Word: techs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...electronics)-awaited the moment that a human foot first touched the moon. That feat, the President of the U.S. assured his countrymen, was to be ranked as the greatest thing since -Creation. After that exaltation, there was only one way, by the law of psychological gravity, for Sci-Tech's prestige...
...given way to a new skepticism, the adulation to heckling. To the bewilderment of much of the scientific community, its past triumphs have been downgraded, and popular excitement over new achievements, like snapshots from Mars, seems to wane with the closing words of the evening news. Sci-Tech's promises for the future, far from being welcomed as harbingers of Utopia, now seem too often to be threats. Fears that genetic tinkering might produce a Doomsday Bug, for example, bother many Americans, along with dread that the SST's sonic booms may add horrid racket to the hazards...
Increasingly this new skepticism is spreading even among professionals in the world of Sci-Tech. Indeed, it could be heard conspicuously last week as 4,200 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science gathered in Denver for their annual brainstorming. Arthur Kantrowitz, head of Avco Everett Research Laboratory Inc. in Everett, Mass., came plugging, once again, for the creation of a "science court" that might help sort out "facts from values" in controversies that have been multiplying in the atmosphere of question and dispute. One of the speakers in Denver, Science Historian June Goodfield, a visiting professor...
...location of dams massively certified by science, opposition to the erection of nuclear power plants declared to be safe and sound, open disputes about the real values of scientifically approved medicines, and the increasing willingness of patients to sue physicians to make them account for mistakes in treatment. Sci-Tech, in a sense, has been demoted from its demigodhood. The public today rallies, in its untidy way, around the notion that Hans J. Morgenthau put into words in Science: Servant or Master?. "The scientist's monopoly of the answers to the questions of the future is a myth...
America's current spirit of skepticism toward Sci-Tech is, above all, the popular response to that question. The answer is a no so resounding that when it came, it was mistaken for a mortal war on science. So alarmed was Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, that in 1972 he preached publicly on the urgent need to stave off the "crumbling of the scientific enterprise." Today, with that enterprise clearly waxing (federal funding for science this year: $24.7 billion, up 67% in eight years), Handler's excessive reaction may seem like that...