What is it for?

How the 20th century influenced the evolution of science

The Economist Jun 16th 2012 | http://www.economist.com/node/21556889

Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. By Jon Agar. Polity; 614 pages; $35 and £30. Buy from Amazon.com,Amazon.co.uk

SCIENCE works with problems by making them into manageable, manipulable abstractions. Jon Agar’s ambitious new book sets out to synthesise the insights of many recent historians of science. These might be anything from a field biologist’s notes of lemming populations on Spitzbergen to a physicist’s creation of muon tracks in a cloud chamber, or from a set of equations in the mathematical imagination to a vast computer model of the world’s climate.

In this section

• Tough love
• »What is it for?
• Gold in white and black
• Up hill, down dale
• Happy Bloomsday
• Worldly gestures

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Doing science is making these abstractions. The history of science is understanding how particular abstractions come to be accepted as the right way of producing solutions—and how problems get chosen in the first place. Sometimes the problems are those of the people paying for the science; sometimes they are posed by developments the scientists are interested in; sometimes they are problems that grow out of science itself.

As Mr Agar shows, the great problem-posing processes of the 20th century were its wars. The two world wars and the cold war ratcheted up the spending on science, changing its organisational basis, its political setting and its subject matter. The less obvious aspects of war and science—for example, the introduction of psychoanalysis into British medicine courtesy of shellshock—are given their due, as well as the central Faustian tragedy of the development of the atom bomb.

The bomb that graces the cover of the book has come to stand for the power of science. But Mr Agar’s history is more illuminating on the less obvious story of science’s role in problems of control. Throughout the book, the reader is struck by how much people have seen a lack of control over others as a problem, and science as a source of solutions.

Lewis Terman, developer of intelligence tests, for example, dreamed of psychology as “a science of human engineering” in the 1920s. Eugenicists sought, by combining, in the words of J.B.S. Haldane, the offices of “the policeman, the priest and the procurer”, to control both the actions of their social inferiors and the course of evolution. Devotees and fellow travellers, such as Julian Huxley and H.G. Wells, saw in the biological sciences “the ultimate collective control of human destinies”. The Rockefeller Foundation dreamed of bringing the dangerous “psychobiology of sex” under “rational control” as part of its “Science of Man” programme. And Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, sought to combine the human and the machine into a system—initially, but not only, an anti-aircraft system—that was defined by the way in which it controlled itself.

At first blush these look like futures that simply failed. But the story is more complex. The Rockefeller Foundation’s vision of a “Science of Man” led it to foster a new “molecular biology” at CalTech and other institutions. Today’s control of crops through their genes and children through their pharmaceuticals can both be traced back, in part, to that intervention. And then there is the remarkable story of Song Jian. A Chinese engineer who had been schooled in control theory in Moscow just after Stalin’s death (at which point cybernetics, previously bourgeois and reactionary, became acceptable), he rose to pre-eminence in China’s military-industrial complex. Attending a meeting on control theory in Helsinki in the 1970s, he became convinced of the power of crude computer models like those of the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”. Importing such modelling to his power base at the Chinese missile and space-flight ministry he became crucial in the enactment of the one-child policy in the 1980s.

Mr Agar’s book is somewhat biased towards the physical sciences and it has some odd gaps. Seeing the molecular biology of the 1960s as an information science, Mr Agar overlooks Peter Mitchell, whose breakthrough in understanding that cells store energy, not in molecules, but in potential differences revealed an aspect of life hitherto undreamed of. There is nothing on the fluoridation of water, and too little on nutrition.

Some of the later material on trends too close to the present might well have been omitted. Given the central role of war, a book limited to what Eric Hobsbawm has called the short 20th century—1914 to 1991—might have served better. But overall, Mr Agar has abstracted and made manageable a range of rich and informed analysis. Anyone who thinks seriously about science, and about how it is used, will find it a very useful source of new ways to appreciate both problems and solutions.