Science as a Cultural Human Right

Helle Porsdam

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781512822946
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Droits de l'homme

The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, recognizes everyone's right to "share in scientific advancement and its benefits" and to "enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This right also requires state parties to develop and disseminate science, to respect the freedom of scientific research, and to recognize the benefits of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific field.The right to science has never been more important. Even before the COVID-19 health crisis, it was evident that people around the world increasingly rely on science and technology in almost every sphere of their lives from the development of medicines and the treatment of diseases, to transport, agriculture, and the facilitation of global communication. At the same time, however, the value of science has been under attack, with some raising alarm at the emergence of "post-truth" societies. "Dual use" and unintended, because often unforeseen, consequences of emerging technologies are also perceived to be a serious risk.The important role played by science and technology and the potential for dual use makes it imperative to evaluate scientific research and its products not only on their scientific but also on their human rights merits. In Science as a Cultural Human Right, Helle Porsdam argues robustly for the role of the right to science now and in the future. The book analyzes the legal stature of this right, the potential consequences of not establishing it as fundamental, and its connection to global cultural rights. It offers the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally.

Chapter 1

Setting the Scene

1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

—Article 27, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

There were two Flora Danicas. The first was published in 1648, the second—for my purposes more interesting—between 1761 and 1883. The latter will help set the scene for my investigation into the right to science. Both this right and the second Flora Danica are all about (Western) science, and both have their intellectual roots in the Enlightenment and its struggle against dogma, superstition, and ignorance.

The ambition to collect compendia of knowledge that kept the editors of the Flora Danica going for 122 years dates even further back. In the prologue to his 2004 book on the making of the famous French Encyclopédie, historian Philipp Blom tells us that the first encyclopedic endeavors we know of are cuneiform tablets in the archives of the kings of Mesopotamia, containing lists of all kinds of objects, such as different kinds of trees.1 Later, the Greeks and the Romans also favored encyclopedic works. None of the Greek works has survived, but Pliny the Elder’s Natural History was consulted as an authoritative source of worldly knowledge until well into the sixteenth century.2 The Islamic world also undertook collective encyclopedic efforts, and a number of Arabic encyclopedias were translated into Latin—most famously by the seventh-century bishop and scholar Isidore of Seville, later to be patron saint of the Internet.3 In terms of comprehensiveness, it was the Chinese, though, who published the largest encyclopedic enterprise in 1726: the Gujin tushu jicheng in 745 volumes.4

There was thus a rich global tradition on which the contributors to one of the best known of all encyclopedias, the French Encyclopédie, could draw for inspiration. Including Denis Diderot, Jean d’Alembert, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, these contributors succeeded in publishing twenty-seven volumes, containing 72,000 articles, between 1751 and 1772.5 One entry in the Encyclopédie concerns the word “encyclopédie” itself. The meaning of this word is the “linking of areas of knowledge.” And the goal of an encyclopédie, this entry informs us, “is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, & to transmit to the people who will come after us . . . that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous & happier, & that we do not die without having merited being part of the human race.”6

In the editorial policy from one of the early volumes, the editors outline their aims: “One will find in this work . . . neither the life of the Saints . . . nor the genealogy of noble houses, but the genealogy of sciences, more precious for those who can think . . . not the conquerors who laid waste the earth, but the immortal geniuses who have enlightened it . . . for this Encyclopédie owes everything to talent, nothing to titles, everything to the history of the human mind, and nothing to the vanity of men.”7 Responding to several critics who wanted the Encyclopédie to carry more articles on the Church and Church doctrine, the editorial team made it quite clear that theirs was an attempt to go up against received truths, especially religious truths. They did so at great personal cost. The Encyclopédie was perceived to be dangerous, inciting political as well as religious rebellion. The Catholic Church tried to stop it, and its contributors were threatened with imprisonment, even execution, by the political authorities, who were trying to forestall events that, as we now know, would lead to the French Revolution.8

The French Encyclopédie is often considered one of the beacons of the Enlightenment. Blom calls it “a triumph of reason in an unreasonable time” and “a turning-point in history: the moment when new ideas carried the day over bigotry and orthodoxy.”9 Others have shown less sympathy toward the Enlightenment and its views on humans and nature. Anna Tsing opens her 2015 monograph, The Mushroom at the End of the World, in the following way: “Ever since the Enlightenment, Western philosophers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of Man, which could tame and master Nature. It was left to fabulists, including non-Western and non-civilizational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and not human.”10 Though in different and in some respects contradictory ways, both Blom and Tsing bring forward important insights that are relevant to my exploration of the right to science. I shall therefore come back to them at various points throughout this book.

I start this chapter with a description of Flora Danica, the largest such atlas in the world and a Danish Enlightenment attempt at widening the knowledge of ordinary Danes about their world—in the spirit of the French Encyclopédie. Next, I outline what we know and do not know about the right to science as a human right—and what kind of scholarly and other work we need to undertake to realize its great potential. In this as in subsequent chapters, aspects of Flora Danica bookend thematic explorations of the right to science. It thereby forms a backdrop to or narrative arc for my argument that this particular human right has special relevance today because of its potential, when used responsibly, to bolster the freedom of science and culture for the benefit of scientists themselves, the public, and society in general.

Flora Danica

The word “flora” can mean two different things: the plants growing in a particular region and a book that deals with the plants to be found in this region.11 One of the first floras in the latter sense, and an inspiration for the Flora Danica, was a book published in 1588 on the plants growing in the Harz area of Germany. Another source of inspiration was the more modest books of herbs without illustrations or descriptions that were published in other parts of Europe. These were much cheaper and enabled the less well-off to find medicinal plants they could either develop themselves or buy in their local pharmacy.

