The Politics of Science (Part 1)
Many a genius has been destroyed by people of lesser talent defending the status quo. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician who practiced in Vienna during the mid-nineteenth century, demanded that his hospital colleagues and subordinates wash their hands, especially when moving from autopsies and sick wards to the charity childbirth ward he directed. When the incidence of puerperal fever and resultant death declined dramatically to well below that of the rich women’s childbirth ward, proving the importance of cleanliness even before Pasteur, Semmelweis was fired and vilified. His livelihood gone, he committed suicide soon afterward.
The principle figure who for decades upheld the creed that dedifferentiation was impossible was Paul Weiss, who dominated biology saying the things his peers wanted to hear. Weiss was wrong, but along the way he managed to cut short a number of careers.
For many years the American Medical Association scorned the idea of vitamin-deficiency diseases and called teh EEG electronic quackery. Even today that august body contends that nutrition is basically irrelevant to health. As the late-eighteenth-century Italian experimenter Abbe Alberto Fortis observed in a letter chiding Spallanzani for his closed-minded stance on dowsing, “… derision will never help in the development of true knowledge.”In the past, these character flaws couldn’t wholly prevent the recognition of scientific truths. Both sides of a controversy would fight with equal vehemence, and the one with better evidence would usually win sooner or later. In the last four decades, however, changes in the structure of scientific institutions have produced a situation so heavily weighted in favor of the establishment that it impedes progress in healthcare and prevents truly new ideas from getting a fair hearing in almost all circumstances. The present system is in effect a dogmatic religion with a self-perpetuating priesthood dedicated only to preserving the current orthodoxies. The system awards the sycophant and punishes the visionary to a degree unparalleled in the four-hundred-year history of modern science.
There has even been a scientific study documenting how choices made by the peer review system depend almost entirely on whether the experts are sympathetic or hostile to the hypothesis being suggested. True to form, the National Academy of Sciences, which sponsored the investigation, suppressed its results for two years.
If these methods succeed in prolonging the apostasy, the establishment generally exerts pressure through the schools. Successful academics are almost always true believers who are happy to curry favor by helping to deny tenure to “questionable” investigators or by harassing them in a number of ways. For example, in 1950 Gordon A. Atwater was fired as chairman of the American Museum of Natural History astronomy department and curator of the Hayden Planetarium for publicly suggesting that Immanuel Velikovsky’s ideas should receive a fair hearing. That same year Velikovsky’s first book, Worlds in Collision, was renounced by his publisher (MacMillan) even though it was a best seller, because a group of influential astronomers led by Harvard’s Harlow Shapley threatened to boycott the textbook department that accounted for two thirds of the company’s sales. No matter what one may think of Velikovsky’s conclusions, that kind of backstairs persuasion is not science.As the conflict escalates, the muzzled freethinker often goes directly to the public to spread the pernicious doctrines. At this point, the gloves come off. Already a lightning rod for the wrath of the Olympian peers, the would-be Prometheus writhes under attacks on his or her honesty, scientific competence, and personal habits. The pigeons of Zeus cover the new ideas with their droppings and conduct rigged experiments to disprove them. In extreme cases, government agencies staffed and advised by the establishment begin legal harrassment, such as the trial and imprisonment that ended the career and life of Wilhelm Reich.
I was writing my first scientific paper when I walked to work one morning and found our laboratory on the sidewalk – all our equipment, notes, and materials in a junk pile. I was told neither of us worked there anymore; we were welcome to salvage anything we wanted from the heap.
Also, the slightest pressure on the animal’s skin produced currents. No one understood why, but there they were. I found descriptions in the older literature of silver electrodes with a layer of silver chloride applied to them, which were reported to obviate the false interelectrode currents. I made some, tested them, and then fitted them with a short length of soft cotton wick, which got rid of the pressure artifact. When I wrote up my results, I briefly described the electrodes. Afterward I received a call from a prominent neurophysiologist who wanted to visit the lab. “Very nice,” I thought. “Here’s some recognition already.” He was particularly interested in how the electrodes were made and used. Some months later, dammed if I didn’t find a paper by my visitor in one of the high-class journals, describing this new and excellent electrode he’d devised for measuring direct-current potentials.
A couple of years later, while Charlie Bachman and I were looking for the PN junction diode in bone, I was asked to give a talk on bone electronics at a meeting in New York City. The audience included engineers, physicists, physicians, and biologists. It was hard to talk to such a diverse group. The engineers and physicists knew all about the electronics but nothing about bone, the biologists knew all about the bone but nothing about electronics, and the physicians were only interested in therapeutic applications. At any rate, I reviewed some bone structure for the physicists and some electronics for the biologists, and then went on to describe my experiments with Andy Bassett on bone piezoelectricity.
Semiconductors are so named because their properties place them between conductors and insulators, so you could very well call them semi-insulators; the meaning would be the same. My opponent was playing a crude game. Where saying these derogatory things about me, he was actually agreeing with my conclusion, merely using a different term.This man’s antagonism had begun a couple of years before. When Andy Bassett and I had finished our work on the piezoelectric effect in bone, we wrote it up, submitted it to a scientific journal, and got it accepted. Unbeknownst to us, this fellow had been working on the same thing, but hadn’t gotten as far in his experiments as we. Somehow he learned of our work and its impending publication. He called Andy, asking us to delay our report until he was ready to publish his own data. Andy called me to talk it over. What counts in the scientific literature is priority; he was asking us to surrender it. There was no ethical basis for his request, and I would never have thought of asking him to delay had the situation been reversed. I said, “Not on your life.” Our paper was published, and we’d acquired a “friend” for life.
It was a nice maneuver but, fortunately for me, it wasn’t legal. As medical investigator, I could be fired only by Washington, and the local chief of staff soon got a letter from VACO ordering him to reinstate me. Soon I began to get on some “enemies lists” at the natinal level too. In December 1974 I got word that our basic NIH grant (the one on bone) hadn’t been renewed. No reasons were given. This was highly irregular, since applicants normally got the “pink sheets” with at least the primary reviewer’s comments, so they could find out what they’d done wrong. Instead I was told I could write to the executive secretary for a “summary” of the deliberations.
I was, to say the least, puzzled. The subjects “worthy of support” were precisely the main ones we were working on. It didn’t make any sense until I reflected that this was just after I’d helped write the first Sanguine report and had begun to testify about power line dangers before the New York Public Service Commission. Perhaps the Navy was pressuring the NIH to shut me up.If someone at the federal level was trying to lock me out as early as 1974, he forgot to watch all the entrances, for my proposal of that year on acupuncture was approved. I’d originally tacked this on to the main NIH application, where is was criticized as inappropriate. I merely sent it off to a different study section, which funded it. After a year we had the positive results described in Chapter 13, and I presented them at an NIH acupuncture conference in Bethesda, Maryland. Ours was the only study going at the problem from a strictly scientific point of view, that is, proceeding from a testible hypothesis, as opposed to the empirical approach of actually putting the needles in and trying to decide if they worked. To the NIH’s basic question – is the system of points and lines real? – our program was the only one giving an unequivocal answer: yes.
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