The Infinite Monkey Cage - Does Science Need War?

Episode Date: July 21, 2014

Does Science Need War?Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by comedian Katy Brand, science writer Philip Ball and medic, author and broadcaster Kevin Fong. They'll be asking whether scientific progress needs the pressures and casualties of war to drive it, or whether some of our biggest scientific breakthroughs, that have resulted from periods of conflict, would have happened anyway? It's a serious topic, but never fear, on the way the intergalactic battles faced in Star Wars, and why only the French could come up with onions as a cure for burns, are all equally seriously investigated.

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Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And today we are asking, war, is it all the fault of scientists? That's not what we're asking at all. That's a very simplistic approach, Robin. Well, it is obviously a simplistic approach because we are very much pandering to modern media and therefore it's much better to approach ideas by approaching them simply and wrongly

because then you trend on Twitter. Hashtag war bad. I don't expect nothing less from an English literature graduate. Who hasn't been trained to think hashtag art rubbish. LOL. Look, look, it says in this book by one of our guests, Philip Ball, that historians, I quote, historians, philosophers and sociologists

can offer little more than compromised contingent half-truths. And that's where the sentence ended, did it? Or hashtag telegenic scientist cherry-picked data? You carried on, you carried on. Because I believe it actually continues to say that truly apolitical scientists are an impossibility and in any case striving to be apolitical is an abjuration of moral responsibility.

To discuss how some scientists have been compromised by war and yet how war has generated new knowledge and led to great scientific innovations, we have three guests. Hello, my name's Katie Brand, and I am a writer and an actor and sometimes a comedian when the wind is right. I have written a book about being a stand-up comedian

called Brenda Monk is Funny, which is neither scientific nor about war. And I'm Dr Kevin Fong. I'm an anaesthetist at University College London Hospital and I'm currently a doctor flying with Kent Surrey Sussex Air Ambulance and author of the book Extremes, Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body. I'm Philip Ball. I'm a science writer

and I'm the author of Serving the Reich, which was a book about how German physicists coped under the Nazi regime, and it didn't have any jokes in it. But we're going to find the humour in it. We will. We're going to find the humour in the third, right? Much like Gordon Kay did, don't you worry. And this is our panel!

Katie, we're going to go to you first of all because you are our, as you know, theology graduate of choice. We have one theology graduate that we always come back to. It's you. We have one wizard as well, who we have once a series. But we're cruelly kept apart. Me and the wizard. The potency of the theology graduate and the wizard thrown together could change. That means you have to listen instead to Beyond Belief, which fills in our slot during potency of the theology graduate and the wizard thrown together could change. That means you have to listen instead to Beyond Belief,

which fills in our slot during the rest of the year. Is it called Beyond Belief? Is it? Well, it'd be an apt description. It is called Beyond Belief. This is very much not the core demographic for it. Well done. But I actually did want to talk from a kind of philosophical perspective. We're talking about science and war, what science does during war, and how scientists

behave during war. And in some ways this is a show where we're going to be talking quite a lot about ethics and morality. So do you think that science and the acquisition of knowledge can be amoral? Well, I think what's interesting about scientists that have made massive leaps forward during war is that

usually afterwards they will argue that they were not really a part of the ideology of whatever the prevailing sort of oppressive force was that was demanding these apparently kind of slightly morally dubious experiments and I think I think there's probably some credibility to that I guess the basic question is can you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or can a good thing come from a bad thing? And I think if you want a sort of ethical starting point from somebody who I can feel my theology tutors laughing even now as the theology graduate

of choice for a Radio 4 show, but since I'm the only one here, and you're asking me to give you an ethical baseline to jump off from, I would say that yes, because you can detach the thing itself from the person and the circumstances under which it was generated, and it can become useful to humankind in the future. So I think that it's interesting that you can separate the product from the person. So you think that, I mean, this is... Removing the idea of threat,

removing the idea of merely just scientific endeavour and curiosity, that there is a possibility that that result in itself can be objective before then it is thrown out to the various different subjective whims of other humans. Yes, I do. I think I do. But unfortunately, it's difficult, because only with hindsight can you tell. I mean, it's a similar debate to what goes on

in terms of medically based animal testing. You know, these things are morally questionable at best and deeply upsetting and disturbing at worst. And yet, you know, anybody who's had a child cured as a result of animal testing is going to have to think very hard about whether they really do have a problem with it. is going to have to think very hard about whether they really do have a problem with it. So separating the products from the act is a kind of quite a tricky balancing act, but I do think it can be done with a kind of clear-headed approach.

