The applications are most promoting in the medical field. Cardiovascular Imaging Systems in Sunnyvale, California, manufacturers a probe smaller than 1 millimeter that can provide snapshots of a patient’s arteries. It’s currently used in more than 200 cardiology centers around the world. Says Director of Marketing Adam Dakin: “Everybody is trying to create miniaturized devices for invasive surgery. There’s no question that it will play a prominent role in the future.”
Although simple versions of miniature devices have already had an impact, advanced versions and widespread use are still several years away. In Japan, scientists are designing an “intelligent” micro device that can travel through the human digestive tract. And airplanes eventually might be able to twist and adapt their wings to be more efficient and flexible. Artificial body parts might provide total flexibility and full capabilities for people who have lost their natural limbs.
“There is an explosion of new ideas and applications,” says Kurt Petersen, who eight years ago co founded Lucas Nova Sensor. So, when scientists now think about future machines doing large and complex tasks, they’re thinking smaller than ever before.
5. Social Responsible in Science and Arts
Compared with the immediate practical responsibility of the scientist, the responsibility of the artist must seem puny. The decision which faces him is not, I think, one of practical action: of course he will try to throw his weight into the scale, and that weight, if he is a writer or even a painter of genius, may have its effect. For the novelist—in our society the only artist who has a mass audience and at the same time effective economic control of the means of addressing it – the hope of some decisive influence is a reasonable one. For him, since he takes of all artists what is probably the largest portion of his culture as material, there is no more escape from the necessity for treating the content of his work seriously than there is for the social psychologist he is coming so closely to resemble. The dichotomy which people have tried to establish between artistic proficiency and artistic content is becoming unbearable to almost all sensitive minds. I doubt if it has ever been real—we might have admired Shelley as much if he had been indifferent to such things as war and tyranny, though I doubt it; certainly had he been indifferent we should never have been led by him.
There is no Hippocratic Oath in literature, and I am not attempting to draw one up. As far as I am concerned, the artist is a human being writ large and his ethics are the ethics of any human being. Perhaps I can best illustrate what seems to me the new consciousness of those duties of assertion and refusal from one writer, and I do not think it is without significance that this writer projects the whole situation of choice into a scientific parable, the parable of a pestilence: a pestilence many human beings are called to fight against, called not by any supernatural obligation but by the simple fact that the fight against a plague is something like a biological human obligation. Albert Camus seems to me to be the first modern writer, though I am certain he will not be the last, to put the problem of responsibility in specific terms: “ I only know”, he wrote, “that in this world there are pestilences and there are victims, and it is up to us not to ally ourselves with the pestilences.” For the medical scientist, who knows that he may quite well be called upon today to use literal pestilences, of mind and body, in psychological and bacteriological warfare that statement has a meaning clearer, I think, and more imperative than its author intended. But for the scientist as general enemy of pestilences and the artist as general representative of humanity, the basic pestilence which, by its epidemic spread in our time challenges his allegiance, is the same—it is the pestilence which, through the spread of irrational fears and irrational hatreds, through the acceptance of coercion, through the neglect of what one can only call social and personal sanitation in our attitudes to society, leads us to forget who we are and who our fellow men are: the pestilence which exterminates “gooks” or dissidents, which apologizes for torture and massacre in any shape or form, whether it be called for the moment revolution or collective security, the pestilence of atom bombs and concentration camps. In the last resort, there is only one ethically satisfactory reply to that pestilence: an unqualified and unargued “No”. This “No” does not spring, I think, from any idealistic or metaphysical imperative, but simply from the fact that by saying anything else we should cease to be human beings. 感谢您阅读《ScienceandTechnolo 》一文，出国留学网(liuxue86.com)编辑部希望本文能帮助到您。
