“ I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.” —Isaac Asimov, A Cult of Ignorance
One wonders what Isaac Asimov would have made of today’s events. In his day, he wrote trenchantly about the public’s ability to accept what scientists have to say about public policy. Perhaps too trenchantly. Consider Asimov’s cutting rhetoric in “A Cult of Ignorance,” an essay he wrote in 1980.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way throughout political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
[And] we have a new buzzword … for anyone who admires competence, knowledge, learning, and skill, and who wishes to spread it around. People like that are called “elitists.” That’s the funniest buzzword ever invented because people who are not members of the intellectual elite don’t know what an “elitist” is, or how to pronounce the word.
Yes, that’s trenchant all right. But how persuasive was it? And how persuasive would such rhetoric be today? About as effective, I imagine, as the advocacy of variolation offered by a character in the Kenneth Branagh film, “Frankenstein.” This character, Professor Waldman, is administering what he calls a “tiny, harmless amount of anti-smallpox serum” that will “prevent a plague in this city.”
How was that received? Well, a would be recipient of the serum cries, “You just said pox! … You doctors kill people. I don’t care what you say, you’re not stickin’ that in me!” But Waldman insists, adding, “It’s the law!” Unimpressed, the serum skeptic stabs Waldman to death.
Although the film was released 30 years ago, it seems all too relevant today. And so, we might ask, could Waldman have succeed ed, or at least saved his own life, if he had behaved differently? Maybe. But when Waldman confronted the serum skeptic, it was, perhaps, already too late. Similarly, when a vaccine skeptic is about to assume authority over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it may be, in some sense, too late. The political and cultural climate is what it is. By now, Katalin Karikó, PhD, the scientist who laid the groundwork for mRNA vaccines, should be as celebrated as Jonas Salk, MD. But she isn’t.
For us at GEN, as it is for anyone who celebrates scientific advances, our task is to make up for lost time. And we have to recognize that with developments such as social networking, the difficulty of our task is greater than even Isaac Asimov would have imagined. But we must try—and do so without indulging in rancor.
