Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic
Park is an allegation against the unreasonable use of science.
In the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, one of the characters in the book:
Scientists are
actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they
can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They
conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don't do it,
someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to
do it first. That's the ga me in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an
aggressive, penetrative act... Discovery is always a rape of the natural world.
Always.
This problem arises especially in the
scientific field that serves as the basis for Crichton's novel, genetic
engineering, which poses many important ethical problems. There are
many things that we can already do, or are close to achieving, but should they
be done? I will mention a few:
