[Q] Do you have ideas about what belief systems should guide scientist then, regarding ethical issues?
Well, that's a very broad question and would take a long time to argue the various aspects of this issue, but one aspect would be then perhaps what ethics should guide a scientist and here I think I see one major problem with the way science is going today, in terms of ethics. Science, in my time, has changed dramatically, not so much in the progress that it has made... and progress has been logarithmic since a long time... since the industrial revolution when modern science began... but in terms of being tied to commerce... has become commercial, very much so, and the unfortunate thing is that the ethics of businessmen is penetrating into science, it's taking over. We had an ideal of a scientist. Every historian will tell you that not the scientists... that scientists were not approaching always the ideal, but still at least this was what we were striving to achieve, but that has changed. So here we have a situation where profit... economical profit is becoming the major goal of doing science, and that again I see as the wrong direction. It would mean that basic science would diminish because there is no immediate profit. And the other result is the big science that you already mentioned and other adverse effects, and this is, in my opinion, again, quite wrong, and we should go back to the old ideal of science, even if we are not angels, we are not that, we are just human, we have all kinds of drawbacks and all kinds of things we are doing that we should not be doing, but at least we should try and we should make people who go to science have a Hippocratic oath of a kind that they will be honest, that they will not be pursuing personal gains and they will not be... I don't know... and so on and so on. Of course the physicians don't stick to that oath either but at least we can show that we are interested in that and not that we are interested to become businessmen. Businessmen are cheating, are liars, are doing everything, false advertising and so on and so on, just to make profit. If we will do science like this, that will be the end of science.