Well, you were reading earlier, Brian, about the use of... Talking about animal experiments, animals in war, that there were people who used to set far to camels and send them out into... Yeah, Adam Rutherford, actually, who's also been on the show, animals in war, that there were people who used to set fire to camels and send them out into... Yeah, Adam Rutherford, actually, who's also been on the show, came gleefully into the office with his book.

Everyone has a book that comes out of this show. And in his book, it detailed, I think, in the 15th century, there was someone famously who set fire to camels and used them as weapons, charged them with flaming camels. That is the worst idea in the history of animal warfare. It didn't work. They're going to walk a couple of feet and fall down dead, aren't they? So not only was it a poor idea, but

it was a poor idea because it didn't work, is your view? Yeah, history has not judged that man kindly, I don't think. What would you have used instead, Kevin, rather than the camel? Surely no, a camel has a massive water store on board. They're literally the worst animals to set on board. They're literally the worst animals on fire.

They're really hard to light. That's true. Philip, these dilemmas were crystallised absolutely in World War II. You have very famous scientists, Heisenberg and Planck amongst them, who seemed in part to justify their actions, collaboration, whatever you want to call it, with the Germans at the time, by saying that essentially knowledge should be separated

from what you do, the uses of the knowledge. So there's some sort of higher cause, if you like. The acquisition of knowledge is amoral, completely separated from how that knowledge is used. Yeah, and I think that's a position that a lot of scientists still take. And I can see how one could is used. Yeah, and I think that's a position that a lot of scientists still take. And I can see how one could defend it. I guess, first of all, I'd say that a lot of science isn't about the acquisition of pure knowledge.

Much more than we usually acknowledge is about making stuff. And that was certainly the case for a lot of the German physicists. I mean, Heisenberg, during the war, was in charge of the nuclear program that the Germans were running, and that was very clearly about making stuff, about making nuclear reactors and bombs, ultimately. So once you're making something, you're already having, you're acting in a social context. There are social and political implications of that. But I think what disturbed me most about the way the physicists at least responded

under Nazi rule was not so much that they were claiming that their science was amoral, but that they were using the science as a shield to hide behind so that they didn't have to confront the very difficult political questions that were around at that time, but in particular the political questions about the exclusion of many of their colleagues who were classified at least as Jewish. This was seen as a political question that a scientist or any academic in German society at that time shouldn't bother themselves with in a professional context. So I think that was really the worry, not so much that what they were doing was terrible or wrong, but that they were using what they were doing as a way of saying, you know, this doesn't concern me, that I'm, in a sense, I'm following a higher

calling by working on science. And of course... Wasn't it that Heisenberg was actually worried about his links, wasn't he, with some Jewish scientists and how that may well affect him? Well, you see, I mean, one of the situations that arose in the 1930s, before war broke out, really, was that there were a couple of physicist Nobel laureates in Germany who decided that the new physics that they couldn't quite understand, quantum mechanics and relativity, was Jewish science, because Einstein, in particular, was at the heart of it all,

and that he was surrounded by a cabal of people that included people like Heisenberg and Max Planck who were promoting this science, and Jewish science, in their view, arranged the facts to suit themselves. It was just seducing the press rather than doing good, solid experimental physics like they did. And Heisenberg was part of that because he agreed with Einstein's ideas. And so he was confronted with the difficult situation of having to back Einstein's ideas without appearing to back

Einstein. And Heisenberg walked a very delicate tightrope in doing that because he did crave, really, I think we can say, the good opinion of the leaders he wanted to know that they respected him and that they felt he was going to be useful to the state and so you know he at one stage he appealed to Himmler to exonerate him from the charges that have been made against him he was called a white Jew at one stage by one of these Nobel laureates and he went to Himmler to get the approval of the state. That's quite interesting, you put it in context, historical context, because if you're talking about special relativity, that's 1905, so it's 30 years later

that you begin to, what, reinterpret the science, really challenge things like special relativity, because it's pretty widely accepted by the mid-30s, of course, because you can't build a bomb without it. like special relativity, because it was pretty widely accepted by the mid-30s, of course, because you can't build a bomb without it. It was generally accepted by most serious scientists, although the opposition to it began actually before even the Nazis came to power.

