I see this all the time in discussions over alternative energy and AI: the idea that scientists or corporations can completely suppress, or control the rate of, scientific progress. This has always struck me as odd, because I think on some level that literally anything that’s possible will inevitably be found by somebody. Maybe that’s naive, or could cause such a huge delay that it’s still effective. Maybe I don’t believe in the “great man” concept. Or maybe I just don’t believe that genies can ever be put back into bottles; once someone makes a discovery or realization, it seems to me that it’s too late, no matter what the circumstances.
Of course, the more connected humanity has become, the harder this is. That’s why I can’t help but laugh whenever someone suggests, say, “a pause on AI research” (enforced by who, with what consequences?).
Am I missing something here? How hard can anyone today stop or suppress something once discovered? For how long?
Minor stuff, certainly. Some time ago, I had found some studies that said HFCS had a lower satiety rating than cane sugar. Now, when I searched kinda recently, I could no longer find those studies- but I did find a few that said HFCS was fine as far as satiety went- but they were funded by soda or corn orgs or companies.
And Big Tobacco hid that smoking causes lung cancer for a decade or more.
Internal tobacco company memos showed that executives knew and hid the scientific evidence that smoking was deadly in 1953. In 1964 the Surgeon General announced that smoking causes lung cancer. So, for about a decade- and millions of smoking deaths- Big Tobacco repressed science.
AFAIK the only stuff that’s actually being suppressed is stuff that’s truly dangerous. Things like the genetic code for smallpox, details on how to make nuclear weapons, etc. Other than that, I think it’s more a matter of propaganda to try to sway the public against certain findings that would harm an industry, and / or restrictions on commercialization (things like Monsanto’s policies towards the farmers that use their product) than any true suppression.
It seems to me (a non-scientist) that there are a number of steps before new science takes hold and reaches general acceptance. Steps like publication, replication, and recognition for example. Controversial science that has active scientific opposition can go on for some time before it is either disproved or generally accepted. It seems likely that even good science might get lost somewhere along that trail, and be forgotten before general acceptance is reached.
Even once generally accepted, though, I think if the repression could be imposed powerfully enough and long enough, the knowledge could be lost. I don’t think it’s a practical fear at this time, I don’t think there is any entity that has that much power or control over human knowledge.
I do have to wonder if AI itself might reach that stage at some point, where their goal might be to direct humans back to a simpler, less independent society where scientific research is discouraged or disallowed.
AQ Kahn stole a bunch of info about nuclear reactors from the Netherlands, and used that to help build nuclear weapons in Pakistan. He also shared that info with North Korea. Now North Korea shares nuclear technology with Iran, Syria and Libya under Gadaffi.
The USSR stole a lot of nuclear secrets from the US. The USSR helped China build their nukes. France helped Israel build their nukes. I think something like 40 countries could build nuclear weapons if they actually wanted to. Its been less than a century and nuclear secrets are not really secrets anymore. There are just a lot of economic and military punishments for pursuing nuclear weapons that deters nations.
Smallpox’s DNA is public record.
There are military secrets that get suppressed and that should be suppressed. But even a lot of those end up leaking or being stolen sooner or later. Supposedly China’s 5th gen fighter jet is based off of stolen blueprints of the US’s 5th gen fighter jets.
Part of what represses new science is ridicule when people have an emotional and financial investment in the existing paradigm. That can take new ideas decades to overcome, but even then the new idea usually wins out.
I can’t think of a single scientific advance that has ever been successfully repressed. (Caveat: if one has how would we know?)
Lots of now well-regarded findings took time to be followed-up, of course. Science is run by humans and can’t avoid their biases. Publish an article in an obscure journal in a non-major language and it will languish. Go against the consensus of top scientists and see how many cites you get. Get a reputation for arrogance and watch funding get cut.
What makes science so successful is that everything gets written down and nothing is forgotten. Doing the literature search or prior art search is absolutely basic. Dig into the story of any breakthrough and you’ll see that. The indexes don’t get scrubbed, they just get bigger.
And anybody can do the search. When I wrote a book on lactose intolerance I spent a year going to the med school library to flip through the big fat annual volumes to dig up what had been published. I read every paper ever, except for the aforementioned few which were in such obscure journals that even a major med school didn’t subscribe.
The problem today is such an overabundance of purported research that some good results might get overlooked. Needle in a haystack is almost of effective as sweeping out the barn. But still two different things.
Tobacco and global warming make nice examples of how it can work for a time. The link between tobacco and cancer, and carbon emissions and warming were suspected by many scientists and other people. What the corporate campaigns did was change the confidence in those links, not the idea the links existed.
