Should scientifics investigators need to be responsible for their discoveries?

mmmm
this is realy controversial!!! tell me what u think!!
i will post my opinion later!!!
david

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

This is a loaded question. It is asking whether or not someone else might use the invention to do harm or misuse it. An example is gunpowder. It was made to make fireworks by the Chinese over 3000 years ago and look what it is doing today. Do we then blame the Chinese for all the damages that gunpowder has done over the centuries? This is true with many inventions from knives to atomic bombs. Even medicines that can help many can also kill or injure a few because of allergic reactions. This is why this question is very difficult to answer but if you were to ask about a specfic invention we could answer that much easier.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Think of Alfred Nobel or the Wright Brothers. They were not thinking about wars when they were creating their inventions. The Wright Brother thought planes would be used for scouting, rendering wars pointless. The thought of bombing civilians from the air did not occur to them at the time.

Later in his life Alfred Nobel went on to try and cure his guilty conscience of creating TNTby creating the Nobel Peace Foundation.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

David_Becks: This is not so controversial. Almost any invention in the world can be used to do harm to your fellow man; often the most valuable inventions are more harmful as a result of their greater utility.

Consider motor vehicles: man's greatest killer and his most destructive brainchild. You probably knew someone who was killed by one...

Still, our present economy would go out the window if we got rid of motor vehicles, particularly the big trailer trucks that move things from one place to another.

We are owned by trucks. And they kill us all the time.

 

Indeed, not so controversial as you think. The founders of Relativity/Quantum Mechanics did not envisage these theories being used to create Atomic Weapons. Admitedly Eisntein saw the potential by the mid-1930's and acted on it. Oppenhiemer is documented to have been terrified at his creation though.

Did Watson and Cricks envisage genetic engineering and the moral maze that is? Can they be blamed for creating the mess?

Humans seem to have capacity of using a benign discovery in ways that the discover could never think of. They can't be blamed for that. You can, if you wish, blame the inventors of things like nerve gases and other lethal weapons as they set out to make them lethal.

 

"Every tool is a weapon... if you hold it right."
Ani Difranco

 

Zyklon B was originally developed as a pesticide... phosgene is a compound still used in cloth dying processes.

 

ultimatly its all gods fault (figurativly speaking, of course) for puting things on this earth that could be utilized by us to hurt eachother. you cant blame the people who use what is at there disposle to meet there own ends. if were capable of doing it we have a right to.
blame god, hes the one who gave us that right.

 

Don't forget there's plenty of atheists who wouldn't be able to get out of the argument that easily.

I'd rather blame the politicians. They are the ones that create the perfect conditions for using discoveries and inventions in a destructive way.

 

By the way, Alfred Nobel wasn't all that innocent, as he manufactured munitions.

 

For what it's worth I'd say yes, and the people who fund the work. Who else is going to be responsible? At the moment nobody is.

 

Another reason for him to cleanse his conscience.

 

All technology represents power and thus can be used to harm other people; to punish the inventor for the invention's misuse by another not only punishes them for the actions of others, but also punishes them more for inventing a more useful technology.

Why is a new thing any different from an old thing?

Why is it my fault if I stab someone with a steel knife, but a scientist's fault if I stab someone with a fusion-powered laser knife?

 

Like I said, let's blame politicians then. Without them there'd be no wars (or not as many) and not so many opportunities to use neat inventions as deadly weapons.

 

No one can make you stab people with a fusion-powered laser knife, they can only ask you to.

Unless someone invents a way of controlling you remotely with a device, then that would be different. A marvelous technology that would be...

 

I claim all responsibility for the discovery that the epithelial stem cell compartment of the continuously growing molar of the sibling vole uses the same regulatory system as the continuously growing incisor of the mouse.

BY GOD I HOPE NOBODY USES THIS DISCOVERY TO HARM SOMEONE ELSE!!! I would be devastated.

 

I somehow doubt that we discovered all that without harming any voles or mice.

 

no, I had to kill several voles from a vole colony kept at the university.

Then the caretaker decided to kill off the colony with last christmas without asking me.


Only science has kept them from being butchered as a population. Until the genocide occurred.

 

Bloody nuisance all these animals.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Spurious... I always pictured you as a vole strangler. To punish you for your perfidy I plan to use your findings on tooth growth regulation for EEEEVIL.