Chuck Norcutt wrote:
>However, I still insist upon good science.
>
Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about the specific subject being
discussed, and offer no opinions.
Even if all the various external pressures didn't exist, good science is
hard and people who are really good at it are fairly scarce. First, you
need a fairly high level of pure intellectual capacity. Next, you need a
lot of highly specialized and arcane knowledge and experience. Next you
need to be able to be unbiased and dispassionate.
Doing so in defining the problem, designing experimental techniques to
measure parameters and and developing useful hypotheses to test is hard
enough. Then in interpreting results, it can be very hard, impossible
for some, to be dispassionate about outcome.
Humans seem to be wired to want to believe in things and ideas. When an
idea has come out of one's own head and years of ones life have been
spent working to investigate it, coming to the conclusion that it
doesn't work is a battle againts natural human instincts. For many,
there would also be a major loss of income and standing. I wonder how
many professors begin to suspect in their unspeaking hearts that the
theories that they have developed and built a career on are insufficient
right about the time their kids start college, so owning up publically
might not only end or sidetrack their careers, but nip those of their
children in the bud. Can you imagine putting 25 years of work into
something, then even if you are allowed to do so, starting all over from
scratch? Who hs the intestinal fortitude?
How much more difficult then for those many folks in the sciences whose
beliefs are psychologically more important than some abstract truth. And
then there are the many, many who just don't have the intellectual
and/or technical training and abilities to do a first rate job, no
matter how hard they try.
Simple example. My father was a Phi Beta Kappa PhD from Berkeley who
found the puzzles of research endlessly fascinating. In fact I think
they were the real core of his internal life. His field was pesticide
research, where one of the key tools was a gas chromatograph. He was so
highly regarded in his little niche that for most of the 60's, no
scientist in China was allowed to buy a gas chromatograph without his
blessing on the research project and equipment chosen.
So somewhere back in history when biologists were first raising the
issue of the terrible environmental effects and longevity of DDT in the
environment, I asked him about it. Although he worked for a big Ag
chemical company, he agreed that DDT was a real threat and way
overutilized. His personal scientific opinion was that it should be
restricted to a very few, limited uses, but he freely admitted a total
ban was much more likely and a reasonable solution.
Then he told me that, although he agreed about the DDT threat, that what
all those folks measuring DDE and other breakdown products of DDT were
measuring in birds eggs, mammals and their milk, etc. wasn't related to
DDT at all. He said that technical advances had lowered the price of gas
chromatography substantially and a bunch of biologists had run off with
them to measure things without sufficient knowledge of biochemistry and
the hardware. He said much of what was being measured as being from DDT
was in fact, some things called poylclorinated biphenyls That was the
first time I had ever heard of PCBs. He explained what they were, what
they were widely used for and why, why they were nasty and that I would
be hearing a lot more about them in the near future. He was bang on
about that.
So while there are certainly venal, weak and otherwise unworthy
scientists, there are also many who are true and pure of heart, but it's
a really complicated universe and some of them will still do inadequate
and incaccurate work. And that's the way the world is, always has been
and is likely to remain.
To rail against that and ruin ones health and enjoyment of life is like
complaining about the coming and going of the Sun.
Moose
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