Scientific Research is a Token of Humankind's Survival

1. Instead of a large income a scientist receives freedom, camaraderie and independence; honours and promotions that depend on his own ability far more than in other occupations; and, above all, "the overwhelming feeling of uncovering yet another one of nature's mysteries." As the essay puts it, science is an exciting adventure in which the major reward comes from the discovery itself — the satisfaction of the work is the payment.

2. The three nuclear powers — the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom — wanted to ban the testing of new nuclear weapons, but a ban is useless if it cannot be policed. Their problem was therefore one of verification: suppose the powers sign an agreement to stop testing, and suppose one of them breaks it by secretly setting off an underground nuclear explosion — how can the others detect the violation? Underground explosions shake the earth in much the same way earthquakes do, so the difficulty was telling the two apart.

3. In the survival of humankind — specifically, in the detection of secret underground nuclear tests. Keilis-Borok had been working in Moscow on the pure theory of seismic waves, with no thought of any practical use. Because an underground explosion produces tremors similar to those of an earthquake, his theory became the means of distinguishing a cheat's bomb from a natural event, and so made a verifiable test-ban treaty possible.

4. The nuclear test ban. The scientists at Geneva worked out a technical solution to the detection problem, and that solution, in the author's words, "eventually allowed politicians to reach one of the most important decisions of their times: nuclear test ban." The order of events matters: the experts met first, and the political decision followed from what they were able to show could be done.

5. The author names both kinds together as threats to the survival of civilisation: earthquakes (natural), and, as man-made ones, the self-inflicted destruction of megacities, environmental catastrophes, and economic and social crises. He then gives examples of what a single modern disaster could be — a massive release of radioactivity from a nuclear waste disposal site, an earthquake in the middle of a megalopolis, or an outburst of mass violence — any of which could cause up to a million casualties, make a large part of the world uninhabitable, or trigger a global depression or a war.

6. The answer is (iii) scientist. The sentence is the essay's opening epigraph and is immediately explained by the question that follows it: why do some of us still decide to become scientists, "despite the fact that businessmen, lawyers, and doctors enjoy a much higher income"? Lawyers, doctors and businessmen are therefore named as the rich professions and cannot be the "you" of the taunt. The person who is clever but poor is the scientist, and the whole essay is his reply.

7. It expresses surprise, suddenness and a pleasing sense of being carried along by events rather than directing them. The passive construction — he does not say "I went to Geneva" but "I found myself in Geneva" — makes it sound as though he looked up one day and was simply there. It also expresses the essay's larger theme in miniature: a man absorbed in abstract mathematics, with no thought of the real world, is suddenly lifted out of his study and set down in the middle of international politics, because his work turned out to matter.

1. The word token in the title means a sign and a guarantee — something that both shows survival is possible and helps bring it about. Keilis-Borok justifies the claim in three stages.

First, by narrative proof. In 1960 the human race was protected from extinction by nothing better than the arithmetic of Mutually Assured Destruction — a "thin thread", as he calls it, since each superpower could destroy the other and each had twenty minutes in which to retaliate. The one way out was a treaty banning tests, and the treaty was impossible until somebody could tell a secret underground explosion from an earthquake. Seismology answered that question. Research done for pure mathematical pleasure therefore became a direct instrument of survival, and the test ban followed. This is not an argument but a case, and it is the strongest thing in the essay.

Second, by pointing to the community that science creates. The Geneva experts came from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, with every cultural and political reason to distrust each other, and yet they succeeded, because "we were all scientists" and could build a common language out of respect for hard evidence, ranking by expertise alone, and persistent self-criticism. Science thus supplies the one channel of honest communication that survives when politics has broken down — and a species that can still talk to itself can still be saved. Hence his conclusion: "while there is science, there is hope of survival and well-being for all of us."

Third, by examining the present danger. The threats now are earthquakes in megacities, environmental catastrophe, nuclear waste, mass violence, economic collapse — each capable of a million casualties — and they keep growing although trillions of dollars a year are spent against them. Money, therefore, has already been tried and has failed; what remains is intellectual resource. "The hope and the responsibility for breaking the stalemate rest not on the money but on intellectual resources," and only basic research can create the springboard for a new disaster-preparedness industry.

