Which is the most dangerous branch of science?

t's not easy to evaluate the risk-benefit ratio of science. Physics is sometimes criticized for inventing nuclear weapons. But it also gave the world electromagnetism and the airplane. Biology has done a lot of good, including determining the true number of sexes, which humans have long wondered about.

If we count Marxism, which so far has killed 100 million people, as a science as Karl Marx claimed it was, the honor of “most dangerous science” would fall to economics and sociology. Other fields, like climate studies and public health, have great potential for harm, but are still unable to influence their object of study—and with luck they will stay that way.

Pharmacology gave us the Pill, which resulted in a massive depopulation crisis as sex became divorced from pregnancy. Now it has found a way to increase drug prices to thousands of dollars per treatment.

What about chemistry? Prüss-Ustön et al. ^[1] claimed that chemicals kill 581,000 people a year. This excludes combustion products and natural chemicals such as asbestos, as well as unquantifiable deaths such as second-hand smoke and fluoride. But the chemical industry and the science of chemistry are two different things. Deaths from chemistry research are rare.

Raccoon Dog (Source: Justapedia)

As for radioactivity, apart from its use in wartime, there have been only 32 deaths from nuclear accidents.^[2] This doesn't include accidental deaths during medical radiation treatment, X-ray exposure, and other secondary uses. Even measuring deaths due to medical errors, which The Lancet put at 123,603 per year,^[3] is fraught with challenges. Most people probably know someone who died due to malpractice whose death remained uncounted; yet medicine probably saves more lives than it takes.

Even computer science is now suspect, with people worrying about what AI might do if someone ever invents it. Indeed, computers can be a significant source of stress, partly because the industry can't create an operating system that doesn't turn to shit within ten years. But so far, deaths from computer operating systems aren't even listed in the Merck Manual or at the CDC.

Clearly, we need to distinguish technology from science. Science can't be held responsible for misuse of discoveries which, after all, are about forces of nature that will certainly kill us if we don't understand them.

The sole exception is biology. One scientific experiment in biology is likely to have created Covid-19, which was said to have caused 6,855,733 deaths.^[4] This figure is only approximate, as it doesn't include China, which Statistica says provided unreliable numbers; and the numbers of deaths in some countries are almost certainly overestimated. Nonetheless, millions of deaths from a single experiment is an unprecedented failure of science. It may be why one science magazine continues to insist that Sars-CoV-2 came from a wet market, as that infamous Cell paper ^[5] claimed. Their latest claim is that it came from the raccoon dog . It's easily debunked: a five-minute search shows that the evidence for the raccoon dog theory ranges from circumstantial to non-existent. Even Chinese scientists discounted it , saying ^[6]

These results suggest that raccoon dogs exhibit lower susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 compared to those animal species with a high prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

That's a pretty definitive way of exculpating raccoon dogs.

Wishing science to be exonerated from the Covid catastrophe may be understandable, but it's essential for the science establishment to acknowledge its role in the disaster and to find a way to prevent it from happening again. Blaming some animal species picked at random avoids the need to face the tougher problem, and it's dishonest.

Until geologists gain the ability to accidentally destroy a planet and computer scientists figure out how to make a PC that can outwit a human, biology will retain its title of the most dangerous branch of science. That honor was bestowed upon biologists by their dependence on a government bureaucracy that failed to evaluate the risk of what they were funding.

The problem wasn't a lack of rules to prevent a known risk. The risk was well understood, and rules had been put in place. Why were they circumvented?

feb 25 2025, 8:47 am