history of science – Close Read

The importance of sensible politics to good science

Stuart Ritchie writes a newsletter-blog that I quite like, called Science Fictions. On May 30, he published a post on this blog entitled ‘Science is political – and that’s a bad thing’. I thought the post missed some important points, which I want to set out here. First, the gist of his argument:

[About the “argument from inevitability”] After a decade of discussion about the replication crisis, open science, and all the ways we could reform the way we do research, we’re more aware than ever of how biases can distort things – but also how we can improve the system. So throwing up our hands and saying “science is always political! There’s nothing we can do!” is the very last thing we want to be telling aspiring scientists, who should be using and developing all these new techniques to improve their objectivity. … [About the “activist’s argument”] If you think it’s bad that politics are being injected into science, it’s jarringly nonsensical to argue that “leaving politics out of science” is a bad thing. Isn’t the more obvious conclusion that we should endeavour to lessen the influence of politics and ideology on science across the board? If you think it’s bad when other people do it, you should think it’s bad when you do it yourself. … If we encourage scientists to bring their political ideology to the lab, do we think groupthink—a very common human problem which in at least some scientific fields seems to have stifled debate and held back progress—will get better, or worse?

There’s also a useful list of what people mean when they say “science is political”:

Ritchie writes below the list: “There’s no argument from me about any of those points. These are all absolutely true. … But these are just factual statements – and I don’t think the people who always tell you that ‘science is political’ are just idly chatting sociology-of-science for the fun of it. They want to make one of two points” – referring to the inevitability and activism argument-types.

I agree with some of his positions here, not all, but I also think it might be useful to specify an important set of differences with the way the terms “politics” and “science” are used, and in the contexts in which they’re used. The latter are particularly important.

The statement “science is political” is undeniably legitimate in India – a country defined by its inequalities. Science and technology have historically enjoyed the patronage of the Indian state (in the post-war period) and the many effects of this relationship are visible to this day. State-sanctioned S&T-related projects are often opaque (e.g. ISRO, DAE and DRDO), top-down (e.g. Challakere and INO) and presume importance (e.g. Kudankulam and most other power-generation projects).

India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru baked science into the Indian nation-project with his stress on the “scientific temper”; his setting up of institutes of higher science education and research; and the greater liberty – and protection from having to justify their priorities – he accorded the nuclear and space programmes (yoking them to the nation’s prosperity but whose work and machinations today are not publicly accessible).

But counterproductively, the Nehru government’s policies also stunted the diffusion of ‘higher’ technologies into society. Currently, this access is stratified by class, caste, location and gender: wealthy upper-caste men in cities and poor lower-caste women in villages lie at the two extremes of a spectrum that defines access to literacy and numeracy, healthcare, public transport, electricity and water, financial services, etc.

Second, asking the question “is science political?” in some country in which English is the first language is different from asking it in a Commonwealth country. Pre-Independence and for many years after, English-speakers in government were typically Brahmins hired to help run the colonial government; outside of government, access to the English language was limited, though not uncommon. Today, access to English – the language of science’s practice – is controlled through the institutions that teach and/or regularly use the language to conduct trade and research. Yet English is also the language that millions aspire to learn because it’s the gateway to better wages and working conditions, and the means by which one might navigate the bureaucracy and laws more effectively.

In these ways, a question arises of who can access the fruits of the scientific enterprise – as well as, perhaps more importantly, whether one or a few caste-class groups are cornering the skills and benefits relevant to scientific work for ends that their members deem to be worthier. When a member of an outgroup thus breaks into a so-called “top” research institute with the characteristics described above, their practice of science – including the identifies of existing scientists, and their languages, aspirations, beliefs and rituals – is inevitably going to be a political experience as well. Put another way, as access to science (knowledge, tools, skills, findings, rewards) expands, there are also going to be political tensions, questions and ultimately reorganisations, if we take ‘politics’ to mean the methods by which we govern ourselves.

In this regard, the political experience of science in India is inevitable – but that doesn’t mean it will always be: the current historical era will eventually make way for a new one (how political the practice of science will be, and its desirability, in that period is a separate question). Nor does it mean we should lower the thresholds that define the quality of science (relevant to points 2, 6 and 8 in Ritchie’s list) in our country. But it does mean that the things about science that concern a country like ours (post-colonial/imperial, agricultural, economically developing, patriarchal, majoritarian, diverse) can be very different from those that concern the UK or the US, and which in turn also highlights the sort of political questions that concern a country the most.

With this in mind, I’d also contend against junking the “argument from inevitability” simply because, in India, it risks prioritising the needs of science over those of society. A very simple (and probably relatable) example: if a lab that has been producing good research in field X one day admits an ESL student belonging of a so-called “lower” caste, it has to be able to tolerate changes in its research output and quality until this individual has settled in, both administratively and in terms of their mental health. If the lab instead expects them to work at the same pace and with the same quality as existing members, the research output will suffer. The student will of course produce “sub-par” work, relative to what has been expected of the lab, and might be ejected while the institutional causes of her reasons to “fail” will be overlooked.

