How complex is science and technology? How many interactions, side effects, and unintended consequences are there from the most mundane (and the most sophisticated) of our developments? The old adage that “the more we know, the more we find out that we don’t know” appears to be particularly accurate in the 21st century.
In general, we find out the particularly negative consequences of our developments far sooner that we find out the positive ones. Take nanotech for example, a very large amount of research is being expended to both develop this technology for applications from electronic circuitry to textiles, while a lesser but still large amount of research is dedicated to determining the effect of those same products on their exposure to the human body and the environment. Take biotech, an enormous amount of research was dedicated in the 1990s and early part of this decade on the sequencing of the human genome (and other genomes as well). During the period of the Human Genome Project, junk DNA was pretty much ignored, hence the term ‘junk.’ Now researchers are finding that this junk DNA has a relation to how, where, and when the genes that were mapped in the HGP are expressed. And then look at a NASA report issued this week that cites human activity as being mostly responsible for global warming (if there is global warming of course), neglecting of course possible cyclic solar or natural terrestrial effects. And we pretty much had it all decided that an asteroid or similar impact in the Yucatan area of Mexico was responsible for the decline of the Triassic dinosaurs. That, of course, was before other researchers came up with alternative possibilities that included biological diseases and solar events. And then the PC was considered to be the only truly practical and usable computing device and Apple Macs were considered to be too pricey and narrow to survive for long.
For more than 30 years, R&D Magazine ran a column written by Fred Jueneman called the Innovative Notebook. In these columns, Fred looked at alternative possibilities for many commonly accepted scientific ideas. Fred (a former researcher who now lives in Northern California and writes music on his Mac) gave us a legacy that is more true today than ever, that we should never accept the accepted and never ignore any possibility.
