Write short note: Science and Social Responsibility. (2004)
Knowledge is separable from its application, but scientists, laboratories and states are not separable from the consequences. Social responsibility is the sociological question of who is answerable for knowledge once it leaves the laboratory — and the answer has shifted from the individual conscience to institutional design.
Responsibility as an institutional property
- Robert K. Merton‘s norms of science (1942) — universalism, communism of findings, disinterestedness, organised scepticism — make integrity a structural property enforced by peer review and replication, not a private virtue.
- Ulrich Beck (Risk Society, 1986) names the modern failure as organised irresponsibility: harms are real, but causation is diffuse and probabilistic, so no institution is accountable.
Dual-use research
The same knowledge heals and kills — nuclear physics, virology, artificial intelligence. Controversy over gain-of-function influenza research, and the 2018 case of He Jiankui, who produced gene-edited infants in China and was imprisoned in 2019, show that a discipline’s self-regulation can fail well ahead of the law. Publication norms and open science, which Merton treated as virtues, become liabilities once findings are weaponisable — the ethos of science turns against itself.
Ethics committees and regulation
- India moved from voluntary to statutory control after scandals. The 72nd Parliamentary Standing Committee report (2013) indicted the conduct of HPV vaccine studies on tribal adolescent girls in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat for defective consent and inadequate reporting.
- The Indian Council of Medical Research’s national ethical guidelines (2017) and the New Drugs and Clinical Trials Rules, 2019 made registered ethics committees, informed consent and compensation for trial-related injury mandatory — responsibility converted into procedure.
Whistle-blowing
Responsibility often falls on individuals at personal cost. The murder of the highway engineer Satyendra Dubey in 2003, after he exposed corruption in a national project, led to the Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014, still awaiting effective operation — an illustration of Beck’s argument that defining a risk is an exercise of power.
Industrial and agricultural risk
- Bhopal (December 1984) remains the archetype: a methyl isocyanate leak from a plant whose safety systems had been run down, with liability unresolved for four decades; the 337 tonnes of residual toxic waste were finally incinerated only in 2025.
- On genetically modified crops, the moratorium on Bt brinjal (2010) after public consultations, and the Supreme Court’s split verdict of July 2024 on the environmental release of GM mustard, show technology assessment becoming publicly contested. Brian Wynne‘s work on lay knowledge explains why such publics are not merely ignorant.
Data ethics
Responsibility now extends to information. Shoshana Zuboff‘s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) describes behavioural data as raw material appropriated without consent; India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 is a first statutory answer, and algorithmic decisions in credit, policing and welfare raise the older question of universalism in a new form.
Conclusion
Social responsibility cannot rest on the scientist’s conscience alone. It requires what Sheila Jasanoff calls technologies of humility — institutions that build in uncertainty, the distribution of harm and public participation, so that “who bears the risk?” is asked before the innovation rather than after the disaster.