-important threats to mankind, with extensive discussions of the problems in
nuclear research and genetic engineering. With this background the organization of research
and the need for restrictions and control were reviewed.
Depending in part on the problems just mentioned, we have seen rapid changes in the universi-
ties and other research organizations all over the world, with far-reaching consequences for
research and scientific education. Thus the Academy considered it important to have a further
discussion of conditions necessary for a healthy development of science and for creative
activities in general. Attempts by outsiders to formulate rules and to impose restrictions
seem to have a tendency to result in a control that hampers innocuous research but allows
genuine abuse to slip by. The important problem is to find ways to regulate science without
destroying it.
The relativity of the notion "progress in science" indicates why the first part of the
symposium was devoted to a survey of views on this notion in different epochs and cultural
surroundings. The lectures in this part were public and held in the Academy's Beijer Hall,
where the Chairman of the Nobel Foundation and Preses of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
Professor Sune Bergström, gave the opening address. The closed sessions that followed dealt
with anti-scientism and charlatanism, elitism and mediocrity. They continued with the main
discussions of the symposium on the conditions for progress in science. The topics concerned
specialization and inter-disciplinary research, administration and organization of research,
recruitment and selection of scientists and the relations between universities and industry.
The similarity of creative work in different fields made it natural to discuss creativity in
arts and sciences in the last part of the symposium. A report of the activities at the
symposium was given in a final public session at the Academy.
Our symposium was the 58th in a series for which the Nobel Foundation receives grants from the
Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. The
other sponsors were IBM Svenska AB and the Sven and Dagmar Salén Foundation. It is my pleasant
duty as Chairman of the Symposium to thank the sponsors for having made our deliberations
possible.
It is our hope that this volume will be of value for scientists and others interested in the
subject. I thank all the participants for their contributions, and for the activity and
enthusiasm they showed during the symposium.«
»'«Unfortunately, Professor M. K. G. Menon's contribution to the Symposium was not available at
the time of going to press.
vii
viii Introduction
The organizing committee consisted of:
Professor Gunnar Eriksson, University of Uppsala,
Professor Tord Ganelius, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
Professor Lars Gyllensten, The Swedish Academy,
Professor Carl-Göran Heden, The Karolinska Institute, Stockholm,
Professor Rolf Luft, The Karolinska Hospital, Stockholm,
Professor David Magnusson, University of Stockholm,
Professor Bo G. Malmström, University of Gothenburg,
Professor Bengt Nagel, The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm,
Professor Frans Erik Wickman, University of Stockholm.
During the 5 years of preparation and the symposium week the organizing committee was assisted
by the personnel of the Secretariat of the Academy; in particular Eva Andersson, Solgerd Björn-
Rasmussen, Birgitta Lundeberg, Karin Stenback and Margareta Wiberg Roland. I thank them all.
The Seventeenth-Century Outlook
on Science
SIR PETER MEDAWAR
Clinical Research Centre, Harrow, Middlesex, England
For an intellectual - that is to say someone preoccupied by ideas and by the life of the mind,
the first 10-20 years of the seventeenth century were probably the best time ever to be alive,
for this was the age of Bacon and Comenius - the age when science began and that which repre-
sents the watershed between essentially medieval and essentially modern world outlooks. It was
an age of exhilaration and high expectations, fizzing with ideas and born aloft by scientific
ambitions. Although cognate movements were in progress in France and Italy and elsewhere in
the world I shall be speaking mainly of England because that is where the evangels of the new
philosophy lived.
It is very easy in writing of the seventeenth century or indeed of any other period, to fix
one's attention only upon those movements of thought that point to or portend the future and to
disregard all movements of thought that came to a dead end or have since been forgotten.
This would be a specially grave blunder in thinking of the seventeenth century. We must not
forget for example that the reign of King James I was also the age of the darker Shakespeare of
Hamlet, Macbeth, Timon and Lear.
