PARIS: A century ago, pondering what the future might bring, Anatole France said that “my dream is to read the books of schoolboys as they shall be in the year 2000.” As the millennium passes into history, perhaps we should ask if our schoolchildren are being inspired in the way Anatole France once hoped.
The 20th century saw great technical revolutions, such as television, air transport, and rocketry. At a deeper level, two conceptual revolutions also occurred. From atoms to stars, we now have a precise, operative picture of nearly all physical phenomena. The only major gap in our knowledge involves the origins of the universe. The second conceptual revolution was started by molecular biology. Here too we now have a precise, operative picture of all life processes, from bacteria to humanity. Again, the only major gap concerns origins: the notion of a "primordial soup" in the oceans in which nucleotides and peptides somehow organized themselves into living organisms is not fully convincing.
Today’s schoolbooks recount these achievements with pride. But something important for scientific advance is missing in our children’s lives. A sense of wonder about future scientific progress is lacking; a growing cultural disinterest in science is taking hold. Moreover, increasing legal roadblocks to scientific progress are stifling inventiveness everywhere.
Anatole France lived in an age of great inventors like Gustave Eiffel and Thomas Edison. He could discern the looming industrial explosion of the 20th century, when a few major companies drove technical innovation and made electricity, chemistry, transport, communications, and computers key parts of everyday life. But these same companies, which shaped much of the 20th century, are now under myopic pressure from their shareholders to abandon long-term research in favor of short-term profits. Look at the oil companies: although the world faces growing uncertainty about new sources of energy, these companies, which have both the intellectual and material means to prepare for the next century, have more or less abandoned their role as providers of a new vision.
While the spirit of waning interest in basic science, which characterizes today’s large industrial groups, dominates in Europe, a brilliant American countermeasure has been the rise of small “high tech” companies that engage in basic research and long-term reflection. As a result, America offers better conditions for scientists than Europe, and the cost of this to Europe is high. In the last five years, France alone lost some of its best computer scientists to the United States.
But not all is well in America either. Indifference – indeed, sometimes outright hostility – to scientific progress exists there as well. One institution that blunts the dynamism of Silicon Valley and the high tech companies is the legal system. We had a taste of the American courts at my small place at the Ecole de Physique et Chimie in Paris, when one of our teams invented a clever system to monitor the heartbeat of a new-born baby. A special bed sheet monitored the vital signs, without any instrument attached to the body.
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The device was of potentially great benefit to babies born in families with a history of sudden infant death. Manufacture in the US, however, was blocked because of the threat of liability. If just one child died on this sheet, no matter the cause, the company producing the sheet would likely be held liable. So the sheet was not produced, and thousands of families are forced to continue using old, painful monitoring systems.
Legal roadblocks are spreading to other countries, but they are not alone in inhibiting science. Another American invention – one increasingly exported to Europe – is the advocacy of so- called “political correctness” which views much of science as “a rape of Nature.” Often reduced to anti-scientific propaganda, these ideas are diffused from non-scientific university departments to students, high school teachers, and ultimately to young children. Everywhere you look, the excitement about scientific advance that gripped Anatole France is being replaced by ignorant fear and incipient censorship of scientific thinking.
The young are particularly vulnerable to this. In the popular mind, science is blamed for deadly weapons and environmental pollution, even if the decisions to produce weapons are political, not scientific in nature, and the main reason for pollution is the profit motive, not scientific progress. Indeed, politically correct critics forget that most progress in the fight against pollution comes from scientists, and that science created the means to monitor arms control agreements. It is no wonder, therefore, that locally trained young people in America, and to a large extent in Europe, tend to avoid university science departments, with new students largely recruited from among recent immigrants.
In the face of legal impediments, contempt, and indifference, what will science do in the 21st century? My hope is that the coming years will witness, among other things, an explosion in bio-engineering, with new forms of drug delivery, artificial organs, and so on. None of these advances will occur, however, without a change in attitude. In place of today’s indifference and sometimes outright hostility, we must create conditions that will nurture scientific research and restore the central position of science in the culture of Western societies.
Cutting down legal impediments and changing attitudes won’t happen overnight. Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who escaped death in the Nazi camps to become a writer, wrote movingly about his life as a chemist and about “the strong and bitter flavor of our trade, which is nothing more than one special case, a more bold version, of the trade of life.” If the spirit of scientific exploration and creativity is to be renewed in our time, we must create educational systems and schoolbooks informed by the spirit of Primo Levi.
