The following last chapter in Robert O. Becker's book, "The
Body Electric" should give some insight into the politics of science.
How and why some researchers and their research gets funded while
others have their funding cut. Maybe, it will also offer us some
research as to why many researchers in CFS, Autism, ADHD, and
Alzheimer's continue to bark up some safe tree and will not dare
delve into truth of the matter - will not challenge the Big Lie - since
this might very well cut their funding, ruin their reputations, and
even end their careers.
paul doyon
btw, Dr. Robert O. Becker has twice been nominated for the Nobel
Prize for his work on dedifferentiation - but most likely some
mysterious someone objected.
Postscript: Political Science
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by
gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens
that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents
gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with
the idea from the beginning.
-Max Planck
Dispassionate philosopher inquiring into nature from the sheer love of
knowledge, single-minded alchemist puttering about a secluded basement
in search of elixirs to benefit all humanity - these ideals no longer
fit for most scientists. Even the stereotype of Faust dreaming of
demonic power is outdated, for most scientists today are
overspecialized and anonymous - although science as a whole is somewhat
Mephistophelian in its disregard or the effects of its knowledge. It's
a ponderous beast, making enormous changes in the way we live but
agonizingly slow to change its own habits and viewpoints when they
become outmoded.
The public's conception of the scientist remains closest to its image
of the philosopher - cold and logical, making decisions solely on the
basis of facts, unswayed by emotion. The lay person's most common fear
about scientists is that they lack human feelings. During my
twenty-five years of research I've found this to be untrue yet no cause
for comfort. I've occasionally seen our species' nobler impulses among
them, but I've also found that scientists as a group are at least as
subject to human failings as people in other walks of life.
It has been like this throughout the history of science. Many, perhaps
even most, of its practitioners have been greedy, power-hungry,
prestige-seeking, dogmatic, pompous asses, not above political
chicanery and outright lying, cheating, and stealing. Examples abound
right from the start. Sir Francis Bacon, who in 1620 formulated the
experimental method on which all technical progress since then has been
founded, not only forgot to mention his considerable debt to William
Gilbert but apparently plagiarized some of his predecessor's work while
publicly belittling it. In a similar way Emil Du Bois-Reymond based his
own electrical theory of nerve impulse on Carlo Matteucci's work, then
tried to ridicule his mentor and take full credit.
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 the 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 health care 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.
This situation has come about because research is now so expensive that
only governments and multinational corporations can pay for it. The
funds are dispensed by agencies staffed and run by bureaucrats who
aren't scientists themselves. As the system developed after World War
2, the question naturally arose as to how these scientifically ignorant
officials were to choose among competing grant applications. The
logical solution was to set up panels of scientists to evaluate
requests in their fields and then advise the bureaucrats.
This method is based on the naive assumption that scientists really are
more impartial than other people, so the result could have been
predicted decades ago. In general, projects that propose a search for
evidence in support of new ideas aren't funded. Most review committees
approve nothing that would challenge the findings their members made
when they were struggling young researchers who created the current
theories, whereas projects which ponder to these elder egos receive
lavish support. Eventually, those who play the game become the new
members of the peer group, and thus the system perpetuates itself. As
Erwin Chargaff has remarked, "This continual turning off and on of the
financial faucets produces Pavlovian effects," and most research
becomes mere water treading aimed at getting paid rather than finding
anything new. The intuitive "lunatic twinge," the urge to test a hunch,
which is the source of all scientific breakthroughs, is systematically
excluded.
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.
Membership on even a few review boards soon establishes one's status in
the "old boys' club" and leads to other benefits. Manuscripts submitted
to scientific journals are reviewed for validity in the same way as
grant requests. And who is better qualified to judge an article than
those same eminent experts with their laurels to guard? Publication is
accepted as evidence that an experiment has some basic value, and
without it the work sinks without a ripple. The circle is thus closed,
and the revolutionary, from whose ideas all new scientific concepts
come, is on the outside. Donald Goodwin, chairman of psychiatry at the
University of Kansas and an innovative researcher on alcoholism, has
even put it in the form of exasperation: "If it's trivial, you can
probably study it. If it's important, you probably can't."
