Posts tagged Politics

Arsenic (As) and Old Lace

In the olden days of yore, sci­ence was taught as a guild craft. Knowl­edge about essen­tial pro­ce­dures, and about the inter­per­sonal pol­i­tics of sci­ence, were passed down from advi­sor to stu­dent in much the same way that ancient guilds passed down knowl­edge from skilled prac­ti­tioner to apprentice.

That’s the way that I learned sci­ence. In this sys­tem, there were a num­ber of received truths. Since I’m now one of the Auld Ones, I pass them along to you.

“In sci­ence, your score for abil­ity is a zero or a one. Your score for how well you get along with oth­ers is a zero or one. Mul­ti­ply the two scores together.”

This, of course, means that a lot of skill is nice, but if your per­son­al­ity or inter­per­sonal ethics are lack­ing, that it’s all for naught. Literally.

“Two peo­ple is about sex. More than two peo­ple, it’s about politics.”

This blog is about pol­i­tics. Today I want to blog about the pol­i­tics of sci­ence, using the recent NASA press con­fer­ence and paper on arsenic biol­ogy as an object lesson.

Recall that last week the blogs, includ­ing this one, were all a–twit­ter about a NASA press release that teased the pos­si­bil­ity of life on other planets.

NASA will hold a news con­fer­ence at 2 p.m. EST on Thurs­day, Dec. 2, to dis­cuss an astro­bi­ol­ogy find­ing that will impact the search for evi­dence of extrater­res­trial life.

Well, it didn’t take long for this to turn sour. First, the pre­dictable response of the blog­ging com­mu­nity was to blow this state­ment out of all pro­por­tion and turn it into a dis­cov­ery of life on other plan­ets. Per­son­ally, I had hoped for life on Saturn’s moon Titan.

Some points about sci­ence. Not all sci­en­tific jour­nals are cre­ated equal. Jour­nals with wide cir­cu­la­tion, such as Nature or Sci­ence, or in med­i­cine, the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion (JAMA), New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine, or Lancet are per­ceived as more “valu­able” in terms of pub­li­ca­tion. Most sci­en­tists (includ­ing me) have gone through an entire career with­out pub­lish­ing any­thing in these jour­nals. Pub­li­ca­tions in these jour­nals are expected of junior fac­ulty (to grossly over­sim­plify, let’s say sci­en­tists between 30 and 40) at major uni­ver­si­ties like Har­vard or Yale or Caltech.

So you can see that the com­pe­ti­tion for these rare pub­li­ca­tion slots is quite intense. Because the sci­en­tists who pub­lish in these jour­nals are, by def­i­n­i­tion, quite com­pet­i­tive, the jour­nals have imposed some­thing called an embargo which puts a tight lid on release of the research results before the pub­li­ca­tion date on the paper. In med­i­cine, this can cause prob­lems if a sci­en­tist feels she has a cure for some dis­ease that is killing peo­ple, and wants to save lives by get­ting the word out as soon as pos­si­ble. This rarely hap­pens, but when it does is a quite intense tug-​​of-​​war between one’s pro­fes­sional ethics and duty to soci­ety. I’m only per­son­ally aware of one such find­ing, the dis­cov­ery of STI571 (now called Ima­tinib or Gleevec), a true “mir­a­cle drug” that now cures cer­tain types of blood can­cer, or leukemia. My uncle died of chronic myel­oge­nous leukemia just weeks before then-​​STI571 could be approved for use, so I’m keenly and per­son­ally aware of the con­flicts involved.

This rep­re­sents what Thomas Kuhn called a “par­a­digm shift,” a now-​​overused term. Most sci­en­tists like me are doing what Kuhn called “nor­mal sci­ence”. A par­a­digm shift turns science’s world­view upside-​​down by a new method, or new way of look­ing at the world, or in the case of STI571/​Imatinib/​Gleevec, a new way of treat­ing can­cer. Par­a­digm shifts are, by def­i­n­i­tion, exceed­ingly rare.

Still, sci­en­tists will try to make their work into a par­a­digm shift. That’s what’s hap­pened here. We were promised a par­a­digm shift (“life on other plan­ets!”). What we got was nor­mal sci­ence. That makes peo­ple mad.

Really mad. As in, mul­ti­ple blog posts attack­ing the authors, the jour­nal, and the agency that sup­ported the work. Carl Zim­mer in Slate sum­ma­rized many of the con­tro­ver­sial points sur­round­ing the work.

Why do we feel cheated? Well, the embargo process was manip­u­lated. Wolfe-​​Simon and her col­lab­o­ra­tors either delib­er­ately over­sold their find­ings, or allowed them to be over­sold, pre­sum­ably because of the need for pub­li­ca­tions in so-​​called “high qual­ity” journals.

In the com­ments sec­tion of last week’s arti­cle, the day before the announce­ment, I said:

I was pretty jazzed too, but it appears that we’ve got the sit­u­a­tion where yet another group is fight­ing for fund­ing in a very restric­tive envi­ron­ment and is try­ing to make an impres­sion on peer reviewers.

It’s impos­si­ble to know who’s respon­si­ble for overblow­ing this. As you can see in the Zim­mer arti­cle and blogs like io9 and Wired, blame is accru­ing to Wolfe-​​Simon, NASA, and sci­en­tists in gen­eral in about equal mea­sure. I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, and it’s not helped by NASA say­ing things like “you sci­en­tists need to dis­cuss things like this in the jour­nals and not in the blogs.”

Sci­ence has always involved more than two peo­ple, so it has always been polit­i­cal. Sci­ence now is more polit­i­cal than ever, to the point where peo­ple are openly ask­ing whether sci­en­tists are advanc­ing a Demo­c­ra­tic agenda. It’s sad, but a nat­ural exten­sion of what I was taught, and what Kuhn was writ­ing about in The Struc­ture of Sci­en­tific Rev­o­lu­tions.