Dealing With Controversy? Take The High Road

Controversies have always been a part of science, but scientists who have found themselves embroiled in hot debates often find them distasteful. Researchers say that at worst, scientific arguments can result in acrimony, with allegations of dishonorable behavior among combatants. Despite the potential for ill will, others insist that disputes can be conducted with mutual respect. Some scientists say controversies can invigorate and enhance interest--and result in important advances--in the contested field. Few scientists ever find themselves at the center of controversy, maintains Trevor Pinch, who studies the sociology of scientific controversy as a professor in the department of science and technology studies at Cornell University. "If you get engaged in a full-blooded scientific controversy, it's a rare moment in a scientific career. Most scientists, as Thomas Kuhn would say, are doing normal science. They're mapping out the paradigm. They're solving puzzles. They're not engaged in controversial work at all. It's only a few scientists in a few cases that get involved in these sorts of controversies." Pinch, coauthor of a book containing case studies of seven scientific disputes (H. Collins, T. Pinch, The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993), suggests that scientists may wish to avoid controversial areas if at all possible. Controversial work, for example, invites detailed scrutiny. "It's one thing to do an experiment that's only going to be read by a small number of people," Pinch points out. "If you produce an experiment that shakes up 200 years of [science], then you've got to make damn certain that all the controls are there and you've done the thing carefully." Additionally, "the sort of science you're involved in becomes very, very different. The media get involved very quickly. You certainly wouldn't want to do this if you didn't have tenure." Despite Pinch's discouraging words, many scientists do find themselves, by choice or by happenstance, involved in scientific argument. One scientist who deliberately chose to initiate a controversy is Lynn Nadel, now professor and head of the department of psychology at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Early in his career, long before he even had a tenure-track position, Nadel coauthored a book (J. O'Keefe, L. Nadel, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, Oxford, England, Clarendon Press, 1978) that offered a novel theory for the function of the hippocampus, a brain structure long known to be involved in memory. The book proposed that the primary function of the hippocampus was not simply to store memories. Instead, said the theory, the hippocampus creates non-egocentric maps of the world, and memories, which are stored in other parts of the brain, become linked to locations on these maps. Twenty years later, the controversy sparked by that book still rages. Nadel describes his reasons for taking on that controversy this way: "Right from the beginning I was motivated by a desire to spin a grand theory. . . . I think it's impossible to do science and to have a big goal in mind without realizing you're going to be coming up against other views of the way something works." These other views, observes Nadel, have evolved over the years. "In the early '70s people were extremely skeptical of the idea altogether. Then it was sort of generally accepted, and it's still generally accepted, but there's still this controversy about whether it's the best way to think about it." BOTH SIDES MAD: Keith Rigby, Jr. found himself in the middle, with both sides of a New Mexico mining debate angry at him. J. Keith Rigby, Jr., an associate professor of civil engineering and geological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, has repeatedly come up against views opposed to his own. He's been involved in at least three controversies in his career, two relating to the demise of the dino-saurs, and he has seen cordiality and acrimony among the participants. "Within any controversy there will be a set of key players," remarks Rigby. "And these are generally divided into two groups: those who are actively researching and actually have data to contribute to the argument, and those people who are hangers-on, who want to re-evaluate that data in different lights. Accepting the observations at face value is common among the active participants," and they tended to remain friendly and professional, Rigby says, but the hangers-on may come to the table with a fixed set of conclusions contrary to the new data. Rigby says he witnessed these behaviors after he began revealing his data indicating that the dinosaurs were in decline before an asteroid hit Earth 65 million years ago and did not become extinct even then, but persisted into the Paleocene epoch. "We tend to put scientists on some sort of Olympian plane," observes Pinch. "[But science is] a bunch of people, working with scarce resources. The only reward they have--financial rewards are not great--is making a scientific discovery, and if there's a lot at stake, I think these things will tend to get acrimonious." Researchers interviewed by The Scientist have recited a litany of complaints and allegations about their opponents in scientific disputes. They say that their opponents have engaged in name-calling and personal attacks. They allege that opponents have attempted to get manuscripts pulled from journals, to have tenure denied, and to have grant applications