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The British Society for Social Responsibility in Science
Beginnings
British Society for Social Responsibility in Science was an influential movement with a strong intellectual and activist legacy. that emerged in the early 1970's. More on background. Many of its members are prominent thinkers and campaigners whose influence continues today. Understanding BSSRS is important to understanding science, politics and society in the last 50 years. Former BSSRS members have now come together to create an archive of BSSRS and the groups which were part of the BSSRS family. It will provide an organized and complete set of materials for researchers, activists, educationalists and any other agency/individual with an interest in the history of radical science and its relevance for today. The materials will be brought together and be made available to the public both electronically via a website and in hard copy by host organizations.
Background
BSSRS was a part of a much wider movement of intellectuals and technicians that had deep historical roots in the history of radical and trades union politics but became a ferment in response to the Vietnam War and student movement of the mid-1960s. The movement had many facets.
Among them were...
a call for more democracy in educational institutions and workplaces, especially student representation questioning hierarchies in medical and other training institutions more social accountability in industries and research institutions, e.g., opposing using university computers to plan bombing patterns in Viet Nam nuclear arms control opposition to the use of chemical and biological weapons, land mines and cluster bombs concern for over-use of pesticides and the 'Green Revolution' technologies of political control, including closed circuit television cameras psychiatric drugs in-vitro fertilization energy policy, particularly nuclear technologies concern about the social relations of production of knowledge, technologies and manufacturing, e.g., scientific management (Taylorism, Fordism) agitation about hazards at work anti-racist science teaching radical psychology, sociology, economics, geography radical history and philosophy of science feminism as applied to science, technology and medicine
There was a related movement about the politics of knowledge in the arts, social sciences, medicine and the natural sciences in which the frameworks of ideas, assumptions and theories of knowledge were scrutinized both politically and philosophically.These critiques extended to the philosophical and ideological aspects of all forms of expertise. An impression of the scope of this movement can be gained from the following list of periodicals (popup) (link to). Rudi Dutschke, a leader of the German student movement, referred to this overall movement as 'the long march through the institutions'.
Committee
BSSRS set up a National Committee, which established working groups on particular topics.
Probably its most prominent members in the early days of BSSRS were Steven and Hilary Rose, though other members were also well known figures or became so. Other key characters include Jonathan Rosenhead, David Dickson, Judith Walker, Dot Griffith, Tim Shalice....
More successful then the initial working groups were the many local groups which developed organically and pursued local campaigns, published newsletters etc. Among the most active of these were groups at Brighton, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield. BSSRS started to produce a Newsletter which soon metamorphosed into the magazine Science for People.
Two formative early events were:
i) a 3-day conference in 1969 on The Social Impact of Modern Biology with audiences averaging 700. Its papers came out in book of the same name, edited by Watson Fuller;
ii) a intervention at the 1970 British Association meeting at Durham – BSSRS members raised ‘political’ questions at what were supposed to be technical sessions, distributed leaflets, organised a street theatre performance as attendees were exiting from the Presidential Address. See Durham for more.
Durham
An early activity by BSSRS was at the 1970 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), held that year in Durham. BSSRS had only been founded the previous year, and had seemed set to function as a normal elite scientific pressure group. The unconventional nature of the Durham intervention was important in announcing a new kind of scientific activism, and in defining the group’s trajectory.
The intention of the intervention was to draw attention to the social dimensions of scientific activity, both in what was seen as legitimate scientific enquiry, and in terms of the social implications of scientific choices. The slogan of the BSSRS activity was “Science is Not Neutral”. BAAS was an annual jamboree attracting some thousands of mostly lay participants. The BSSRS group, about 10-strong including several children under 10 years old, stayed in 2 miners’ cottages, and had an organisational base of sorts in the University’s Sociology department.
The intervention got off to a flying start on the first evening. The President’s Address of Lord Todd was to take place in Durham Cathedral. The group had been supplied with an advance copy of the Address by a friendly journalist. Copies annotated with barbed marginal notes were distributed to the entire audience, who could be heard tuning over in unison. As the audience emerged from the Cathedral they were greeted by a street theatre performance portraying people dying of the effects of chemical and biological warfare.
Throughout the BAAS meeting, BSSRS members raised pointed questions about the non-neutrality of science with speakers who had been expecting only to address the technical aspects of their topic – and the bright lights of primed TV crews captured the exchanges. Many sessions were leafleted with a stream of relevant position papers. A rather disjointed American psychologist wrote, duplicated and handed out poems about the experience.
Finally an inaccurate and arguably defamatory internal memo from a BAAS official (whose day job was with the Chemical Industries Association) who had paid a consultant to infiltrate the summer’s planning meetings for the intervention was passed to the group. Three of those attacked in the memo initiated libel proceedings, and BSSRS terminated the intervention. Other campaigns...
Campaigns
Campaign Against Plastic Bullets The origins of BSSRS lay in concern about research into chemical and Biological weapons, and the society’s foundation was swiftly followed by the saturation use of CS gas in Derry in 1969. CS gas proving to have operational drawbacks, the British Army (which by then had taken over security duties in Northern Ireland) soon adopted rubber bullets, and then plastic bullets, as their principal weapon for dispelling potential riots.
BSSRS soon became involved in revealing and critiquing the wide variety of ‘security’-related technological innovations which the Northern Ireland crisis spawned. This array was given the name ‘The Technology of Political Control’ in the BSSRS book of the same name (Penguin, 1977; 2nd edition Pluto 1980). Over 100,000 of these impact weapons were fired between 1970 and 1989, causing 14 deaths and hundreds of injuries, many of them severe.
Initially BSSRS was almost alone outside the Irish republican community in campaigning against these weapons. As the casualty figures grew BSSRS joined forces with the National Council for Civil Liberties (now ‘Liberty’) to launch the Campaign Against Plastic Bullets, with a range of distinguished patrons. The campaign produced a range of informative material, from speakers’ notes to A5 leaflets. The combination of NCCL’s campaigning experience and BSSRS’s detailed domain knowledge achieved the aim of wider public awareness of their misuse, and of their potentially grave consequences even when used according to the official rules of engagement.
Legacy of 'Technology of Political Control' found in Hartford Web Publishing, Omega Foundation, 3rd World Traveller