But before turning to the darker thoughts that distinguish the seventeenth century let us
consider first the hopeful and ambitious element that was epitomized by the motto of the
scientific pioneers: the words Plus Ultra - the affirmation that there were no limits to the
advancement of learning - that in science there would always be more beyond. The motto arose
in the following way: the impresa or heraldic emblem of the rulers of Spain in the fifteenth
century was a representation of the pillars of Hercules flanking the Straits of Gibraltar.
According to legend Hercules who erected the pillars, inscribed on them the words Ne Plus Ultra,
No More Beyond, for the Straits of Gibraltar marked the western limits of the known world and
there was not known to be any land beyond.
But when under the patronage of Queen Isabella of Spain Columbus discovered the West Indies the
motto Ne Plus Ultra had to be amended by leaving out the negative so that by the time of
Charles I of Spain it had become Plus Ultra and this is the form in which we see it in the
choir stalls of Barcelona cathedral - and so the cry "more beyond" came to be that which
animated the pioneer scientists who later united to form the Royal Society of London. What a
great day for a scientist to be alive! - a day when it seemed that there was no limit to the
advancement of learning or to the power it would confer upon us.
But there was a much darker side to thought in the seventeenth century. The Lord was reputed
to have created the universe in six days and it was accordingly part of the Judaeo Christian
tradition that the universe would last six thousand years - of which according to Bishop
Ussher's chronology - just over four thousand had already gone by. Folk with a religious turn
of mind, who of course included scientists, many of whom were in holy orders, accordingly
realized that the end of the world was approaching fast and that those still alive might well
be witnesses of its ending. The thought crops everywhere. Shakespeare1s sweet Rosalind in 4s
You Like It, bantering with Orlando says "The poor world is almost six thousand years old",
adding that in all that time no man had ever died - as Orlando had threatened to do - of love;
3
4 Sir Peter Medawar
John Donne the poet said in a sermon that "I was borne in the last age of the world"; and in
the most famous passage of all Sir Thomas Browne (MD, Leyden) spoke of himself as one of those
"whose generations were ordained in this setting part of time" that it was vanity and folly to
build tombs and monuments to last for many years. "Time may be too short for our designs ...
the great mutations of the world are acted ... it is too late to be ambitious." All the same,
it was very many years before the concept of futurity took root - the concept that the world
still had an indeterminate future before it and need not be suspected of being about to come to
an end.
A third very important element in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century - an
important ingredient of everyone starting afresh - was the process of freeing oneself from the
doctrinal tyranny of the past, especially as it was represented by works of Aristotle as inter-
preted by the schoolmen. Francis Bacon, Henry Power, Robert Boyle and Joseph Glanvill could
hardly find words strong enough to express their concept for the doctrinal tyranny of Aristotle
for the strength of their resolution to cast him off. This was indeed a necessary condition
for further progress. For these were all men who had developed for themselves a modern concept
of the character and virtues of the empirical truth - the doctrine that whatever the virtues
might be of "poetic" truth and the concept of truth implicit in the writings of infinitely
credulous and gullible Aristotle, nothing in science could be admitted to be true except that
which was demonstrably the case - as it might be revealed by observation and experiments.
"Methinks I see now", said Henry Power "how all the old rubbish must be thrown away". The new
philosophers showed excellent judgement, for Aristotle around their necks would surely have
sunk them.
It is most important, though, that the birth and development of science should not be presented
as a straightforward success story; I spoke earlier of the seventeenth century being a water-
shed between an essentially medieval and an essentially modern world picture - and the medieval
persisted well into the seventeenth century and weaves into contemporary science. Joseph
Glanvill who believed firmly in science and in the Royal Society, believed also in witches:
Bacon was a firm believer in magic and alchemy and Professor Paulo Rossi* was not unjust when
he described Francis Bacon as "a mediaeval philosopher haunted by a modern dream".
