Both scientists and non scientists have a tendency to regard science and culture as different and parallel, if not competing things, between which one can or must choose. Science is not conceived of as an alternative, either neutral or competitive to culture but rather as a central component of a human culture more broadly understood, a component that existed long before the term science was coined and will long outlast current understandings of science as a specialized or privileged activity that can be engaged in only by members of a self perpetuating professional community.

I strongly believe that the evolution of understandings of science is too important to be left solely in the hands of a closed community of scientists. What is needed is indeed an army, a more diverse array of human beings who have in common a shared sense of science as a valuable component of human culture and a willingness to shoulder the burden of making it into what it has the capability to become.

For this to happen, we all need to work much harder to not only reduce the perception of science as a specialized and isolated activity of the few but to make it in fact the product and property of all human beings.

John Warga