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PARIS: A century ago, pondering what the future might bring, Anatole France said that “my dream is to read the books of schoolboys as they shall be in the year 2000.” As the millennium passes into history, perhaps we should ask if our schoolchildren are being inspired in the way Anatole France once hoped.
The 20th century saw great technical revolutions, such as television, air transport, and rocketry. At a deeper level, two conceptual revolutions also occurred. From atoms to stars, we now have a precise, operative picture of nearly all physical phenomena. The only major gap in our knowledge involves the origins of the universe. The second conceptual revolution was started by molecular biology. Here too we now have a precise, operative picture of all life processes, from bacteria to humanity. Again, the only major gap concerns origins: the notion of a "primordial soup" in the oceans in which nucleotides and peptides somehow organized themselves into living organisms is not fully convincing.
Today’s schoolbooks recount these achievements with pride. But something important for scientific advance is missing in our children’s lives. A sense of wonder about future scientific progress is lacking; a growing cultural disinterest in science is taking hold. Moreover, increasing legal roadblocks to scientific progress are stifling inventiveness everywhere.
Anatole France lived in an age of great inventors like Gustave Eiffel and Thomas Edison. He could discern the looming industrial explosion of the 20th century, when a few major companies drove technical innovation and made electricity, chemistry, transport, communications, and computers key parts of everyday life. But these same companies, which shaped much of the 20th century, are now under myopic pressure from their shareholders to abandon long-term research in favor of short-term profits. Look at the oil companies: although the world faces growing uncertainty about new sources of energy, these companies, which have both the intellectual and material means to prepare for the next century, have more or less abandoned their role as providers of a new vision.
While the spirit of waning interest in basic science, which characterizes today’s large industrial groups, dominates in Europe, a brilliant American countermeasure has been the rise of small “high tech” companies that engage in basic research and long-term reflection. As a result, America offers better conditions for scientists than Europe, and the cost of this to Europe is high. In the last five years, France alone lost some of its best computer scientists to the United States.
But not all is well in America either. Indifference – indeed, sometimes outright hostility – to scientific progress exists there as well. One institution that blunts the dynamism of Silicon Valley and the high tech companies is the legal system. We had a taste of the American courts at my small place at the Ecole de Physique et Chimie in Paris, when one of our teams invented a clever system to monitor the heartbeat of a new-born baby. A special bed sheet monitored the vital signs, without any instrument attached to the body.
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As the US presidential election nears, stay informed with Project Syndicate - your go-to source of expert insight and in-depth analysis of the issues, forces, and trends shaping the vote. Subscribe now and save 30% on a new Digital subscription.
Subscribe Now
The device was of potentially great benefit to babies born in families with a history of sudden infant death. Manufacture in the US, however, was blocked because of the threat of liability. If just one child died on this sheet, no matter the cause, the company producing the sheet would likely be held liable. So the sheet was not produced, and thousands of families are forced to continue using old, painful monitoring systems.
Legal roadblocks are spreading to other countries, but they are not alone in inhibiting science. Another American invention – one increasingly exported to Europe – is the advocacy of so- called “political correctness” which views much of science as “a rape of Nature.” Often reduced to anti-scientific propaganda, these ideas are diffused from non-scientific university departments to students, high school teachers, and ultimately to young children. Everywhere you look, the excitement about scientific advance that gripped Anatole France is being replaced by ignorant fear and incipient censorship of scientific thinking.
The young are particularly vulnerable to this. In the popular mind, science is blamed for deadly weapons and environmental pollution, even if the decisions to produce weapons are political, not scientific in nature, and the main reason for pollution is the profit motive, not scientific progress. Indeed, politically correct critics forget that most progress in the fight against pollution comes from scientists, and that science created the means to monitor arms control agreements. It is no wonder, therefore, that locally trained young people in America, and to a large extent in Europe, tend to avoid university science departments, with new students largely recruited from among recent immigrants.
In the face of legal impediments, contempt, and indifference, what will science do in the 21st century? My hope is that the coming years will witness, among other things, an explosion in bio-engineering, with new forms of drug delivery, artificial organs, and so on. None of these advances will occur, however, without a change in attitude. In place of today’s indifference and sometimes outright hostility, we must create conditions that will nurture scientific research and restore the central position of science in the culture of Western societies.
Cutting down legal impediments and changing attitudes won’t happen overnight. Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who escaped death in the Nazi camps to become a writer, wrote movingly about his life as a chemist and about “the strong and bitter flavor of our trade, which is nothing more than one special case, a more bold version, of the trade of life.” If the spirit of scientific exploration and creativity is to be renewed in our time, we must create educational systems and schoolbooks informed by the spirit of Primo Levi.