So, in science as elsewhere the seventeenth century illustrates that the course of history is
never linear but if we look back on it and try to appraise the durability of the movements of
thought in the minds of the new philosophers of the seventeenth century, we need be in no doubt
that it was the sanguine and hopeful element in their thinking that was most completely justi-
fied and borne out for in the outcome, when measured in terms of the degree of fulfilment of
declared ambitions science may today be judged incomparably the most successful enterprise that
human beings have ever engaged upon. Today we can say with exultation or gloom according to
temperament in science that everything which is in principle possible will be done if the
intention to do it is sufficiently resolute and sufficiently long-sustained. This is science's
greatest glory and also perhaps its greatest threat.
^Francis Bacon/from Magic to Science (London 1968)
Science, Technology, Progress and
the Break-through: China as a
Case Study in Human History
JOSEPH NEEDHAM
East Asian History of Science Library, Cambridge, England
INTRODUCTION
It is surely quite clear by now that in the history of science and technology the Old World
must be thought of as a whole. Even Africa may have been within its circuit. But when this
oecumenical view is taken, a great paradox presents itself. Why did modern science, the
mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology,
take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo? This is the most obvious
question which many have asked but few have answered. Yet there is another which is of quite
equal importance. Why was it that between the second century B.C. and the sixteenth century
A.D. East Asian culture was much more efficient than the European West in applying human
knowledge of Nature to useful purposes? Only an analysis of the social and economic structures
of Eastern and Western cultures not forgetting the great role of systems of ideas, will in the
end suggest an explanation of both these things.
There seems no doubt that in early periods there was feudalism in China. It might perhaps be
described as a "Bronze Age" proto-feudalism. It covered the period, roughly speaking, from the
middle of the second millennium B.C. down to about 220 B.C., at which time the first unification
of the Empire took place. But from then onward, the use of the word "feudalism" seems more and
more difficult because whereas the earliest period bears some resemblance to European medieval
feudalism, the later periods are very different. The social system which emerged has been
called bureaucratic feudalism. In other words, the ending of the first feudalism in China did
not give rise to mercantile capitalism and industrial capitalism, but brought about instead a
bureaucratic system involving the loss of the aristocratic and hereditary principle from
Chinese society. What happened, one might almost say, was that when the individual feudal
lords of the intermediate levels ceased to exist, there remained only one great feudal lord,
namely the emperor, governing and collecting taxes through a gigantic bureaucracy.
The members of this bureaucracy did not fully form a hereditary group, and so did not consti-
tute a class in the customary sense of the word when used in relation to European societies.
It was, as it were, an estate, and it had fluidity; families rose into it and sank out of it.
It was in fact a learned élite. As is well known, at a later period entry was through the
State examinations, a system which began during the Han dynasty, in the first or second
century B.C., but did not attain its real flowering until the T*ang dynasty in the seventh
century; and then it went on until the coming of the Republic in 1911. The examinations -
again this is very generally known - were entirely based on literary and cultural subjects,
and did not include subjects which could, in any sense, be called scientific, but still, the
examinations were quite difficult; indeed, when the extreme complexity of the Chinese language
and literature is borne in mind, very difficult.
But there were also, at different times and periods and in varying degrees, ways of getting
around the examinations and entering the civil service hierarchy without passing through them.
There was the "Yin privilege", by which the sons of bureaucrats were given an easier entry than
those who came from outside.
6 Joseph Needham
But on the whole, as far as individuals were concerned, the class was fluid. Families were
rising into it and sinking out of it all through the centuries. It is also known that at some
periods, the possibilities for a man of rural peasant family were quite considerable, and it
was sometimes the custom for farmers to club together to pay for a tutor for some particularly
promising young man in order that he might enter the Imperial service; investing, as it were,
for benefits that would then accrue to his native place.