Another unforeseen abuse has arisen, which has lowered the quality of
training in medical schools. As the peer review system developed,
academic institutions saw a golden opportunity. If the government
wanted all this research done, why shouldn't it help the schools with
their overhead, such as housing, utilities, bookkeeping and ultimately
the salaries of the researchers, who were part of the faculty? The
influx of money corroded academic values. The idea arose that the best
teacher was the best researcher, and the best researcher was the one
who pulled down the biggest grants. A medical school became primarily a
kennel of researchers and only secondary a place to teach future
physicians. To survive in academia, you have to get funded and then get
published. The epidemic of fraudulent reports - and I believe only a
small percentage of the actual fakery has been discovered - is eloquent
testimony of the pressure to make a name in the lab.
There remain today few places for those whose talents lie in teaching
and clinical work. Many people who don't care about research are forced
to do it anyway. As a result, medical journals and teaching staffs are
both drowning in mediocrity.
Finally, we must add to these factors the buying of science by the
military. To call it a form of prostitution is an insult to the oldest
profession. Nearly two-thirds fo the 47-billion 1984 research budget
was for military work, and in the field of bioelectricity the
proportion was even higher. While military sponsors often allow more
technical innovation than others, their employees must keep their
mouths shut about environmental hazards and other moral issues that
link science to the broader concerns of civilization. In the long run,
even the growth of pure knowledge (if there is such a thing) can't
flourish behind this chain link fence.
If someone does start a heretical project, there are several ways to
limit this threat. Grants are limited, usually for a period of one or
two years. Then the experimenter must reapply. Every application is a
voluminous document filled with fine-print forms and meaningless
bureaucratic jargon, requiring many days of data compilation and
"creative writing." Some researchers may simply get tired of them and
quit. In any case, they must run the same gauntlet of peers each time.
The simplest way to nip a challenge in the bud is to turn off the money
or keep the reports out of major journals by means of anonymous value
judgements from review committees. You can always find something wrong
with a proposal or manuscript, no matter how well written or
scientifically impeccable it may be.
Determined rebels use guerrilla tactics. There are so many funding
agencies that the left hand often knoweth not what the right hand
doeth. A proposal may get by an obscure panel whose members aren't yet
aware of the danger. The snowstorms of paper churned out by the
research establishment have required the founding of many new journals
in each subspecialty. Some of these will accept papers that would
automatically be rejected by the big ones. In addition, there's an art
to writing a grant proposal that falls within accepted guidelines
without specifying exactly what the researchers intend to do.
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 harassment, such
as the trial and imprisonment that ended the career and life of Wilhelm
Reich.
Sometime during or after the battle, it generally becomes obvious that
the iconoclast was right. The counterattack then shifts toward
historical revision. Establishment members publish papers claiming the
new ideas for themselves and omitting all references to the true
originator. The heretic's name is remembered only in connection with a
condescending catchphrase, while his or her own research programs, if
any remain, are defunded and the staff dispersed. The facts of the case
eventually emerge, but only at an immense toll on the innovator's time
and energy.
To those who haven't tried to run a lab, these may seem like harsh
words, unbelievable, even paranoid. Nevertheless, these tactics are
commonplace, and I've had personal experience with each and every one
of them.
I got a taste of the real world in my very first foray into research.
After World War 2, I continued my education on the GI Bill, but those
benefits expired in 1947. I'd just married a fellow student named
Lilian, who had caught my eye during our first orientation lecture, and
I needed a summer job to help pay expenses and set up housekeeping. I
was lucky enough to get work as a lab assistant in the NYU School of
Medicine's surgical research department.
I worked with Co Tui, who was evaluating a recently published method
for separating individual amino acids from proteins as a step toward
concentrating foods for shipment to the starving. Dr. Cok, a tiny man
whose black, spiky hair seemed to broadcast enthusiasm, inspired me
enormously. He was a brilliant researcher and a good friend. With him I
helped develop the assay technique and began to use it to study changes
in body proteins after surgery.
