Questioning the value or usefulness of science may be the closest thing the modern world has to heresy.
In a world of continuous scientific progress and technological ubiquity, it can be difficult to properly gauge the extent of science's effect on society outside of isolated, high profile, contentious issues.
As easy as it can be to get lost in the weeds of stem cell research or cloning, Virginia Tech's Department of Science and Technology in Society looks to demystify that very matter.
"STS examines the effect science has on society and vice-versa," said philosophy professor Joe Pitt, who works with the STS program. "We examine how scientific knowledge is generated, (and) whether we're justified in that knowledge."
STS is an interdisciplinary program, examining science and technology's effect on society from a variety of perspectives - history, philosophy, sociology and other fields not usually associated with science to create a more complete picture.
"STS is an interdisciplinary arena as opposed to a scientific discipline, which is defined by dominant theories or approaches to its subject matter," said Gary Downey, a professor of STS. "We teach a variety of approaches to a question."
That question pertains to the interplay between scientific and technical progress on one hand and the moral, ethical and social implications of those advancements on the other.
"There's a complex interaction between what I call 'social technologies' and the generation of scientific knowledge," Pitt said. "If the National Science Foundation decides to fund one type of research and not another - that creates knowledge in one area and not the other."
That kind of interplay between the various spheres of influence creates a more complete understanding of how scientific knowledge is created and how it affects human society.
"As an arena, (STS is) defined more by a problem, a question and people come to it - both with different topical interests and different theoretical expertise," Downey said. "In part, the field follows trends. For example, it used to be the case that physics was the dominant science and now genetics is dominant."
The fields of inquiry used within the STS program can be as broad as the environmental effects of new technologies and bioethics to the history of science within Medieval Islam - an approach taken by one STS student.
"My area gives us a window into the lost, so-called "Golden Age" of Islamic scientific revival in the 7th through the 12th centuries," said Najma Yousefi, an STS Ph.D. student. "Helping to understand that can help us understand the inferiority complex in the Arab and Muslim mind when they compare themselves to the West."
Doris Zallen, another STS professor and a former geneticist, agreed with Downey's assessment of STS' mission and method.
"The goal in STS is to be a part of the evaluation; we can provide a balance to the scientists," Zallen said. "In the long run, it's good for scientists to hear these other trained voices who are experienced at looking at the impact of science on society and society on science."
The intersection of these worlds is an inevitable result and needs to be studied and, where possible, addressed, Downey said.
"We argue that in a scientific or technical arena, there are always non-technical dimensions," Downey said. "For those people who are trained in the sciences or engineering, those dimensions are seen to be irritations, but we take them and assert they are key constituent elements of the problems that are being addressed."
Downey said that interplay does indeed work both ways, with social interest being a principal informant as to what areas concern contemporary STS most.
That two-way approach can be very informative in fully understanding the scientific disciplines.
"When we ask, 'What is science?' we can't simply say, 'What scientists do' because scientists raise children, they teach." Pitt said. "Scientists petition for more money, they have power plays; there's internal politics that affect how and what kinds of scientific knowledge they generate."
Even STS is affected by the human interest factor in society.
"STS as a field follows societal issues," Downey said. "If we're going to solve a problem, we have to know what society considers a problem."
Zallen said it's important not to misunderstand STS; it's not an attempt to find fault with science itself.
"I think scientists want to do the right thing, they want to help, and basically there's always a sense that this will be useful to others and an ethical intent," Zallen said.
Sometimes, however, simple human impulses can lead to moral justifications and a kind of blindness to consequences borne of good intentions.
"If you've worked for 10 years on something, and you've dedicated yourself to it, and you've pushed this knowledge to a particular point, you may be so driven by the goal that you don't give enough attention to the ethical dimensions," Zallen said. "You mean well, you say, 'This is good stuff, and it'll do a lot of good in the world, so let's push it.'"
Zallen said many people misunderstand science as something much more rigid than it actually is, and that misunderstanding leads to various problems.
"It's a construct - a product of the scientific revolution, its particular features have been historically molded," Zallen said. "Scientists chuckle at philosophers who think this is all building to some theory, but the 'play' in the lab is what I miss the most."
