Search results

Critics argue that the social scientific movements in political science has led to bad government. But there is no sound scientific foundation for the schism between traditional Western normative philosophy and social science. (SJK)

Scientists in the arena / Solly Zuckerman -- The philosophy and practice of national science policy / Alvin M. Weinberg -- The productivity of science in a society / J.B. Adams -- Cost-benefit analysis in research / C.D. Foster -- Operational research and national science policy / Russell L. Ackoff -- Decision making in research policy at the industrial level / A.E. Pannenborg -- France's scientific policy / J. Saint-Geours -- Observations on national science policy in Sweden / Bror Rexed -- Science policy making in the United States / William D. Carey -- Scientific potential as an object of investigation and control in the Soviet Union / G.M. Dobrov -- National research planning and research statistics : the case of Hungary / Alexander Szalai -- Science policy making in Latin America, with special reference to Argentina / R.L. Cardón -- Science policy in India / A. Rahman -- Science policy in a small country : Israel / Daniel Shimshoni -- Applying first principles / R. Aron.

In Greg Bear's critically acclaimed science fiction novel Darwin's Radio, the activation of an endogenous retrovirus (SHEVA), ironically located in a "noncoding region" of the human genome, causes extreme symptoms in women worldwide, including miscarriages. In the United States, a task force is assembled to control the pandemic crisis and to find out how SHEVA operates at the genomic level. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes manifest that SHEVA is too complex to decode in this way and, moreover, that it is not a disease at all. Biologist Kay Lang speculates that SHEVA is triggered by signals from the environment, and that newborn SHEVA children will be a new variation or species of Man. In this essay I analyze Bear's literary experiment with science along Deleuze and Guattari's important, but largely overlooked, concepts of State science and nomad science. Bear's novel gives narrative form to nomad-scientific ideas about life, notably Lynn Margulis's theory of endosymbiogenesis, which holds that a species' DNA is an assemblage of many genomes acquired in symbiotic relations. The import of Bear's informed speculations, I argue, is not crass prediction but a nomadic vision of life as always already different (impure, infected) and in becoming—a counterpoint to the image of the double helix as the bedrock of human identity. Darwin's Radio is a key example of how fiction can be an excellent partner for science, technology, and society, analyzing and intervening in debates about life and laying bare epistemological and biopolitical tensions of technoscience.