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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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6. Albert Szent-Györgyi

Professor Szent-Györgyi was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1893. He studied first at the University of Budapest and completed his doctorate in 1927 from Cambridge University, England. He started research as a medical student in histology, then turned to physiology, pharmacology, bacteriology, physical chemistry and chemistry. Eventually he took up wave mechanics and cancer research, studying the basic mechanisms of regulation.
After teaching in England, the Netherlands and Hungary, Professor Szent-Györgyi came in 1947 to the United States and was appointed director of the Institute for Muscle Research at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he still works. After numerous honorary degrees, memberships and other achievements, Professor Szent-Györgyi received in 1937 the Nobel Prize in medicine for elucidation and discovery of the catalytic function of C4-dicarboxylic acids and the isolation of Vitamin C.
In 1947 appeared The Nature of Life, A Study in Muscle, in 1960 Introduction to a Submolecular Biology, in 1962 Science, Ethics and Politics, in 1968 Bioelectronics, in 1970 The Crazy Ape, as well as Fifteen Minutes to Zero.

In the Crazy Ape you wrote that man seemed bent on bringing about the Kingdom of the Cockroaches.1

 

There are certain rules, half physical rules, rules made by physicists, by their experience. The one rule is that what can happen will happen. There are two thousand bombs ready to be fired. Nuclear bombs, each of which will destroy the entire world, because if one is fired, all of them will be fired. There are some two thousand buttons. If one button is pressed, all of mankind will be wiped out. For every button there are four fingers to press it. There are four people sitting next to it. So there are four thousand people on whom man's fate depends. We do not know who they are. Therefore, statistically the probability is that one of these groups of four people will press the button sooner or later.

By accident or by going crazy. As you know, people can be quite irrational at times. Two years ago, the animal house of my laboratory,2 where I do my experiments, was destroyed by vandals. There was no sense in that either.

 

How many animals were in your laboratory?

 

A few hundred.

 

They were killed?

 

They were killed, yes. They were thrown into the sea.

 

You have repeatedly complained that since World War II the United States has spent a trillion dollars on arms and war.

 

A trillion dollars! Can you imagine such a sum of money? I cannot. How much safety could that money have given America. Now we are very unsafe. Everybody is unsafe, not only in America. If we had spent that one trillion dollars on feeding the children of the world, America would now be the country loved by everybody and the United States would be quite safe. Instead we are now very unsafe.

According to where we presently stand, there are fifteen tons of TNT3 for every single human being. So we actually sit on a keg of fifteen tons of TNT. Both here and in Russia the military leaders think that we will be really safe only when we sit on thirty tons of TNT, not fifteen. We improve our missiles and we design new submarines. The Soviet Union too makes more missiles and submarines. Then of course, someday, thirty tons will be not enough and they must have sixty tons of TNT to sit on for every human being alive.

 

Are the scientists not responsible for this state of affairs?

 

Sometimes I give lectures to students. There are always some who get up and say, ‘Why don't you scientists stop war? If all scientists would say we do not work any longer for war, there would be no war.’ I reply, ‘Why pick on us? If all students would say we do not accept the draft, if all workmen would say, we will not work for war industry and all taxpayers would refuse to support war, there would be peace.’ In other words, everybody is responsible. As it stands now, the political

scoundrels, who are thinking only of the next election and nothing else, are willing to kill the whole world for it.

 

You once quoted a Hungarian poem: ‘If you are among brigands and you are silent, you are a brigand yourself’4 That is then actually what we all are doing?

 

Yes, that is what the Netherlands does. What Scandinavia does. But governments should get together and say, ‘Stop that, we do not intend to be killed by you.’ But Richard Nixon just laughs. Why does not Holland say, ‘We break diplomatic relations with those who endanger our life.’ It took three billion years to develop man. Why life endangered by a handful of insane? Man seems to be unfit to make a livable world. We are clever enough to construct supersonic airplanes and rockets to the moon, but we are not fit to engineer a human society. Man will get what he wants, what he seems to be looking for.

