Royal Society discussion -: Science, technology, and social responsibility

This meeting was set up to discuss whether individual scientists and technologists should be held personally responsible for their discoveries; what their employers' obligations are; how to balance the threats and risks of new technologies against the opportunities; and whether we need new public policies to deal with such issues. While voices from the middle ground were heard, there was a camp at one extreme of the discussion maintaining that science is an impartial quest for truth conducted according to unchanging rules of scientific procedure; and at the opposite extreme was a camp arguing that the traditional distinction between science and technology is blurring, and that science and the results of scientific inquiry are intimately bound up with their social context and cannot be considered in isolation from it. These differing philosophies were evident in most of the sessions.