By undertaking such socially minded affirmative action, research labs can surmount the concerns Ritchie flags vis-à-vis the “argument from inevitability” (i.e. by recalibrating v. compromising their expected outcomes). They can also ensure the practice of science produces benefits to society at large, beyond scientific knowledge per se – by depoliticising science itself by admitting the political overtones mediating its practice and improving access to the methods by which good science is produced. It bears repeating, thus, that where science is a reason of state and daily life in all its spheres is governed by inequalities, science needs to be political.

The paradoxical virtues of primacy in science

The question of “Who found it first?” in science is deceptively straightforward. It is largely due to the rewards reserved by those who administer science – funding the ‘right’ people working in the ‘right’ areas at the ‘right’ time to ensure the field’s progress along paths deemed desirable by the state – that primacy in science has become valuable. Otherwise, and in an ideal world (in which rewards are distributed more equitably, such that the quality of research is rewarded a certain amount that is lower than the inordinate rewards that accrue to some privileged scientists today but greater than that which scholars working on ‘neglected’ topics/ideas receive, without regard for gender, race, ethnicity or caste), discovering something first wouldn’t matter to the enterprise of science, just as it doesn’t mean anything to the object of the discovery itself.

Primacy is a virtue imposed by the structures of modern science. There is today privilege in being cited as “Subramaniam 2021” or “Srinivasan 2022” in papers, so much so that there is reason to believe many scientific papers are published only so they may cite the work of others and keep expanding this “citation circus”. The more citations there are, the likelier the corresponding scientist is to receive a promotion, a grant, etc. at their institute.

Across history, the use of such citations has also served to obscure the work of ‘other’ scientists and to attribute a particular finding to a single individual or a group. This typically manifests in one of two forms: by flattening the evolution of a complex discovery by multiple groups of people working around the world, sometimes sharing information with each other, to a single paper authored by one of these groups; or by reinforcing the association of one or some names with particular ideas in the scientific literature, thus overlooking important contributions by less well-known scientists.

The former is a complex phenomenon that is often motivated by ‘prestigious’ awards, including the Nobel Prizes, limiting themselves to a small group of laureates at a time, as well as by the meagre availability of grants for advanced research. Scientists and, especially, the institutes at which they work engage as a result in vociferous media campaigns when an important discovery is at hand, to ensure that opportunities for profit that may arise out of the finding may rest with them alone. This said, it can also be the product of lazy citations, in which scientists cite their friends or peers they like or wish to impress, or collections of papers over the appropriate individual ones, instead of conducting a more exhaustive literature review to cite everyone involved everywhere.

The second variety of improper citations is of course one that has dogged India – and one with which anyone working with or alongside science in India must be familiar. It has also been most famously illustrated by instances of women scientists who were subsequently overlooked for Nobel Prizes that were awarded to the men who worked with them, often against them. (The Nobel Prizes are false gods and we must tear them down; but for their flaws, they remain good, if also absurdly selective, markers of notable scientific work: that is, no prize has thus far been awarded to work that didn’t deserve it.) The stories of Chien-Shiung Wu, Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind.

But also consider the Indian example of Meghnad Saha’s paper about selective radiation pressure (in the field of stellar astrophysics), which predated Irving Langmuir’s paper on the same topic by three years. Saha lost out on the laurels by not being able to afford having his paper published in a more popular journal and had to settle for one with “no circulation worth mentioning” (source). An equation in this theory is today known as the Saha-Langmuir equation, but even this wouldn’t be so without the conscious effort of some scholars to highlight Saha’s work and unravel the circumstances that forced him into the shadows.

I discovered recently that comparable, yet not similar, circumstances had befallen Bibhas De, when the journal Icarus rejected a paper he had submitted twice. The first time, his paper presented his calculations predicting that the planet Uranus had rings; the second time was five years later, shortly after astronomers had found that Uranus indeed had rings. Stephen Brush and Ariel Segal wrote in their 2015 book, “Although he did succeed in getting his paper published in another journal, he rarely gets any credit for this achievement.”

In both these examples, and many others like them, scientists’ attempts to formalise their successes by having their claims detailed in the literature were mediated by scientific journals – whose editors’ descisions had nothing to do with science (costs in the former case and who-knows-what in the latter).

At the same time, because of these two issues, flattening and reinforcing, attribution for primacy is paradoxically more relevant: if used right, it can help reverse these problems, these imprints of colonialism and imperialism in the scientific literature. ‘Right’ here means, to me at least, that everyone is credited or none at all, as an honest reflection of the fact that good science has never been vouchsafed to the Americans or the Europeans. But then this requires more problems to be solved, such as, say, replacing profit-based scientific publishing (and the consequent valorisation of sensational results) with a ‘global scientific record’ managed by the world’s governments through an international treaty.

Axiomatically, perhaps the biggest problem with primacy today is its entrenchment. I’m certain humanities and social science scholars have debated this thoroughly – the choice for the oppressed and the marginalised between beating their oppressors at their own game or transcending the game itself. Obviously the latter seems more englightened, but it is also more labour-intensive, labour that can’t be asked freely of them – our scientists and students who are already fighting to find or keep their places in the community of their peers. Then again, beating them at their own game may not be so easy either.