 

Follow the dinosaurs?

 

Yes, that is what I expect.

 

If man's brain was not developed by nature to search for truth, but to search for food and the brain is an organ of survival, how to program man, as Skinner seems to envisage?5

 

We cannot program man. He searches safety, but only the wrong kind - short-range safety. My brain is made only for short-range not for long-range thinking. The long-range safety would be not to build bombs. Man is not fit to build a stable society, such as we ought to be building. The globe has become too small. Only one group can live on it. It is very simple. The force of weapons has increased ten million fold. At the same time distances have decreased a thousand fold, that is already a billion fold difference. So we can wipe out all mankind, and that is what we will do. You cannot have the distance and the globe shrinking and the power of weapons growing. They are now too big for this little globe and they are in the hands of a few political schemers.

 

But could it be that they are all afraid of using them?

 

Till an accident happens.

How do you envision the future, especially for children?

 

There is no future. I do not like to discuss the environment, since I am not an expert. I am a chemist. But Paul Ehrlich6 is a good friend of mine. He has written about it. He showed that if we go on at our present rate, all the planet's resources will be exhausted in no time.

 

But some believe new sources of energy can be tapped from sunlight.

 

Sunlight, no. The energy problem can be solved by hydrogen fusion. That would give an endless amount of energy. That would give us energy but would not make metals, nor would it give us food. Nor does it solve our problem that we don't know what to do with our brain. Every problem has two solutions: a technical solution and an intellectual or moral solution. Without the moral solution the technical solution is worth nothing. Till now, mankind has learned by making mistakes. That is how people learn. Now, we cannot learn anymore by mistakes, because if we were to make the mistake of an atomic war, all mankind will be wiped out. We cannot learn from mistakes anymore. We just seem to go on making more and more mistakes without learning.

 

You seem to be without hope.

 

Indeed, I am not very hopeful. Of course, it is preposterous to say mankind must disappear. Perhaps it will not. I do not know. No one knows. But as a scientist looking at the trends and looking at the statistics, I say it will disappear if he does not learn to think in global terms.

 

But that is what the Club of Rome is advocating.

 

Yes, that is very fine. But what will Richard Nixon do at the same time? He has ordered thousands of acres of crop land destroyed every single day in Vietnam, with enormous bulldozers, they call them Roman ploughs. They continue to erase thousands and thousands of acres of crop land every single day, while the Club of Rome is making calculations that we will have not enough food.

 

How to stop Nixon?

 

We cannot stop him because people are stupid and they like what he does. Churchill once called democracy not a good system but there was

no better. That is still the situation. Any system is good if the people are good. We like what Nixon does and that is why we have him.

 

Are you totally pessimistic?

 

There is a little chance that there is a break. There is now a generation gap. The young people clearly see that this world of ours is idiotic. They do not have a plan what to do, but they reject this world.

 

You have noticed this in students?

 

Not students. I see that in hippies. The hippy movement rejects the world, because it is senseless. They cannot accept it. If you do come into this world with a normal brain, you cannot accept it. What can they do? Reject it. One of the troubles of our society is that it is a geriatric, gerontocratia of old people. And it is a rule that after forty the brain cannot take in new ideas. Everybody knows that you cannot teach new tricks to old dogs.

 

But that is not true. Kant7 wrote his first book when he was forty-four.

 

Yes, but he had thought about these problems when he was young. He just put down on paper what he had thought of as a young man. You cannot change that. I am a very active scientist, because as a young man I have learned that science was beautiful. I lived for it. Now I realize that science is harmful, but I seem to be unable to stop working, because as a young man I learned it that way.

 

But you could not do harm with your cancer research.

 

Oh yes, one can. If I were really to solve the problem of cancer, if we would know how to stop cancer, we could also make cancer chemically. At once, the Pentagon would produce the matter by the ton in self-defense. There is nothing that cannot be abused. It depends on moral and ethical considerations, and our modern rulers seem to have none.


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