The publication of these books coincided with the rise of a general interest in botany as well as with the development of botanical gardens. Inspired by these trends, Danish king Christian IV (1577–1648) thought it was time for people in his kingdom to learn about plants and their use as medicine against illnesses. In 1645, he approached the head of the University of Copenhagen with a plan for producing a book about herbs and plants for the general reader. He required names to be in both Danish and Latin, and he wanted descriptions of the habitat and use of the plants:

Inasmuch as God Almighty this Land/ amongst others/ with divers Herbs hath blessed/ by which the lowly Country-dweller without Means to seek the Advice of a Physician against Ailments and Diseases/. . . even as he harried be by suchlike/ readily is cured and restored: then We graciously solicit you/ speedily to prepare and commit to the Printing Press/ an Herbarium in Danish/ for the Weal of our lowliest Subjects/ in which the Herbs that common grow and native are to this Country/ with Names be listed in Danish and in Latin/ and the places where they are wont to grow: and to signify and propagate withal/ their best Uses against Ailments and Diseases/ for the Benefit of the common Man.12

As there were not yet any independent chairs in botany at the University of Copenhagen, it fell to a professor of anatomy, surgery, and botany, Simon Paulli, to carry out this work. Paulli finished his Flora Danica in 1648, only a few months after King Christian IV died. It was Christian’s son, Frederik III (1609–1670), who received all 886 pages of text plus 92 pages of index and 372 plates of woodcuts of the plants.

Paulli’s Flora became very popular and was much used over the next many years. At some point, however, demand arose for a more accurate depiction of Danish plants. German-born physician, botanist, economist, and statistician Georg Christian Oeder (1728–1791), who was to become the first editor and most important drafter of the second Flora Danica, wrote about Paulli’s work, for example, that it was “to put it mildly, very incomplete.”13 From the planning stages to the collection of plants and their publication in copper engravings and on paper, the second Flora Danica was much more ambitious than Paulli’s Flora.14 The first of several editors, Oeder was interested in what we would today call citizen science. He knew that it would be impossible for him and his assistants to gather enough plants for the Flora Danica, the Kingdom of Denmark at this time encompassing in addition to Denmark itself also Schleswig-Holstein and Oldenburg-Delmenhorst (both part of what is today Northern Germany) and Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. His idea was therefore to engage voluntary collaborators, especially gentlemen farmers and clergymen, but also students and correspondents throughout Denmark. As noted by Jean Anker in his history of the Flora Danica, “The voluntary collaborators throughout the realms should be able to give information about the names of the plants, together with a number of things about their use, especially as home-made remedies. For, thought Oeder, farmers were not afraid of making experiments, especially on themselves, which physicians could not carry out. People on the spot could likewise undertake far more thorough investigations of the different tracts than could Oeder himself; thus they could make considerable contributions to his Flora.”15 Although Denmark acquired colonies, forts, and trading posts in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Flora Danica was never intended to cover plants from these tropical parts of the realm.16

Oeder did not have an easy start in Denmark. Having studied medicine at the University of Göttingen under the famous anatomist, physiologist, and naturalist Albrecht von Haller, he was called to Copenhagen in 1751 on the recommendation of von Haller and others. As I describe in more detail in Chapter 3, the Danish king created a special position for Oeder as royal professor of botany at the botanical institutions that were founded at around this time. This position was outside the jurisdiction of the University of Copenhagen, which opposed the hiring of Oeder and failed him when he defended his thesis in 1752. These defenses were public, and the successful defense of a doctorate thesis was a necessary requirement for a professorship. The official reason given was his deficient Latin skills: Oeder “was able to read, but he did not speak [Latin] well.”17

The king paid the new royal professor of botany out of the privy purse. In addition to overseeing the building of a new botanical garden in Copenhagen, the king wanted Oeder to establish a library for “the public benefit and use” of all present and future “lovers” of botany.18 This new library for ordinary lending became Denmark’s first public library, to be extended in due course to encompass all the natural sciences.19 It opened in 1761—in rooms adjacent to Oeder’s official residence at the Frederik’s Hospital in Copenhagen so that he could take good care of the books.20 The idea was, as Oeder informed the public in a notice in a local newspaper in January 1761, that the new library would be open to all botany lovers on Wednesdays and Saturdays between 10 a.m. and noon and that Oeder himself would offer public lectures on botany in those same rooms on Tuesday and Friday mornings between 11 a.m. and noon.21 In order to promote a wider knowledge of botany as a practical science, Oeder furthermore intended to carry out experiments involving Danish drugs at the Frederiks Hospital in collaboration with senior medical physicians. Botany cannot, he repeatedly stated, “be of general use as long as it is a science only for the few.”22

That same year, 1761, Oeder sent out subscription invitations to people in as well as outside Denmark. Four-page folders in Danish and French, these invitations included the first plate of the Flora Danica, depicting the cloudberry, and explained that the Flora Danica would appear in fascicles including sixty plates or engravings each. There would be one installment a year, and it was possible for subscribers to choose either a cheaper copy in black and white or one in color. The subscription rates would be reasonable, as the king would support the project financially.

The approved original, drawn and hand-colored by an artist, would be used as a muster plate and engraved on the copper plate. Illuminists would then copy the muster plate in the required number, and if a whole set of the Flora Danica was later ordered, the muster plates would be used again.23

Oeder’s plan for the Flora Danica included five subprojects or items:

1. An introduction to botany in Danish.

2. A methodical list in pocketbook format of all plants in the country for use on expeditions.

3. A description of all the plants.

4. An illustrated work with copper engravings of all the plants.

5. A practical section in which the properties and uses of the plants are described.24

This plan turned out to be overly ambitious. Oeder did manage to publish ten fascicles between 1761 and 1771, one a ye...