Is Science Moving Too Quickly? :: Technology Essays

Is Science Moving Too Quickly?Before when I heard the word erudition the first thing came to my mind was human being cloning. However, recently I started thinking deeper toward this issue. Before, I thought everything ab unwrap science is unnatural. Scientists are going against God and Human nature. After reading Bishops and Rifkinss articles my military position changed toward science completely. By comparing and contrasting these great scholars, science make more sense to me. In 1995 J. Michael Bishop wrote an article deploring the detractors of scientific advance handst and exploration. Likewise, in 1988 (republished in 1998) Jeremy Rifkin wrote an article warning of the dangers of advances in the science of biotechnology and commerce for caution in that area. Both men agree on some(prenominal) issues but disagree on many more. The credentials of both men are very different. J. Michael Bishop, a professor of microbiology at UC San Francisco, as the get out of a seemingly obs cure observation (Bishop 239) regarding a virus that causes cancer in chickens, has won a Nobel Prize for identifying genes that are involved in the genesis of human cancer. Jeremy Rifkin is a well- make outn, well-written, informed, respected social activist, a non-for-profit watchdog for Everyman. Both men mention religion. Bishop is annoyed over having to re-fight battles with religious zealots uniform those who press for the t distributivelying of humansism despite the finding for Darwins theory in the Scopes trial. Rifkin appeals to them Human-authored creation could lead to a laboratory-conceived second Genesis which could then lead to a biological Tower of Babel and the spread of chaos throughout the biological world, drowning out the ancient language of creation (Rifkin 245). Bishop is probably more scientifically knowledgeable overall. However, in the article he makes an interesting point unintentionally not in his favor, regarding scientific ignorance. Many adult Ame ricans do not even know that the Earth circles the Sun (Bishop 241). Recently, a prominent member of Congress betrayed his ignorance of how the prostatic gland differs from the testes (Bishop 241). Bishop also says that even scientists do not understand each other. After laboring readinessily to make a text comprehensible by the readers of Scientific American, (a magazine not for the uneducated), he was dismayed by the comment of a solid-state physicist of considerable merit who asked him, What exactly is a gene? (Bishop 242). Likewise he reports that 23 geophysicists could not distinguish amongst DNA and RNA a Nobel Prize winning chemist had never heard of plate tectonics and biologists who thought string theory might have something to do with pasta.