STS emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to awareness among the public and officials that there was a communication breakdown between people trained in scientific and technical fields and those trained in social sciences as well as policymakers.
"Starting in the '30s, we saw history and philosophy of science emerge as fields of study, and by the '50s, we saw sociology start to play an important role," Pitt said. "But these were within their respective departments, not talking to each other, and their results weren't satisfactory."
"At the same time, in the '60s and '70s, science and technology were coming to be seen as societal problems ... how do we solve problems involving science and technology?'" Downey said. "There's a sense among universities that society needs people who can help it solve scientific and technological problems that have technical and non-technical dimensions."
The STS graduate program has tracks in history of science and technology, philosophy of science, social and cultural studies, as well as policy studies.
"When I was a student of economics, I started to examine the history of science in the Muslim world as a way of better understanding the current economic situation there," Yousefi said. "When I was discussing this with my adviser, Professor Pitt, he said to me, 'That's your area; that's what you should be studying.'"
Yousefi said his current studies have proved far more applicable than his former approach.
"I'm training to go into the academy, but STS could as easily put a student in a policy-making job or back into private industry," Yousefi said.
What seems to unite the members of the STS faculty is a similar feeling that the dominant paradigm within their respective fields didn't address the problems posed by the interaction of scientific advancements and their implications for the social order.
"Some of us have come from the real world of science. As a geneticist, some questions were raised when I moved from the genetics of algae - the green scum on ponds - to human genetics," Zallen said. "As I moved into that field, a number of ethical issues arose in my work ... I found that the man who thought he was the biological father was not providing genes to the baby."
Zallen said she found other unexpected responses to new scientific tools, which caused her to question her basic assumptions.
"There were questions when I was developing genetic tests and whether or not people wanted to use them," Zallen said. "I was killing myself coming up with information and people were saying, 'We're not going to use that.'"
"When I looked further, they had good reason," Zallen said. "It wasn't that they were anti-science or too dumb to get was I was saying; sometimes the test can tell you, and sometimes it can't - you're given a range: it could be 12 percent it could be 25 percent; is that enough to be of any use to you?"
Downey also found his technical training wasn't enabling him to untangle important social issues posed by science, in particular nuclear power.
"I was trained initially as a mechanical engineer," Downey said. "As an undergraduate I got interested in public controversies over environmental issues."
"I could understand arguments from both proponents and opponents of nuclear power," Downey said. "What I couldn't understand was why they were fighting."
Eileen Crist, an associate professor with STS studies biodiversity issues and finds the implications of extinction highly relevant to society.
In 2003, Crist wrote in Wild Earth that the loss of half the Earth's species might not be disastrous for humans, but would result in the loss of uninvestigated medicines, products and food sources.
"The crucial question is not whether a world with less variety and richness is viable, but rather, who would want to live in such a world?" Crist said.
STS trains students to work in both of those communities and between them, acting as a type of interpreter.
"The problem for the field is that you have people trained in some environment who don't know that what they need is someone who can mediate between technical and nontechnical fields - so you don't have recruiters coming from corporations, nonprofits or government saying, 'We need STS people to help mediate our technical people and our nontechnical people,'" Downey said.
This lack of understanding leaves STS graduates to have to make their own case.
"STS people have to sell themselves, they have to compete for positions in nonacademic environments by demonstrating we have a capability from which you would benefit," Downey said.
Downey said students leaving the STS program enter academia, public policy groups, nonprofits and private industry.
"People who come out of this graduate program are very good at interacting with people across the whole range of capabilities and competencies; they're good at talking to technical people about technical stuff and non-technical people about non-technical stuff," Downey said.
The end result is someone ready to work in both the technical and non-technical fields of these overlapping worlds and address their problems.
"I say that these people lead, because through work in STS one becomes - in a way - triply schizophrenic: through historical work involving the emergence of some technical issue, through philosophical work and social or cultural or political science they understand the non-technical dimensions of that issue," Downey said.
That leadership has netted results in the past, as scholarly concern has caused scientists to reevaluate ongoing research. One such example was research into genetic recombination, which was halted for two years while scientists evaluated the state of the research and its ethical implications, Zallen said.
"They knew there was some great value from studying recombination, from putting genes from one organism inside another to study that gene," Zallen said. "They also knew they needed to examine the possible implications."