Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

180 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
Yet one retains the impression, buttressed by numerous historic encounters
with every sort of bully in scientist's clothing, that a lifetime of
this sort will reinforce an impoverishment of the soul, stinginess of the
heart and narrowness of mental vision that is hardly any different from
that of the medieval monk, scribe, soldier or peasant. . .
A few months ago, I attended a poetry reading given by a Czech
poet/neurophysiologist Miroslaw Holub, at the Lamont Library of
Harvard University. I liked his poetry quite a bit; I am sure he is a good
neuro (etc.), and know him also as a prominent activist in the years
between Dubcek and Havel. Commenting on the differences between literary
theory and scientific work, Holub related this conversation between
Paul Valery and Albert Einstein.
Valery asked Einstein: "Albeit, answer me this: When you get a new
idea, do you run to your notebooks to write it down as fast as you can
before it's forgotten" To which Einstein replied: "In our profession, Paul,
a new idea arises so very rarely, that one is not likely to forget it, even
years later."
To support my thesis that the scientists of the modern world are in no
sense the torchbearers of true civilization, but are little different (in the
majority) than the brain-dead scholastics of the Middle Ages, I have identified
a Credo of thirteen articles resembling the dogmatic catechisms of
various cults and creeds, such as the words of the Mass, the laws of
Leviticus, the Nicene Creed, the Benedictine Rule, the Confessions of
Faith, the Book of Common Prayer, and the like:
THE SCIENTIST'S CREDO
I. That research be its own justification, whether its purpose be noble, silly
or malevolent.
We see this in particular in research on animal subjects, however there
are many examples to be taken from all the sciences. The truism that many
discoveries which were useless at the time they were made turned out to
be of some use, even a century or two later, has, in our day, been elevated
into the above principle, which asserts that "All research must be valuable
because it may be useful." Such an argument would, in the older religious
credos, be equivalent to an exhortation to monks to commit murder
because they might find something which, thirty years later, will give
them some good reasons to instruct novices in the evils of murder.
II. That there are hidden laws of Nature which guarantee that the fruits of
all research must ultimately be of benefit to mankind.
This is a stronger version of Article I, however, the emphasis here is on
the "hidden laws," which posit a kind of ultimate "Moral Essence," or