I was prompted to write this post, in fact, after I stumbled on four seemingly innocuous words in a Wikipedia article about stellarators. (I wrote about these nuclear-fusion devices yesterday in the context of a study about solving an overheating problem.) The article reads that when a solenoid – a coiled wire – is bent around to form a loop, the inner perimeter of the loop has a higher density of wire than the outer perimeter. Surely this is obvious, yet the Wikpedia article phrases it thus (emphasis added):

But, as Fermi pointed out, when the solenoid is bent into a ring, the electrical windings would be closer together on the inside than the outside.

Why does a common-sensical claim, which should strike anyone who can visualise or even see a solenoid made into a loop, be attributed to the celebrated Italian physicist Enrico Fermi? The rest of the paragraph to which this sentence belongs goes on to describe how this winding density affects nuclear fusion reactors; it is an arguably straightforward effect, far removed from the singularity and the sophistication of other claims whose origins continue to be mis- or dis-attributed. Wikipedia articles are also not scientific papers. But taken together, the attribution to Fermi contains the footprints of the fact that he, as part of the Knabenphysik of quantum mechanics, worked on many areas of physics, allowing him to attach his name to a variety of concepts at a time when studies on the same topics were only just catching on in other parts of the world – a body of work enabled, as is usual, by war, conquest and the quest for hegemony.

Maybe fighting over primacy is the tax we must pay today for allowing this to happen.

On anticipation and the history of science

In mid-2012, shortly after physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe had announced the discovery of a particle that looked a lot like the Higgs boson, there was some clamour in India over news reports not paying enough attention or homage to the work of Satyendra Nath Bose. Bose and Albert Einstein together developed Bose-Einstein statistics, a framework of rules and principles that describe how fundamental particles called bosons behave. (Paul A.M. Dirac named these particles in Bose’s honour.) The director-general of CERN, the institute that hosts the LHC, had visited India shortly after the announcement and said in a speech in Kolkata that in honour of Bose, he and other physicists had decided to capitalise the ‘b’ in ‘boson’.

It was a petty victory of a petty demand, but few realised that it was also misguided. Bose made the first known (or at least published) attempts to understand the particles that would come to be called bosons – but neither he nor Einstein anticipated the existence of the Higgs boson. There have also been some arguments (justified, I think) that Bose wasn’t awarded a Nobel Prize for his ideas because he didn’t make testable predictions; Einstein received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1915 for anticipating the photoelectric effect. The point is that it was unreasonable to expect Bose’s work to be highlighted, much less attributed, as some had demanded at the time, every time we find a new boson particle.

What such demands only did was to signal an expectation that the reflection of every important contribution by an Indian scientist ought to be found in every major discovery or invention. Such calls detrimentally affect the public perception of science because they are essentially contextless.

Let’s imagine that discovery of the Higgs boson was the result of series of successes, depicted thus:

O—o—o—o—o—O—O—o—o—O—o—o—o—O

An ‘O’ shows a major success and an ‘o’ shows a minor success, where major/minor could mean the relative significance within particle physics communities, the extent to which physicists anticipated it or simply the amount of journal/media coverage it received. In this sequence, Bose’s paper on a certain class of subatomic particles could be the first ‘O’ and the discovery of the Higgs boson the last ‘O’. And looking at this sequence, one could say Bose’s work led to a lot of the work that came after and ultimately led to the Higgs boson. However, doing that would diminish the amount of study, creativity and persistence that went into each subsequent finding – and would also ignore the fact that we have identified only one branch of endeavour, leading from Bose’s work to the Higgs boson, whereas in reality there are hundreds of branches crisscrossing each other at every o, big or small – and then there are countless epiphanies, ideas and flashes, each one less the product of following the scientific method and more of a mysterious combination of science and intuition.

By reducing the opportunity to celebrate Bose’s work by pointing to just the Higgs boson point on the branch, we lose the opportunities to know and celebrate the importance of Bose’s work for all the points in between, but especially the points that we still haven’t taken the trouble to understand.

Recently, a couple people forwarded to me a video on WhatsApp of an Indian-American electrical engineer named Nisar Ahmed. I learnt when in college (studying engineering) that Nisar Ahmed was the co-inventor, along with K. Ramamohan Rao, of the direct cosine transform, a technique to transmit a given amount of information using fewer bits than those contained in the information itself. The video introduced Ahmed’s work as the basis for our being able to take video-conferencing for granted; direct cosine transform allows audiovisual data to be compressed by two, maybe three orders of magnitude, making its transmission across the internet much less resource-intensive than if it had to be transmitted without compression.

However, the video did little to address the immediate aftermath of Ahmed’s and Rao’s paper, the other work by other scientists that built on it, as well as its use in other settings, and rested on the drawing just one connection between two fairly unrelated events (direct cosine transform and their derivatives, many of them created in the same decade, heralded signal compression, but they didn’t particularly anticipate different forms of communication).

This flattening of the history of science, and technology as the case may be, may be entertaining but it offers no insights into the processes at work behind these inventions, and certainly doesn’t admit any other achivements before each development. In the video, Ahmed reads out tweets by people reacting to his work as depicted on the show This Is Us. One of them says that it’s because of him, and because of This Is Us, that people are now able to exchange photos and videos of each other around the world, without worrying about distance. But… no; Ahmed himself says in the video, “I couldn’t predict how fast the technology would move” (based on his work).