So the movement from “a few studies show…but they have flaws” to “overwhelming evidence supports…” took decades longer than it should have.
In other cases I’d say it’s an engineering or industrial problem that represses the science. Nuclear stuff falls in this category, as well as advanced microchip design and manufacturing. The science behind it is just talk without the industrial capacity to put it to use.
Of course all of those are big things. As mentioned, little discoveries may languish for years before being rediscovered and found to be important. A famous example is Mendel’s discoveries about genetics. The extremely important flip side to that is you can’t go grab some obscure paper from 30 years ago that no one has ever bothered to replicate or follow-up on, and expect it to be a world changing idea, or even correct.
That obscure article wasn’t repressed, it was just unnoticed.
Among my fellow students in the mid to late 50s, when we wanted to bum a cigarette off one another, we asked for a cancerette. We knew, whatever Big tobacco tried to suppress.
Yeah almost by definition it’s not possible. If it’s possible it’s not science, it’s just something someone did one time. The fundamental bit of science is sharing reproducible results. Even before science was science, the sharing bit was important
In the end I think the correct answers/solutions will come out but they may may well be suppressed for years or decades or more. See: Lead in gasoline. The researcher who found it was a problem was made a pariah by the company that sold lead and wanted to continue. Took decades to remove lead from gasoline (and other things). So, eventually the good science prevailed but it took a long time to get there (and at least one guy’s career).
I’m gonna be contrarian and say maybe there’s a lot of science discoveries that have been made that we don’t know about, because they’ve been repressed successfully!
Well…there are conspiracy theories that some people have invented some great new energy source that will revolutionize the world and the oil companies buy the rights to it and then bury it. It would not surprise me if, when the day comes there is little oil left (not soon but it is finite) the oil companies will magically tell us they have a solution! Also, it will cost everyone a little more than oil did.
Sooner or later someone will come up with the same idea that was repressed I would think.
It is not that the science itself has to be repressed actively, but it might be difficult to obtain funding to repeat an experiment, or a variation of an experiment, that has already— supposedly— been done:
It’s been done successfully for a limited time in limited parts of the world, for example the suppression of “Jewish Physics” in Nazi Germany, or Lysenkoism in communist Russia. Also, the suppression of science that conflicted with some people’s reading of the Bible, for example the Christian suppression of the heliocentric universe. Even without active suppression, there is also forgotten science, like Greek astronomy that took ~1800 years to resurrect.
The term “coffin nail” dates back to the nineteenth century, just a few years after the advent of mass-produced cigarettes.
Later research that showed the harm done by second-hand smoke may have been delayed longer than it should have (I say this as someone whose father smoked even at the dinner table despite my childhood asthma).
The thing about science is that everyone is working on everything, everywhere, and because everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants, it’s always a short hop to the next step. If you make a huge breakthrough and get suppressed, 1, 5, 10 years later, someone else is going to have the same breakthrough, maybe in a completely different country with different priorities. No matter how hard the powers that be want to suppress something, it’s going to keep on popping up, and at some point it’ll break free.
There was a sci-fi story I read many years ago, called “Half the Battle”, about people trying to rebuild science and technology after the collapse of civilization. The point was, just knowing that something was possible was half the battle. Making nuclear weapons is the classic example. How many countries have made their own at this point? The “secrets” of the bomb are mostly just some fancy engineering, and probably aren’t even the only way to make them work. But knowing it’s possible is all it really takes to make a bomb, unless someone bombs you to try to stop you.
Things like smallpox are only limited by the availability of samples. We all know roughly where they’re kept, but it’s the physical security that makes it hard to access. If you found a sample out in the wild, it would be pretty straightforward to produce it in bulk. The basic techniques for that are the same for almost any biological research.
Smoking causing Lung cancer was repressed for about a decade.
Right. We lost at least a decade.
Sure- people knew it caused a nasty cough, and made some lung conditions worse. So, they just thought- when it gets bad, I will quit and it will all be okay. But the Big C is the scary one. Quitting doesnt make lung cancer go away.
Actually, smoking causing lung cancer is a great example of science never being repressed, even though its findings were successfully challenged for a period. A fascinating, though long, read is “The history of the discovery of the cigarette–lung cancer link: evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global toll” by Robert N Proctor. Of course it’s true that Big Tobacco spent billions to counteract those findings, but that didn’t repress them. In fact it was a very short time from the evidence becoming overwhelming in the early 50s to the Surgeon General’s Report of 1964, presumably the decade you’re saying the findings were repressed, at least a very short time by government action standards.
It’s much like saying that global climate change science has been repressed. It hasn’t. That Big Carbon has spent billions challenging the science is the existential opposite of repressing it.