OPTIMISTIC SCIENTISTS

It seems that at one time scientists were generally optimists, although it's pretty hard to recall those days when you consider our current crop of white lab coat-wearing doomsday predictors. In earlier times, scientists were people who studied the physical world and unraveled many of its secrets. Indeed they provided mankind with many wonders and generally improved our lot in life. We are flying around in airplanes, hooking up with the entire world via telephone and computers, living longer and enjoying better health due to the technological and scientific advances of these earnest people. Diseases that had plagued humanity for eons were cured, nutrition was improved and even M&M's made with dark chocolate were given to us for our enjoyment. Nothing not to like about all that.

And indeed scientists were always talking about how rosy the future looked with some of the breakthroughs they were working on. Anybody with a few miles on them recalls the last chapter of our grade school history books, excitedly titled "The Future!" or, more majestically: "Mankind's Forward March!" in which the world of the future contained all manner of life-improving gadgets and a small empire of space colonies. We'd all live to be 300, robots would clean up after us and if you felt like flying around you'd just strap on your personal jet pack and take off into the wild blue yonder.

No mention was made of nuclear meltdowns, giant oil spills, chemical poisoning of rivers and people, the continuation of mass starvation on much of the planet or the melting of the ice caps that would introduce Ohio and Nevada to the joys of ocean-front living. We had it all under control, you see, everything was going to turn out just swell. We trusted our scientists as they provided us with miracle product after miracle product, drained our pesky swamplands and lined our homes with asbestos to keep us toasty warn in the winter.

Well, we all know how a lot of that turned out, and the cancer plague from which we suffer is but one symptom. And it turns out those pesky swamplands came in pretty handy to Mother Nature as a tool for balancing our environment, just like the rain forests once thought to a great source of exotic wood. Live and learn, eh? So now the same breed of people who brought us all these life-enhancing miracles are predicting the end of life as we know it because of the wondrous things they have invented. Seems we had too much of a good thing and now it's time to pay the piper, Mother Nature. Kind of like the Roaring Twenties that led to the Whimpering Thirties of the Great Depression, but much worse.

At least that's one take on the whole doomsday thing. Maybe it's not science that's the problem, just maybe it's our new breed of scientists, as dour a bunch of nay-sayers as we've seen since the advent of the Inquisition, and we all know what a dour and humor-free bunch were the Inquisitors. Today's scientists can't seem to get enough publicity for predicting a dire cataclysm for mankind due to our many sins, mostly consisting of listening to these bozos in the first place. That's a pretty bizarre and creative approach to religion, one has to admit: You believed in the faith too deeply and followed our commandments too faithfully so now you must suffer grievously. Put that in your hash pipe and smoke it! Maybe then their incoherent blathering will make some sense.

Ah, sense, that's what's missing here, and I won't insult you by calling it common sense because it apparently isn't very common at all. Many people don't think it makes much sense to have the government regulating scientific endeavors, saying things like it breaches the rules of capitalism and stifles creativity. So the government loosens its regulatory powers. Then what you get is Love Canal and untested drugs poisoning people. The asbestos debacle comes to mind as well. As it turns out, as long ago as 1928 asbestos industry leadership knew very well that there "could be a problem" with people's lungs in regard to asbestos. As for myself, I need look no further than my own father, who died a long and tortuous death due to tiny fibers of asbestos lodged in his lungs. That certainly was "a problem" for him and our family.

So perhaps a bit more testing and stringent regulation of miracle products is in order as we march into Mankind's Brave New World. And let us not condemn science for the fix we're in, since science is the medium we used to identify our problems. The Neanderthals probably blamed the spirits for the end of the Ice Age during which they thrived, but at least we are aware of the forces of nature and our own impact upon them. And maybe we ought to start recruiting some new types of people to wear the white lab coats, people who are aware that science is a double edged sword. And people who do not feel it is their duty to consider those while lab coats to be religious vestments ordaining them with powers beyond their status as ordinary human beings who just happen to be scientists. There is no crystal ball in the laboratory, people, just work to be done. As my father used to say: "Hop to it."