DISCUSSION 
Price: Yes, we are changing the whole system of scientific 
communication; it is now clear that the scientific paper is a 
dead duck. One just doesn’t lay down knowledge in little 
bricks like this any more. We have relinquished this sort of 
task to machine-handling and the scientist now does something 
rather different. He no longer has a personal stake in immor- 
tality by becoming Mr. Boyle of Boyle’s Law: a quite different 
sociology of knowledge is coming into being. 
Brain: It is obvious, I think, that we cannot isolate extra- 
polation from values. What is going to happen depends on 
what people will think good, and what we would like to happen 
depends upon what we now think good in these various contexts. 
I want now to ask you whether in fact there is any conclusion 
to our discussion; whether you think that anything ought to be 
done about it, and if so what? It seems clear that part of the 
difficulty of the situation in which we find ourselves comes from 
the fact that science operates very largely without foresight. 
People do good, in fact, that evil may come, though that is not 
their intention. It is a good thing to abolish malaria, but the 
net result is that the population increases, which puts a strain 
on the current food supplies. It was a Nigerian economist 
writing about this who said: “‘I know I ought not to say this, 
but I do hope that before they improve hygiene any more they 
will do something to improve agriculture.” Chisholm made the 
point that people in under-developed countries are no longer 
accepting the situation as they used to—a situation in which 
50 per cent of the children never grow up, for example, a 
situation only made tolerable by ideas such as reincarnation, a 
situation which rather recalls the acceptance by our great- 
grandparents of the loss of several children in every family, 
which was taken almost as a matter of course. Contact with 
European culture is rapidly changing all that. 
Then we come to the time factor. As Brock has said, we may 
now foresee to some extent what ought to be done, but can we 
catch up with events? Because what is happening now is the 
product of what was done over the last twenty-five or thirty 
years. It seems to me that questions about the world’s food 
366 
