POST-MODERN SCIENCE

INTRODUCTION

• “In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the
philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their
enquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of the century, said, ‘The sole
remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.’ What a comedown from the great tradition
of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant.”
- Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

The rise of post-modern science (interdisciplinary, team-driven, driven by technology, highly specialized,
dominated by professionals, and extremely powerful as an analytical tool)
 INTRODUCTION

• How did we transition from “modern” to “post-modern” science?

• We’ll look at three specific examples:

• The transition from the Newtonian to the relativity/quantum view of the universe
• The DNA revolution in the mid-20th century
• The neuroscience revolution around CRISPR
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• The Heliocentric Revolution

• Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

• Johannes Kepler (1571-630) and the laws of motion

• Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and the telescope

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• Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1726)

• Calculus and gravity
• Mathematical proof for Kepler’s 3rd law of motion
• Newton’s three laws of motion and the conservation of energy

• The universe operates according to uniform laws that are the same at all
times and places; it is a picture of absolute certainty
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• The twentieth-century physics revolution

• Max Planck (1858-1947) – light is not a wave put a particle and it pulses out in quanta

• Albert Einstein (1879-1955) – Newtonian conceptions of gravity are not entirely

accurate; we have to understand that space and time are linked and that heavy objects
can “bend” light making the universe appear to be relative. We know this as Special
and General Relativity.
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• What happens when you combine quantum mechanics with relativity: you
can generate lots of power

• The Manhattan District, c. 1941-1945

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• The Manhattan District

• Recruiting “Jewish” Physicists

• Fission – Otto Hahan and Fritz Strassman

• The refugees try to warn the Americans – Enrico Fermi

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• Manhattan District
• The bomb team – led by J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)

• Processing plutonium and uranium

• Problem-solving – General Leslie Groves (1896-1970)

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• Manhattan District
• President Harry Truman (1884-1972) and the decision to drop the bomb

• The power of post-modern science

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• Charles Darwin (1809-1882) – natural selection

• Gregor Mendel (1822-1888) – genes govern inheritance

• Experimented with pea plants
• one expression of each trait (open versus curled leaves) seemed to be dominant over a
recessive version
• (A+a)2 = A2+2Aa+a2
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• What are genes and what do they look like – DNA?

• Hans Delbrűck – genes must be some kind of molecule

• Oswald T. Avery – 1in 1944 his lab found that infectious pneumococcus transformed
non-infectious pneumococcus using deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
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• James Watson (1928 - ) and Francis Crick (1916-2004) leading a large team
figured out the DNA functioned as a double-helix
• It was held together by base pairs via four compounds (adenine and thymine,
cytosine and guanine)
• This explained how it could split and replicate
• Watson and Crick earned a Nobel Prize in 1962. The former was 34 and the
latter 46
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• Specialization in action – the Cambridge Team

• But what happened to the rest of the team? – Watson on women and
minorities

• Watson lost his Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory position in 2007

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• Psychiatry

• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

• Id, ego, and superego

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• Neurons – by the 1880s scientists knew that neurons sent signals through the
body
• By the 1930s they new that chemical neurotransmitters crossed the gap
between neuron and muscle at synapses
• The discovery of DNA further cemented the model that the nervous system
functioned like an electrical grid and the brain like a binary computer
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• The Human Genome Project - by the 1980s the technology became available
to sequence the human genome
• The federal government provided $3 billion in funding, mostly from the
Department of Energy
• This involved hundreds of researchers at dozens of labs
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• Craig Venter and Celera Genomics – Venter moved from the NIH to a non-
profit research company that shifted to for-profit status in 1998
• Celera Genomics completed a rough sequence of the human genome at the
same time as the publicly-funded researchers
• Celera tried to patent the human genome, but lost in the courts
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• CRISPR - clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats

• Scientists working on bacteriophages found that some could detect and
destroy DNA from rival viruses via CRISPR, which used the protein Cas9
• They realized it would be possible to create an artificial virus that would
remove DNA fragments from an organism for therapeutic purposes
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• In 2012 Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published a paper

proving that CRISPR Cas9 could be coded into RNA and used to modify
genomic DNA (this earned them the 2020 Nobel in Chemistry)

• A permanent therapy for heritable diseases such as Tay-Sachs?

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• What are the moral implications of this immense scientific power?

• Will it be used to manage heritable and infectious diseases?
• Will it be used to make designer humans?
• Will it be made available to all people as a natural right?
• Will it be available only to the wealthy?
• Will it be a public good or a source of profit?
• Will it be weaponized (like E=mc2)?