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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (May 2, 2000)
Editor in chief: Laura Cadiz Editorial Editors: Bret Jacobson, Laura Lucas Newsroom: (541)346-5511 Room 300, Erb Memorial Union P.O. Box 3159, Eugene, OR 97403 E-mail: ode@oregon.uoregon.edu Tuesday May 2,2000 Volume 101, Issue 143 Emerald Scientists are not like other people — which is good, be cause nobody wants a histo rian designing fluid-dynam ics computer simulations. And in large part, nobody wants a scientist critically evaluating the reign of Mad King George as a func tion of having 15 chil linked immunosorbent assay world. Do these go to people who experiment for years using estab lished principles and facts? Not ex actly. Conventional wisdom in sci ence is that Nobel Prizes are awarded to people who discover phenomena that do not make sense. Usually, they are per uien. As much of a pain as * it is for scientists and normal people to talk to and understand each other, though, obvious ly we need to commu- I nicate. Moreover, the I definite differences be-1 tween how scientists | and “nnns" think' arp S secured tor these heretical ® ideas, and then they prove that they’ve been right the whole time. The FLA is such a phe nomenon. Opponents of it offer many valid reasons for I why we should not support | corporate members on our 1 monitoring organization’s l! Knorrl Mo+lirollir artificial, and we could JOTlClthcifl monitoring” is something all benefit from sharing * fmkpr that Nike already has and our perspectives. uruocr will always have control In fact, the scientific nvpr- thp fart tVmt it ic not ai_ method would be useful in some of the policy decisions that have to be made at the University. This can be seen in the iiber-hype of Nike CEO Phil Knight’s response to the Uni versity’s joining the Worker Rights Consortium. The scientific method is sup posed to be a dynamic system for evaluating any testable hypothesis. Though any system can be manipu lated — and the scientific method is no exception — the validity of the method is still true, and it can be as useful to other people as it is to scientists. Among Knight’s opinions about the issue, apparently he and Nike would rather have their factories monitored by the Fair Labor Asso ciation than by the WRC. Not that he would necessarily change his multimillionaire mind if we joined both groups, but would it be all that bad if we did? I have read as many arguments against the FLA as you have. Some are ridiculous; some are logical. But none are tested. I bet many sci entists would argue for joining the FLA if for no other reason than for the sake of experimentation. Sure, in science we like things to make sense based on what we already know. But that’s not to say that nothing interesting happens. For example, every year, the sci entific community awaits the awarding of the Nobel Prizes to the Michael Jordans of the enzyme ways congruent with our percep tion of workers’ rights is entirely the problem. For a moment, let’s think about what’s important. Is the flavor of the board so critical, or do we sim ply care that foreign workers are not taken advantage of? The 1997 Nobel Laureate in Medicine was mocked for years be cause he tried to prove that certain communicable diseases are not caused by any life form. Eventually he was vindicated, and we now be lieve that things such as mad-cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases are in fact caused by infectious, non living, biologically produced, mu tant proteins. It was counterintu itive for everyone at first. But clearly, it wasn’t wrong. Counterintuitive or not, will it hurt to try the FLA too? Must we be so cynical to say that just because industry board members are in volved, workers everywhere will be worse off for generations? Nothing is totally wrong unless you prove it. And you can’t prove anything without an experiment or two. If we join the FLA, the worst that will happen is that it won’t do as good of a job as the WRC. But what if it’s better? We’ll never know until we try. Jonathan Gruber is a columnist for the Ore gon Daily Emerald. His views do not neces sarily represent those of the Emerald. He can be reached via e-mail jgruber@ gladstone.uoregon.edu.