It began in the 1920s when there was a very unsettled German state. And at one point, Einstein decided in 1922, decided he wasn't going to speak at a big physics conference, because he genuinely was worried that he might be assassinated, just like members of the government had been assassinated at that time. There was so much social unrest. So basically, the anti-Semitism that lay behind it was already very evident in Germany in the 1920s, when general relativity at that point had only just been put forward and was very much in the air, and quantum mechanics at that time was being invented.

So there was nothing new about that in the 1930s. Do you think that if you're living through that kind of moral mess and horrifying situation, and you don't feel there's necessarily anything you could do about it, that there might have been some relief in continuing the sort of purity and relative straightforwardness of scientific endeavours. Heisenberg very much felt that. He said it in almost those words, actually,

that he was doing something higher than this sort of dirty business of politics. So that I can understand, but I think that any of the academics at the time, they knew what was, I mean, they were very clearly confronted by the fact that their colleagues were being, you know, expelled from their jobs. And not a single high-profile scientist resigned as a result of the exclusion of non-Aryans from university positions. Some claimed they were going to if the Nazis took this terrible step, and then when it actually happened, you know, there was no response. I think even a cynic today would be hard-pushed to suggest that were a racial minority or cultural minority to be excluded from our universities,

that there wouldn't be a huge backlash, there wouldn't be mass education. Was there more of a backlash? And this is just a genuinely question out of interest, I'm not trying to make some sort of art-science divide, but was there, although I always enjoy that, but was there more of that kind of moral grandstanding from the sort of more arts side of the universities? Yeah, there was.

That's one of the things that did dismay me, to find that actually it was some of the artists and some of the theologians, actually, in Nazi Germany who made a much bolder, much more outspoken stand against the measures that the Nazis were bringing in than any of the scientists really did. I have, having worked with Brian for, you know, three years now or more, found generally the cold-hearted arrogance and superiority of the scientists.

I'm very rarely surprised by that. Well, actually, Kevin, actually, because you've worked in both fields. You work in medicine now, which is obviously very much working with people, but also you have science training. So with your scientist hat on, do you see that there's a sense in which... I suppose, as Philip's suggesting, you separate knowledge... Let me put it this way.

You imagine scientific knowledge is some kind of higher kind of knowledge, so it's not sullied by the messy society below. I think there is the suggestion that you can disentangle the pursuit of science from everything around it, isn't there? And that there's a certain purity to it. And I think when you move into medicine, it becomes messier, just because

medicine is literally more messy, but also in its pursuit it's less precise, less certain. Actually, when I was studying physics I read up a little bit about the pursuit of the building of the first atomic bombs, and I did get the impression

that the scientists at the time, quite apart from everything else, got quite seduced by the elegance of the science that they were allowed to pursue in this whole endeavour, and I sort of got the science that they were allowed to pursue in this whole endeavour. And I sort of got the impression that they used other things as qualifications to allow them to pursue this academic line that they would probably never have had an opportunity to otherwise.

