Word: public
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nowadays the very vocabulary of public discourse can be bewildering. Even to be half informed, the American-on-the-street must grasp terms like deoxyribonucleic acid, fantastic prospects like genetic engineering, and bizarre phenomena like nuclear meltdown. The technical face of things has driven some people into a bored sort of cop-out-"science anxiety," it is called by Physics Professor Jeffry Mallow of Loyola University in Chicago. The predicament has made most Americans hostage to the superior knowledge of the expert: the scientist, the technician, the engineer, the specialist...
...science court" that might deal impartially with arcane controversy. It has grown so technical that some lawyers wonder whether ordinary electors can still adequately function as jurors. Says Attorney Gary Ahrens, a professor at the University of Iowa: "Practically nothing is commonsensical any more." Surely the spectacle of the public making decisions in semidarkness is an affront to common sense...
...public has needed no expertise to read about DDT, thalidomide and cyclamates, nor to learn that the DES that seemed a nifty preventive of miscarriage in the 1950s was being linked to cancer a generation later. The citizen's problem, at bottom, is how to assess the things that so often come forth in the beguiling guise of blessings. What to believe? Whom to trust? This is a recipe for public frustration...
Thus the problems that the individual copes with as a private person are knotty enough; public issues have grown immeasurably more complex. Government has long since subsumed science and technology into its realm, both as the fountainhead of its projects and as an object of its regulation. The calculations that measure national military strength are as impenetrable to the civilian-on-the-street as the formulas of the ancient alchemists. The surreal arithmetic of SALT might as well be the music of the spheres, for all the help it gives ordinary folks trying to get a clear picture...
...result of secrecy compounded by confusion and some startling ignorance was dramatized by the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant crisis. While the event made plain that Government and corporate experts had not quite leveled with the public about the hazards of nuclear power, it also proved, frighteningly enough, that the experts sometimes did not tell the whole story simply because they did not know it. Joseph M. Hendrie, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said of himself and other officials, as they tried to cope with an incipient meltdown: "We are operating . . . like a couple of blind men staggering...