Ethical Considerations 
pre-existing evils until they are seen to be intolerable. Two 
hundred years ago, you and I might have been walking about 
with swords, but we are not now allowed to walk about with 
Mills bombs or automatic pistols. I pointed this out forty 
years ago, and was rather complacent about it. The trouble is 
that everything is happening too quickly with these atomic 
bombs. When an evil is sufficiently magnified everyone recog- 
nizes it as an evil, and that is one of the things that science does. 
Wright: ‘Yo return to the question of what we, as a group, 
can do about this: I have worked with politicians a great deal 
and I deprecate the view that they are a different race. I think 
government has been defined as the art of the possible, and this 
in fact is what the politician is trying to do. As a scientific 
adviser it was my job to point out to the politician what I felt 
to be desirable, after obtaining as much information as I 
could on a given scientific point. But it was /zs job to see what 
he could get done. This is less easy, because he has to measure 
the possibilities of public acceptance of alternative policies. 
It seems to me that we overlook this aspect of what can be done, 
and that we should not say ‘Well, we as scientists would do 
this, but of course the politicians stop us.” This is a negative 
approach; we and the politicians must together try to discover 
how we can take the people with us. This is primarily, of course, 
a matter of education. 
Price: I would like to take up Wright’s challenge. There is 
something we can do directly or very shortly in the future. 
Part of the business of the transition to a Big Science phase is 
that scientists are becoming very much more numerous and 
are becoming immensely more powerful and prestigeous. With- 
in this generation the scientist will cease to be the man on tap, 
and become the man on top. The motivation of scientists 
seems to be changing in an interesting manner, so that the 
course of direct political action, previously anathema, now 
seems to be becoming respectable. Scientists are now extruded 
rather more rapidly and numerously from the research front 
and they get—in the vernacular—kicked upstairs to positions 
of political responsibility, so that many scientists actually have 
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