Culture Clash

Certain to provoke debate within a wide range of academic and professional communities, Culture Clash reveals one of the most important and defining conflicts in contemporary American life. Exposing how the legal system both supports and restricts American science and technology, Goldberg considers the role and future of three projects - artificial intelligence, nuclear fusion, and the human genome initiative - to argue for a scientific vision that infuses research with social goals beyond the pure search for truth. Law, in accordance with the American ideal of giving everyone a fair say, stresses process above all else, seeking an acceptable, rather than a scientifically correct, result. This characteristic has been especially influential in light of the explosive growth of the legal community in recent years. In this controversial book, Steven Goldberg provides a compelling look at the intersection of two of America's most powerful communities - law and science - to explain this apparent contradiction. Rarely considered in tandem, law and science highlight a fundamental paradox in the American character, the struggle between progress and process. Science, with its ethic of endles