The Changing Temptations of Science

摘要

The changes in science over the past century have outpaced society's images of science, of what sort of activity it is, and of what scientists are and do. Have these changes also outpaced science's capacity to assure its integrity and quality? At the turn of the twentieth century, literary representations of science lionized the lone genius, often as one who stood against the tide of conventional opinion, such as the hero of Sinclair Lewis's 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Arrowsmith. Although the problem of science's social organization was challenged in the 1920s and '30s with "Nazi science" and the rise of Soviet science, the response was a reafHrmation of the idea of science as a vocation carried out by individuals bound by a shared community ethic. The history of this period has been told and retold, but one product has endured. We can call it the liberal theory of science. It was articulated by two physical chemists, Michael Polanyi at the University of Manchester and James Bryant Conant at Harvard University.