The Ethicality Of Science

4 Pages 1016 Words

The Ethicality of Science by Ryan Potter

“The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants” General Omar Bradley. Our lives revolve around the makings of our thinking. The creation of tools to extend body and mind, pushing humanity to unimaginable limits, this is the nature of human science. In our attempt to further ourselves, we often have put our ethics in hind view, passing over the true benefits and hindrances of what we create. Yet, in retrospect, nations have realized that with great benefit also come equal or greater consequences. Restrictions have begun stopping ‘evils’ of science. The first look at ethics in science were seen with the after math of the second world war; we continue to see some ethical restriction with current technology and can only hope to see it in the future. At what point will our Ethics finally catch up to our technology?

The aftermath of World War 2 caused the world to turn around and examine the extent of our technology. With the introduction of the atomic bomb in the Second World War, the allies were given a weapon so powerful that no one dare provoke them. The benefit of the technology was lost when Russia was also given the matching muscle. Humanity was given the potential to annihilate itself. The World realized the defect in this and soon began dismantling the weapons of terror. Unfortunately, it is to late too turn back the decision of designing the bomb, a fact we may one day regret if the current rise of terrorism find use in atomic weapons.

Genetic Engineering has received a large amount of attention on the ethics front. It is considered a delicate line between right and wrong. The technology is advancing rapidly but still has many flaws to work out. Mapping genomes take a substantial amount of time, so knowing what an individual is altering in genetic code is usually unknown. In addition, as seen recently, genetically...