The public and the scientists

There's a graphic floating around the web that comes from a Pew study about science and society. The general public thinks differently than the scientists:

Mostly I'm on board with the scientists, not too surprisingly. But I find it interesting to think a little about the items on which I part company with them.

• I have qualms about using animals for research. Sure, all life is pretty brutal, though we don't like to think about it. And I eat animals. Yet I believe we should only do research on animals when our big brains and ingenuity can't come up with any alternative. And I don't trust that scientists think searching diligently for alternatives is important. I may be wrong.

• I'm glad to see that scientists aren't close to unanimous in endorsing the safety of foods on which pesticides have been used (most all commercial foods.) It seems to me that we may not entirely know what we doing to ourselves with these poisons. Can science really promise that all or even most of the possible dangers have been thoroughly studied? Not if studying them would cost the companies whose costs are lowered by pesticide use.

• On the item on nuclear power plants, I think the scientists are being bamboozled by their own cleverness. Yes, science has learned how to release energy from atoms. That's remarkable all right. And we may even know what it would take to shield ourselves and posterity from the toxic byproducts of our ingenuity, though I don't think we've yet demonstrated that capacity. (The U.S. has thousands of tons of "legacy" nuclear waste sitting around waiting for safe disposal.) Though the engineering know-how to manage nuclear energy production may exist, I don't trust that we have to social capacity to build and manage this energy safely. And this question is not within the domain of science; the general public may very well have a clearer experiential idea of what social systems can do than the men and women in the labs.

• The more extreme forms of offshore drilling evoke the same reaction that I have to nuclear power: the technology for doing it may exist, but what makes us think we can use it safely and without major damage to oceans and shorelines? Nothing, if the experience with BP in the Gulf of Mexico is taken seriously.

• And then there is fracking. Here I think there is mammoth evidence that oil extractors don't give a damn about the environmental effects of their process. And it looks as if the scientists too have their doubts. That's what you get when your process causes earthquakes and the companies doing it refuse to release data on what chemicals they are injecting into the earth.

• I skipped over the item on GMO foods. On this, I'm with the scientists; farmers have been modifying plants as long as humans have been growing them. But even though I'm somewhat convinced this is safe, I've voted to require that the producers label their GMO products. The public may be untutored, but we have a right to know.

Do you find that you agree with the scientists? If not, do you know why? This seems a worthwhile exercise.