I don't know what your observations were of that, Philip, but that was the sense I got. So I do think you're right. I do think that there is a sense in which people think they can pursue science, you know, in a vacuum. And I'm not sure that that's true. And certainly when you look at the way that medicine has progressed in the last century, and particularly in the context of war, you realise that that separation doesn't exist, that it doesn't happen in a void. Well, it's interesting when you say there about science in a vacuum, but for instance, you know,

Los Alamos, where, you know, this research was being done by some of the the greatest you know particularly American physicists but wasn't there also a sense that they felt that they they had to work on the bomb because this was part of you know the war effort this well I don't think all the scientists involved in Manhattan project and and the competitor projects to build atomic weapons were all equal in the zeal with which they pursued that. That's at least not my reading of it. There were people who went forwards and had very little remorse about it. There were others like Morris Wilkins,

who I once spoke to about his involvement in the uranium separation problem at Berkeley. So he had a tiny part, really, in the assembly of the first atomic weapons, but in later life had massive guilt about it. And it was mostly his guilt about that that caused him to leave physics and caused him to pursue molecular biology, so going from what he defined as the science of death

towards the science of life. So his guilt drove him away from it. So I think they all, as individuals, had different reactions to being involved in those programmes. During a war, you could imagine how compelling it would be to be told, the other side are building a nuclear bomb, so what are you

going to do? Just let them do it? And they're the baddies. So we're the goodies. We're going to need one too. So you're actually serving the light side, not to bring everything down to Star Wars, but which I don't even like. Well, that's an outrageous statement. Wouldn't it be great?

We get away with talking about burning camels, but then some firebrand goes and says she doesn't like Star Wars. We've discussed some controversial things here so far. You know, it's a deeply religious film, Star Wars. I'm surprised you like it. It's all about, you know, light side and good side and kind of really simplistic morality. There is no light side in Star Wars.

There's a dark side. They never say the light side. Oh, OK, fine. Well, fine. I have been peer-reviewed and found wanting. Watch the film. She said there is a dark and a light side. There definitely is. Otherwise, it would just be Darth Vader. His mates go, what do we do now?

Everyone's bad now. Can you be good for a bit? Ooh, not even your father. That is a rubbish Darth Vader impression. I'm not doing Darth Vader. I haven't seen it since 1977 because I grew up the... Right. Anyway.

Well, that idea... No one thinks, as far as I can tell, in wars, in general day-to-day things, no one thinks, I consider myself to be evil. Even the evil consider, I think I'm doing the right thing. And other people go, I think it's quite evil.

Yeah, exactly. And everyone is always the hero of their own story and you can justify anything to yourself. On that topic, there's a great Michelin web sketch, I think, about a couple of Nazis and one of them comes in and sort of says, Hans, are we the baddies? And sort of starts listing all the things that might point to the idea that they are, in fact, the baddies? And sort of start listing all the things that might point to the idea that they are in fact the baddies.

And it's quite a sweet representation of two low-level guys just caught up in something they don't really understand. I'm not saying that that was obviously what happened to these very high-ranking scientists, but I think, yeah, I mean, I can imagine... I'm just trying to put myself in the position of some of these people except without any of the knowledge and skill and ability, scientifically. But morally, you know, if someone said to me,

you have to write a novel about this, and otherwise all your family are going to disappear, and we're going to pull all your toenails out and hang you upside down until you're dead, I might consider writing the novel. Especially if I was told that somebody else was writing a very similar novel for the other side that was going to have far more impact on who won the war. So, I mean, how could I possibly tell until afterwards where you kind of have that moment where you look back and go,

God, I was one of the baddies. I love this novel-writing thing. Who have the Nazis got? The Nazis have got Jilly Cooper. If we don't get Jackie Collins on our side, good news, she's written Hollywood Husbands, whereas Jilly's. If we don't get Jackie Collins on our side, good news, she's written Hollywood Husbands, whereas Jilly's only got Polo. Why do I know both those books exist? Let's move on. No, they are both very good books, and I commend you for knowing that.

But, yeah, I think that's a key thing, isn't it? That at the time you're doing something, you will believe that you're doing the best you possibly can under those circumstances well i was wondering kevin if we'll get back as well to the kind of the ethics side but as someone you know your day-to-day existence is dealing with medical trauma and obviously again when we get back to the idea of the actual physical benefits if i want to say the benefits of war you know what is it that we we have in terms of the medical world? When do we start to see the history of innovation changing due to war? I mean, is the great advantage of war for medicine merely the fact that so many guinea pigs are created?

