Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is home to the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial. Founded in 1824, it’s one of the oldest science education centers in the United States. In 2014, the institute featured “101 Inventions That Changed the World.” When I visited this exhibition with my son, who is a science writer, we tried to guess which inventions made the list. We got a lot of them right, but some were surprising. The top three inventions were pasteurization, paper, and controlled fire; rounding out the list were the sail, air-conditioning, and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Among others were the telephone, cloning, the alphabet, penicillin, the spinning wheel, vaccination, transistor radios, email, and aspirin. Two inventions that my son and I would never have predicted were gunpowder (number 20) and the atomic bomb (number 30)—both of which have arguably done far more harm than good.

To be fair, the list was not 'the too 100 inventions that have changed the world for the better,' it was just 'the top 100 inventions that have changed the world.' I'm reminded of Olivander in the first Harry Potter book telling Harry that great does not necessarily mean good, and that Hitler won Time's Person of the Year Award in 1938. Just the fact that something is important does not speak to it's ethical standing or implications.