Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

Since World War II, the Promethean image of science has eroded: the belief in science and technology as harbingers of wealth and happiness had to be reluctantly discarded as a fateful illusion. Scientific research is today perceived both as the major source of human progress and as the cause of new dangers threatening the very survival of humankind - intentionally, as through science-based A-B-C weapon systems, or inadvertently, as through the impact of science-based technological and economic development on our global environment. This poses a new challenge for public policy: both the growing effectiveness of science-based technologies and the growing hazards connected with their production and utilization seen to call for active political intervention. No modem state today can do without a science and technology policy which is expected both to promote and to curb.