As far back as people can remember, Pandora has been given a pretty bad press.  After all, she was the one who opened the box, releasing all the evils of the world.  Seems to me she might be guilty of curiosity, but the folks who put the damn things into the box should take most of the heat.

That’s a long time ago, of course, but we are still doing it: blaming the guys who let the cat out of the bag, although nowadays Pandora has other names.  Brigitte Boisselier opened the box and took out human cloning.  Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had a real rummage around, taking out anthrax, smallpox, ricin, and a whole cocktail of germ and chemical weapons. Kim Jong IL found nuclear bombs in there, and the long range missiles to deliver them.  And there are lots of other guys who are always taking out dynamite, Semtex, land mines, guns, drugs, nuclear waste and all that stuff. 

Governments and police forces and armies spend a lot of time and effort trying to stop Pandora from doing it.  And they spend even more time and effort trying to get her evils back in the box.  If they weren’t so busy and self-righteous they might realise that whatever goes into the box is one day going to pop out, and it might be easier to concentrate our attention on the guys who put the stuff in there. 

Of course, science is like a child; doesn’t know right from wrong.  If scientists can mix a couple of things in a test-tube in a way that ain’t been done before, they’ll do it.  Will it save the world or end the world?  They don’t care.  Governments aren’t much better; they still believe in Santa Clause.  Or at least, they believe that if they have a secret no-one else will ever find out about it.  That only leaves the commercial organisations, with their directors who tell lies in their balance sheets and sell cigarettes to third world countries and take resources from third world countries.   Not surprising that we keep on filling up that old box of Pandora.

Nothing I can do about, of course.  ‘Cepting maybe voting out of power cynical politicians; and lobbying for dubious research programmes to be cancelled; and not buying shares in the companies who trade in the stuff; and giving my pension funds an ethical shift.  Come to think of it, if the couple of billion folk who live in democracies all did that, we might just get to the bottom of Pandora’s box.  And the old Greeks, who know about these things, told us that there is one good thing in there, trapped at the bottom.  Let’s see if we can’t let Hope out of the box!