The image which many scientists wish to convey is that the pursuit of "pure" science is "objective" and unsullied by practical economic, political and social concerns. Developments within the Science and Technology Studies (STS) community over the past two decades, however, have sought to break down the supposed barriers between science and society. Leading theorists argue that not only do science and technology influence society, but that, as a human endeavor, society must necessarily affect both the way science and technology develop but also the content of scientific and technological thought. Researchers within STS are now engaged in detailed case studies of how this interaction between science and society occurs. Dr. Shirley Roe is engaged in an important study of the nature of the science-society interaction when biologists struggled to determine the nature and origins of life. Even today, scientists argue about how life began on earth: either by creation, spontaneous generation or transportation from another planet. The last view, however, begs the question since one is then left with the question of how life arose on the planet from which life was transported to earth. Scientists who reject creation argue that conditions on earth in primordial times coalesced in some way so that living organisms sprang to life and evolved. Scientists are trying to reproduce these conditions in order to prove that life could have generated on earth without external interference. Dr. Roe is examining the origins of these debates in French biology of the 18th century. In famous experiments, Tuberville Needham and Georges Buffon tried to demonstrate the existence of conditions in which life can arise. Their opponent, Lazzaro Spallanzani, in a series of brilliant experiments, demonstrated sources of contagion which led to the seeming "spontaneous" growth of new organisms within Needham's primordial brew. Objectivists wishing to defend "pure" science would argue that these are all straight-forward scientific experiments uninfluenced by social concerns. Dr. Roe is challenging this view. She has found that the new biological discoveries of Needham and Buffon became controversial precisely because they were seen at the time as having daring implications for religion and morality. She situates both proponents and opponents of the new biology within the crisis over the philosophes that was so prominent at the time and argues that the new biological evidence for active matter struck at the heart of the notion of a divinely ordered world. By lending support to atheism and materialism the new biology called into question the religious basis for social morality and political order. Attacks on the new biology were motivated by a conservative defense of the established order. The parallelism with contemporary issues of science, religion, and morality are striking. Hence, Dr. Roe's study not only will illuminate the interactions of science and society in the 18th century but will also illuminate many of the concerns of modern religion with advances of contemporary science.
