How to think about the most contentious ideas in science

Jeff Goldblum has made many contributions to this world, but perhaps the best is his delivery of an iconic line in the 1993 film Jurassic Park. During a scene in which his character, Ian Malcolm, berates the dinosaur park’s creator, John Hammond, Goldblum utters the words that have become a long-enduring meme: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

The could-should paradigm, as we might loftily call it, is an excellent way to think about the risks and rewards of scientific endeavours.

Still, it is rare to see scientists strongly come out against their own area of research – Malcolm, as a mathematician, probably didn’t much care about genetics developments. Perhaps this is what made recent warnings against creating “mirror life” – organisms in which molecules have the opposite orientation to everything else on Earth, with the potential to wreak havoc through the biosphere – so stark, coming as they did from people working directly on the idea (see “The story of mirror life: From intriguing idea to unprecedented threat”).

While mirror life fails hard on the “should” side of the scale – there seems to be little obvious reason for creating it – in other cases, the decision isn’t so easy. Perhaps the thorniest recent example is gain-of-function research. This is where organisms, often pathogens, are modified to enhance their abilities, with both risks and rewards. Altering a flu virus, say, so that it can more easily infect humans, is clearly a risk. But if it helps us understand the virus and potentially prevent a pandemic, would it be worth it?

Gain-of-function has always been contentious, but, recently, the debate around it has become explosive. People who believe that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind covid-19, was created in a lab – a belief for which there is no evidence, it should be said – have leapt on gain-of-function research as a smoking gun. Does this mean such work must be banned? Probably not – but, per Malcolm’s words, we must bear in mind the distinction between “could” and “should”.