Put it simply, I find such forms of communication – and thereunto the way we are prompted to think about science – objectionable because they are content with ‘what’, and aren’t interested in ‘when’, ‘why’ or ‘how’. And simply enumerating the ‘what’ is practically non-scientific, more so when they’re a few particularly sensational whats over others that encourage us to ignore the inconvenient details. Other similar recent examples were G.N. Ramachandran, whose work on protein structure, especially Ramachandran plots, have been connected to pharmaceutical companies’ quest for new drugs and vaccines, and Har Gobind Khorana, whose work on synthesising RNA has been connected to mRNA vaccines.

Trump, science denial and violence

For a few days last week, before the mail-in votes had been counted in the US, the contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump seemed set for a nail-biting finish. In this time a lot of people expressed disappointment on Twitter that nearly half of all Americans who had voted (Trump’s share of the popular vote was 48% on November 5) had done so for anti-science and science denialism.

Quite a few commentators also went on to say that “denying science is not just another political view”, implying that Trump, who has repeatedly endorsed such denialism, isn’t being a part of the political right as much as stupid and irresponsible.

This is a reasonable deduction but I think it’s also a bit more complicated. To my mind, a belief that “denying science is not just another political view” could be unfair if it keeps us from addressing the violence perpetrated by some supporters of science, and the state in the name of science.

Almost nowhere does science live in a vacuum, churning out silver bullets to society’s various ills; and in the course of its relationship with the state, it is sometimes a source of distress as well. For example, when the scientific establishment adopts non-democratic tactics to set up R&D facilities, like in Challakere, Kudankulam and Theni (INO); when unscrupulous hospitals fleece patients by exploiting their medical illiteracy; and when ineffective communication and engagement in ‘peace time’ leads to impressions during ‘wartime’ that science serves only a particular group of people, or that ‘science knows best’. These are just a few examples.

Of course, belief in pseudo-Ayurvedic treatments and astrological predictions arise due to a complicated interplay of factors, including an uncritical engagement with the status quo and the tendency to sustain caste hierarchies. We must also ask who is being empowered and why, since Ayurveda and astrology also perpetrate violences of their own.

But in this mess, it’s important to remember that science can be political as well and that choosing science can be a political act, and that by extension opposing or denying science can be a political view as well – particularly if there is also an impression that science is something that the state uses to legitimise itself (as with poorly crafted disease transmission models), often by trampling over the rights of the weak.

This is ultimately important because erasing the political context in which science denialism persists could also blind us to the violence being perpetrated by the support for science and scientism, and its political context.

When I sent a draft of the post so far to a friend for feedback, he replied that “the sympathetic view of science denialism” that I take leads to a situation where “one both can and can’t reject science denialism as a viable political position.” That’s correct.

“Well, which one is it?”

Honestly, I don’t know, but I’m not in search of an answer either. I simply think non-scientific ideas and organisations are accused of perpetrating violence more often than scientific ones are, so it’s important to interrogate the latter as well lest we continue to believe that simply and uncritically rooting for science is sufficient and good.

The real story of ‘The Old Guard’

Spoiler alert: Don’t read this post if you intend to watch The Old Guard but haven’t done so yet.

The Old Guard, an action film starring Charlize Theron among others, released on Netflix on July 10. In a scene in the film, Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) delivers two undying men to the CEO of a pharmaceutical company (Harry Melling) only to watch the CEO, demanding that their proof of immortality be “indisputable”, stab them to death and then watch their wounds heal. After he’s had his fill, the CEO orders the men to be taken away to a lab for ‘tests’. Before he leaves the room, Copley walks up to the CEO and attempts to remind him that “this” – referring to their arrangement, pursuant to the CEO’s stated intention to mine the immortals’ genetic material for life-saving drugs – “is about science, not profits or sadism”.

The Old Guard has received good reviews, as you might know if you’ve already watched it, but perhaps the film’s entire story could have been non-existent were it not for Copley’s naïve beliefs, no?

At another point in the film, Copley talks about entering into his deal with Merrick, the CEO, because Copley’s wife’s death of ALS taught him that genetic gifts that could alleviate “needless suffering” should be shared with humanity, not hoarded by a few. A noble sentiment – and I almost fell for it until being jolted back by another character, who reminds Copley that the gift wasn’t his to give. In The Old Guard, it’s four white people who have been forced to give, but the argument is strengthened by the fact that it’s an apt metaphor for the real world, in which it’s often the people of the developing world, and in that world the most marginalised, doing the ‘giving’.

In effect, the film’s story is about Copley’s mistake and Copley fixing that mistake – except the mistake doesn’t seem defensible to me as much as it must have been born out of a long-standing ignorance of a bunch of issues, from self-determination to science’s need to be guided by politics. When Copley tells Merrick that “this is about science, not profits”, I laughed out loud, and my scalding hot tea poured out through my nose when he added “or sadism”. What kind of person arranges to violently capture four people who really don’t wish to be caught, puts them in chains, and brings them to a pharma company believing it’s neither for “profits” nor “sadism”?

Even more broadly, when has science ever not been for sadism or profits? Vast swathes of modern science as we know it – since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the entry into consciousness in those moments of the science-military nexus, exemplified by the apoliticism of Enrico Fermi that, in the final analysis, had deeply political ramifications – have been for profits and power, if not directly sadism.

