On a trip to the US last week, I had one of the most unexpected conversations about science I think I’ve ever had. I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts - just across the Charles River from Boston - where I was visiting the labs of some scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Cambridge is home to one of the world’s greatest concentrations of intellectual brain power. Not only does it play host to MIT, which is former or current home to some 59 Nobel prize winners, but the super brains of Harvard University are also just down the road.
However the conversation in question wasn’t with some wizened emeritus professor of advanced genius studies, nor even a white-hot young researcher ready to change the way we see the world. It was with a taxi driver, whose cab I jumped into en route to the train station.
He was in his late forties, perhaps, and his mustache and short hair were flecked with grey. When I slid into the back seat, he turned around to ask in an accent tinged with French how my day had been - so I told him, genuinely, that it had been great. “Why so?” he asked, after which I found myself launching into an exposition of the wonders of artificial intelligence and robotics.
He seemed pretty interested in the idea, so we talked for a little while about machine learning and other subjects before he asked me what use all this research was. How would all the money spent on robots help mankind, he wondered?
I paused for a moment to phrase my answer, but he got in first. “I can tell what you think,” he said. “I can see by the smile on your face.” It was true, I confessed, I am generally pretty positive about the benefits of science. “But you know what Bertrand Russell said,” he rebutted. “Science without conscience is not science.”
Russell said a lot of different things about science during his life, although that particular quote wasn’t one that I had heard before. If Russell did say it - something I haven’t been able to confirm - perhaps he meant it in the context of the development of nuclear weapons. But my taxi driver was using it in a more economic sense. “How will people in poor countries benefit from all these robots?” he said.
Regardless of whether or not the quote came from the pen of the British logician, this Massachusetts cabbie was making a very good point. Since the days of the internet bubble, the issue of a technological divide separating the developed and developing worlds has been a real concern.
It’s a problem that hasn’t really improved since then. Economic disparity does divide the world into digital haves and have-nots. The same will probably apply in the future to things such as nanotechnology and robots, and, infamously, is already the case when it comes to access to medical technologies.
By this point, the taxi driver was skillfully negotiating a traffic jam heading into Boston while more than holding up his end of a debate about the ethics of scientific research. Before long, we had moved on to the related topic of HIV/Aids, which he considered to be the most important scientific challenge of our age. Why were governments not spending more money on discovering a cure for Aids, he asked. I responded that the same could be said of influenza or malaria, which also kill millions of people.
And so the conversation went on, as we threaded our way through Boston towards the train station. I was beginning to wonder whether the selection criteria for taxi drivers in Cambridge were as rigorous as those for MIT and Harvard when the driver explained that in fact he was a research pharmacist who had once worked for a big pharmaceutical company.
”But my diploma is not from the US, so they don’t recognise it here,” he said, which is why he was driving cabs. He didn’t seem exactly bitter about this state of affairs, but there was a hint of anger in his voice. “You know,” he said, “there is no division between scientists, but here they make a distinction.”
His tale obviously isn’t unique - around the world, professionals from developing countries end up doing other kinds of work. But as I jumped out of his cab into the heat of the Massachusetts summer, it made me think about what science loses when it shuts people out.
These days, young scientists are finding it more difficult to get into countries such as the US and the UK. In May, the US National Academies of Science reported that science was being harmed by a sense among international students that the US was “a less welcoming place than other places”. In July, UK universities urged the government to scrap plans that would prevent international students from appealing if their visa applications were rejected.
Ultimately, science is an international business and the best thing for scientific research is to allow movement to be as free as safely possible. To do otherwise might foster interesting cab rides, but creates a big downside.