Finally he guards the claim from overstatement. Science is "not the beginning and the end"; human qualities matter more, and science is only their guardian and caretaker — and only "if humanly used." The token is a promise, not a magic charm: it works if we do.

2. The writer takes up a familiar prejudice — the "common lore" that a person immersed in science has no practical sense — and turns it upside down.

He begins by granting the joke, which is a shrewd move. It is true, he says, that one of the greatest mathematicians of our time was sometimes so lost in a current problem that he left home wearing shoes from two different pairs. Having conceded the comic surface, he asks the reader to look carefully at the other side.

His first illustration is historical: all new technologies and all new branches of industry, from defence to entertainment, stem from fundamental research. He lists the past yield — antibiotics, electronics, biotechnology, synthetic fibres, the green revolution, genetic forensic diagnosis. Each of these began as abstract enquiry and now underlies an entire industry. Antibiotics were not invented by someone looking for a marketable product; electronics came out of the physics of the atom; genetic forensics came out of curiosity about DNA. Nothing could be more practical than the things that make everything else possible.

His second illustration is the future: only basic research can now give us new sources of energy, new mineral deposits, efficient defence against terrorism, a cure for cancer and new forms of transportation. These are exactly the problems the practical world most wants solved, and none of them has a shortcut.

His third illustration is personal and economic, and it is aimed at a student deciding what to study. People trained in theoretical physics are head-hunted by financial institutions; those trained at the frontiers of biology become founders and directors of pharmaceutical companies. "Knowledge of basic science will give you a head start in whatever career you choose."

The unstated illustration, of course, is the author's own story. A man doing mathematics on seismic waves with no thought of the real world turned out to hold the key to a nuclear test ban. Defining "practical" as producing real effects in the world, rather than as looking sensible, the scientist in odd shoes is the most practical person alive, because the work he does while apparently dreaming is what everyone else will be standing on in fifty years.

3. The essay is unusually full of other people's words. There are four that matter: the popular expression "If you are so clever, why are you so poor?"; Tolstoy on the writer who cannot live without writing; Frank Press on the good feeling of like-minded people working together; the French proverb "Nobody is satisfied with his wealth, everybody is satisfied with his wisdom"; and McGeorge Bundy's "Ours is the time of contest over issues not completely understood." They serve several purposes at once.

They organise the essay. Three of them are printed as epigraphs at the joints of the text, each announcing the section it stands before. The popular expression introduces the defence of a poorly paid profession; the Press quotation introduces the Geneva story about collaboration; the Bundy quotation introduces the closing movement about dangers we do not yet understand. They work as signposts in an essay that has no other headings.

They let the author voice the objection without owning it. Beginning with a taunt aimed at himself is disarming: the reader's own scepticism has been spoken aloud, so it no longer has to be defended, and the author can proceed to answer it.

They borrow authority. A geophysicist arguing that scientists are admirable is an interested party. Tolstoy speaking about vocation, an American presidential adviser speaking about uncertainty, and a leading American geophysicist speaking about the pleasures of teamwork are all witnesses from outside the case. The Press quotation is especially well chosen: Press is an American, which makes him the ideal witness for a claim about cooperation across the Iron Curtain.

They give compression and memorability. The French proverb makes the point about money and wisdom in one line that would otherwise need a paragraph, and its irony — everyone thinks himself wise enough and no one thinks himself rich enough — carries the argument further than plain statement could.

And they enact the thesis. The essay claims that thinking is a shared, international, cross-generational activity; a text built out of a Russian novelist, an American scientist, an American statesman and an anonymous French proverb is a small demonstration of that claim.

4. (Explanation followed by a short argued essay.)

Explanation. The sentence is the third and greatest of the lessons Keilis-Borok drew from Geneva. He means that science is a permanent, functioning channel of honest cooperation between human beings, which stays open even when every other channel has closed. In 1960 politics had failed: the two blocs could not trust each other and the world was held together by the threat of mutual extinction. Yet the scientists in that closed room could still work together, because their profession runs on evidence rather than loyalty, ranks people by expertise rather than nationality, and criticises itself without mercy. That shared discipline produced a technical answer, and the answer let the politicians sign. So long as such a community exists, he is saying, there is always somewhere for a solution to come from — not only for war, but for disease, hunger, energy and disaster. "Well-being" matters as much as "survival" in his sentence: science is not merely what saves us from catastrophe but what makes a decent life possible.