Modern medicine is not at all free of pain either. Even within the limited view of physical violence, drug trial protocols require a set of preclinical trials to be conducted in ‘animal models’, and many researchers who work with animals also grapple with mental health issues, for example in the form of compassion fatigue. Only in this decade or so have we begun to grow organs in the lab or virtual environments in computers to simulate the actions of different drugs, and even these solutions are eons away from entering regular practice. And then there’s the brutal history of medical and psychological experimentation that, at various points in time, overlapped disturbingly neatly with the day’s most significant human rights abuses.

If we considered violence of other forms as well – including but not limited to rationalists who wield ‘science’ to delegitimise non-scientific ways to organise and make sense of the world and to terrorise the followers of other traditions; to the West, which, “rather than improve conditions of work where necessary, or make a provision for proper career structures where they are lacking so as to attract local graduates, … has found it simpler and less expensive to import foreign doctors to work under conditions which locally trained doctors would not accept” (source); to even imperialist trade agreements that suppress local enterprise in favour of foreign imports – neither medicine nor the institutions responsible for its development are at all free of violence.

This said, I’m not railing against Copley here as much as his writers, Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández. Even considered in toto, The Old Guard affords Copley the resolution of his moral crisis by facilitating the rescue of the ‘caged’ immortals – but in so doing legitimises the separation of scientific practice from cruelty and abuse. But as history has revealed on multiple occasions, science as so many of us would like it to be is so frequently not what it actually is. As a human enterprise, it’s dirty, fraught and contested. Most of all – likely to the chagrin of those who still believe there can be a functional line between science and politics that wouldn’t be to science’s detriment – it is negotiated. And the more we persist in our efforts to install the scientific enterprise on a pedestal, as being even if only in idea to be untainted by social and cultural considerations, the more we diminish its influence on society, the more we overlook its use unto oppressive ends and thus the more we empower those who do so.

Instead, what Copley should really have done after being contacted is deduce preemptively that Merrick is cruel and therefore Merrick’s practice of science is bound to be cruel, sign the contract (to keep the deal from going to someone else) and then stealthily undermine Merrick’s plans while also protecting the immortals. Then, once Merrick has been killed off (in order to make it a good action film), the immortals volunteer to have their genomes sequenced and the corresponding results uploaded onto a preprint server, and then recall all their time on this good Earth to write anecdotally well-supplied books about the real history of science.

A great discussion on the history of India’s tech.

On February 27, the Bangalore International Centre and Carnegie India hosted a panel discussion around Midnight Machines, the new book by Arun Mohan Sukumar that traces the interplay of technology and politics in independent India (read The Wire Science‘s review here). The panelists were Arun (my friend and former colleague at The Hindu), space entrepreneur Susmita Mohanty, Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Gowda, historian of science Jahnavi Phalkey, and Anu Singh of Carnegie India.

The whole discussion was about 90 minutes long, and picked up steam after the first 15 minutes or so. If you’re at all interested in the history of science and technology in India, I recommend you watch the whole thing on YouTube. If not, I’d like to draw your attention to two a few interesting (to me) passages of discussion and which I’ve also transcribed below. The parts where Arun and Phalkey directly debated each other, Arun emerged with only minor bruises, which I shouldn’t have to tell you is a considerable feat and may not have been the case in a full-on, two-person debate!

Jahnavi Phalkey, 32:00 – The political ambition of a state is now technological ambition. That’s why the technological story of the latter half of the 20th century is a political one, and is therefore also political in India. The other aspect of this is centralisation. While we in India have argued that the Indian state centralised research funding through the CSIR, DAE, the space programme, etc. with all money going into a few facilities, look at Europe. The European answer was CERN, with countries coming together to build facilities. Apart from the UN, there was no economy then that could conduct scientific research at the scale the tone for which was set during the Second World War.

Therefore, the centralisation solution adopted (also) in India was no different from what was happening globally. So what was happening in India was not anomalous. It’s a part of the larger story. To add a footnote to the Nehru story: Nehru spoke science, he said “scientific temper”, but look at the institutions he established: the IITs (when it was 60 years before India setup the IISERs) and the CSIR (he didn’t go for the Max Planck Institutes model, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes model or the Harnack principle but focused on industrial research); the IISc came 50 years before independence. So the accusation that Nehru spoke science, did science but didn’t do technology is not held out.

[At one point, Arun also talks about how India needed a Nehru to navigate the Non-Aligned Movement to still secure favours form different governments without upsetting the precarious balance of powers (so to speak) to help set up some of India’s preeminent IITs. I skimmed through the video twice but couldn’t find the exact timestamp.]

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 43:50 – A CSIR scientist said the failure of the solar cooker project basically ensured that all the scientists [who worked on it] retreated into the comfort of their labs and put them off “applied science”.

Here’s a project commenced almost immediately after independence meant to create technology by Indians for Indians, and after it failed for various reasons, the political spotlight that had been put on the project was counterproductive. Nehru himself investing this kind of capital exposed him and the scientific establishment to criticism that they were perhaps not used to. These were venerated men in their respective fields and they were perhaps unused to being accountable in this visceral way. India offered a prototype of the solar cooker to Egypt and, I believe, Rhodesia or South Africa, and the joke goes that the order was never repeated. D.D. Kosambi says in an opinion piece at the time that the only person who made any profit out of the solar cooker affair is the contractor who sold it for scraps.