The institution of the mandarinate had the effect of creaming off the best brains of the nation
for more than two thousand years into the civil service. Merchants might acquire great wealth
yet they were never secure, they were subjected to sumptuary laws, and they could be mulcted
of their wealth by inordinate taxation and every other kind of governmental interference.
Moreover, they never achieved a mystique of their own. In every age the sole ambition of the
sons of even wealthy merchants was to get into the official bureaucracy; such was the prestige
value of the world-outlook of the scholar-gentry that every channel of advancement led through
it and every young man of whatever origin wanted to get into it. This situation prevailing,
it was evidently impossible for the mercantile classes of Chinese culture to acquire anything
like the positions of power and influence in the State which they attained during the
Renaissance in Europe. In other words, not to put too fine a point upon the matter, whoever
would explain the failure of Chinese society to develop modern science had better begin by
explaining the failure of Chinese society to develop mercantile and then industrial capitalism.
Whatever the individual pre-possessions of Western historians of science, all are necessitated
to admit that from the fifteenth century A.D. onwards a complex of changes occurred; the
Renaissance cannot be thought of without the Reformation, the Reformation cannot be thought of
without the rise of modern science, and none of them can be thought of without the rise of
capitalism, capitalist society and the decline and the disappearance of feudalism. We seem to
be in the presence of a kind of organic whole, a packet of change, the analysis of which has
hardly yet begun. In the end it will probably be found that all the schools, whether the
Weberians, or the Marxists, or the believers in intellectual factors alone, will have their
contribution to make.
The fact is that in the spontaneous autochthonous development of Chinese society no drastic
change parallel to the Renaissance and the "scientific revolution" in the West occurred at all.
I often like to sketch the Chinese evolution as represented by a relatively slowly rising curve,
noticeably running at a higher level, sometimes a much higher level, than European parallels
between, say, the second and fifteenth centuries A.D. But then after the scientific renais-
sance had begun in the West with the Galilean revolution, with what one might almost call the
discovery of the basic technique of scientific discovery itself, then the curve of science and
technology in Europe begins to rise in a violent, almost exponential, manner, overtaking the
levels of the Asian societies and bringing about the state of affairs which we have seen during
the past two or three hundred years. This violent disturbance of the balance is now beginning
to right itself.
No doubt in true historical thinking the "ifs" so attractive to popular thought are out of
place, but I would be prepared to say that if parallel social and economic changes had been
possible in Chinese society then some form of modern science would have arisen there. If so,
it would have been, I think, organic rather than mechanical from the first, and it might well
have gone a long way before receiving the great stimulus which a knowledge of Greek science
and mathematics would no doubt have provided, and turning into something like the science which
we know today. This is of course a question of the same character as "if Caesar had not
crossed the Rubicon", etc., and I only state it in this categorical form in order to convey
some idea of the general conclusions which a prolonged study of Chinese scientific and techno-
logical contributions has induced in the minds of my colleagues and myself.
There was an essential difference between the guilds in China and those in the west, just as
much indeed as there was between the city in China and the city in the West. Perhaps it can
be summed up by saying that the conception of the city-State was unknown in Chinese culture and
civilization and the cultures that derived from it. You have to set against the European
conception of the city-State the Chinese conception of a city with its walls, surrounded by
many villages from which the people come for the sake of market and trade, and with the head-
quarters of the magistrate or provincial governor appointed from the Imperial Court, responsible
to no one except his superior officials in the bureaucratic hierarchy. There would also be a
military commander (several grades lower in rank), and the two would have their offices in the
town. It would, in a sense, be a walled, fortified city "held for the Crown" by the responsible
local officials. There is nothing in Chinese history resembling the conception of a mayor or
burgomaster, alderman, councillors, masters and journeymen of guilds, or any of those civic
individuals who played such a large part in the development of city institutions in the West.
