Science & Tech Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Polanyi’s sentence is built like a controlled burn: one clause scorches his own profession, the next sketches a path out of the smoke. “Neglectful” is a deliberately abrasive choice, aimed inward. It refuses the comforting myth that science is automatically self-correcting and morally insulated. The sting comes from the phrase “responsibility to protect science” - not to protect society from science, but to protect science itself: its norms, its public legitimacy, its freedom from political capture, and its vulnerability to bad-faith manipulation. He’s suggesting that scientists, absorbed in discovery and career incentives, have sometimes left the institution exposed.

Then he pivots to an almost reluctant optimism: “increasingly aware.” That’s not praise; it’s a diagnosis. Awareness arrives late, often under pressure. The subtext is that scientists don’t get to be passive technicians anymore, because society has stopped treating science as a secluded priesthood. As research becomes entangled with nuclear weapons, climate policy, biotech, AI, and industry funding, the social consequences become too loud to ignore. Polanyi, a chemist who lived through the Cold War’s moral arithmetic, is writing from a world where the laboratory’s outputs can restructure geopolitics.

The real intent is to reframe “responsibility” as dual: guarding the integrity of knowledge production while also owning the downstream effects of what that knowledge enables. It’s a call for scientists to be citizens with credentials, not just specialists with clean hands - because the hands were never clean; they were just out of frame.