You know, Archibald Mackindo, the group of people who were operated on by him, they actually called themselves the Guinea Pig Club. Is that part of the importance of it? So I think war, without question, has always advanced certain branches of medicine, particularly that branch of medicine that deals with traumatic injury. And so it's interesting that you bring up Archie McKindo

and the Guinea Pig Club, because this is the birth of reconstructive plastic surgery. And here you see our relationship, our difficult relationship with science and technology with science and technology as neutral things that can both help us and hurt us. So what's the technology there? Well, they build the Hurricane fighter plane in an attempt to defend us, a successful attempt to defend us from the coming air war, the Battle of Britain that's

approaching. And it's a very, very useful and very, very capable vehicle. It's a marvel of engineering. It's just three decades after the Wright brothers' first flight, and it's a plane that can fly at 400 miles an hour, more or less, and fly at very high altitudes, carry a formidable platform of weapons. But there's a problem, and the problem is this thing is built out of wood. It's covered in stretched Irish linen. You dope all of that Irish linen in nitrocellulose.

So the whole thing already wants to burst into flames as soon as you strike a light to it. Then you fill that thing with gallons and gallons and gallons of high-octane fuel, and you put a pilot in the middle and you let other pilots shoot flaming bullets at them. And, you know... I think, to be honest, I could have told them that was a bad idea. But, I mean, it seems ludicrous when you describe it like that, doesn't it,

that you would put people into the air in those machines, and yet they were essential. They were the most important aircraft of the Battle of Britain, and yet there was a price, and the price was people who were burnt beyond all recognition and then who would parachute down into their own country as survivors. And what do you do? What do you do when you're facing that? For the first time, you're facing people who have survived horrific injuries, and do do you do? What do you do when you're facing that? For the first time you're facing people who have survived horrific injuries and do you leave them? Do you institutionalise

them away from society to protect them from society and society from them? Or do you try and do something to mitigate the consequences of that? And MacKindo and his team at East Grinstead at the Queen Victoria Hospital decided that they would try and do something. They would try and reconstruct these people. And that's quite incredible innovation of taking forwards what had been otherwise quite rudimentary reconstructive surgery and making it a thing whereby you could rebuild people's entire

faces was the birth of what we understand by reconstructive plastic surgery today. So I think that that is a very good example of you know, this wasn't just an innovation, this wasn't like sort of the pure science that we're talking about in the building of atomic bombs. This is an attempt by medicine to try and mitigate the consequences of technology that's helped you and then hurt you. And there's a very similar story surrounding heart surgery and all

manner of heart surgery and heart transplants isn't it but that's correct and so what you see again is science and then technology mechanizing war so giving you in world war one ways of putting projectiles into people's bodies and particularly their hearts and then and then that being a catalyst for cardiac surgery now you know it's incredible to think that at the turn of the 20th century, the textbooks still said you must never operate on a human heart. It's just different from all the other organs. It's an inviolate hole. It can't be operated upon. Anyone who does so is a maverick who deserves to lose the respect of their colleagues. And yet, when war came and so many

people came with such injuries, such horrific injuries to their hearts, the surgeons had to think again and they had to try. Now, there were some attempts in World War I to operate on hearts with not much success, and then in the interwar period, nothing happens. No one really goes back there. They say, the textbooks are right, we shouldn't do this. And then World War II comes, and particularly D-Day. And now you've got more weapons that are better able to injure people,

and you've got the technology to fly them back from the D-Day Normandy landings, back to Cirencester, and you've got a new generation of surgeons that are saying, well, we've got to try. We've got to try again. And until then, people really didn't believe that you could successfully operate on the heart, but there was one American surgeon, Dwight Harkin, operating out of Cirencester Field Hospital, who performed this amazing series of operations where he removed, I think it was

134 foreign bodies from the hearts of wounded soldiers, and nobody died. And that, for medicine, was like planting a flag in new territory. It was exactly like planting a flag in the South Pole in the Antarctic expeditions. I guess the point I'm making is that this was an exploratory effort. There had to be something that would catalyse, that would give you enough courage to go forwards and operate on the human heart. And until then it had been terra incognito.

