离骚讴歌呐喊
从屈原的离骚到杂记的讴歌，或许再加上一声呐喊，不要抱怨沉默的人太多，他们在心底呼唤！
The quest for excellence in research has not been accompanied by a quest for excellence in the evaluation of that excellence. Can excellence be evaluated, and with what degree of precision?
If it cannot be evaluated, then we should just toss a coin and save ourselves a lot of trouble.
If it can be evaluated with precision then we should just fine-tune the present system.
If our evaluation system is error-prone then we must redesign the system taking error-proneness into account.
The system is likely to be error-prone prone for two reasons.
1. Novel ideas are usually both difficult to understand (even by their creator) and difficult to communicate (that's one reason why they they tend to be labelled "novel").
2. The historical record clearly shows that great scientific discoveries have often been achieved with minimal support of, and/or despite active hindrance by, the discoverer's "peers." This evidence should not be dismissed as "anecdotal." That excellence is ignored, opposed, or unfunded, is as much a fact as that the sun riseth in the east and setteth in the west (see Bernard Barber's study in Science (1966) 134, 596-602).
(Duffin, J. 2000).Gregor Mendel's work, funded from monastery coffers, provided the basis for the modern revolution in biotechnology, but was not appreciated for 35 years.
Charles Darwin's work was self-funded and initially was much opposed by the religious establishment and by many in the scientific establishment.
George Romanes' work was self-funded and opposed by the scientific establishment (see these web-pages).
William Bateson's work was largely self-funded and opposed by the scientific establishment (see these web-pages).
Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity was funded by working for the local patent office.
Schaudinn's discover of the bacterium causing syphilis was greeted with scorn (see below).
Watson & Crick discovered DNA structure "on the side", while being funded for other work. ...
Peter Mitchell's studies of novel ideas on energy formation in mitochondria were largely self-funded.
Helena Czajkowski (Robinson) when working as a technician, at her own initiative discovered that periwinkle leaf extracts depressed white blood cell counts, opening the way for cancer therapy with vinca alkaloids
Stephan Jay Gould's promotion of Richard Goldschmidt's work is still held in scorn by the evolution establishment (New York Review of Books 42, 17-19).
Some of the above eventually received Nobel Prizes, but too many died before they were recognized, or were not recognized at all. From the very beginnings, to the modern era, the list goes on and on and on ....
Grant agency administrators point with pride to the power of "DNA evidence" in judicial settings. Too often for comfort, decisions which appeared clear cut at the time, have since been overthrown. Yes, a triumph for our medical research system in exposing defects in our legal system. However, in some cases it was too late. The accused had been found guilty and a death sentence administered.
Yet, these very same agency administrators will defend to the last ditch their own judicial practices with respect to peer review. The halls and corridors of our universities and research institutes are awash with academic blood, yet they still will not admit how flawed the system is!
In most areas where creativity is at a premium (the stage, literature, etc.) the administrators recognize that high creativity is often divorced from marketing skills and expect applicants to have agents. Not so with the biomedical research agencies! This is not an argument for agents. It is an argument for the biomedical research agencies profoundly changing the way they go about their business.
One of the many ironies of the peer review system as it currently operates is that it is believed to stimulate competition, and hence high achievement. It certainly stimulates competition for funds. But what are the funds for? There is another competition, - the competition to discover. Here the competition for funds works as a weapon. By eliminating the majority of your potential competitors using the weapon of non-funding, you decrease the competition to a level that can be managed by politics and trade-offs. Thus, you can move along at a leisurely pace, playing politics for all its worth, and even creaming off your unfunded potential competitors ideas as their grant applications, year after year, cross your desk. And of course, the more expensive the project, the less likely there are to be competitors, and the greater the scope for politics. An alternative is bicameral review as proposed in these web-pages. This retains some of the competition for funds, but also increases the competition to discover. Watch out! At the moment of elation when you arrive at a critical “break- through,” you may find that another laboratory, albeit working on a shoe-string budget, has just published the same finding! For those who need the "spur" of competition (as if curiosity and a desire to help humankind were insufficient), this pressure, the pressure to be first to make a discovery, is the real competition. This is the competition which the current peer-review system destroys, but which bicameral review promotes. |
| Shuffling Deckchairs Modern political campaigns are expensive. Successful politicians are usually those who are most successful at campaign fund-raising. Indeed, quite often it is success at fund-raising, rather than ability in skills which make for wise governance, which decides whether a politician will be elected. So, in the hope of future favours, special interests move in. Thus, public pressures mount for the reform of campaign financing. In Canada we had Bill C2 (Feb. 2000), and there were similar calls for legislation in the USA and elsewhere. However, despite much lip-service, such reforms never seem to be implemented. Why?
