stomach-turning

This is a leftover bit from two weeks ago when we visited the prison, and I can't bring myself to close the browser tab I opened when we got home without saying something about it.

We left the prison via the giant gated entry for delivery trucks, and in this area there was a screen with a whole collection of frankly unconvincing-looking "oscilloscope" readings. On further investigation this turned out to be a seismic scanner for detecting stowaways. "Any type of lorry can be checked on the presence of stowaways with almost a 100% precision" says the website of S4h Science 4 Humanity, who manufactures this system, "it was found that the smallest motion, a sniff, even a heartbeat could be detected through the chassis of a vehicle, whether empty or loaded." I mean, intellectually I understand. It's a prison. You don't want people to escape.** Hiding in/on/under a delivery truck would be an obvious way to escape. Therefore a way to detect people who are doing this is useful. But it still turns my stomach. This is science for humanity? Whose humanity???

I guess what this did is trigger a flashback to the visceral doubts I always had about working in research. One time while I was doing my PhD, I was home for a visit, and my dad said some proud-dad thing to the effect of, "Oh I was telling my friend John that you are working in England and you're going to cure cancer!" and...oh, God, no dad, I'm not going to cure cancer. If my project goes really really really well the work I'm doing *might* contribute to some research which someday far in the future might lead to an alternative diagnostic method for one specific type of cancer, for which there is incidentally already a gold standard diagnostic method we have no chance of ever competing with (cf. https://lolmythesis.com/).

Science is a force for good.
Investment in technology will move us forward.
We have to stay on the cutting edge.

...are things I felt like I should have believed, but never really did. "Why don't you find a job in your field?" everyone says. Because this. This is why. Not that I have principles or anything - it's this AND the fact that my husband makes plenty of money at a company fully invested in all three of these ideas, and if he didn't, I'd probably go out and find a job in my field. But still. There it is.

**the prison director talked about how 20 years ago the system was entirely different - except for the most dangerous inmates, prisoners left the prison every day and worked in the surrounding farms and industries. There were, unsurprisingly, many more escapes - people just arranged to get picked up at work - but the great majority of prisoners still served their time, and when they got out of prison, they had skills and experience in the wider world that made re-integration a much easier process. Today, approval to leave the prison is granted in only a handful of cases every year. The prison is locked down tight and no one has escaped in years. The director attributed these policy changes to a societal change in the perception of the risk prisoners pose to society at large - and it seemed relatively obvious that this change in perception was at least correlated with the change in the makeup of the prison population from mostly-Swiss to mostly-foreign. All food for thought.