We take it for granted now that science has a social responsibility, The idea would not have occurred to Newton or Galileo. They thought of science as an account of the world as it is, and the only responsibility that they acknowledged was to tell the truth. The idea  that science is a social enterprise is modern, and it begins at the industrial revolution. We are surprised that we cannot trace a social sense further back, because we nurse the illusion that the industrial revolution ended a golden age.