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.
The head secretary told me what happened. This was during a big fund
drive to build the present NYU Medical Center. One of the society
surgeons had lined up a million-dollar donation from one of his
patients and would see that it got into the fund, if he could choose a
new professor of experimental surgery - now. As fast as that, Co Tui
and his people were out. I vowed to Lilian: "Whatever i do in medicine,
I'm going to stay out of research."
I'm happy that I wasn't able to keep my promise. The research itself
was worth it all. Moreover, I don't want to give the impression that I
and my associates were alone against the world. Just when hope seemed
lost, there was always a crucial person, like Carlyle Jacobson or the
research director's secretary to help us out. However, right from my
first proposal to measure the current of injury in salamanders, I found
that research would mean a constant battle, and not only with
administrators.
Before I began, I had to solve a technical problems with the
electrodes. Even two wires of the same metal had little chemical
differences, which gave rise to small electrical currents that could be
misinterpreted as coming from the animal. 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.
I probably should have sat down at that point, but I thought it would
be nice to talk about our present work. The rectifier concept was
tremendously exciting to me, and I thought we might get some useful
suggestions from the audience, so I described the experiments showing
that collagen and apatite were semiconductors, and discussed the
implications. After each talk, a short time was set aside for questions
and comments, generally polite and dignified. However, as soon as I
finished, a well-known orthopedic researcher literally ran up to the
audience microphone and blurted out, "I have never heard such a
collection of inadequate data and misconceptions. It is an insult to
this audience. Dr. Becker has not presented satisfactory evidence for
any semiconducting property in bone. The best that can be said is that
this material may be a semi-insulator."
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.
Now there he was at the microphone trying to scuttle my presentation
with a little ambiguous double-talk. I thought, "He must be doing the
same work as we are again. If he wins this encounter, I'll have trouble
getting my data published, and he'll have a clear field for his."
Instead of defending the data, I explained that semi-insulator and
semiconductor were one and the same. I said I was surprised he didn't
know that, but appreciated his approval of my data! Someone else in the
audience stood up in support of my position, and the crisis was past.
The lab isn't the only place a scientist has to stay alert.
In 1964, soon after the National Institutes of Health approved the
grant for our continuing work on bone, I received the VA's William S.
Middleton Award for outstanding research. That's a funny story in
itself. The award is given by the VA's Central Office (VACO), whose
members had already decided on me, but candidates must be nominated by
regional officers, and the local powers were determined I shouldn't get
it. Eventually, VACO had to order them to nominate me.
The award put me on a salary from Washington instead of Syracuse, and
due to the pressure from VACO I was soon designated the local chief of
research, replacing the man who signed all the papers at once. I was
determined to put the reseach house in order, and I instituted a number
of reforms, such as public disclosure of the funding allocations, and
productivity requirements, no matter how prominent an investigator
might be. Many of the reforms have been adopted throughout the VA
system. They didn't make me popular, however. Over the next several
years there was continuous pressure from the medical school to allocate
VA research funds for people I felt were of little value to the VA
program itself; thus the money would have constituted a grant to the
school. I knew that if I didn't deliver I would eventually be removed
from my position as chief of research. In that case, I would go back on
a local clinical salary and my research program would again be in
jeopardy. Therefore, at the beginning of 1972 I applied for the
position of medical investigator in the VA research system, a post in
which I would be able to devote up to three fourths of my time to
research. I was accepted. The job was to begin a few months later; in
the meantime I continued as chief of research.
Apparently, my new appointment escaped the notice of my local
opponents. I'd accepted several invitations to speak at universities in
the South and combined them all into a week's trip. I left the office a
day early to prepare my materials and pack. While I was still home, my
secretary called. She was crying, and said she'd just gotten a memo
firing me as chief or research and putting me to work as a general-duty
medical officer in the admitting office. This not only would have
closed our lab, but also would have kept me from practicing orthopedic
surgery.
I 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.
