We just hit the point in the semester where my “Ethics in Science” class discusses the novel Cantor’s Dilemma by Carl Djerassi. For those who inhabit the world of scientific research — and for those who don’t but are hungry for an insight to how human relationships and scientific activities are entwined — it’s a nice little novel. (Indeed, I’ve discussed it already in a couple other posts.)

What I’m going to discuss in this post is a situation that’s pretty much at the end of Cantor’s Dilemma, a situation where my view of what was most likely to happen after the last page (in Novel-land, where the fictional characters go on with their lives after we close the book and put it back on the shelf) turns out to be very, very different from my students’ views of how things would probably go for those characters. I’m curious to know whose reading of the likely outcomes seems most reasonable.

But, to lay that out, I need to give you details about where things are at the end of Cantor’s Dilemma.
If you have not yet read Cantor’s Dilemma, and if there is even a remote possibility that you might read Cantor’s Dilemma at some point in the future, and if knowing how the novel ends has any non-zero probability of taking the fun out of your future reading of this novel (as I imagine it would for me), then for goodness sake do not read any further in this post! This post will be loaded with spoilers. Not just minor spoilers, either. To really explain the situation at the end of the novel about which my students and I disagree, I need to spoil most of what there is to spoil.

I’ve warned you. Choose carefully.

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Near the end of the “Ethics in Science” course I teach, we read the novel Cantor’s Dilemma by Carl Djerassi. It does a nice job of tying together a lot of different issues we talk about earlier in the term. Plus, it’s a novel.

While it’s more enjoyable reading than the slew of journal articles that precede it, Cantor’s Dilemma is a little jarring for the students at first, because it contains whole passages that aren’t directly relevant to the question of how to be a responsible scientist. As one of my students synopsized: “Science. Sex. Science. Sex. Science. Sex.”

Upon reflection, though, I think at least some of the “novelistic” relationships in this novel really do have something to say about the nature of the scientific life. Explaining it is going to require some spoilers, though, so if you haven’t read the novel and don’t want me spoiling it for you, go read it before you click the link for the rest of the post!

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