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Designing power plants, cleaning water, managing supply of food, and understanding the myriad factors that affect our well-being are all possibilities created and/or expanded by the often overlooked scientific work. People are often seen as resorting to pure beliefs when adequate conditions seem out of logical reach, but the relation between science and hope can be much more complex. That being said, how does the situation of the 400 million Indians who do not have access to electricity, theme of the article Waiting for Light, by Jake Abrahamson, relates to the legal and ethical fight called by terminally ill cancer patients in Brazil, as Nature mentions in Brazilian courts tussle over unproven cancer treatment, and what are the roles science and hope play in those scenarios?
In contrast to most citizens of developed countries, people living in poor areas do not enjoy most benefits of science, having to put much greater emphasis on hope. The article Waiting for Light depicts a “slice of life” of a group of Indian villagers who have several basic concerns to address and very little knowledge of science: due to lack of an electrical grid, they are deprived from any nightly activity but sleep. Light, while more often seen as a metaphorical representation of knowledge, can also be a reference to belief in a more pleasant future – as the well-known idiom says, “There is light at the end of the tunnel”. The villagers’ wondering about how it is like to have always-on electricity in the United States, their unknowingness of what the Internet is, and of how a solar-powered lantern can “trap the day’s energy” are all examples of how disconnected a position they are put on, relative to the “enlightenment” of science.
While inhabitants of Indian hamlets might not know about technological advancements ubiquitous in many other places, they strongly display their belief that the sun and moon are gods, and their dreams of engaging in productive activities even after the sunset. After years of broken government promises to wire the grid, private companies started leasing battery-powered lanterns, recharged daily by the sunlight, for a mere $2.50 to the villagers. The product was an instant success, as families would finally be able to harness the hours of the night to study, work, and even get water from a pump without being attacked by snakes they couldn’t previously see in the dark. Subtly, science changed the focal point of the Indians’ hope: the lantern made them believe in a better future, instead of wasting their expectations on the government power program.
Unfortunate conditions are not, however, restricted to external factors. “Hope is the last to die” could well be the motto for terminal cancer-struck Brazilians who sought court rulings over the free distribution of a potential “miracle drug” developed and covertly given away by a retired chemist from the country’s largest university. With a complicated name, the compound phosphoethanolamine has triggered intense discussion over the ethics, reliability and even necessity of decade-long clinical studies for drug certification.
Moreover, in spite of the fact that patients were somewhat more knowledgeable of science in general than the villagers mentioned previously, they still chose to let hope in a “mystery drug” supplant the rules of the scientific method. Ironically, while placing their hope on a research product, and by implication, the scientists behind it, several of the patients decided to let blind hope set aside the established scientific method, occasionally with the support of courts. As an answer to the question, “If I am already “bound to die”, why not let me have the still unsafe medication?”, they stopped taking their prescribed medications altogether, putting themselves in far more uncertain terrain – all due to belief in the purported effects of the white and blue phosphoethanolamine pills.
During the entire year of 2015, Brazilian patients’ will to fight for their survival gave rise to questions whose answers are far from unanimous, and created a process that, paradoxically, pits science and hope against each other, even though hope in new medication stems from scientific work. Is it all right to override safety and manufacturing regulations by forcing a university lab to make and hand over a non-tested substance by a court order? Responses vary, but science journal Nature voiced its concerns over the purity of the compound on the pills, as they are not produced in a specialized factory, while the University of São Paulo’s Board of Regents declared former court orders to be “a threat to the integrity of the scientific method and the university’s autonomy”.
The two situations described thus far have occurred in different countries, and with different social groups, but both brought attention to how intricate the relation between hope and science is. The two might go in a cycle: first, science made the use of electricity possible, then Indian villagers hoped to have access to it, then science made a lantern capable of “trapping the day’s energy”, which made the villagers be able to “let go” of their previous hope for a new, broader one – and they needed not understand the process to enjoy its benefits. Science and hope may also nourish each other but conflict at the same time, such as in the Brazilian case. Researchers synthesized phosphoethanolamine, generating hope for the terminally ill, who then used this very hope in an attempt to bypass the scientific method. The high demand for the pills and the “miracle” reports turned out to give the scientific community hope to further understand – and if all goes well, eventually market – a promising treatment for cancer.
1101 kilobits of thought 