Yes. I'm a doctor, an epidemiologist, and lots of my professional colleagues flip back and forth between industry and medical roles. I know them; they are not bad people. But it is possible for good people in bad systems to do things that inflict enormous harm.
Interpretation
Even well-intentioned individuals can cause harm when operating within flawed systems.
This quote highlights the complexity of human behavior, particularly in professional settings. It emphasizes that people who are fundamentally good can still contribute to negative outcomes when they are part of broken systems or structures that do not support ethical practices, suggesting a need for reform and awareness in such environments.
In practice
During a conference on public health, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of ethical practices in medical systems.
Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence.
Positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine.
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.
Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.
If anyone should doubt whether the electrical matter passes through the substance of bodies, or only over along their surfaces, a shock from an electrified large glass jar, taken through his own body, will probably convince him.
Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don't look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact, that is what we mean by understanding.
For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.