Is science a blessing or a curse? The honest answer is that science is neither; it is power, and power takes its character from the hands that hold it. The same understanding of the atomic nucleus produced the bomb that threatened the world in 1960 and the medical isotopes that treat cancer today. The same chemistry gave us fertilisers that feed billions and the pollution that poisons our rivers. The same networks that spread knowledge instantly to a student in Nepal spread lies just as fast.

But the balance, on the evidence, is strongly positive. Science has roughly doubled human life expectancy in a century; it has ended smallpox; it has fed a population that older methods could not have fed; it warns us of earthquakes and storms; it gives an ordinary student access to a library that no king once possessed. Against this, its harms — nuclear weapons, environmental damage, surveillance — are real, but each is a harm of use, not of knowledge. Knowing how the nucleus works does not oblige anyone to build a bomb, and, as Keilis-Borok's own story shows, the same knowledge that made the bomb detectable made the ban on testing possible.

That is exactly why the essay ends as it does. Science is "not the beginning and the end"; human qualities matter more, and science, "if humanly used", is their indispensable guardian and caretaker. A blessing or a curse is therefore the wrong question. The right question is who is using it, and for what — and that is a question about honesty, courage and conscience, not about laboratories.

1. (a) "We" are the technical experts of the three nuclear powers of the time — the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom — meeting behind closed doors at the Palace of Nations in Geneva in 1960, with the author among them as a Soviet specialist in seismic waves. (b) What had to be saved was, in the first place, the negotiation itself. The experts came from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, and the political tension of the Cold War hung over their heads; agreement "outwardly seemed impossible, given all our differences in cultural background." Beyond that, what was at stake was the test-ban treaty, and beyond that the human race, since at the time every man, woman and child lived under the threat of annihilation. (c) Respect for hard evidence means that a claim is settled by measurement and not by who makes it, so a Soviet seismogram and an American one can be laid side by side and argued about honestly. Undisputable ranking by expertise only means that authority in the room came from what a person knew, not from rank, nationality or political backing — which is precisely what allowed enemies to defer to each other without humiliation. Persistent self-criticism means that each side was in the habit of attacking its own conclusions before anyone else could, so no one had to defend a weak position out of pride. Taken together the three make a professional culture in which people can be opponents politically and colleagues intellectually at the same time. (d) It made a technical solution possible — a method of distinguishing an underground nuclear explosion from an earthquake — and that solution "eventually allowed politicians to reach one of the most important decisions of their times: nuclear test ban." It also taught the author personally that he had like-minded people all over the world and need never feel lonely abroad.

2. (i) Not true, according to the essay — though the author admits money is the more popular belief. He states plainly that "the hope and the responsibility for breaking the stalemate rest not on the money but on intellectual resources." His evidence is that trillions of dollars a year are already being spent to contain modern disasters by all known techniques, and the dangers keep growing. Money can only buy more of what already exists; when what exists is not enough, only new knowledge can help. He quotes the French proverb — "Nobody is satisfied with his wealth, everybody is satisfied with his wisdom" — to explain why people nevertheless go on believing in money: we always feel short of wealth and never short of wisdom, which is exactly the wrong way round.

(ii) True. This is the essay's central claim and the meaning of its title. Intellect saved the world in 1960, when a piece of pure seismic theory made a nuclear test ban verifiable and therefore signable. Intellect is also the source of everything that has improved human life — antibiotics, electronics, the green revolution — and it is the only resource capable of answering the dangers that now threaten civilisation. Hence: "while there is science, there is hope of survival and well-being for all of us." The author adds one condition, which should be included in a full answer: intellect must be humanly used, since "science is not the beginning and the end" and human qualities matter more.

(iii) True, with a precise meaning of "stalling". To stall a disaster is to hold it off, and that is exactly what basic research does, in two ways. It supplies the means of prediction and detection — the author's own field, earthquake prediction, exists for that reason, and the detection of secret nuclear tests stalled an arms race. And it supplies the means of preparation: "only the basic research can create a springboard for developing new disaster preparedness industry." What it does not do is abolish danger. Earthquakes will still happen; research only decides whether they kill a million people or a hundred. The claim is therefore modest and defensible — research buys us time and warning, which is all that can honestly be promised.