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Science As A Tool Towards Progress

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Throughout its conception and growth, science has been a source of befuddlement as well as a source of great knowledge for the masses. Often, science is challenged by those with other motives, for example, those with staunch religious beliefs, and other times by those that do not truly understand what it that they are engaging, for example, those that read an article about a recent scientific study and assume they know everything there is to know about the field due to their brief study of the article. But science as a subject of study is not the cause for any of this, it is the human beings that attempt to use science as a tool for their own personal, social, economic, or political furtherment, that should be called upon to dissect this. …show more content…

So, when science is used as a tool for progress it means that a branch(s) of knowledge are being used as tools for the overall betterment of a group.
To start off, in Michael Bishop’s article, Enemies of Promise, he advocates that modern science is under attack by those that have no true understanding of what science is, and its limitations. Bishop is an American microbiologist that studied at Harvard and in his piece, he gives a personal anecdote of a shared discovery amongst him and other microbiologists, where they discovered something inside a virus carried by chickens, “that chicken virus was the vehicle by which [they] were able to uncover genes that were involved in the genesis of human cancer” (Bishop). This example shows that small discoveries, that some virus’ carry portions of the hosts DNA, can lead to much larger finding that shaped the future of various species to come. With this new discovery, a better understanding was made on how cancer forms in humans, as well as possible ways to fight it. What is more, is that if these scientists had simply stopped at their initial discovery, they would not have uncovered the pertinent information that led them to their unknown, albeit desired, destination. It was their choice to attempt to use the virus that caused cancer in chickens towards a new understanding of the

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