THE 1970s: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: OVERVIEW

Meeting Ground

The decade of the 1970s was a meeting ground for two opposing attitudes about science and technology: optimism that science could bring progress and prosperity and radical mistrust of its power to change life for the better. In the 1950s there had been a general public consensus that science advanced the power of the United States and made domestic life in the newly constructed suburbs easier. In the 1960s, however, many Americans questioned the uses of U.S. power, especially during the Vietnam War, and they viewed the domestic ease facilitated by technology as corruptive to spiritual values and as destructive to the environment. In the 1970s these two attitudes toward science often clashed and combined, making the debate over the progress of science often as important as the progress with science.

An Era of Debate

In the 1970s the tendency to question authority spread among a wider segment of the population. Ordinary people who disagreed with the directions science took asked questions and argued with the experts. Scientists, industrialists, and governmental bureaucrats—the "experts"—were no longer simply trusted to make all the decisions about the use and development of science. Overt protest of scientific and technological priorities was no longer unusual. In the controversy over genetic engineering, most Americans felt it was perfectly appropriate for them to have opinions about basic research issues. This boldness would have been un-thinkable two decades earlier. Fundamentalists and evangelical Christians, who had abandoned their opposition to the teaching of evolution in the middle third of the twentieth century, began again to argue that evolutionary science could be questioned. The presence of toxic waste and pesticides in the soil and water became subjects of concern and opposition in small communities across the country. The daily news was full of controversy over what scientists and engineers should do. At the same time, U.S. society refused to give up its hopefulness and awe at the wonders accomplished by science.

Optimism

Perhaps the best symbol of American faith in science was the excitement about the exploration of space. The space program, especially the manned moon flights early in the decade, seemed to symbolize the strength of the United States and its unlimited technical and scientific capabilities. A measure of its popularity is the extent to which product marketing tried to associate itself with astronauts. Tang, a popular orange-flavored drink, was "the breakfast of astronauts." Food Sticks, a sweet, chewy snack, and Actifed, a nasal decongestant and antihistamine, were advertised as having been taken on Apollo flights. The Volkswagen Beetle, a type of automobile, compared itself to a lunar module.

Understanding

The faith in scientific progress typical of the 1950s was evident in the public response to new technologies that brought the world closer together. People would understand each other better through faster air travel and better telephones. Personal computers could give everybody unlimited access to information that previously had been limited to large corporations. Even the distance between species narrowed as primatologists taught apes and chimpanzees to use human languages so they could tell us how the world looked from their perspective.

The Vietnam Syndrome

Yet the realization that progress could bring destruction as well as cooperation also grew. By 1970 a majority of Americans opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam and wanted a withdrawal of troops. Science and technology symbolized the horror of war to its opponents. The sounds of the Huey helicopter and machine-gun fire became the audio signatures of the war, replayed endlessly on the evening news. American planes rained fire and poison on Vietnam. Napalm, Agent Orange, and white phosphorus chemical technology destroyed crops, forests, and mangrove swamps and burned combatants and civilians alike. The surreal mathematics of the Pentagon's daily body counts—which, when added up, would have every Vietnamese man, woman, and child dead more than once—seemed a further example of out-of-control science and technology.

Asking for the Moon

Even the Apollo space program could be criticized as serving elite goals and contributing to the uneven distribution of national resources. Democrats, seeking to recapture the White House in 1972, promised to scale back space exploration and redirect the funds to education, the war on poverty, and other social programs. Entertainer and social critic Gil Scott Heron contrasted the deprivation of black life in the ghetto with the extravagance of putting "Whitey on the moon." The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was particularly irritating to the black community because it had the worst record of any government agency for hiring black Americans for any position—never mind as astronauts.

Scientists and Engineers

The science professions were affected by the same social trends as the rest of society. Many were horrified by the Vietnam War. Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson noted that scientists concerned over the military exploitation of their work were altering the direction of their research. At the 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one member threw a tomato at former vice-president Hubert Humphrey to protest the war, an unheard-of breach of decorum. But some of the same people who questioned the profession's ability to do harm believed in its capacity to do good. Physicists, who had been shaken decades earlier by their role in creating weapons of mass destruction, searched enthusiastically for particles smaller than the atom, the fundamental building blocks of matter. Astronomers looked for signs of life in the solar system. Chemists and engineers sought ways to undo the damage of pollution.

Decade's End

There was no clear resolution to the debates begun in the 1970s. Some things were halted as a result of public outcry. DDT, Agent Orange, and some aerosol sprays, believed to be damaging to humans and the environment, were banned. The era of rapid building of new nuclear power plants in the United States ended as a result of the Three Mile Island accident (and, later, the Soviet Chernobyl disaster), though this was not yet clear in 1980. The program to put humans in space was suspended and started up again with a slightly more modest budget. Genetic engineering research moved from academic centers to industry, where it shielded itself from public and regulatory scrutiny. A project to map the purpose of all human genes began, quietly and uncontroversially funded by the government at a level rivaling the Apollo program. Some scientists and lay people felt all the debate had been harmful and tried to avoid it. Others were more suspicious than ever before.