The following is an essay from a 1980 issue of OMNI magazine written by the great science fiction author and editor, Ben Bova. I believe it is even more relevant today than it was 45 years ago.
It was only a small item, down in the corner of a page of the Sunday New York Times:
“… smallpox has been eradicated.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) officially announced that smallpox has been wiped out everywhere on Earth. One of the great killer diseases has itself been killed. No more need for smallpox vaccinations. No more need for international travelers to carry the yellow cards that prove they are not bearers of the dreaded disease as they cross national borders.
The rest of the news that same day was filled with the usual passions: riots, threats of war, terrorism, starvation, population problems in India and Latin America, inflation, unemployment, strikes… on and on and on.
Americans were in the streets, marching in memory of those who were killed in military service. It was Veterans Day, when we honor our dead and remember the wars we have fought.
Iranians were in the streets, too, in Tehran, where they held more than 60 American citizens hostage in the U.S. Embassy and were demanding the return of their deposed shah so that he could face the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s version of justice.
No public celebrations greeted the news from WHO. No one cheered from any rooftop. Smallpox is a thing of the past. The scourge that has killed millions and scarred hundreds of millions will never again threaten any child or adult. Ho hum. That’s what scientists are supposed to do, right?
Well, yes, it is. But how often does the public stop to reflect that what scientists do is rather miraculous?
Perhaps I’m prejudiced. I started my writing career as a newspaper reporter back in the late 1940s. Every summer, in those days, newspapers carried a long, ugly running story about polio. It was like covering the baseball season. All summer long we ran box scores every day on the number of children who had died of polio, the number placed in iron lungs, the number crippled for life.
That’s life. What can you do about it?
Then one springtime we carried one single story. Lots of human interest. Plenty of wonderful photographs. Children were being inoculated with the Salk vaccine.
Good front-page stuff: a kid screaming bloody murder as a doctor jabbed a needle into his arm and his anxious mother smiled bravely in the background.
That was a dull summer, poliowise. And there has never been another summer when any newspaper in the land has had to carry a running account of polio’s ravages.
Now we’ve wiped out smallpox. We’ve eliminated another killer disease.
A curious doublethink takes place in most human minds on subjects such as this. Polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, for countless ages were regarded as inevitable natural disasters that humankind just had to bear, scourges sent by the gods to keep us in our place. Then science – the product of human thought – puts an end to these diseases, and people accept their absence as being in the natural order of things.
The same people who unthinkingly accept the gift of life from modern science, as if scientists are supposed to produce miracles the way chickens produce eggs, are quick to blame modern science for many of the problems that our society has not solved.
“No more nukes,” they chant, holding science (and scientists) responsible for Three Mile Island.
“No DNA experiments.” they shout, visions of horror movies dancing in their heads.
“No research on intelligence,” they demand, being told that such studies are done by “elitists.”
Such people form the shock troops for the armies of ignorance. In another place, or another time, they would be shouting. “Death to the Shah,” or “Down with Galileo,” or even “Sieg Heil!” Like Konrad Lorenz’s ducklings, they will follow whatever or whoever moves across their field of vision at the critical moment when they are ready for imprinting.
Unwittingly, they are destroying our one true hope for a better future: science, the most human activity that human beings engage in, the highest expression of rational human thought.
Yes, the work of scientists can lead to nuclear reactors or genetic engineering or computers that are smarter than we are. Scientific research and experimentation can also lead to the banishment of disease, hunger – and ignorance.
For, beyond all the controversy on the uses of scientific knowledge lies the fact that the ultimate goal of science was summed up beautifully by the English poet John Donne, nearly four centuries ago:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful; for thou art not so ….
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!