Honorary Degree Assembly

Speaker: SIR CHARLES SNOW AUTHOR AND SCIENTIST

I THINK that in giving this address this afternoon, the most useful thing I can do, if only to clear my own mind, is to say what this symposium has and has not done. My feeling is that on the whole we've asked a number of the right questions, and questions of great importance and of considerable intellectual and moral difficulty. I don't think that we've found the right answers. I don't think it was feasible that we should find the right answers, and that is no great discredit to us.

If we seemed to suggest a lack of humility, which is inappropriate in these circumstances, so difficult and in some ways so grave, then that's a personal fault that we shall be responsible for. But on the whole, I would have thought that - to an extent at least - some of the questions have really been asked. And here I would like to say that among a great many of the participants, by far the greater number, there was complete unanimity on the major questions to be asked. I have to say that I thought the last speech of Dr. Dubos last night gave a quite inaccurate impression of the general feeling among the participants in your symposium. We differ in a number of attitudes and Dr. Wilder Penfield showed you in his most moving speech this morning that he is a man of deep religious faith in the normal sense. Many of us have not that support and would, I suppose, call ourselves some kind of humanists.

But on the major questions, nearly all the participants, I think all here this afternoon, and all perhaps but one or two of our American colleagues, are in substantial unanimity on the major things which men have got to apply their minds and their moral natures to.

It seems to me that our proceedings fell into three divisions, though in fact it wasn't the chronological order, because this morning, having talked a good deal about conscience in modern medicine, it occurred to us to ask what conscience was. I think that was a very sensible thing to do and perhaps we should have done it earlier. We discussed that in different ways. Dr. Penfield talked, as one of the great brain surgeons of the world, of the relation - I think he would say - the absence of determinable relation between brain and mind. As is fitting in a country which is the psychoanalytical capital of the world par excellence, we had a most interesting discussion of the psychoanalysis of conscience. And I think we all thought that Dr. Rado gave a wise and humane treatment and drew a division between conscience which is an inhibitive and negative factor and conscience which acts as a selfrewarding system and makes people feel good when they do good, which is a very satisfactory state to be in, granted to few of us.

I felt an absence of any social discussion of conscience, of man's moral nature, and I suspect that is a gap rather common in my country and yours that we ought to be thinking about more intensively than we are. These are not so completely individual problems as we're sometimes inclined to think. There were remarks about this thrown out in the course of the discussion, but we never got nearer than just mentioning that collective man was involved, although I know that Dr. Gerard and others, and Dr. Weaver, feel very strongly upon this point. But having said something about the nature of conscience itself - I think that instead of "conscience" I would prefer the term "man's moral nature" - we then succeeded in distinguishing between two kinds of problems of conscience with which modern medicine is concerned.

The first is very old. It is the set of problems which beset any practicing physician in the course of his relations with his patients. It is very important not to forget the moral nature of the doctor-patient relationship. We didn't talk much about it because we were all pretty satisfied with what is generally established in this relationship. In many ways, indeed, it seems to me a thing which is very sacred and ought not be intruded upon unnecessarily. It is partly for that reason that we didn't give more than a dismissive word to euthanasia and Sir George Pickering remarked that doctors really are designed to heal people and not to kill them and that it would be unfortunate if homicidal doctors were really let loose. And he further said he thought that if euthanasia was in fact decided by society, it would have to be a decision society as a whole, and then society ought to provide not doctors but, as it were, licensed humane executioners to perform the act....

The section on private morality did not worry us. We all feel a deep respect for the doctor-patient relationship, and if I appear to brush it to one side, it is simply because we had nothing original to say. But let us not forget that it is in fact the foundation of all real medicine.

But we came then to another and much more difficult kind of morality, which Mr. Warren Weaver at our first meeting christened "statistical morality." And this seems to me indicative of the kind of trouble which, in the complexity of our world, men are bound to run into. I think I said myself that we are more "members one of another" than we ever could have been in St. Paul's time. Every action of ours has a possible effect, not only in our own circle, not only in our own country, but conceivably to people we don't know and never shall know. This is the nature of a highly articulated world. And so one can perform acts which are in themselves innocent acts, or even good acts, which nevertheless with sufficient foresight and sufficient intelligence one can see bring the risks or indeed the certainty of disease and death, perhaps, to people who are anonymous and have left no mark behind them.

The kinds of act of which we were thinking are those, of course, concerned with the production of radiation, the pollution of the air, even the making of automobiles. All these things are acts which society does - which are done by good men, by men who wish no harm to anyone. And yet, the necessary result of these actions is that harm is inevitably done on a statistical basis. This is a terribly difficult problem to cope with either meditatively or in reality. Mr. Aldous Huxley said very wisely: "You can't write works of art about problems of statistical morality." That is true, and yet, unless we think of it, unless we apply our minds to it, we shall be leaving the world worse off than we found it.