As indicated above ("Winners do not want change") this is precisely the situation that prevails in the medical research funding system. In response to pressures for reform the twentieth century Canadian Medical Research Council engaged in another round of rearranging deckchairs. The cosmetic offered for the twenty first century was to rename itself The Canadian Institutes for Health Research. There is another political agenda to consider. The ultimate track record is a investigator's genes. Of course, the author of these web-pages is not advocating that agencies seek to know an applicant's genetic background! But one of the major issues in 20th century politics was the struggle between Communism and Capitalism. Lysenkoist genetics was supported by Stalin and Kruschev in part because it suggested that "nurture" (environment) rather than "nature" (genes) was of major importance. It was only a question of giving the proletariat an equal opportunity (i.e. a "level playing field"), and they could do just as well as the bourgeois middle and upper classes. The granting agency equivalent is to look at the applicant as he/she is at the time of the application. Are his/her ideas better than those of the others? Asking about his/her track-record is perhaps asking about what may have been unfair advantages (e.g. having gone to an "ivy-league" university, having had better teachers, etc...). With arguments such as this, those with leftward political leanings in decision-making positions in grant agencies may be preventing necessary reforms. Under the system of "bicameral review" proposed here, track-record is carefully defined for evaluative purposes as the ratio of performance to dollars received. From those to whom much has been given much is expected. Against the CIHR (MRC) juggernaut, a few lone voices speak out. They call themselves CARRF, the Canadian Association for Responsible Research Funding. Some examples of their attempts to get government support for the reforms which the CIHR (MRC) itself is unwilling to implement are documented in these pages. First, some background papers by people who have thought long and hard about peer review are provided. We begin with President Nixon's plan to achieve a cure of cancer by 1976 (Click Here if you want to skip the papers). |
The cure of cancer by 1976 (Irvine Page, 1971)
Research Grants (Szent-Gyorgyi, 1974)
In Praise of Smallness (Erwin Chargaff, 1980)
Malice's Wonderland (Daniel Osmond, 1983)
Bicameral Review (Four Papers by Forsdyke: 1989, 1993a, 1993b, 1994)
CARRF.
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Some Quotations Worth Remembering
"On the other hand, I will say you deserve this and worse, for you have been disarming by steps those who have control of the sciences, and they have nothing left but to run back to holy ground" Archbishop Piccolomini to Galileo 1633 concerning the outcry over the Dialogue |
"I am attacked by two very opposite sects - the scientists and the know-nothings. Both laugh at me - calling me 'the frog's dancing-master.' Yet I know that I have discovered one of the greatest forces in nature."
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| "Our own more direct way of calling a spade a spade, ... with the intention that everyone should understand it as a spade, seems more satisfactory.... However this may be, the fear-of-giving- themselves-away disease was fatal to the intelligence of those infected by it, and almost everyone ... had caught it to a greater or less degree. After a few years, atrophy of the opinions invariably supervened.... The expression on the faces of these peoples was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly unhappy, for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear-of-giving- themselves-away disease has yet been discovered." Samuel Butler (1872) On the Colleges of Unreason in Erewhon |
| "Original thought is much more common than is generally believed. Most people, if only they knew it, could write a good book or play, paint a good picture, compose a fine oratorio; but it takes an unusually able person to get the book well reviewed, persuade a manager to bring the play out, sell the picture, or compass the performance of the oratorio. Indeed, the more vigorous and original any one of these things may be, the more difficult will it prove to even bring it before the notice of the public. The error of most original people is in being just a trifle too original." Samuel Butler (1887) in Luck or Cunning, Cape, London. Or, to paraphrase H. G. Wells - "In the land of the intellectually blind, the one-eyed man should be king, but is not." John Maynard Smith made essentially the same point in 1952 (see below). |
[John Burden Sanderson] "would say ... that he is very tolerant about theories -- [but] that what really tells is facts. But then what are facts that are essential? It's the theory that determines that. I would simply disregard as trivial and misleading heaps of things which he considers essential, and vice-versa. And even the simplest 'facts' are expressed, - perceived - through theory." John Scott Haldane on his Uncle's aversion to theory in science. [Kant wrote similarly]. Letter to Louisa K. Trotter. 3 December 1891. [Their son, J.B.S. Haldane was born the following Guy Fawkes' day.] |
