Roger Boisjoly was a rocket engineer with NASA on the eve of the fatal Challenger launch (January 28, 1986.)  Reviewing the data, he found that the cold weather on the launch day would surely cause the seals on the rocket boosters to loosen and fall apart – and in an environment when even one miscalibrated equation can cause serious consequences, you can see where this is going.

Boisjoly and four of his colleagues implored their bosses to change the launch date.  Their local bosses, at a NASA plant in Utah, agreed with them.  But the “big people” at NASA headquarters didn’t want to wait, so the launch went ahead – and only a few minutes into launch, the shuttle exploded, killing all astronauts on board.

The tragedy deeply impacted Boisjoly for the rest of his life, and he turned to speaking about ethics in engineering and the sciences at universities around the world, at first for the therapeutic benefit, but eventually to warn the world’s most technically brilliant young people about the human cost of projects that go awry.

It is difficult, especially when one is an undergraduate student just beginning in the precarious world of engineering and the natural sciences, to remember that all actions eventually have a consequence.  Of course, when one is directly working with people, as a physician or nurse, one can easily see the consequences of one’s actions – perform a surgery and this patient lives, switch medications and that patient dies.

Yet even in biochemical research, physics, or electrical engineering, we are all working towards something better – something to better people’s lives or expand their knowledge.

I have an introductory biology lab this semester.  The lab periods are tedious – four or more hours of practicing basic laboratory techniques, centrifuging, conducting protein assays, ad nauseam.  One of our labs involved working with rat liver.  Another lab was about horse blood.  In all this mundane activity – pulverizing the liver, separating the blood, washing the bloody (apologies) cell membranes three or four times, which takes almost an hour alone – it is easy to forget that all of us, as budding biology or bioengineering majors, will one day be using this knowledge in real world applications.  Perhaps we will end up misusing it as well.

Some people like to claim that scientists, doctors, and engineers “play God.”  It certainly seems that bravado and ego can override humility and common sense, as in the case of Roger Boisjoly and the Challenger shuttle.  As we enter this bright new century of scientific and technological achievement, we should be wary of approaching the limits of what the human mind can do – because what is a mind without a heart?