Musings on Scientific Memory Culture
by Meagan Olsen, 2024 Design & Technology Fellow
The night after visiting Auschwitz I, I sat in my hotel room and stared at a diagram depicting a wastewater outflow system constructed at the concentration camp. This figure, so similar to ones I had calculated in multiple fluid mechanics classes, stopped me in my tracks and lingered in the periphery of my mind for the rest of my time in Poland. I felt like my relationship with chemical engineering had changed. And yet, upon my return to Chicago, it was disturbingly easy to let the experiences and conversations fostered by the FASPE program fade into the background of day-to-day life.
The first few days were filled with little reminders. I nearly cried cooking dinner two days after returning because the image of the pots and pans brought to Auschwitz by Jewish families in hope of a life afterwards flashed before my eyes. But as soon as I stepped back into the workplace, those thoughts were pushed aside, replaced by more mundane concerns about experiment timelines and conference preparations. This rapid ability to disconnect from painful truths has left me contemplating the role of memory in science.
People decoupling history and contemporary life is not specific to any society or professional field. The Trail of Tears ran through my hometown. Small metal placards dot the streets, marking the historic route alongside modern roads and the occasional bike path. One of my childhood homes stood less than 700 feet from the route. Despite this fact, no history class mentioned a connection between our town and the Trail. I did not even know a memorial park stood across the street from my former high school until earlier this year.
In Berlin, buildings used to house forced laborers during the Nazi regime now serve as bowling alleys, bonsai tree shops, and kindergartens. Only through recent efforts have euthanasia sites, labor camps, and other locations of atrocities been converted into documentation centers and memorials. Even with bronze Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks embedded in the sidewalks, it is easy to avoid directly facing the history of the city.
Separated by time and an ocean, the relationship each society has cultivated with its past ethnic cleansing and genocide resemble one another. There is a desire to forget. A hope that modern life can be separated from what came before. These choices to neglect or obscure history out of comfort or convenience prevent us from reckoning with the fact that past events are deeply intertwined with the present. Modern life is built on these painful foundations. This fact includes our science and our technology.
At some point in their education, most engineers are forced to grapple with times when technology has caused harm. From Bhopal to Tuskegee, every field has its incidents. The way these events are discussed varies substantially depending on who is participating in the conversation, but they are almost always presented as single moments in history. Classes neatly summarize what happened, where past technologists went wrong, and the design lessons that can be learned from previous mistakes. This method of framing tragedy outside of full historical context prevents us from understanding the foundations on which our current work is based.
Universities often try to bridge this gap between technology and social context by requiring engineering majors to take humanities courses. Many engineering students respond by doing the bare minimum to pass these classes with an acceptable GPA. Modern STEM jobs primarily reward technological prowess, so there is no incentive for scientists or engineers to learn about anything else. From the start, the system is constructed to discourage contextualization of science.
The intricacy of scientific thought and practice also contributes to this disconnect. Science is too complicated to consider every single detail at every single level. As we dive into the technical development process, a necessary reliance on numbers and abstract processes emerges. Teams focusing on hyper-specific subject areas solve problems with varying levels of inter-team communication. These mechanisms, which we must apply to make any progress, obscure our impact.
Proponents of this engineering model underscore the significant advances modern science has made. These improvements in our quality of life and access to food, medicine, and technology are undeniable. But valuing technological advancement above all else creates an environment in which scientists and engineers are incentivized to forget. Names like Wernher von Braun, J. Marion Sims, and James Watson continue to adorn buildings, and their respective fields build upon that influence. We celebrate scientific figures for their discoveries while simultaneously ignoring the circumstances through which those discoveries were made.
There are myriad issues associated with forgetting or simply never learning the history of science. Each mistake or disproven, bigoted idea is lost within the overall march of progress. Seemingly innocuous design choices can then further encode decades of biased decisions without technologists realizing. Viewing tragic events or problematic research as isolated moments prevents us from exploring the bases of our disciplines and questioning our assumptions about how science should be done and who can benefit from it. If we refuse to acknowledge this history and the damage science can cause, we will inevitably perpetuate further harm.
Two weeks after returning from the FASPE program, I attended a synthetic biology conference. The first few sessions were simply chances to listen to exciting new research in my field. This spell was broken by a presenter from a government research laboratory who, when asked about a potential military application during her Q&A session, claimed that she was “just a lab rat” who left the “higher-level thinking” to her superiors. The memories I had let fall into the background came crashing back. I spent the rest of the conference compiling a list of concerning ethical behaviors we had discussed among the Design & Technology cohort, which I then turned into the bingo card below to help others engage more critically with scientific presentations.
None of the researchers who presented their findings at this conference approached their work with the intent of doing harm. Every single talk highlighted specific ways that research could improve aspects of society. However, unless the STEM community can find a way to incentivize remembering and centering the tragedies of science in our decision-making, we are bound to repeat them.
Meagan Olsen was a 2024 FASPE Design & Technology Fellow. She is a PhD candidate in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University.