Science & Tech Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Polanyi is pushing back on a familiar dodge: that science is a neutral engine and ethics are optional accessories bolted on after the fact. His phrasing turns that excuse inside out. “Grafted onto” is a deliberately biological metaphor, suggesting something foreign, cosmetic, even desperate - the way institutions sometimes paste an ethics board onto a research program to reassure the public. He rejects that separation outright. If human rights are “essential” to using technology wisely, they can’t live in the PR department; they have to sit inside the operating system.

The subtext is a defense of scientific legitimacy in an era when scientific power has outpaced social consensus. Polanyi, a Nobel-winning chemist who lived through the 20th century’s proof that technical brilliance can coexist with moral catastrophe, is implicitly addressing the lineage from wartime research to surveillance states to biotech’s new frontiers. His claim isn’t sentimental; it’s structural. Science depends on norms that look a lot like rights: openness, the ability to dissent, protection from coercion, the idea that a person is not merely raw material for progress. Without those conditions, “science” collapses into controlled output - an instrument of whoever holds authority.

The move to “scholarship in general” widens the indictment. He’s not just policing laboratories; he’s calling out any knowledge industry that treats human beings as data points without dignity. Polanyi’s intent is to make ethics non-negotiable by arguing it’s not external regulation but internal method: respect for rights is part of what makes inquiry worthy of trust.