Society as a laboratory: the social risks of experimental research

Professor Wolfgang Krohn and Priv-Doz Dr Johannes Weyer are in the Fakultat fur Soziologie, Universitat Bielefeld, Universitatsstrasse 25, D-33615 Bielefeld, Germany. This paper was written in connection with several research projects in which 'experimental implementations' of various kinds were studied (see Herbold, Krohn and Weyer, 1991; Herbold, Krohn and Weyer, 1992; Asdonk, Bredeweg and Kowol, 1991; and Weyer, 1994). IN M O D E R N SCIENCE, there is an increasing tendency to extend research processes and their related risks beyond the limits of the laboratory or other such institution, and directly into the wider society. To greater or lesser extents, these moves are experiments. This tendency is apparent in, for instance, nuclear energy technologies, some developments in ecology, the use of physiologically dangerous chemicals, the introduction of some medicines, and in some military technology. A common denominator in such cases is that they cannot be legitimised in the name of research alone. In keeping with at least the German way of viewing them, they are declared to be the 'implementation of verified knowledge', and are justified on the basis of non-scientific (for instance commercial) interests. With the increased rate of technological innovation in recent decades, the implementation of verified knowledge has frequently become (nolens volens) the testing of risk-involving technologies. For want of a better term, we will refer to these processes as 'experimental implementation(s)', 'real-life experiments' or 'implicit experiments'. The 'risks' of interest here are related to safety, not to (for instance) the probability of obtaining publishable scientific results or of making profits. These terms have been chosen to suggest that the introduction of new technologies frequently reveals features of the traditional laboratory experimental generation of knowledge. Indeed, this is often deliberately built into the design of the project. Real-life experiments, however, differ fundamentally in one aspect from traditional ex-