"I have got to know another sad specimen of this kind - one of the foremost physicists in Germany. To two pertinent objections which I raised against one of his theories and which demonstrate a direct defect in his conclusions, he responds by pointing out that another (infallible) colleague of his shares his opinion. ... Authority gone to one's head is the greatest enemy of truth." Albert Einstein (on his controversy with Drude 1901. Collected Papers). |
"The really depressing thing ... is that, the evil being of slow maturation and coming to no obvious crisis, there will never be anything in the nature of a panic. And as recent events only too clearly show, it is only in moments of panic that anything gets done. Foresight is one thing: but acting on foresight and getting large bodies of men and women to accept such action ... are very different matters." Aldous Huxley to Ronald Fisher (1931) |
| "Any report of famine in Russia today is an exaggeration or malignant propaganda." Walter Duranty of the New York Times (circa 1932) who prostituted high literary skills to win a Pulitzer prize for reporting of Stalin's purges in the Ukraine. |
"There does not exist, and cannot exist in the world, a science divorced from politics. The fundamental question is with what kind of politics is science connected, whose interests it serves - the interests of the people or the interests of the exploiters." Response of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences to the attack of the great US geneticist H. J. Muller on its endorsement of Lysenkoism. Pravda 14th Dec. 1938 |
| "The mass trials have been a great success, comrades. In the future there will be fewer but better Russians" GRETA GARBO, in Ninotchka, 1939 |
"The situation of research is different. Actually, almost anyone who makes a scientific advance of almost any kind is bound to be exposing, as erroneous or obsolete, views and methods formerly taught and trusted. The teacher especially who is accustomed to pontificate is decidedly reluctant to eat his words or to recast his courses. He therefore finds some excuse for not doing so by ignoring or, failing that, belittling and criticizing, with more or less astuteness, views which threaten his current stock of ideas. This temperamental factor is almost always in evidence in the earlier reactions to any new notion, and of course the publication of new findings and the discussion of their relevance is not really carried out in logical terms." Ronald Fisher, pioneer in the field of statistics (1940) |
"When in 1916, Dampier-Whetham ... submitted a screed of mine, on the genetical interpretation of the biometrical work Galton had inspired, to the Royal Society, the referees appointed are rumoured to have been Karl Pearson and Reginald Punnett. The Society's action was impeccable; these were two leading lights in statistics and genetics respectively, with the additional advantage ... that they were not very likely to agree. In fact, I suspect the rejection of my paper was the only point in two long lives on which they were ever heartily at one. Lest this sad story seem depressing, it has the point that the author of the paper was chosen to succeed each pundit in turn." Ronald Fisher, pioneer in the field of statistics (194 3) |
"Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things....Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain. C. S. Lewis (1944) Address given at King's College, London. The Weight of Glory & Other Addresses. Macmillan, 1980 |
| "This story has a simple moral, With which the wise will hardly quarrel; Remember, Prof, it hardly ever, Pays to be too bloody clever." J. Maynard Smith et al. (1952). An ode entitled "The Folly of Being Too Clever" to J. B. S. Haldane on his 60th birthday |
| Edward R. Murrow to Jonas Salk (April 12th 1955): "Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" Salk's discovery of a safe and effective vaccine against polio was largely financed by the March of Dimes Foundation, and built on the work of generations of scientists and doctors. |
| "Once work had ... started, it took Schaudinn only a single day to discover the hardly visible germ, the Spirochaeta pallida. He was absolutely sure of his discovery, but when he announced it at a meeting of the medical society the chairman, von Leyden, rose after the paper was finished and said in effect: 'Gentlemen, you have listened in this hall already to one hundred announcements of the discovery of the syphilis germ. This was the hundred and first.' Accompanied by the laughter of the hostile meeting, Schaudinn left. For many weeks attacks and insults were heaped upon him, and in the front line stood his former chief, F. E. Schultz. ... Meanwhile, Neisser, Levaditi, and Metchnikoff had come out for Schaudinn, his discovery was accepted all over the world, and the way was open for Paul Ehrlich's discovery of Salvarsan." Richard Goldschmidt (1960) In and Out of the Ivory Tower. University of Washington Press, p. 60. |
| "The instruments produced graphs, which Bose explained as recording the heartbeat of the plant... Bose became a famous man, was knighted, and considered himself the great Indian scientist.. The whole thing was a joke, and I wonder how he could get away with it and be feted all over Europe as a great man." Richard Goldschmidt (1960) In and Out of the Ivory Tower. University of Washington Press, p. 260-1. |
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) |  |
