Fear of science

This week I watched a movie The Mist, a Sci-Fi horror adapted from Stephen King's novel. Of course the movie has something to do with mist. Well, the storyline is sort of like this. After a night of thunderstorm, a unusual mist rolls into a small town where everybody knows each other . It is to the residents surprise that there seems to be something in the mist that catch and kill people. They later find out that those human-hunting monsters lurking in the thick mist were actually unleashed by some secret scientific experiments or actions carried out by the US military.

Many people found this movie successful in creating the creepy and breath-holding atmosphere. But to me, it is more like a vivid example of people's fear of science.

Although people in general agree that science and technology bring about positive impact on our society, there is a concomitant worry that the development of science may go beyond our control. Although imaginary, the reckless military scientific action and the ensuing detrimental impact reflect lively people's worry in "run-away science."

We have seen the same fear in the development of nuclear power, where people were excited about its ability to solve energy problems on the one hand and worried about its unexpected outcome on the other hand. The case of nanotechnology is probably more recent. A sizable proportion of people in a national opinion survey actually consider the "self-replicating nano-robots going out of control" as an important risk of nanotechnology.

These examples indicate that there exists "ambivalence" in people's attitude toward science. Unless scientists can claim confidently that they have a full control on what they are doing, people will always be skeptic about science. The mist is not the only instance that script writers express such fear (for American people). The movie--Godzilla, where radiations emitted from French nuclear test mutated lizards into gigantic monsters--was actually one that reflects the similar fear.

Are these only imaginations or likely to come true? I don't know. But seeing the fact that the catastrophes usually come from "secret" governmental or military operations, keeping the process of scientific development open to the public may not be a bad idea to reduce people's level of fear.

P.S. For those interested in the movie, please see an article in the NY Times.

Something Creepy This Way Creeps, and It Spells Bad News