rejected. "There are creeps in this world, and creepy things do happen," acknowledges C.K. Gunsalus, who has dealt with disputes of all kinds as associate provost at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. But she says it's essential to keep in mind that "it is also the case that sometimes bad things happen and they're not necessarily related to the creeps." Gunsalus says that it's important to stay on the high road even if one's opponents are genuinely behaving badly. "The high road is often longer, bumpier, and harder, but always better. However the other person is behaving, you yourself should continue to be professional, to be polite, to refrain from slinging mud, to focus on the facts, and to keep trying to reframe the dispute in terms of the facts, not the personality issues. It is, I think, human nature to believe in something strong enough that you come to believe that anybody who doesn't agree with you has something wrong with them--they're stupid, they're not getting it, they're lazy, they're wrong, they're inherently evil," continues Gunsalus. "You read things into these situations, and the trick is to maintain a level of rigor and detachment about what's going on. I really do think the essence of it is not personalizing it. That's what makes it a professional dispute rather than a fight with your sister." RELIED ON SCIENCE: James Carey, a professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, published his medfly findings in a peer-reviewed journal article. Things can get especially dirty when a controversy is conducted within the public arena. James Carey, a professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, discovered this after he was asked to serve on a panel examining the state of California's fight against the Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly), an agricultural pest that was presumed to be an occasional invader, hitching a ride with visitors and agricultural products from out of state. Carey's subsequent examination of the data convinced him that the medfly had established a permanent breeding population in California, suggesting that the state's eradication efforts, which involved massive spraying of the pesticide Malathion, would prove futile. Carey describes an incident at a public meeting in which the chairman of the panel attacked him, his research, his interpretations, and even Science, the journal in which Carey published a peer-reviewed paper outlining his data and his conclusions (J. Carey, Science, 253:1369-73, 1991). "When you have one of these fiascoes in the making, where it's just embarrassing, think about people in those settings whose conduct you admire," advises Gunsalus. "Quiet dignity is very important in those circumstances, and nondefensiveness is very important. And sometimes there's not really a good way to respond other than to take the high road and get out." Carey did just that. Ultimately, while the state of California never formally indicated its agreement with Carey's conclusions, it adopted, in Carey's words, "a policy based in reality." For example, the state no longer conducts piecemeal pesticide spraying whenever there's a medfly outbreak. Instead, sterile medflies are released routinely throughout the affected areas. Rigby had a similarly unpleasant experience with a public controversy. Years before he became involved in the dinosaur discussion, he prepared an environmental impact statement for the United States Bureau of Land Management on a proposal to strip-mine coal in the San Juan basin of New Mexico. "I viewed myself as in the middle, which means I had both sides mad at me," he recalls. He took the position that the strip-mining could proceed, but that protections had to be built in to protect the local environment--hence, neither environmentalists nor miners were happy. "It got to the point where I was receiving threats on the safety of my family and myself at 3 o'clock in the morning." Eventually the government decided not to allow the mining to proceed, and the controversy died quickly. Rigby believes that, compared to a controversy that stays within the scientific community, a public controversy "appears much more heated and burns hotter, but I think after the issues are resolved it dissipates quicker. There's not as long a hanging-on of the bad feelings." Gunsalus advises scientists to tread carefully when choosing to get involved in public disputes: "When you have clashing belief systems, when you have political issues, when you have disputes where people are going to bring values to them that are not going to be factually based, . . . then you have to go in with your eyes open." Some scientists, she suggests, should be willing to acknowledge to themselves that they are not constitutionally suited for such controversies. Threats at 3 a.m. are probably rare in scientific controversies, but controversy can certainly have a negative effect on one's career. In the realm of funding, for example, Rigby probably echoes many researchers' beliefs when he alleges, "If there is no controversy, and you get good reviews, you get funded. But if you're involved in a controversy, the likelihood of you getting funded is really pretty marginal," since it often takes only a single reviewer from the other side to assign an application a lukewarm score, and so prevent a grant from being awarded. This is extremely unlikely, at least as far as the National Institutes of Health goes, counters Howard K. Schachman, professor of