The summary was half a page of double-spaced typing. It said my
proposal had been lacking in clarity and direction, and that the
experimental procedures hadn't been spelled out in enough detail. The
main problem seemed to be that I was planning to do more than the
reviewer thought I could do with the money I was requesting. In
addition, my report on the perineural cell research with Bruce Baker
was criticized as "data poor." The statement concluded: "On the other
hand, there are some areas which appear to be worthy of support and are
reasonably well described, e.g., bone growth studies, regenerative
growth, and electrical field effects."
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.
Nevertheless, when the grant came up for approval in 1976, it, too, was
cut off. The stated reasons were that we hadn't published enough and
that the electrical system that we found didn't have any relation to
acupuncture. The first was obviously untrue - we'd published three
papers, had two more in press, and had submitted six others - and the
second was obvious pettifogging. How could anyone know what was related
to acupuncture before the research had been done? I happened to know
the chairman of the NIH acupuncture study section, so I wrote him a
letter. He said he was surprised, because the group itself had been
pleased with our report. By then it was obvious that something was up.
As of October 1976 we would have no more NIH support. As the money
dwindled, we juggled budgets and shaved expensese to cover out costs,
and with the help of Dave Murray, who was now chairman of the
orthopedic surgery department at the medical school, we kept the
laboratory intact and enormously productive. We actually published more
research than when we hadn't been under fire.
Early in that same year, however, my appointment as medical
investigator had expired, and I had to reapply. Word came back that my
application had been "deferred," that is, it had been rejected, but I
had the option of reapplying immediately. In her accompanying letter,
the director of the VA's Medical Research Service wrote, "While your
past record and strong letters of support [the peer reveiws of my
application] were considered favorable, the broad research proposal
with sketchy detail of technique and methodology was not considered
approvable." Now, the instructions for medical investigator
applications clearly stated that I was to spell out past
accomplishments and indicate future directions only in broad outline.
Instead, the director was applying the criteria for first-time grant
applications just entering research. She invited me to resubmit the
proposal in the other format. But that would not have helped. Even if
the second application was approved, the money would arrive six months
after the lab had been closed and we had gone our separate ways.
There was another strange thing about the rejection. By that time all
federal granting agencies had to provide the actual reports (with names
deleted) of the peers who had done the reviewing. Three out of the four
were long, detailed, well-thought-out documents in the standard
critique format; they'd been neatly retyped, single spaced, on
"reviewers's report" forms with an elite typewriter. One was absolutely
lavish in its praise, saying that the VA was fortunate to have me and
that the proposed work would undoubtedly make great contributions to
medicine. Another was almost as laudatory.
One name had inadvertently been left on one page of the third review.
It was the name of a prominent orthopedic researcher with whom I had
disagreed for years about commercialization of bone-healing devices.
Since our mutual disregard was well known in the orthopedic service, I
feel it was indefensible for the director to aks him to review my
application in the first place. Perhaps she expected a more damaging
critique from him. He did complain that the proposal was insufficiently
detailed. However, his appraisal was quite fair and even said my
proposed work was of "fundamental importance to the field of growth and
healing." It obviously led up to a recommendation for approval, but the
last sentence of that paragraph had been deleted.
The last review was half a page of vague objections, typed
double-spaced on a pica machine with no semblance of the standard
format. There was a revealing mistake ("corrective" tissue instead of
connective tissue) that showed the writer had glanced at my proposal
for cues but really didn't know what it was about. Strangest of all was
the phrasing of thisw pseudoreview: "[Becker's proposal] is broad and
sweeping in scope and contains little documentation for technique and
methodology. However, in view of his past record and strong letters of
support, a decision should be deferred..." The director had used it
almost word for word in her letter.
She certainly had no motive for such conduct herself. I'd met her
briefly a few years before. In 1966 she'd been appointed chief of
research at the Buffalo VA Medical Center and had visited Syracuse to
see how I'd organized the program there. Our conversation was pleasant
but quite innocuous.
...to be continued.
--
Paul Raymond Doyon
MAT (TESOL), MA Advanced Japanese Studies, BA Psychology
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do
nothing"