This is the kind of criticism confronted by the scientific establishment and it is a consequence of politics. I agree with Prof Phalkey when she says it was a consequence of the political establishment not insulating the scientific establishment from the sort of criticism which may or may not informed but you know how the press is. That led to a gradual breaking of ranks between the CSIR and the political vision for India where you’d have these mass technologies that [Phalkey] mentioned, and you can see the best evidence for that is Nehru’s pursuit of massive industrialisation in the second Five Year Plan, from 1956 to 1961.

This isn’t to say that Nehru was surrounded by advisers who all believed in the same thing; there was of course [P.C.] Mahalanobis who believed in a more aggressive form of industrialisation. But at various points of time one constituency was trumping another, within even the establishment. But it needs to be said that the PM was not in favour of introducing tractors in agriculture… Again, this is all criticism with the wisdom of hindsight.

Jahnavi Phalkey, 53:16 – In the 1970s, look at the number of democratic regimes that fell due to hot wars fought during the Cold War in the rest of the world. You’ll start to see why the need for control was felt.

Arun Mohan Sukumar [following after Rajeev Gowda’s comments], 55:05 – Another dimension is the presence of universities in the US, which incubated the military-industrial complex. Harvard and MIT in Boston and Stanford in the Silicon Valley were the nuclei for research. In India, some of these are truly unfortunate circumstances that the government has no control over. When the first batch of graduates passed out of IIT Kanpur in 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Immigration and Naturalisation Act giving Indians, and people of other nationalities, an automatic path to citizenship. So the best minds of our country were prompted by the fact that there aren’t enough jobs or enough well-paying jobs in India [to enter] a feeder line created between India and the US, from which it is very difficult to come back. Those circumstances too must be acknowledged.

Susmita Mohanty, 56:20 – Even brain drain is hugely exaggerated. I’ve lived in four different countries. The talent pool we have in India today is as big or bigger. There are people leaving the country but not everyone is the best coder in town.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 57:24 – The appropriate technology movement that started in the late 1960s and early 1970s was this philosophy that grew out of Western Europe and the US which called for lesser consumption of natural resources and labour-intensive jobs with a view to conserving resources for the planet, a lot of which was precipitated by a report called ‘Limits to Growth’, which essentially predicted this catastrophe that would befall humanity by 2000.

And then economist [E.F.] Schumacher writes this book called ‘Small is Beautiful’ [in 1973] and creates a revolution incidentally not just in advanced societies but also in developing countries, where leaders like Indira Gandhi coopted the movement to say to the people that you should consume less, conserve your natural resources and deploy labour-intensive technologies that will essentially be beneficial to you and your way of life. Seminar after seminar was organised by top institutes of the time to talk about how you can create fuel out of biogas, how you can mechanise bullock carts – technologies that are not scalable but nevertheless are quick-fixes, and this is where ‘jugaad’ has its historical origin: in the valorisation of frugal innovation.

[Phalkey shakes her head in disagreement.]

This would’ve been acceptable had it not been for the fact that investments in the space and nuclear programmes continued unabated. … So on the one hand the state was promoting big science and it wasn’t as if they had an ideological or political compulsion against Big Machine and big technologies. There was just factors such as financial considerations and the government’s own inability to develop technology at home which, I argue, led Indira Gandhi to co-opt the appropriate technology movement. … In India, perhaps it’s harsh to say that we moved backwards, but the objective was not to redefine technology but to shun it altogether. [Phalkey is quite in disagreement at this point.] That unfortunately is I feel a byproduct of the legacy of the 1970s.

Jahnavi Phalkey, 1:01:14 – I have to disagree because there’s been only one science plan in the country in its history, and that was done in the 1970s under Mrs Gandhi’s regime. Eighteen-hundred people from user ministries, the Planning Commission, scientific institutions and industry sat together over 18-24 months and came up with a comprehensive plan as to how to take research happening in the institutions and in the CSIR through Planning Commission allocation of money to the user ministries. We haven’t seen anything on this scale before or since.

Problem was as soon as Mrs Gandhi implemented the plan, she also implemented the Emergency. When the Emergency was pulled back, the Morarji Desai regime decided that India did not need [the science plan]. So the argument you’re making [addressing Arun] of scaling back on technology or technology as a solution to the social, political and other problems that India had was more due to the Janata regime and not Mrs Gandhi’s. One needs to make this small distinction because this was simply not true at the time.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 1:06:09 – What was remarkable to me while writing this book was this factoid that comes from this book on the history of computing in India by C.R. Subramanian: he says the import of computers to India tripled during the years of the Emergency. For my life, I can’t imagine why! But it goes to show that despite the anti-automation protests of the 1970s and 1970s, and remember that 1978 is the year when IBM quit India for whatever reasons, there was beginning to be this gradual embrace of technology and which really takes off from the 1980s. And from the moment of liberalisation in 1991, it’s a different story altogether.

