Is there a rebellion against scientific knowledge?

• Author: Park, Robert L.

Splinter groups of geneticists, environmentalists, and physicists are making headlines by blaming technological progress for the woes of the planet.

THE UNABOMBER, who had been killing and maiming people--mostly academics--for two decades, explained in a letter to The New York Times that "We would not want anyone to think we have any desire to hurt professors who study archaeology, history, literature, or harmless stuff like that. The people we are out to get are the scientists and engineers.... We advocate eliminating industrial society."

The Unabomber, though, posed no more threat to industrial society than random bolts of lightning. There is simply no way back. Earth can not sustain its burgeoning population of 5,500,000,000 people without modern agriculture, transportation, immunization, sewage treatment, etc. With no control on population growth, technology is in a desperate race just to stay even. Nevertheless, growing numbers, in one way or another, share some of the Unabomber's romantic longing for a simpler world. Unable or unwilling to comprehend the technology on which they depend, they are deeply distrustful of the science behind it and reject the Western scientific tradition that created it.

It is a romantic rebellion, led not by the semi-literate yahoos of fundamentalist religion, who are the traditional foes of science, but by serious academics who regard themselves as intellectuals. They range from environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin, who sees disaster lurking behind all technological progress, to a University of Delaware philosophy professor, Sandra Harding, who seems to believe that the laws of physics were constructed to maintain white male dominance. An Afro-centric writer, Hunter Adams, contends that black Africans were "the wellspring of creativity and knowledge on which the foundation of all science, technology and engineering rest." John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, responds to patients who believe they have been abducted by aliens by agreeing with them. A Harvard-trained physicist, John Hagelin of Maharishi International University, claims that experts in transcendental meditation can generate "consciousness fields" that induce tranquility throughout society.

What these people share is a profound hostility to the reliance on reason and evidence that is the basis of modern science. This anti-science rebellion has spread through popular culture like a virus.

In the film "Jurassic Park," the premise is that, having gained control over the genetic basis of life itself, scientists use their incredible power to make an amusement park populated by flesh-eating dinosaurs. The fictional theme of arrogant scientists creating monsters they can not control is hardly new. Hubris, after all, was the downfall of Dr. Frankenstein. However, the same theme is to be found at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History.

The "Science in American Life" exhibit at the Smithsonian actually was paid for with money provided by American chemists. Concerned that people give little thought to the impact of science on their lives, the American Chemical Society approached the Smithsonian in 1989 about creating a permanent exhibit to remind viewers of how they benefit from science. The chemists raised $5,300,000 to develop it.

Historians at the Smithsonian had their own ideas of what science meant to American life. When I visited the exhibit shortly after it opened in 1994, a middle-aged guide in a white lab coat explained: "In the '20s, we thought scientists were gods; now we know they're the source of our biggest problems." That's not exactly what the chemists had in mind. They envisioned something along the lines of the old Dupont commercial--"Better things for better living through chemistry." What they got was closer to Love Canal.

The first stop on a tour of the exhibit is a re-creation of the 1876 chemistry laboratory of Ira Remson at Johns Hopkins University. It's a good place to start. In 1879, Constantine Fahlberg, a German scientist working in...