No one would go near it. And yet from the end of the war onwards, you see this proliferation in heart surgery, proliferation in cardiac surgical techniques, so much so that within 20 years of those first efforts by Harkin, later in civilian world, so 1948 is the first time he does it in civilian world, within 20 years of that,

you've gone from never having operated on a human heart before with any hope of success to, in 1967, Christian Barnard taking a heart out of a recently dead person and putting it into the body of a nearly dead person and creating a survivor out of that, which is an incredible thing to have happened. It seems quite ironic, though,

that the massive medical advancements that you're describing are the the consequence of just finding really efficient ways of killing people that you're kind of if we can find a better more efficient way of killing people then we also then then we suddenly start to think of more efficient better ways of saving their lives there's uh that's always been the case it was. It's interesting, you might have come across this, Kevin, in the 16th century, the treatment for burns then, the innovation then, came about because people were having to treat gunshot wounds

and the only treatment that they knew of was pouring boiling oil on them to cauterise them and no-one particularly liked doing that. And the French doctor Ambroise Paré came up with a new solution, which was onions ground up with salt. And, you know, it turned out this was the burns cure of the Renaissance, was ground up onions. And he was a military surgeon, and he, you know...

I suppose that exemplifies the way that, it seems often, these advances come out of extreme desperation. You'll try anything. You have to. You have to find a solution. But why was it... I mean, that is... The idea... Why onions? What was it that he... How much do we know? He was French. Yeah. Well, that was a... LAUGHTER I was wondering if anyone was going to risk going there.

They all have them available. Yeah. She's got them there. But I wanted to go back to the idea of when we're talking about different innovations. So, for instance, gunpowder. Gunpowder, as far as I know, was initially started as it was going to go, look, you can make fireworks, hang on, there's something else you can do, you can actually kill people with it. And then we talk about the planes, there we have the Wright brothers,

as you said, you know, a little more than 30 years, and then, well, in fact, less than that, of course, they became machines of war. And the hurricane, the design of the hurricane i mean are at that point are the designers at any point thinking about the humans who are actually flying in them or are they only thinking about war we have to this as quickly as possible it's going to be highly flammable that's just the way it is i mean surely there must have been was there is there no time to think that there might be some way of making it slightly safer? Well, so you could have made them safer.

It would have taken longer. And most of the consideration, as I understand it, about the construction of the Hurricanes, you could knock them together quickly and they were fairly robust and you needed to find a way to replace the vehicles as quickly as possible to replace losses. So, you know, I think that that... No-one's saying that the designers completely ignored the human in the

loop of that, but it was just for them at the time at least the lesser of two evils, and that's what they did. They solved the problem they could solve. They left the mitigation of the consequences of that to other people. And I think actually that's the story of all of our progress, actually. You know, the reason

that war features so much in the story of progress in medicine and actually elsewhere in science is, I think, because it's all about the fight of the moment. I think we like to believe that we look a long way down the road, that we have this plan of where we want to be in 50, 100 years' time, and we move towards that.

But truthfully, at least in my reading of it, every generation faces the fight of the moment and it's defined by that fight and from that come things that help us uh that we take on as new knowledge and things that hurt us that we attempt to mitigate the consequences of and out of that also comes advance so is the flip side to this that peace is bad for science i suppose you could make a compelling argument that it is, because what happens in peacetime is that investment in the generation of new knowledge tends to fall, which we see. We see that science budgets have dropped as a percentage of GDP continually since, I suppose, since the 1950s,

since the Second World War. Aerospace budgets have dropped. NASA has seen their budget drop. CERN is a good example because CERN was built for peaceful purposes after the war. But the investment in nuclear physics, which became particle physics, was very much came out of the experience during the war in the Manhattan Project. which came out of the experience during the war in the Manhattan Project. So I wonder, I mean, you mentioned, I suppose, Kevin, rocketry. Aerospace is the classic example, isn't it, where innovation in aerospace was driven first by the war and secondly by the Cold War. Yeah, and the relationship, you know, we're very quick to celebrate,

you know, Apollo and human space exploration. We very rapidly forget where the people who built those rockets came from and what they'd been doing at the end of the war, involved in certainly in the same place, if not directly involved in some of the worst atrocities committed during World War II. And so there's always that very difficult relationship. But I want to come back to that thing about peace being bad.