Some of these legacies continue to haunt us, whether it is popular protests against nuclear plants, which really came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, not just in India but also in other parts of the world. Some of that really bore on India as well, and I believe continued into the debate on genetically modified crops. If you ask a person who really has a strong opinion on these subjects, I wonder whether he or she would have a clear idea of what the technology is. But they evoke such strong views, and perhaps some of it is due to the constant politicisation of the virtues and vices of the technology.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 1:09:04 – One of the reasons why the Indian opposition to the Human Genome Project was so pronounced in the early 1990s, when the hand of invitation was extended to the Indian government, was because the Vaccine Action programme signed by Rajiv Gandhi and Ronald Reagan just a few years ago ran into a great deal of controversy within and without government; defence ministry officials said here is an effort to take DNA materials from Indians to be turned against India as an agent of biological warfare, and all sorts of rubbish.

[How history repeats itself!]

Adding to this, some private institutes in the US were involved in smuggling anti-rabies vaccines into developing countries. All of this spooked the scientific establishment and which, the book argues, led to us staying away from the Human Genome Project.

… And we missed the bus. Today we say we are able to map the genome of some man from Jharkhand at a fraction of the cost – it is at a fraction of the cost because most of the work has already been done. There is some historical legacy there that unfortunately continues to haunt us.

[Susmita Mohanty mentions ISRO’s famous reluctance to share information about components of its civilian space programme.]

Jahnavi Phalkey, 1:12:26 – There’s also a little bit of politics to it. The information that NASA and ESA share is backed by a very, very, very strong politics of sharing. What can and cannot be shared are clearly divided.

Jahnavi Phalkey, 1:13:57 – If you begin with Robert Clive, we have a history of about 300 years of building suspicion. And to dismantle that kind of suspicion is going to take lots of work. I’m not saying to not have participated in the Human Genome Project but that it’s not a good thing to share or that we embark on certain projects. I think we might be erring on the side of caution.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 1:17:58 – There are different kinds of technocracies, and the three people surveyed in the book [who represented those kinds] are M. Visvesvaraya, Vikram Sarabhai and Nandan Nilekani. They forged three different organisational structures within government (of course Visvesvaraya did so before independence), and they had different views of technology. I wouldn’t say there were all political animals but they certainly had a good appreciation of politics which was crucial to their success.

For example, Visvesvaraya was a very astute navigator of colonial-era politics but then resigned as the diwan of Mysore over what he perceived as anti-Brahmin protests in the Madras presidency and the threat of that spilling over into Mysore. Finally, after independence, his views were totally marginalised by the establishment of the time.

Sarabhai was in currency throughout but also in many respects was able to tell the leadership what it wanted to hear and at the same time insulate his own team from politics to the extent that ISRO today has a separate recruitment process. Some degree of autonomy was built-in.

Nilekani’s work on Aadhaar goes the exact opposite way: he is very clear that he does not want scientists or technologists running the programme beyond the infancy… He was very sure at the beginning that an IAS officer should be running UIDAI. We can debate the merits of the decision but the fact is, in his view and the view of the team, the technocracy could only survive if it was built from within government. Whereas when Sarabhai died, Satish Dhawan was brought from Caltech to run ISRO. It was very clear for the folks behind Aadhaar that that model would not have survived.

fin.

Featured image: The panelists (L-R): Arun Mohan Sukumar, Susmita Mohanty, Rajeev Gowda, Jahnavi Phalkey and Anu Singh.

Retrospective: The Wire Science in 2019

At the start of 2019, The Wire Science decided to focus more on issues of science and society, and this is reflected in the year-end list of our best stories (in terms of traffic and engagement; listed below). Most of our hits don’t belong to this genre, but quite a few do – enough for us to believe that these issues aren’t as esoteric as they appear to be in day-to-day conversations.

Science communication is becoming more important in India and more people are taking to it as a career. As a result, the visibility of science stories in the press has increased. Scientists are also using Facebook and Twitter to voice their views, whether on the news of the day or to engage in debates about their field of work. If you are an English-speaker with access to the internet and a smartphone, you are quite unlikely to have missed these conversations.

Most popular articles of 2019

The Sciences

Health

Environment

Space

Education

Our choice

The state has become more involved with the R&D establishment, although these engagements have been frequently controversial. In such a time, with so many public institutions teetering on the brink, it is important we ensure science doesn’t become passively pressed into legitimising actions of the state but rather maintains a mutually beneficial relationship that also strengthens the democracy. It is not the prerogative of scientists alone to do this; we must all get involved because the outcomes of science belong to all of us.

To this end, we must critique science, scientists, their practices, our teachers and research administrators, forest officers, conservationists and environmental activists, doctors, nurses, surgeons and other staff, members of the medical industry, spaceflight engineers and space lawyers, rules that control prices and access, examinations and examiners, and so forth. We must question the actions and policies of everyone involved in this knowledge economy. Ultimately, we must ask if our own aspirations are in line with what we as a people expect of the world around us, and science is a part of that.

It would be remiss to not mention the commendable job some other publications have been doing vis-à-vis covering science in India, including The Hindu, The Telegraph, The Print, Mongabay, Indian Express, Dinamalar, etc. Their efforts have given us the opportunity to disengage once in a while from the more important events of the day to focus on stories that might otherwise have never been read.

