Science Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Polanyi’s line lands like a polite rebuke aimed at a familiar fantasy: that knowledge can be pre-filtered for virtue, as if discovery comes with a built-in “harmless” setting. Calling them “dreamers” is doing tactical work. It’s not a slur, but it frames the demand as emotionally comforting and intellectually unserious - a wish for moral certainty in a domain defined by uncertainty, curiosity, and spillover.

The intent is less to defend “science without ethics” than to puncture the comforting idea that ethics can be enforced at the point of discovery. Scientists don’t always know what something is “for” when they find it. Basic research is often a blind groping toward understanding; the applications arrive later, frequently via institutions - militaries, corporations, states - that sit far from the lab bench. Polanyi’s subtext is about responsibility, but it’s also about misplaced responsibility: asking scientists to only discover “good” things is a way for the rest of society to avoid the harder political work of governing how knowledge gets funded, deployed, and constrained.

Context matters. Polanyi, a Nobel-winning chemist who lived through the 20th century’s great collision between scientific brilliance and industrialized catastrophe, is speaking from a world where “dual-use” is the rule, not the exception: nuclear physics, synthetic chemistry, computing, biology. The sentence compresses that historical lesson into a clean provocation: if you want science to do good, you don’t get there by wishing ignorance into existence; you get there by building institutions and norms strong enough to steer what you already know.