Science and Ethics at MINATEC - Student Pugwash and A Just War

by Laure Frachet

Nobody living in Grenoble for more than 2 years cannot have forgotten the polemic that
surrounded the opening of the MINATEC center, in 2006. The potential danger of nanotechnologies raised the issue of ethics and sciences. That is why, may be as a lead for finding an answer, the 13th of November, a conference about science and ethics took place in the MINATEC center.

There were not any debates especially about the nanotechnologies, the topics were more
varied, and destined to students in the world of sciences. Even if minds can’t change in a couple of hours, this cold afternoon of November could have given rise to some thoughts on ethics issues that may concern us in the coming years.

Unfortunately I can’t report on the whole conference, but I was quite disappointed by the two talks I attended.

First, Mr Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra came to talk about the Student Pugwash Movement. It is a kind of association of young researchers in sciences, or graduate students, who meet every year to have some discussions and debates about the issues of science and ethics. They produce papers and a small book made of articles.

The main goal of J-P Pardo-Guerra was to convince those presents that they could find an interest in joining the Pugwash Movement. But his speech was firstly tracing an
history of the Pugwash Movement. The emergence of a assembly of scientists who no longer wanted to work for war projects was really interesting but was scarcely propitious for making us think about ethics. But we can congratulate them on the idea of trying to change the world one by one. I do think that this is the main idea we have to keep in mind after this presentation.

I don’t believe that students who were here this afternoon are going to join the Pugwash Movement. But they now are aware that, in the scientific community, there still is the hope of changing the minds without using weapons or money…

After this presentation we listened to a speech given by Mr Baudouin Albanel, who was
a general in the French Air Force. He had prepared a long text about Ethics and War. Again, I think it was disappointing for the students. Not because it has no direct link with the science, but because it was stating the obvious. Of course, there is an opposition between human rights and war, of course before using a weapon you have to measure the threat. An “ethical war” cannot be a war where firing starts before every non-violent alternative have been tried…

At the end, what we could get out from this presentation was an outline of how the use of weapons can be decided during a war, and all the factors that can interfere when a decision has to be taken. It sounded really mathematical…

To conclude I would say that this afternoon at MINATEC did not change the world or
minds. But this kind of initiative must be praised, and renewed, with more participants, because students of today are about to be the actors of tomorrow and it is quite dangerous to leave us without any background in ethics. As Rabelais said “Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme”. We may not be sufficiently aware of the threat that our knowledge could represent for the world…

Laure Frachet is a third year student at ENSIMAG