Яким би був світ без науки?

Key Points

• The host opens with a thought experiment: what would the world look like without science?
• He recounts the true 1828 case of 16-year-old Victor Jenson in Great Britain, whose minor wound was treated with bloodletting, 20 leeches applied to the anal area, and a probe inserted into the wound—leading to his death.
• Without science, the world would lack the internet, electricity, antibiotics, and vaccines, and would suffer high child mortality, food shortages, poor sanitation, and doctors with knowledge comparable to a modern five-year-old.
• The claim that science causes harm (e.g., atomic or chemical weapons) is flawed: science is a process for obtaining reliable knowledge, and harm comes from how people use it, not from science itself.
• Genetic engineering is compared to a hammer—a tool whose ethical use depends on the person wielding it, not the tool.
• Mainstream media distort science by offering simple solutions and misinterpreting trivial findings to generate clicks, leading to public disillusionment when promises fail.
• American virologist Paul Offit, in "Pandora's Box," argues science rests on two pillars: expert opinion and reproducibility of results.
• The discredited vaccine–autism claim was tested by hundreds of scientists and found false, demonstrating how real science self-corrects.
• Science is imperfect and doesn't always give the answers we want, but the alternative is dangerous, ignorant medicine.

Summary

In this transcript, Ukrainian author Max Kidruk opens with a provocative question: what would the world be like without science? Rather than speculating abstractly, he illustrates his answer with a real historical case from Great Britain in 1828. A 16-year-old boy named Victor Jenson accidentally stabbed himself while playing with a protractor in his basement. Believing he had only cut his vest, he ignored the wound until, ten minutes later, he noticed his clothes soaked in blood. He was taken to a hospital, where the finest doctors of the era bandaged the wound, laid him on his back, and performed bloodletting. Over the next three days, Jenson was repeatedly bled. When results disappointed, the doctors escalated treatment by applying twenty leeches to his anal area. When that too failed, a doctor inserted a probe into the wound and began digging around inside it—apparently reaching the heart, as blood erupted from the boy's chest. Victor Jenson soon died.

Kidruk uses this grim anecdote to argue that without science, our world would look much the same: no internet, no electricity, no antibiotics or vaccines, no free travel—but plenty of child mortality, chronic food shortages, unsanitary conditions, and physicians whose understanding of physiology would rival that of a modern five-year-old. He anticipates the objection that not all scientific inventions have been beneficial, citing atomic bombs and chemical weapons. This argument, he says, is deeply flawed. Science is simply the process of acquiring reliable knowledge about the world; in itself it causes no more harm than a brick or a stone. How we use science is a separate question. He illustrates this with genetic engineering: a potato could be made toxic by editing its genome, but it is poisonous not because it is genetically modified, but because scientists chose to make it so. Genetic modification is merely a tool, like a hammer—useful for hanging a picture, criminal when used to smash someone's head. Blaming the hammer, or the hand holding it, is misguided.

Kidruk then turns to mainstream media, which he says foster distorted perceptions of science. Science does not seek simple solutions; scientific knowledge is a long, gradual, complex, and contradictory process. Yet media often offer simple answers and misinterpret trivial findings to boost clicks. When expectations about a miracle injection that cures all cancers or a super-diet promising a life without disease go unmet, people become disillusioned—but that is a failure of media and credulity, not of science. Quoting Mark Twain, he notes the problem is not what we don't know, but what we know incorrectly. To help ordinary people distinguish truth from fake news, Kidruk cites American virologist Paul Offit's book "Pandora's Box." Offit argues science stands on two pillars: expert opinion—trusting those who study an issue far more thoroughly than we ever could—and reproducibility of results. Experts can err, which is why findings must be tested. When a paper claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, hundreds of scientists across Europe, Canada, and the United States ran experiments to verify it. None succeeded. After hundreds of studies costing tens of millions of dollars and involving hundreds of thousands of children, it became clear that vaccinated children developed autism no more often than unvaccinated ones. Real science prevailed. Yes, scientists sometimes make mistakes; science doesn't always give the answers we want, and sometimes gives none at all. But we have no other path, because the alternative is a bone-setter applying leeches to your anus when you need emergency surgery.