The Need to Know: Utilitarian and Esthetic Values of Biomedical Science

Abstract

When a practicing scientist faces an audience concerned with the ethics of his discipline, he feels somewhat like an author being asked out to lunch by his editor. In the long run, to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, it is always the author who pays. And I suspect that, when a philosopher asks “What new knowledge is needed in the biomedical sciences?” the scientist is expected to pay by agreeing that the question can be answered. But I doubt that it can be answered, suspecting that there is no way of determining in advance what shall or shall not be known, what knowledge we do or do not need. Therefore, I will not be able to predict for you whether what we need to know is in the realm of manipulative genetics, the reconstitution of cell membranes, or even the conquest of neoplasia. I should like, instead, to consider those values which, for a working experimentalist, underlie our need to know.