These things were quite unknown. A phrase comes to one's mind regarding the cities in the
Science, Technology, Progress and the Break-through 7
West: Stadtluft macht frei (a man can become free by entering the city and getting permission
to live and work there). That was inconceivable in Chinese society. Another germane phrase
would be bürgerliche Rechtssicherheit (legal security under the laws of the borough) - the
European merchants freely associating in their towns, and winning charters and advantages of
all kinds from the feudal society which environed them. That was all foreign to Chinese
culture and thought.
THE POWERS OF BUREAUCRATIC FEUDALISM
Next, one may ask what the long-term effects of the feudal-bureaucratic system, the mandarinate
in fact, really were? In classical Chinese society certain sciences were orthodox and others
the opposite. The institution of the calendar and its importance for a primarily agrarian
society, and also to a lesser extent the belief in State astrology, made astronomy always one
of the orthodox sciences. Mathematics was considered suitable as a pursuit for the educated
scholar, and similarly physics, up to a point, especially as they contributed to the engineer-
ing works so characteristic of the centralized bureaucracy. The need of Chinese bureaucratic
society for great works of irrigation and water-conservation (flood protection and tax-grain
transport) meant that hydraulic engineering was regarded favourably among the traditional
scholars and also that it helped in its turn to stabilize and support the form of society of
which they were an essential part. Many students believe that the origin and development of
feudal-bureaucratic society in China was at least partly dependent on the fact that from very
early times the undertaking of great hydraulic engineering works tended to cut across the
boundaries of the lands of individual feudal lords, and thus had the effect of concentrating
all power in the centralized bureaucratic imperial State. By contrast with these forms of
applied science, alchemy was distinctly unorthodox, the characteristic pursuit of disinterested
Taoists and other recluses. Medicine was in this respect rather neutral; on the one hand the
demands of traditional filial piety made it a respectable study for the scholars, while on the
other its necessary association with pharmacy connected it with the Taoist alchemists and
herbalists.
In the end I believe we shall find that the centralized feudal-bureaucratic style of social
order was in the earlier stages favourable to the growth of applied science. Take the case of
the seismograph, paralleled by the existence of rain-gauges and even snow-gauges at a remark-
ably early time, and it is highly probable that the stimulus for such inventions came from the
very reasonable desire of the centralized bureaucracy to be able to foresee coming events.
Thus, for example, if a particular region was hit by a severe earthquake, it would be advisable
to know this as soon as possible in order that help might be sent and reinforcements supplied
to the local authorities in case of popular uprising. Similarly the rain-gauges set up on the
edge of the Tibetan massif would have played a most useful part in determining the measures to
be taken for the protection of hydraulic engineering works. Moreover Chinese society in the
Middle Ages was able to mount much greater expeditions and pieces of organized scientific
field-work than was the case in any other medieval society. A good example of this would be
the meridian arc surveyed early in the eighth century A.D. under the auspices of I-Hsing and
the Astronomer-Royal, Nankung Yuen. This geodetic survey covered a line no less than 2500 km
long reaching from Indo-China to the borders of Mongolia. About the same time an expedition
was sent down to the East Indies for the purpose of surveying the constellations of the
Southern Hemisphere within 20° of the south celestial pole. It is doubtful whether any other
State in the world at that period could have engaged successfully in such activities.
From early times Chinese astronomy had benefited from State support but the semi-secrecy which
it involved was to some extent a disadvantage.
Chinese historians sometimes themselves realized this, for example in the dynastic history of
the Chin dynasty (A.D. 265-420) there is a passage which says:
Astronomical instruments have been in use from very ancient days, handed down from one
dynasty to another and closely guarded by official astronomers. Scholars therefore have
had little opportunity to examine them, and this is the reason why unorthodox cosmological
theories have been able to spread and flourish.
However, one must not push this too far.
It is quite clear that in the Sung period at any rate the study of astronomy was quite possible
and even usual in scholarly families connected with the bureaucracy. Thus we know that in his
earlier years Su Sung had model armillary spheres of small size in his home and so came
gradually to understand astronomical principles. About a century later the great philosopher