Besides, people kind of are accepting of, There's always that very difficult relationship. But I want to come back to that thing about peace being bad for science. People kind of are accepting of, and you hear it almost as a trope, that, well, war is terrible, but it's good for medicine. And now we're saying, well, it's good for science. And actually, I'm not sure you can do that algebra. That algebra is very difficult to do. You know, this idea that, well, because you... And it is a hard one to do. You lose many lives during the war.

This innovation will go on to save lives forever into the future. How do you do that equation? I don't think you can. I don't think you can do it morally or in any other way. But the other thing to ignore in saying that war is good for any of these things is to ignore everything that it destroys. Yes, you get heart surgery, partly out of World War I, certainly out of World War II. Yes, you get reconstructive plastic surgery. Yes, you get any surgery partly out of World War I, certainly out of World War II. Yes, you get reconstructive plastic surgery. Yes, you get any number of other things. What about all of the relationships it destroyed

between the countries that would otherwise have cooperated in science? What about all of the people it destroyed who might have gone on to discover things themselves? So to say that it's good, well, it introduces a perturbation that allows innovation to happen. Whether it's equal to what it destroys is a question that you can't answer. I suppose this is always the issue with history, isn't it, Philip,

that we have to imagine a different present if we want to imagine a different past. If you say, where would we be in aerospace or medicine now if it hadn't been for the Second World War or the First World War, who knows? Yeah, well, that's the point I would want to make. I don't think we have any idea whether peace is good for war, for science, because we've never known that. That, you know, even in times when we're not actively fighting some massive war,

we're preparing for the next one. One of the best ways to get funded in the United States over the past decade or so has been to say that your work is important for national security. We've already said that one of the best ways to be funded during the Cold War was to be working on space missions, which clearly actively were developing military applications

as well as peacetime ones. So I think that even in times when nations haven't been actively fighting a war, they've tended to be preparing for the next one. We've always had military funding. It brings me... I was going to get to the final question, which is related in a sense, which is, is it possible to be moral and a scientist?

Obviously it's possible, but is it desirable? That's a better way of phrasing it. Is it desirable, or is the scientist's job, the research scientist's job, really to just explore nature, to accumulate knowledge? And is it really somebody else's job to decide how to deploy that knowledge? Should we all be absolutely aware of what we're doing? Can we be aware? Well, you know, I think that most of our discussion

has been that you cannot divorce science from society or from the politics, that it doesn't exist on its own, it can't exist on its own, and that as much as the philosophy of science is based upon this inductive reasoning and this step by step by step incremental As much as the philosophy of science is based upon this inductive reasoning

and this step-by-step-by-step incremental progress, actually, that's not the world in which we live. And, in fact, when you look at the progress that we make because science needs resources and because those resources are contingent upon things that have got nothing to do with science, that you get entangled in not just war but all the other areas of life. So for scientists to say we're in this

sort of sect that is apart from the whole of society and all I need to do is to follow Occam's razor and keep going with that and it'll all be alright is I think not just wrong it's just irresponsible and they can't and the physicists involved in the construction

of the first atomic weapons found that out, you know, in the hardest way possible. Isn't there an argument to say, though, that we should be grateful for scientists who divorce morality from what they're doing and annex themselves off? Because if scientists were to apply morality to some of the work they do,

they might be so appalled they'd just stop doing it. And then, even though at the time what they were doing seems morally dubious, we wouldn't get any of the future benefits from it. But, I mean, we're talking about scientists like they're another species. Well, you know... They can definitely breed with non-scientists. But you have to.

If you're a physicist, you pretty much have to, given the gender split. What I'm saying is, is it actually a sort of slightly sort of counterintuitive thing where it's the moral responsibility of a scientist to be amoral about their science? Well, in a sense, I suppose what you're saying is that it's impossible to second-guess or to foresee the use that knowledge can be put to in the future.

