When I was a graduate student in the late 1960s working on my Ph.D., our department had an assistant professor who was working very hard to support or destroy an heretical hypothesis, so heretical that if substantiated, it would revolutionize the fields of biology, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology. Seems as if this young faculty member also had a personality which would grate on students and faculty alike -- a potentially deadly combination.
My graduate advisor was associate head of the department at this time, and had been head of the search committee (if I remember correctly) which brought in this particular faculty member. My advisor was (and still is) one of the most gentle and diplomatic persons I have ever known. He was always totally composed and friendly -- always except for a few hours immediately following departmental faculty meetings. During these faculty meetings, there was a developing acrimonious ground swell among the other faculty to deny tenure to this young, brash, and heretical assistant professor. He was becoming an embarrassment to the department and to the other faculty -- the other faculty were perceived by their colleagues at other institutions as being "guilty" just by being associated with this one faculty member. This increasingly rancorous attitude against this upstart was unanimous, with the lone exception for my advisor. Immediately after each faculty meeting, my advisor would storm into his office, red-faced, and slam the door shut. It would stay shut for perhaps an hour, until he was able to again face the world (and his graduate students and post docs) with a calm demeanor.
This intra-departmental battle continued right up through the final vote on tenure, with much acrimony and dissension throughout the entire process. Finally, and reluctantly, tenure was granted, the battles subsided, my advisor regained his self- control during and after faculty meetings -- and the renegade young faculty -- now tenured -- provided the crucial experimental results which led a few years later to his being awarded the Nobel Prize!
My advisor fought for academic freedom -- the rest of the faculty fought to rid the department of a scientific crank and charlatan -- or so they thought. Fortunately, academic freedom prevailed and my advisor was justified in this case. But this (true) story does not provide a pat answer as to who might be doing genuine crank work and who might just be working on the next Nobel Prize. It is only an illustration of this problem and the difficulties in deciding which is which.
In sum, I offer a plea for others to keep an open mind about controversial research topics. Judge each effort on the scientist s sincerity, on their and your common sense (which, as was pointed out in the original essay, is not as common as one might think), and on your own gut feeling -- don t let the stigma of scientific dogma rear its repressive head too high because by doing so, it just might suppress real scientific progress.
There are a large number of scientists out there who might be interested in attending the one-day conference that wraps up the TRE workshop each year. We send out press releases to a number of journals and newsletters, as well as listservs on the Internet. But there are certainly sources we don t know about. If your professional organization has a newsletter that carries annoucements of events like our conference, or if you subscribe to a listserv whose participants might be interested in learning about our projects, please let me know. Newsletters sometimes require both electronic and hard-copy submissions, so a photocopy of the submissions requirements would be extremely helpful.
Thanks!
The convocation is free, but space is limited; please register by May 27. For more information: Scott Spaulding, NAS 351, 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20418; telephone 202/334-2233; FAX 202/334-1687; e-mail SSPAULDI@NAS.EDU
Annas, George J. 1993. Standard of Care: The Law of American Bioethics. New York: Oxford University Press. 291 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-19-507247-2. Reviewed in The Journal of the American Medical Association 271(10) (March 9, 1994):795 by Walter Gunn, M.D., Miles City, Montana. From the review:
This book is nothing if not up to date.McNeill, Paul M. 1993. The Ethics and Politics of Human Experimentation. New York: Cambridge University Press. 315 pp. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-41627-2.But it is more. Although no thinking physician will agree with all it contains, and, at times, the book is unevenly balanced with what will seem to some a too liberal approach, the discussions are articulate, well researched, and clearly thought through. Perhaps best of all, Standard of Care puts the ethical basis of a host of modern medical problems in a legal setting that clarifies, not confuses, extraordinarily complex issues. It is understandable; it tells it like it is. Buy it.
Last updated: 22 January 1996
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~poynter/tre1-2.html
Comments: pimple@indiana.edu
Copyright 1996, The Trustees of Indiana University