Science and Morals 193 



about the use of power involve moral issues. Since scientists 

 are ordinarily the first people to grasp the meaning of a 

 new kind or dimension of power, they cannot escape a 

 share in the responsibility for its use. Many of the physicists 

 who worked on the atomic bomb both in England and 

 the United States were at least vaguely uneasy about mak- 

 ing it possible to murder tens of thousands of people in 

 one blow, but it remained for the greatest of them to come 

 right out and say that in some sense the physicists of this 

 period have known sin. We are far from having digested 

 that statement and have hardly begun to explore its impH- 

 cations. But it does, I think, mark the end of the time 

 when science could regard itself as completely detached 

 from the moral concerns of man. 



It is by no means only in physics that increases in power 

 heighten the sense of moral responsibility. Progress in 

 biology and medicine now places upon men decisions 

 which used to be left comfortably in the hands of God or 

 to the impersonal forces of nature. Up until very recently, 

 many babies born with grave physical defects did not 

 survive, and many old people who had declined to the 

 state of mere vegetables contracted pneumonia and died 

 peacefully. Now it is possible for a large proportion of 

 them to be kept alive by the use of antibiotics, blood trans- 

 fusions, artificial kidneys, and so on. 



The public has been made aware of the ethical problem 

 through newspaper accounts of certain dramatic cases of 

 euthanasia, but the basic situation is much deeper and 

 more pervasive than these accounts suggest. The fact is 

 that most people who die in their beds could be kept alive 

 for at least a few hours, days, or even months if medicine 

 always did all it knows how to do. There comes a time, 

 however, when the advantages of keeping an unconscious, 

 grossly deteriorated individual alive must be weighed 