It's impossible. This is the argument we make, actually, to government, to funding agencies about funding blue skies research. Precisely the argument is knowledge is valuable for its own sake and we can never see where it's going to lead. I think that it's precisely because scientists can't be expected to foresee all the consequences of the work that they're doing that science generally needs mechanisms where it can stand back

and say, how did that happen? Let's have a look at that. Did we want things to go that way? I think that's all we can sort of realistically hope for, and I think that's what Joseph Rotblat, the nuclear scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, said when he received his Nobel Prize for Peace in 1995, he said that he still saw this ivory tower mentality in science,

that science was apolitical, that there wasn't enough of this kind of reality checking going on at a sort of institutional level. So rather than individual scientists deciding whether or not they should pursue this line of research, it needs mechanisms for just being able to take that step back and look at how things have panned out. But is it fair to ask the scientists to do that? Should the scientists not continue with what they're doing and trust, as you say, the higher mechanism?

I think scientists trust governments at their peril. And that's one of the lessons that, the lessons that you could see from the war, both in Germany and in the Manhattan Project. If they don't do it for themselves, then they're just going to be manipulated. I think that's an important part of what scientists should do. We've defined a utopian vision on the monkey cage. Is it a utopian vision?

Yes, a world in which scientists and moral scientific advice is weighed properly in democratic institutions. Excellent. So we asked the audience, what is the medical innovation that you are waiting for? We did tell them they could be frivolous, so if you are thinking, why didn't they have a cure for all death? Well, we did say, yeah, we'll take that as read.

So what is the medical innovation that you are waiting for? Brain transplant. Then maybe I can learn how women think. Mike Pittman. What? Women think just like you. I'm ripping that off. Attacked gene for one's husband.

So, there you go. So, that's the answer to that one. Yeah. A cure for baldness, because if Brian loses his hair, his media career will be over. That's from Brian's agent. Compulsory rationality genes for all. That's it. I'll go with that.

Right. So, thank you very much to our guests, who have been Katie Brand, Dr Kevin Fong and Philip Ball. And, Brian, you received a letter, I believe, this week, or indeed we received a letter. A letter. Katie was here at the very beginning of this debate, actually. It's this strawberry, the infamous strawberry alive or dead debate.

And we received a letter from Jacob Parry with a photo of a germinating strawberry. And he said, Does this bring us any closer to a unified theory of strawberry death? Is a germinating strawberry. And he said, does this bring us any closer to a unified theory of strawberry death? Is a germinating strawberry one strawberry, or many strawberries? When did the transition occur? I find strawberry death even more troubling in the light of the strawberry resurrection.

Kevin, just very briefly, as a medical expert, is it correct to view the germination of a strawberry as a resurrection? I have never tried to resuscitate a strawberry. But does that imply they're dead or alive? Let's not start that again. Can I just say, when I initially brought up sharding a strawberry on that show about 400 years ago, I never thought it would carry on like this.

I'm completely delighted. You can see how philosophy's taken so long to get anywhere, where we can't even deal with one fruit. I am a multitude, I am jam, in the words of Walt Whitman. All we've established over the many programmes that we've discussed this is that there can be a dead strawberry in the sense because you could put one near a supernova explosion, and it would no longer be a strawberry after the supernova

explosion. Though that apparently, apparently is not scientists' main endeavour. We've got to build something that's going to get a strawberry to a supernova, or we'll never know. If we could just stop fighting all these wars, we could afford to answer questions such as this. We need the strawberry wars, and then someone will finally figure it out.

It's going to go on and on, isn't it? Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for listening. Goodbye. APPLAUSE In the Infinite Monkey Cage. The Naughty Monkey. In the Infinite Monkey Cage. Without your trousers. In the Infinite Monkey Cage. Turned out nice again. That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast.

I hope you enjoyed it. Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio? Hmm. Anyway, there's a competition in itself. What, you think it should be more than 15 minutes? Shut up, it's your fault. You downloaded it. Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you can listen to.

Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alka-Seltzer. Life Scientific. There's that one where the 30s dad discovered the atomic nucleus. Inside Science, All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond. Richard Hammond's sister. Richard Hammond's sister, thank you very much, Brian. And also Frontiers, a selection of science documentaries on many, many different subjects. These are some of the science programmes that you can listen to.

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