Now that all the hoopla regarding Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer has died down, we can focus on the serious ethical and science issues raised by the Manhattan project — the US effort to build a nuclear bomb.

Examining the social impact of the Manhattan project is required, but not enough. The release of the movie, and its popularity, does provide an opportunity to discuss the ethical responsibility of scientists — a topic which receives scant attention.

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As a group, scientists must take into account the social and ethical consequences of their research, as the current debate around AI demonstrates.

The ferocious debates surrounding vaccines, the ugly tactics of the anti-vaxxer groups, the fear-mongering surrounding the use of AI and ChatGPT, all highlight a serious deficiency of our times.

The capitalist business model has prioritised technology as a commodity, ready to be sold in mass quantities.

We have ignored the ethical consequences of technology, and failed to ask for whose benefit scientific innovations are developed and deployed.

The Manhattan project specifically revealed two interconnected features of scientific work: the major impact the sciences had on the wider society, particularly military technology and it revealed that scientific work can be moulded by big project........

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