does science matter anymore?

Biologists in Scotland cloned a sheep. Oceanographers found life thriving in the steaming, noxious vents of deep sea volcanoes--without oxygen or light. NASA found possible evidence for ancient life on Mars. All this scientific fecundity seems to fly in the face of the warnings in books, symposiums and newspaper articles over the past several decades that the end of science is near.

The end-of-science camp argues that science is all but over, in large part because of its success. Having solved the accessible mysteries, researchers are left with unanswerable questions (like the nature of mind) or untestable theories (such as string theories that work only in 10 or 11 dimensions).

But do the recent discoveries mean that reports of the death of science (to paraphrase Mark Twain) have been greatly exaggerated? Or despite cloning and the potential for Mars life, is the golden age of discovery already riding into the sunset?

To most scientists, the answer is (not surprisingly) simple. “The end-of-science argument is stunningly myopic,” said Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson. “We’re on a frontier with unknown terrain ahead.”

“We’re living in a dazzling age,” said Stanford chemist Richard Zare. “It’s breathtaking, the advances we’re making.”

On the other hand, there is ample indication that science no longer has the hold on the hearts and purse strings of the American people that it did during the golden age when it gave us Einstein and polio vaccines, men on the moon and atomic bombs. Scientists and science writers alike have been “cranking out funeral odes enough to bury us all,” said physicist Frank Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J.

Two years ago, perhaps the premier scientific instrument of the century--the superconducting super collider--was abandoned by Congress, leaving a huge empty tunnel in the ground under Waxahachie, Texas, and an equally huge hole, some physicists believe, in the search for a fundamental understanding of nature. “Six hundred million dollars just went poof,” said Nick Samios, director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.

More recently, scientific leaders representing a million engineers, mathematicians and scientists held a press conference in Washington in March to protest the fifth straight annual decline in President Clinton’s proposed science budget (in constant dollars). Clearly, some scientists are worried, and with reason. Speaking to leaders of the country’s national laboratories earlier this year, Martha Krebs, head of high energy physics research for the Department of Energy, warned that support for basic science was definitely waning in Congress.

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One of the first to suggest that science as we know it was coming to an end was UC Berkeley biologist Gunther Stent, who published a book about “the end of progress” in 1969. Cloning notwithstanding, Stent stands by his book. “Not everything I said turned out to be right. But my feeling is that I was more right than wrong.”

He acknowledged that his views are unpopular. “They have made me enough enemies to last a lifetime,” he said.

But the issue, he said, is complicated. The cloning of a sheep, for example, was an application, not a discovery. “They didn’t uncover any new things. It’s a very ingenious trick.” In fact, Stent said: “I don’t think molecular biology exists anymore. It’s all applications.”

Stent was part of a 1989 panel of deep thinkers, including Nobel laureates, who met at the 25th annual Nobel Conference to discuss the issue--along with 4,000 interested participants. Then last year, science writer John Horgan published a controversial book provocatively called “The End of Science” that Krebs said was being read with interest--perhaps not surprisingly--at the highest levels in government. “It might give an excuse to cut money,” said physicist David Gross, the new director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. “If science has come to an end, it doesn’t need to be funded.”

Scientists concede that major discoveries can only be made once. “Once you discover something, it’s hard for somebody to discover it again,” said Robert Peccei, UCLA dean of science and arts.

But whether science is over, he said, is “very much in the eyes of the beholder. There are certain fields that end for a while and people do different things.”

A good example of a discipline that might reach a dead end is his own field of particle physics.

The melting away of support for the superconducting super collider is a reminder, he said, that “there are limits: It takes too long. It’s too much money. The tunnel you have to make is too big.” To go much further in particle physics today may require building machines powerful enough to re-create small pieces of the big bang itself.

“We might get stuck,” conceded Peccei. “That might be the end of that particular branch of science.”

On the other hand, science has a long history of figuring out how to do impossible things. Even Ernest Rutherford--who discovered the atomic nucleus--turned out to be colossally wrong when he said that anyone who foresaw practical applications from nuclear physics was “talking moonshine.” Rutherford didn’t know about nuclear bombs and reactors.

Scientists can dig up all sorts of similar dour predictions that turned out to be untrue.

“Certainly 30 years ago people never would have thought of doing experimental cosmology,” said Peccei. “And now that’s one of the hottest fields.”

From flying formations of telescopes able to detect life on other planets to the gravity wave detectors already under construction, these experiments on the universe itself seem ripe for new discoveries. Among the impossible questions cosmologists hope to answer within their lifetimes is: What is the so-called “dark matter” that appears to make up 99% of the universe?

“The biggest questions remain unanswered,” Gross said. “What gave rise to the structure [of the universe]? The origin of matter? There’s this incredible wealth of new data that’s coming in all the time.”

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Even if one branch of science does reach a dead end, as the doomsayers predict, others branch off in new directions. For example, the whole field of materials science seems to be wide open for new discoveries, scientists say. The rules that govern atoms are well known, but the things made up of atoms--from glasses to brains--remain a mystery. As the late Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once said, knowing the equations that describe atomic orbitals does not tell us about “frogs, musical composers or morality.”

Even if all the fundamental laws of physics were known, we would not know the “mind of God,” Wilczek said. “We will not even get much help in understanding the minds of slugs, which [sums up] the current frontier of neuroscience.”

There’s an unexplored universe of new science, said biologist Wilson, in learning how living systems assemble themselves from their simpler parts.

“We do not know how ecosystems are put together from species,” he said. We don’t understand the brain. We don’t understand the relationship between biology and social behavior.

If these mysteries seem intractable, it may simply be because scientists haven’t learned how to ask the right questions, Gross said. “Once a problem is well formulated, eventually--and usually much more quickly than anyone imagined--it gets solved.”

Besides, the purpose of science is not to know every last detail about everything, Caltech physicist David Goodstein said. “It’s to simplify. To learn what we need to pay attention to and what we don’t need to pay attention to.”

As scientists see it, the biggest threats to their field may well be psychological and political rather than technical. Big, expensive experiments increasingly require tricky international collaborations that come with their own complications--like the recent delay of almost one year in the launching of the space station because the Russians couldn’t build their module on time.

While experiments like the failed superconducting super collider become prohibitively expensive, theories become incomprehensibly abstract. And not everyone thinks it’s important to spend tax dollars or brain power on tracking down the first millisecond of time or the final frontiers of space. “The big issue that resonates with Congress is: Who cares?” Gross said. “Is this going to make a better toaster?”

Unfortunately, better toasters, like computers and medical technology, are most often the unforeseeable results of what may seem like highly abstract and esoteric research. “And you can’t cut off the head without hurting the trunk,” Gross said.

The complexity of much cutting-edge science may also feed into the already powerful preference people have for superstition and pseudo-science. “People want an easier understanding of their own lives than what is offered by science,” Wilson said. “What science offers is illumination and adventure. But it is a journey across rough terrain. It doesn’t come easy. And so the child in us says: I want to believe in something I already understand.”

In the end, the psychological boost that comes from cloning sheep or finding evidence for ancient life on Mars may be just the antidote the doctor ordered for the fear that when it comes to science, all has been said and done. “It reminds us that we still live in the age of discovery,” Goodstein said. “It may be the end of science someday, but it’s not here yet.”