In the wake of the death of his beloved mother, he declared: "It is the intimate which seeks utterance in me, seeks to make its cry heard, confronting generality, confronting science".
The controversy goes to the heart of one of the most fundamental issues confronting science in a free society how to balance the right to free scientific inquiry with the need for scientific responsibility to humanity at large.
Another terrific aspect of the play is that Michael does confront the science and writes about it with such elegance and clarity that a lot of very difficult propositions, like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, are so vividly elucidated that I think they do live for a general audience.
The former president of MIT discusses challenges and policy issues confronting academia, science and technology, and the world at large.
In my latest book, The Workshop and the World, I describe what they can teach us about confronting modern science denial.
Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes the President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Craig Calhoun, NYU's University Professor of the Social Sciences, for a discussion of the challenges confronting social science research.
Reading "Buddhism in the Modern World," a collection of essays edited by David L. McMahan, I was struck by the pragmatic tone of the contributors, their preoccupation with what Mr. McMahan identified as "globalization, gender issues, and the ways in which Buddhism has confronted modernity, science, popular culture and national politics".
Yet most of the real-world dilemmas confronted by science -- and particularly medical and biological researchers -- involve good men and women in full command of their senses and choices weighing the consequences of novel actions undertaken for the advance of knowledge and the alleviation of suffering.
As vom Saal and Hughes argued in their article (2005), the appropriate technical response when confronted with science conducted by interested parties is to use that fact as an alert to look, perhaps more deeply than one otherwise might have, for "what specific factors, other than source of funding," may be associated with the results of that science.
