00:11
You know, I don't even have to write the ethical, what do you guys have to do something right for
the human subjects? IRB, yeah, exactly. I don't have to ever do that. I don't have to worry if
my molecules are getting hurt while I'm doing experiments. And yeah, like it's not, there are
other sort of ethical questions. What would you submit when you start a new project? I mean,
I have no idea. No, just a proposal. Just a proposal? Just a proposal saying give me money
and they do or they don't. Oh, wait, money means like a research funding, that's all?
Yeah, like the grants. Yeah, yeah. Oh, so you don't need to get any kinds of permission to
do your experiments? I mean, other than like a basic safety training, no. Oh, interesting. I
had no idea. Yeah, you know, it doesn't matter how much sample I use. Doesn't matter how much,
like how wasteful I am with the sample. It's just my fault, you know.
So how, so the basic safety training means it's just really basic stuff, so it doesn't...
I mean, yeah, like chemical handling, like you don't mix acid with organics or,
you know, this is what you're supposed to do when there's a chemical spill and things like that. And
I don't actually have to do any sort of, yeah, no, like there's no special like permission I
need to request for conducting my experiments on top of my proposal. Oh, so for example, yeah.
So for example, if your experiment has a small, like a risk that... Risk to who? To... To me?
To you or other people in the building or something like that. I mean, okay, if it's,
again, like if it's a radioactive substances, for instance, right, then I need to be certified
to be able to handle radioactive things. But it's not like I'm asking some other third-party entity
to let me handle the radioactive material. I just need to pass the school's radioactive
material handling test and that's it. And I presumably have done that already before the
03:04
proposal. Yeah, so yeah, like very, very little ethical sort of concerns in my line of research,
right? And I mean, you have a little bit more than I do, but you also don't worry about, you know,
whether you're finding, like whether what you're going to discover in this research is going to
start or end the war, right? However, it takes a very, very long time to get approval.
Even a slight change, modification to this information sheet, it takes two months,
probably. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. It's been, it's kind of insane.
But maybe, I don't know, like maybe that's not for an entirely unreasonable reason, right? Like
maybe that is actually important because you, especially because you're dealing with a human
subject. And even though you think... Yeah, sometimes it's just a bit too much.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. For example, if there are typos, yeah, we have to submit for amendment.
Oh, typos. Yeah, yeah. It's just, sometimes it's just too much.
Yeah, yeah. I can imagine that it's like logistically annoying, but if you're
experimenting with human beings or with any living things for that matter, I feel like
you don't think that your experiment, which I know because I've done, is pretty chill. I don't
think it's traumatic in any way. But there's a potential, right, always that they might become
triggered. And when that happens, you want to make sure to be able to say that, hey, we did
pass all these protocols, and you can't blame us, right? Yeah, in that sense, you have a bit
more ethical responsibility than I do in my research. But think about Oppenheimer. He was
just supposedly purely interested in the nuclear physics, like what's going to happen in atoms
under extreme conditions. And for all we know, that's all he was interested, right? I don't
think he was trying to start or end the war. He was just trying to do his science things. It's just
that he felt like this technology, when the Germans were starting to get ahead of this nuclear fission
capabilities, he was like, oh, this could destroy the whole country. And when he realized that,
06:01
he felt like, we need to know more about this technology. Before they get to do it,
we need to get ahead of them, right? And that sort of psychological sort of reasoning
is very understandable. So does the movie describe what happened to him after the war,
after the bombs were dropped? Yeah, I would say that they spend about a little bit less than a
third of the movie, the last little bit less than a third of the movie, sort of showing how much he
struggles with the consequences of his work. First of all, it was a lot more powerful than he
had ever had an intention of. And they basically were not aware of any of the long-term effects
that people will suffer from. Because the Trinity test, the test they did at Los Alamos,
they did it in the middle of nowhere, made sure everyone is outside of the blast radius and
everything. But yeah, they simply couldn't estimate what would be the long-term effect
of the radiation. And they do sort of show him struggling with what have we done by making this
technology available. And I think he really does struggle with it afterwards. Yeah, and I don't
want to say too much because it's netabare. But the choices that they made about how to portray
the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was also like, hmm, that's how you want to do it,
the concept. I want to talk about this with other American friends who supposedly have got
history education from American system and how they think about how this was portrayed.
In terms of biopic, it was solid. I feel like they could have done something a little bit
differently about how they decided to go about portraying the bombing itself.
I feel like Oppenheimer, like the movie and from a few articles I've read,
09:08
Oppenheimer seemed like he was obviously talented and brilliant on his own. But I also don't think
he was like Niels Bohr or Einstein of his era. I think he would have been a pretty normal,
solid professor who was doing his thing, which is most of the academics. Most of us
don't win Nobel Prize. And yet you continue to do interesting research. I felt like he would
have been that kind of regular professor if it wasn't for his particular interest in quantum
physics and him being in a right place. He becomes friends with Ernest Lawrence, who
is the first person who invented the cyclotron, the whole facility to accelerate
particles. With people like that around, he was able to do what he did. But
if it wasn't for the wartime, if it wasn't for the environment that he was in, I feel like he
would have done a lot more interesting scientific contribution other than this. This just was
a huge part of his life and it sucked the soul out of him. He was already
kind of unstable. He was already difficult in a regular academic way.
A little bit up in his mind kind of thing. But I think after this, he was just such a mess.
He probably could have had other things he could have done if it was in a peaceful time.
So yeah, that did make me think. It makes for a good movie, but oh my god,
what a terrible thing to be actually experiencing through. I thought a similar thing about Marie
Curie as well. When I read her biography written by her daughter, it was a lot of...
There's, in her case, it's World War I, but there was a war involved and she really worked so hard
at this gradient thing. It did a lot of incredible record-breaking things, but also her life
12:02
was such a messy part. She doesn't seem really happy ever in her entire lifetime.
She's working all the time. So yeah, it made me think about what it is.
The sort of dilemma of being brilliant and being born in a different time.
Yeah, that's all. I don't know. I realized that we've been talking about it for 20 minutes,
so I feel like we should wrap it up. Sorry.
Bye.
That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us at EigoDeScience on
Twitter. That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time.
