Well, I'll try to make some cogent comments, but you all have done a pretty good job of identifying the details in the comparison.
For a long while I worked at this boundary. One of my jobs at a large research university was to run the intellectual property operation when this stuff was all getting started after the Bahye-Dole act was passed by Congress in 1982. This law gave title to staff inventions to universities as long as reasonable money sharing policies were enacted, and provided that universities that held title to such creations were diligent in arranging and monitoring the development of licensed properties by outside interests. To simplify things, we owned property that was developed in ways to earn money for the inventor(s), the university, and the firms which developed and sold stuff based on the inventions in the future.
Lots of times, I, a Less Nessmann-like university bureaucrat, would be sitting across from powerful corporate attorneys and scientists who were trying to acquire rights to research outcomes that they were going to sponsor and that they hoped turned out beneficial for them monetarily. They even accused me from time to time of being an attorney or a PhD! I got involved in some interesting stuff like genetically engineered soybeans that yielded larger percentages of lysine, a possible vaccine for malaria, or an easy to use pregnancy test. This was all back in the mid to late 80's when our current world was being born. It was fun and interesting work, but at the bottom of it all, it was all about money.
Looking into the future, which was required to gauge possible development scenarios and related incomes and risks, was a daunting set of puzzles. This was always required, but at no time do I remember anyone bringing up points regarding what these new science-based lifestyles of the future that utilized university-owned technologies might possibly do to our grandchildren.
When I left the field, I did some serious writing about what the boundary zones between religion and science were all about, and passed it around freely. Then I became intellectually involved with a budding area of science popularly known as chaos theory, or more correctly defined as the study of complex systems. I wrote about that. I was even asked to sit on a learned panel of theologians and prominent scientists to discuss this stuff. Imagine that ! They wanted to know what I thought !
The one professional article that I formally published on this stuff was in the seminar group's journal. In that article I posed the argument that science and technology is a set of activities in the present, based on facual past proofs, that increasingly creates the future, good or bad. While religions are a set of activities in the present that constantly reflect past beliefs, and that works as a sort of governor, a retarding factor, on the engines of science and technology to help us to get into new futures with minimal damage to the great systemic experiment of G-d known as human civilization.
No one screamed that I was wrong, nor claimed that I must have had an Einsteinian brain transplant. But over time my life, such as it was, came apart. Evidently someone, somewhere, who was very powerful, did not like what I had to say, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't G-d. In fact I'd say that G-d has had a lot to do with the fact that I'm still able to write and talk about what I know and think, to a certain extent.
Two disparate things stick in my mind from this set of experiences and memories.
The first was an article in the NY Times a few years ago that was about the theologian advising the MIT Technology development operation regarding the development of the university's intellectual properties. (Hey, maybe someone is paying attention out there !) I recalled that this lady, as a post-doc, sat in on some of the seminar sessions that I had been involved in. Her profound observation was something to the effect, "There's something profoundly wrong with a society that operates to force humans to behave more and more like robots, and that also wants to make robots that behave and operate as if they were human."
The other was a friendship that I had with a professor at the university that employed me also. He was from India originally, and was much in demand for interviews all over the world in those days for he had invented the first human-made lifeform, a bacteria that digested crude petroleum and other toxic substances. He sometimes wore huge white horn rim eyeglasses. He would sometimes look at me, blink a few times and say. "You know, this might be a very beneficial thing in the future if only it is developed appropriately."
Oh, I almost forgot my closing line in the published article that I wrote. It said something about, "It was going to be hard to make a viable and moral future when many scientists and theologians were trying so hard to eat each other."
flow....
