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Development of Industrial Technologies and Scientists' Own Accountability
It is with a feeling of remorse that I as a scientist must agree with others that, while the fellow scientists of the world have, from the times of James Watt's steam engine to Dr. Oppenheimer's nuclear bomb, contributed to the opening of new industrial eras by achieving technological breakthroughs, we find ourselves now living in a world of deteriorating global environment without being able to come up with any really effective countermeasures. The polluting substances jettisoned as as the industrialization of the Western countries spread across Europe beginning with the Industrial Revolution in England, has polluted the great rivers like Thames and Rhein eventually pouring into the Atlantic Ocean, and then permeated all corners of the world carried by sea currents, while the nuclear technology has not only created atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also brought about the fear of radiation exposure to much wider areas by helping build nuclear power plants without serious environmental consideration.
It may be said that the primary responsibility resides with the governments of the countries which were directly involved in the development of these technologies. But, I do say that the scientists who took part in the basic research and helped the process of industrial application should also share a moral responsibility. I, for one, played a significant role as a youthful marine scientist in the development of shrimp culture technology among many other projects from 1959 though 1990, and at the end of the 20 century, I feel strongly tht I am also responsible, if indirectly, for the unexpected consequences of the rapid development in recent years of industrial shrimp production in the Asia-Pacific region. As it is self-explanatory in the newspaper article just published (upper left) with its English translation cited below, I have lived the second half of my life trying to correct the ill consequences brought about as a result of the technological breakthrough I myself helped accomplish in shrimp culture.
Since I became aware of the possibility at an early stage of the shrimp culture's development that it could lead to environmental pollution, I began a scientific research aimed at developing countermeasures against some of the virus infections already beginning to threaten the shrimp farms. The subsequent discovery I made in the area of scientific information technology has led to the development of a new countermeasure at our Laboratory which is totally friendly to the environment, and yet very effective in preventing and controlling various infectious diseases playing havoc with shrimp farms. As one of the men responsible for the advent of shrimp culture technology, I have a sense of satisfaction that I now have the opportunity of solving the problems I personally feel accountable as a scientist.
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"Declining Shrimp Farm Production in Thailand"(the newspaper article above)
According to JETRO, the shrimp culture business in Thailand is at the crossroads today faced with a number of difficult problems including decline in production and damages to the environment. Thailand today is the world's largest producer of cultured shrimp with a rapidly expanding output from 1,589 tons in 1977 to 23,566 tons in 1987, and then the whopping 260,000 tons in 1995, an astounding growth by 163 times. This was made possible by the expansion of shrimp farms from a chain of obscure local ponds into today's total land area of 80 thousand Hectors (1997) occupied by 26,145 shrimp farm operators (1995). But, in the last few years, the combination of factors including the abuse of chemical substances and inappropriate water quality control systems has given rise to widespread problems of fatal infection such as are called "Yellow Head" and "White Spot" diseases suffered by the shrimp farms along the shorelines. As a result, the operators are being squeezed between production decline and rising cost. Thailand's shrimp export marked the peak year in 1994 with 178,543 tons, but since continued to decline to the 1997 export of 128,068 tons. In the meantime, a growing number of operators have moved away from the seaside locations into the interior flat land in search of cleaner environment. The interior shrimp farms generally enjoy a much higher productivity and can expect to earn out of a single growth cycle of four months an unthinkably large income which takes the area's ricer farmers some fifty years of hard work in the rice paddies. This became an unresistable lure resulting in an explosive expansion of interior shrimp farms. At present, there are 3,389 interior shrimp farms in operation covering some 888 Hectors of land, involving 4,000 rice farmers with an annual production of 25,000 tons of shrimp, or approximately 10% of the country's total shrimp production. But, the Thai government authorities have been seriously concerned over the adverse impact of the interior shrimp farm operation on the environment, and especially on the rice agriculture, and decided in a Cabinet meeting on July 7, 1998 to issue and enforce a ban on further expansion of interior shrimp farms, and served notice to the existing interior farm operators to prepare to suspend shrimp culture within 120 days.
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