173 
MS. PFUND: Well, I think that they would bring different perspective 
to the whole issue. 
DR. GINSBERG: But you were talking about essentially scientific judg- 
ment of data. That is the issue, I think, that you were — improving the 
ability of the local biohazards committees. 
MS. PFUND: I think there are other issues. I mean, it may be fine if 
this investigator has purified the DNA or whatever, but if he has sloppy work- 
ing techniques, if he runs a very informal lab when he should be following 
strict containment rules, then I think that is not going to be brought up by 
the scientific discussion. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: I think we will move to the next witness. Dr. Bernard 
Davis, do you still wish to speak? Five minutes — 
DR. DAVIS: Less. 
DR. FREDRICKSON: Less, very good. Then we will move to the public 
wi tnesses . 
DR. DAVIS. I understand you called on me earlier, and I am sorry I 
missed part of Mr. Dach ' s presentation, who spoke when I came back in, be- 
cause he raised again the question of the relation between science and pol- 
itics, and I would like to make just a few remarks on this. He made the 
statement that, in effect, there is no such thing as objectivity in science, 
it is an illusion; and I suspect that many people in this room think that is 
all wrong, and many people in this room think that is absolutely right. And 
since it seems to play such a large role in the thinking of some people who 
are very much concerned about the issues that we are dealing with here, it 
seems to me worth a little bit of analysis. 
I would say that it is wrong and pernicious, and the reason that it is 
wrong is very simple; it is based on a play on words. It is based on a 
failure to recognize that the word "science" has several different meanings. 
Science is a body of knowledge. The word "science" is used to refer to a 
methodology used to find that knowledge, and the word "science" is used to 
refer to a whole set of activities people engage in in employing that method- 
ology to achieve the knowledge. 
The activities are certainly not objective. The decision to do this 
experiment and not that one, the decision to work in the field and not 
that one, somebody else's decision to give you the money or not, those all 
involve value judgments which are not scientific. That has got nothing 
to do with whether the final product can be dissected as free as is humanly 
possible of political or other considerations. And if a given individual 
cannot free himself of such distorting considerations, the scientific com- 
munity has evolved powerful methods for correcting errors that creep in. 
It is not infallible, but it is a method that nothing else that human beings 
have ever devised can compare with as a means of finding the objective truths 
of nature that lie there waiting for us to find. 
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