This year, The Wire Science published stories that interrogated what duties academic and research institutions have towards the people whose tax-money funds them, that discussed more inclusivity and transparency because only a more diverse group of practitioners can ask more diverse questions, and that examined how, though science offers a useful way to make sense of the natural order, it doesn’t automatically justify itself nor is it entitled to the moral higher-ground.

The overarching idea was to ask questions about the natural universe without forgetting that the process of answering those questions is embedded in a wider social context that both supports and informs scientists’ practices and beliefs. There is no science without the scientists that practice it – yet most of us are not prepared to consider that science is as messy as every other human endeavour and isn’t the single-minded pursuit of truth its exponents often say it is.

In these fraught times, we shouldn’t forget that science guided only by the light of logic produces many of the reasons of state. The simplest way science communication can participate in this exercise, and not just be a mute spectator, is by injecting the scientist back into the science. This isn’t an abdication of the ideal of objectivity, even though objectivity itself has been outmoded by the advent of the irrational, majoritarian and xenophobic politics of nationalism. Instead, it is a reaffirmation that you can take science out of politics but that you can’t take politics out of science.

At the same time, the stories that emerge from this premise aren’t entirely immune to the incremental nature of scientific progress. We often have to march in step with the gentle rate at which scientists invent and/or discover things, and the similar pace at which the improvements among them are available to everyone everywhere. This fact offers one downside and one up: it is harder for our output to be noticed in the din of the news, but by staying alert to how little pieces of information from diverse lines of inquiry – both scientific and otherwise, especially from social science – can team up with significant consequence, we are better able to anticipate how stories will evolve and affect the world around them.

We hope you will continue to read, share and comment on the content published by The Wire Science. We have also been publicising articles from other publications and by bloggers we found interesting and have been reproducing (if available) on our website and on our social media platforms in an effort to create an appreciation of science stories beyond the ones we have been able to afford.

On this note: please also donate a sum comfortable to you to support our work. Even an amount as little as Rs 200 will go a long way.

The Wire
December 26, 2019

Scientism is not ‘nonsense’

The @realscientists rocur account on Twitter took a surprising turn earlier today when its current curator, Teresa Ambrosio, a chemist, tweeted the following:

https://twitter.com/teresaambrosio_/status/1187259093909757952

If I had to give her the benefit of doubt, I’d say she was pointing this tweet at the hordes of people – especially Americans – whose conspiratorial attitude towards vaccines and immigrants is founded entirely on their personal experiences being at odds with scientific knowledge. However, Ambrosio wasn’t specific, so I asked her:

Where would you draw the line between this view, which I agree is valid in many contexts, and scientism?
— VM (@1amnerd) October 24, 2019

The responses to my tweet, encouraged in part by Ambrosio herself, were at first dominated by (too many) people who seemed to agree, broadly, that science is an apolitical endeavour that could be cleanly separated from the people who practice it and that science has nothing to do with the faulty application of scientific knowledge. However, the conversation rapidly turned after one of the responders called scientism “nonsense” – a stance that would rankle not just the well-informed historian of science but in fact so many people in non-developed nations where scientific knowledge is often used to legitimise statutory authority.

I recommend reading the whole conversation, especially if what you’re looking for is a good and sufficiently well-referenced summary of a) why scientism is anything but nonsense; b) why science is not apolitical; and c) how scientism is rooted in the need to separate science and the scientist.

‘Nothing in the history of science is ever simple’

Once I finished Steven Weinberg’s book Dreams of a Final Theory, I figured I’d write a long-winding review about what I think the book is really about, and its merits and demerits. But there is a sentence in the seventh chapter – titled ‘Against Philosophy’ – which I think sums up all that the book essentially attempts to explain.

Nothing in the history of science is ever simple.

And Dreams of a Final Theory wants to make you understand why that is so. To Weinberg’s credit, he has done a good job – not a great one – with complexity as his subject. I say ‘not a great one’ because it has none of the elegance that Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe did, and it laid out string theory from beginning to end. At the same time, it is still Weinberg, one of the towering figures of particle physics, at work, and he means to say, first, that there is no place for simplicity in his line of work and, second, even in all the terrible complexity, there is beauty.

The book, first published in 1992, is a discourse on the path to a ‘final theory’ – one theory to rule them all, so to speak – and the various theoretical, experimental, mathematical and philosophical challenges it presents. Weinberg is an erudite scientist and you can trust him to lay out almost all facets of all problems that he chooses to introduce in the book – and there are many of them. Also, I wouldn’t call the book technical, but at the same time it demands its fair share of intellectual engagement because the language tends to get (necessarily) intricate. And if you’re wondering: There are no equations.

In fact, I would be able to describe the experience of reading Dreams of a Final Theory using a paragraph from the book, and such internal symmetry is unmistakable throughout the book:

But why should the final theory describe anything like our world? The explanation might be found in what [Robert] Nozick has called the principle of fecundity. It states that the different logically acceptable universes all in some sense exist, each wit its own set of fundamental laws. The principle of fecundity is not itself explained by anything, but at least it has a certain pleasing self-consistency; as Nozick says, the principle of fecundity states ‘that all possibilities are realized, while it itself is one of those possibilities’.

Buy the book.