And this can happen positively or negatively, and statistical morality, I think, can operate in various ways. Think of the deterioration in the human gene pool, a subject dear to the heart of Dr. Muller. It is in fact true that owing to good actions performed by doctors and to their conquests of various diseases, owing to their ability to keep people alive who otherwise would not have been able to keep alive, and therefore would not have been able to propagate the species, the actual stock of genes is likely to be slightly worse - it's certain, in fact, to be slightly worse - than it was a hundred years ago. That is an example where absolute good actions are doing a finite statistical harm to the race. On the other hand, you have a neutral act like letting off an explosive, which is not a bad thing in itself, and won't do very much harm. It's only what it portends that worries me rather than what it does. And yet if enough of these are let off, then in fact the amount of radiation present in the world's atmosphere will gradually become such that a few children will inevitably die of leukemia, children whom we shall never know and whose countries we shall never know.

All these problems are difficult to grasp and yet intrinsic in the nature of our highly articulated scientific society. How are we going to find a way through them? No one, I think, at this symposium and no one that I've heard of in the world is very clear. But it is certain that as components of conscience we shall have to add foresight and intelligence, and we will try to invent phrases like "the developed conscience," "the developed imagination," with which large numbers of men must become possessed, if this world is going to be safe, or if indeed it is not going to be in serious risk of major catastrophe.

We had extremely impressive speeches on one of the ugliest major catastrophes that now threatens our species. We had these from Dr. Brock Chisholm and from the Indian Ambassador, who made, if I may say so without impertinence, the bravest speech I've ever heard from an Ambassador (a class of men not given to bravery) and by Mr. Huxley. And I believe, if for no other reason, those three speeches would completely justify the holding of this symposium. They were said with the deepest concern for all the moral sensibilities of man; they were utterly realistic, and they left one with the feeling with which we should be left, for we are very near the brink of a rather unpleasant cliff.

What can doctors, scientists, responsible men do? Again we will agree, the important thing is first to tell the truth. And there are two components of telling the truth. It's very important that scientists, doctors, responsible men shouldn't exaggerate a possible danger for the best of reasons. It does harm if people overestimate the amount or the danger of radioactive fallout. The scientist must say that the upper limit is this, the lower limit is that. Between the two we have to guess. For if for whatever reason one departs from the strictest scientific honesty, even to warn people, then in the long run you're going to do much more harm than good. We stress that very heavily and I'm sure we're right to stress it very heavily. I've seen dangers of that kind in my own time, and it is a thing for which we should be constantly on our guard.

But of course there is another warning about telling the truth. There are several topics in this world (several of them were touched on with great nakedness at our symposium) which are bound to infringe on serious politics. That is quite inevitable, because politics are just the actions of men like ourselves. We were dealing with some of the scientific problems which are nearest to the lives of men like ourselves. It is quite impossible for these to be not associated with violent political emotion. Nevertheless, it is absolutely imperative that serious and responsible men shall not be frightened of. It is not enough for scientists to make statements of the greatest possible truth; they must have the courage to carry those statements through because they alone know enough to be able to impress their authority upon a world which is anxious to hear, if it can only find voices which can speak with enough clarity and, I think I must say, enough noise.

Well, I think that is a pretty fair representation of how far we got. But I shouldn't like to end on this note of impending doom, because, in fact, we have done not badly but rather well. Let us count our blessings for a moment. Turn back twenty years. As a matter of fact twenty years ago bombs were dropping rather uncomfortably near to us in London, but that is an interlude. Turn back twenty years in your history. We were without antibiotics. Think of the release from suffering, the gain in life's health and joy which have come through that invention. Many of our difficulties arise from just that success - from just that abundance. There are problems. They're very difficult problems, but they come because we have done very well. There's much evil in all of us and much stupidity. But there is a certain amount which is not evil in nearly all of us, and in most of us there is a certain amount which is not stupidity. And out of that mixture of good will and intelligence men have done most wonderful things in our time. Life is richer and healthier, not only in this great rich country but in much simpler countries, than it's ever been in human history.

But we must remember that the way before us is very rough. There is no doubt about that; the human race for various reasons has come through to a particularly pretty patch. This comes through partly because of its own marvels, its own skills, its own good will, its own ability to heal many of its sufferings. And so, let us think - after all, things might be much worse. And things might be much worse because of the efforts of some of these colleagues of mine here, who have through their researches, through their benevolent contributions to mankind, made our lives sweeter, longer and healthier than they otherwise could have been.

And so, in this most beautiful place, Mr. President, I ask our audience just for once to conquer the Western malaise and count the benefits we have.