Roche Continents

The researcher’s supreme objective is to find something totally new about which we know nothing. Renowned biochemist Gottfried Schatz on science as game-playing, on responsibility and the causes of disasters.

Prof. Schatz, how do new things come into the world?

Gottfried Schatz: As a result of curiosity and intuition. We must never stop questioning things and looking at them in a new light. Children show us this when they try to ‘grasp’ the world, in the truest sense of the word.

Their playful, intuitive curiosity provides them with an incessant supply of new and surprising things. And that’s exactly how we ought to conduct research. Many of the really great discoveries, perhaps even most of them, could not have been predicted on the basis of pure logic. Ultimately science is a game. If it gets too serious and po-faced, it looses its innovative strength.

A Game?

Yes, and one of the most exciting games there is. We build intellectual snowmen with our hypotheses, then have fun throwing snowballs at them so that we can knock them down and build better ones.

So scientists never reach their goals?

Natural science can never give us definitive truths. It just gives us models that successively – we hope – carry us closer and closer to the truth. Science is not so much about knowledge as about ignorance. Its supreme objective is to find something new about which nothing is known, to discover something that we didn’t know we know nothing About.

Only fundamentalists think they know everything, and they see that knowledge as indisputable and immutable. Scientists must always be aware that what is true today may turn out to be false tomorrow.

What is the motivation to continue research ad infinitum?

It’s the thrill of the surprise when we discover something new, something that has bewildered us for days, months or years and now suddenly makes sense. That thrill is something we get to experience only rarely, but it’s what drives us onwards.

You were the co-discoverer of mitochondrial DNA. You discovered that the power generators inside our cells have their own genotype. How do you discover something like that?

Mostly by trying to refute a hypothesis. In order to explain the biogenesis of mitochondria in living cells, we postulated the hypothesis that mitochondria contain their own genes. Then we tried to knock down this hypothetical snowman in our experiments. But it stood up against all the snowballs we threw at it, and we found that mitochondria really do contain small amounts of DNA genetic material.

If science is a game, is it a team game or something you play alone?

Most scientists tend by their very nature to be introverted. This intellectual solitude is probably essential for creating something new. Discoveries are the children of solitude, but they are not born in isolation. That’s why we need the scientific community, to prepare the ground for new ideas. We also need the support of society to ensure that science continues to be pursued on a sound basis.

Aren’t two heads better than one?

Two heads won’t necessarily have twice as many ideas as one. Any group inevitably promotes parallel thinking, or even mediocrity. Scientists are like artists: incorrigible revolutionaries, who instinctively reject dogma and inflexible thinking. It’s important for artists and scientists to find spaces where hierarchy, age and titles count for little or nothing. Conservatism is the enemy of science and art.

Scientists as revolutionaries? Is everything allowed, or do they also have responsibilities?

This is an area where I’m a fundamentalist. I would risk my life to stand up against any prohibition of thought or research. There is no greater cruelty than to curb by force a human being’s curiosity and thirst for knowledge.

So does this scientific game have no rules at all?

For thought and research? No. For applying the results of that thought and research? Definitely. Society is under an obligation to control such applications so that they serve the general good. And we scientists, in our capacity as citizens, have to involve ourselves in this process of democratic control, speaking with the responsible voice of science. After all, dairy farmers and doctors stand up for their rights too.

Where does research stop and application begin?

There are certainly fields in which research and application are perilously close to one another, sometimes even threatening to merge. One current example of this is research on human embryos. Here society must always specify exactly what can and what cannot be done with human embryos in the laboratory. But this is a rare exception. In most cases the boundary between research and application is clearly discernible.

For example…

For example genetic engineering in humans. There are precise rules about what methods may be employed, and under what circumstances. Here democracy must come into play, regularly reviewing the rules of the game in the light of the latest findings – and changing them if necessary.

Society must be kept informed about the significance, the benefits and the risks, and its political representatives must have sufficient knowledge to take rational decisions about these matters.

But if a major conglomerate – and here I’m definitely not talking about Roche – conducts secret research in a desert behind barbed wire, then things quickly get tricky. If for this reason alone, we must do everything in our power to strengthen democracy throughout the world, and to prevent private conglomerates from becoming more powerful than the democratically–elected representatives of the people. But we must also see that discoveries in the natural sciences are only to blame for a very small proportion of the great human disasters of the last 200 years.

What is to blame, then?

Books. The Bible, the Koran, Mao’s Little red book, Das Kapital by Karl Marx, and last but not least Hitler’s Mein Kampf are responsible for the death of more people than all discoveries in the natural sciences put together. Nobody would dare to call for all books to be burned from now on, but that’s more or less exactly equivalent to what many people are calling for in the field of research into plants and embryos.

Here again, the solution is to allow books to be written, distributed and read, but to make the implementation of the ideas expressed in those books subject to democratic regulation.

Harmless science? How about bioterrorism and nuclear bombs?

They are certainly applications of scientific knowledge, but extremely disagreeable ones. Scientific discoveries have naturally intensified the deathly effects of ideas and books to an enormous extent.

About Gottfried Schatz

Gottfried Schatz (73), biochemist and recipient of innumerable international honours, was recently awarded the European Scientific and Cultural Prize of Pro Europa, the European foundation for Culture. He is the first natural scientist to receive it. Now Emeritus professor at the University of Basel, Schatz headed its Biozentrum for several years. He played a leading role in elucidating the biogenesis of mitochondria, the cellular power plants, and he was a co-discoverer of mitochondrial DNA.

From 2000 to 2004 he was President of the Swiss Science and Technology Council. Born in Austria, Schatz has also been Visiting Professor at the universities of Harvard and Stanford. Gottfried Schatz is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and two books, a member of numerous scientific academies, the recipient of major prizes, and the holder of two honorary doctorates.

We scientists are not blameless. But we must not forget that the humanities are ultimately much more dangerous than the sciences. That also shows, incidentally, how important the humanities are to our society.