Warning: Scientists Are Becoming Too Much Like Chefs

If you have worked or lived in Boston, you know that when you ride the subway to the airport, the final destination of the train you take is Wonderland. It always makes me smile to think that when I go from the airport to one of the great centers of modern science in the world, my train is moving away from Wonderland. Is this just a coincidence of names or is it a prophecy for what is now happening to science? Are we moving from a wonderland where science is fun, a thirst for knowledge and new understanding, to a world in which scientists are becoming somewhat less than wisdom seekers and something more like chefs? In almost every scientific discipline, the practice of experiments is governed by the same fairly elementary law: change one ingredient (that is, variable) at a time and record the conditions of that change. Thus, others who repeat the same procedure under the same conditions and using the same materials and methods will obtain similar results. This elementary law applies to more than just science; it has governed the practice of making pottery since man first tried to dry pieces of clay in the sunshine. And it certainly still governs the practice of cooking. Yet there are - or ought to be - crucial differences between great scientists and great chefs. The chef must please his customers and clients. But who must a scientist please? A chef must endeavor to keep at least the majority of his secrets from his peers. But a scientist must share his discoveries. Indeed, scientists work in a very different sociocultural context from chefs. They seek more than just a better recipe for paella or a more sublime torte; they are searching for fundamental empirical truths about the world. And they must share their steps toward those truths with their peers in order to win recognition and acceptance. As to how a good scientist should seek the consensus of his peers, I can find no better expression than in William Harvey's dedication of his work on the circulation of blood to the president of the College of Physicians in London. The dedication, published in 1628 and lasting for five memorable pages, reads in part, "I was greatly afraid to suffer this Little Book, other ways perfect some years ago, either to come abroad, or go beyond the sea, lest it might seem an action too full of arrogancy, if I had not first propounded it to you, confirm'd it by ocular testimony, answer'd your doubts and objections, and gotten the President's verdict in my favour; yet I was persuaded if I could maintain what I proposed in the presence of you and our College, having been famous by so many and so great men, I needed so much the lesse to be afraid of others..." Alas, the seeking of consensus by peers is no longer what it used to be. One reason is that there aren't enough "so famous and so great men" with time available to view the work done by others. Or perhaps a corollary is true: that the efforts of today's vast numbers of workaday truth seekers simply overwhelm the famous and the great. Another reason is that those beyond the sea that William Harvey feared are no longer there to burn you at the stake or torture you for the heresy of believing in worlds that you can see by direct observation or that you can create within the lonely sphere of your conjectures. That may sound like a big improvement, but it's not necessarily so. To be considered true and to become part of lasting knowledge, these worlds that you believe in and create by experiment and theory must be seen, understood, and reproduced by others. This means publishing, because the results of an experiment are nonexistent if not published, and the process of publication itself involves the reviewing of peers. All fine, so far, but here comes the sticking point: Today, you can write your paper, you may even get it published after a year or so, but you may then find it ignored forever. Increasingly, large numbers of papers published are failing to meet the test of peer approval because they are largely ignored. Why this is so stems from the erosion of what should be a major difference between cookery and science. Rarely does even haute cuisine challenge dogma for its own sake; rather, the primary goals of the experimenting chef are, as I have suggested, the pleasure of others, the marketing of a unique new dish, or social praise. A scientist should be a possessor of imagination and conviction who has the ability to do an experiment capable of challenging dogmas and transforming the world as we know it. The experiment isn't done for the pleasure of others; instead, the scientist ought to be willing to directly challenge in his or her time, the weight of ideas imposed by what other formidable scientists believed to be true. In the case of William Harvey, for example, those formidable men were Aristotle and Galen, and the dogma was their conviction that the blood did not recirculate. Today, most experiments don't seek to overturn existing beliefs; they simply add new details to current dogma, like small refinements of a chef's recipes. And as a result, their fate may be ignored by many scientists. Of course, some papers, sadly, are ignored not because they are minor works, but precisely because they challenge dogma in a world of science more interested in small refinements of current dogma. There is also another way that scientific experiments should be different from other experiments: they should be carried out with a unique blend of arrogance and humility. To illustrate this, I return to William Harvey. Harvey pressed and let go of veins in a man's arm and from this experiment showed that "it appears plainly that the blood does move towards the upper parts and the heart in the veins." There is great arrogance in saying that such a conclusion is plain when everyone from Aristotle to those in the year 1628 thought that the contrary was also plain to see. There is also extreme humility in accepting that the interpretation of so simple a result is true despite what other men had said or believed before. Most scientists today do not have the time to wonder about the underlying principles of their profession; because of the pressure to publish, they are too busy doing experiments that yield papers. Recently I have been able to take temporary detours from the path that most scientists seem to follow by reading the works of philosophers and great historical figures like Harvey. What one discovers are men and women ready to die for truths that they could see for themselves, rather than accept truths as told by others. In William Harvey's words: "Neither do Philosophers suffer themselves to be addicted to the slavery of any man's precepts but that they give credit to their own eyes." As I closed William Harvey's book, I wondered how many of us, when we do an experiment, do it with a sense of reverence for its history. And how many of our students know the history of science well enough to understand the world they entered. I believe that not enough scientists have this knowledge and reverence. In present-day science, we are riding the train away from Wonderland. Experimental procedures today may seem on the surface to be indistinguishable from the great scientific experiments as I have described them. Deeper down, today's experiments lack the crucial qualities I have already described, and are actually indistinguishable from the experiments of potters or chefs. Because the cost of doing an experiment far exceeds the cost of pressing a vein in a man's arm, young scientists are being trained to be employed, rather than to conjecture and to question. Accordingly, their employers treat them like chefs, expecting them to modify this or that procedure slightly in order to produce dishes that will please their clients and, in return, sell for large sums of money. These scientists do not quite know what science should really be about; hence they are naturally delighted to have a job. They really do not understand that they are "suffering themselves to be addicted to the slavery" of other men's precepts and are coming closer and closer to the sociocultural rules of chefs. Like chefs, they record their results well but do not give them to others (until their findings are patented); they affirm themselves not by the consensus of their peers but by the consensus of their paymasters and their master's clients. In order to reverse that Boston subway train and travel back to Wonderland, we must remember that the noblest gifts of science are the right to doubt and the right to search within for the existence of new worlds that can be seen by experiment. Maria de Sousa is an immunologist at the Abel Salazar Institute for the Biomedical Sciences in Portugal. This essay was adapted from a talk given in September at a symposium in Portugal on "Science as a cultural activity."

Warning: Scientists Are Becoming Too Much Like Chefs

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Maria De Sousa

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January 1989

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