the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, and NIH ombudsman in the basic sciences. First of all, "if the score that any individual reports deviates by some significant number from the average score, . . . that score will be discarded unless that individual has spoken up in public and defended his position." Of course, acknowledges Schachman, "a very strong adversary could have an influence in the oral discussions, and influence other people who are on the fence." Secondly, under NIH's new criteria for evaluating grant applications (R. Finn, The Scientist, 11[16]:1, Aug. 18, 1997), innovative (hence, perhaps, controversial) projects are being explicitly sought. "Certainly NIH is looking for those kinds of proposals," remarks Schachman, "and it is encouraging members of the study sections to look upon them favorably." Veterans of controversy have developed a number of guidelines--some the result of bitter experience--for waging battles honorably and emerging relatively unscathed. Rigby, for example, believes he erred by making too definitive a statement in one of his papers. "We published a paper . . . essentially claiming the occurrence of Paleocene dinosaurs," he relates. "Where that may be the logical conclusion, it was kind of like leading with your chin in a boxing match. While that's kind of the direction the data were pointing us in at the time, you don't need to come out and essentially deliberately provoke somebody. Rather than saying, 'There are Paleocene dinosaurs,' I should have said, 'There are dinosaur remains in Paleocene deposits.' One claims finality of an argument: There are Paleocene dinosaurs, therefore, screw the asteroid. The other one says that there are deposits, but it doesn't necessarily say how they got there, and it leaves the question a little more open." Carey advises: "Stick with the science, and stick with the principles, and never, never advocate. I refused to take an advocacy position [in the medfly controversy], and I stuck to the science, and that carried the day all the way. And I kept my eye like a laser on the scientific paper. That was my salvation in this whole thing." And Nadel's experience tells him to be "less concerned with personal gains and less concerned with awards and status, and more concerned with being a good scientist and having fun doing what you're doing. . . . If you're going to be involved in controversy, at least try to go about it in as honorable and open a fashion as you can. And try to be constructive about how you approach it. Try to keep your mind open to the possibility that you might be wrong. That's the hardest part." "One shouldn't see your opponent in a controversy as somehow deluded, fraudulent, or out just for personal gain," adds Pinch. "They're probably just a regular scientist like you, trying to understand things. They've just got a different understanding of the data. And they're trying to do the best job possible. They're probably not charlatans. I'd like to see a slightly kinder, gentler way that scientific controversies are resolved." Sometimes, as in the case of Rigby's mining situation, controversies are resolved by government decree. More frequently, however, controversies end only after the accumulated weight of years of data and argument sways the majority of the scientific community. And even then there are often scientists who remain unpersuaded. Pinch notes that the cold-fusion controversy was settled to the satisfaction of most scientists years ago, after many experiments failed to replicate the original results, yet some true believers continue to conduct cold-fusion research. "Data alone won't resolve the issue because of the nature of the way science is often done," Pinch comments. "People become suspicious of how other people are interpreting their data, so they won't ship the data out." Moreover, he continues, "Data itself is often ambiguous in these matters." For example, when one side claims a failure to replicate an important experiment, the other side may always answer that the replication failed because it wasn't performed properly. Despite the downright unpleasantness of many scientific disputes and their potential peril to scientific reputations and careers, some scientists believe controversies can be quite productive. Regarding the controversy about dinosaur extinction, Rigby remarks, "If there hadn't been the controversy, there wouldn't have been a tenth of the research that was done to resolve some of these issues. All of the budding spin-off projects that have come out of this have been quite striking." For example, in an effort to determine the properties of the atmosphere during the time the dinosaurs were becoming extinct, Rigby began analyzing gases trapped in ancient amber, an effort that sparked a good deal of research as well as an argument of its own. "You might argue that this kind of competition actually spurs people on to greater efforts," suggests Nadel, "and that in hindsight, 30 or 40 years from now, it may appear as though this is what had to happen in order to get us to the truth." He concludes, "To the extent to which one has a big reach in science, that you are trying to deal with a big issue and trying to explain something exciting, you're going to be involved in controversy. There's just no way around that." Robert Finn, a freelance science writer based in Long Beach, Calif., can be reached online at finn@nasw.org.

Dealing With Controversy? Take The High Road

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