"Only the Prof. could have done it. If he had been killed it is impossible to imagine any other scientist to whom Winston would have listened. ... He had fought at Winston's side at a time when no one had a good word to say for the man who was 'spreading alarm and preventing an understanding with Germany'. ... Winston would recount ..."We were losing some of our best young pilots. Their aircraft would stall and go into a nose-dive, and the pilot was always killed. The Prof., with his mathematics, worked it all out on paper. To come out of the spin safely, the pilot must pick up enough speed in a vertical dive. No one took him seriously. So the Prof. learnt to fly, and then one morning ... he went up alone.... He put his craft into a spinning nose-dive. Those watching him held their breath. ... His theory worked." Remarks concerning Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell) from The Dairies of Lord Moran (Churchill's physician) 1966. |
"I sought the guidance of two Fellows of the Royal Society. One of those I consulted said that Cherwell completely changed the attitude of those at the top towards scientific developments. 'Modern war ... is probably won by ideas, and the real enemy of new ideas is always the expert'. Sir Winston, with the Prof. as tutor, would not allow the expert to kill new ideas or technical innovations. Lord Swinton, who was Air Minister at the time spoke in support. No project was too far fetched, too novel, to be rejected outright by Lord Cherwell." Remarks concerning Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell) from The Dairies of Lord Moran (Churchill's physician) 1966. |
| "In nine cases out of ten large teams and expensive apparatus are a substitute for really accurate observation and really deep thinking. One can't order a Faraday and a von Frisch, with a Laplace to do their mathematics for them. One can order a hundred graduates, a cyclotron, a computer, two electron microscopes, and so on. Such apparatus also impresses visiting journalists; whereas great scientists are often shy or rude, and sometimes both." J. B. S. HALDANE, in Science and Life (1969) |
| "I consider it desirable that a man's or woman's major research work should be in a subject in which he or she has not taken a degree. To get a degree one has to learn a lot of facts and theories in a somewhat parrot-like manner....It is rather hard to be highly original in a subject which one has learned with a view to obtaining first-class honours in an examination." J. B. S. HALDANE, in Science and Life (1969) |
| "In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored. He carries no Baedeker in his pocket, no guidebook which tells him which churches he should visit or at which hotels he should stay. He has only the ambiguous folklore of others who have passed that way. No doubt deeper levels of the mind guide the scientist or the artist towards experiences and thoughts which are relevant to those problems which are somehow his, and this guidance seems to operate long before the scientist has any conscious knowledge of his goals." Gregory Bateson 1971 in Steps to an Ecology of Mind |
| "I also learnt at an early age the great truth that the twentieth century is an age of almost inconceivable credulity, in which critical faculties are stifled by a plethora of public persuasion and information so that, literally, anyone will believe anything." "For resident journalists in Moscow the arrival of the distinguished visitors was ... our best - almost our only - comic relief. ... We used to run a little contest among ourselves to see who could produce the most striking example of credulity among this fine flower of our western intelligensia. ... I got an honourable mention by pursuading Lord Marley that the queueing at food shops was permitted by the authorities because it provided a means of inducing the workers to take a rest when otherwise their zeal for completing the Five-Year Plan in record time was such that they would keep at it all the time." "No other foreign journalist had been into the famine areas in the USSR except under official ... supervision, so my account was by way of being exclusive. This brought me no kudos, and many accusations of being a liar, in the Guardian correspondence columns and elsewhere... Shaw's picture of Stalin as the Good Fabian ... continued to carry more conviction than mine of a bloodthirsty tyrant.... People, after all, believe lies ... because they want to believe them." Malcolm Muggeridge (1972) Chronicles of Wasted Time |
"I feel that much of the work is done because one wants to impose an answer on it. They have the answer ready, and they [know what they] want the material to tell them. ... [Anything else it tells them] they don't really recognize as there, or they think it's a mistake and throw it out. ... If you'd only just let the material tell you." Barbara McClintock, circa 1980. |
"Barbara McClintock belongs to a rare genre of scientist; on the short-term view of the mood and tenor of modern biological laboratories, hers is an endangered species. Recently, ... she met informally with a group of graduate and postdoctoral students. They were responsive to her exhortation that they "take time and look," but they were also troubled. Where does one get the time to look and think? They argued that the new technology of molecular biology is self-propelling. It does not leave time. There is always the next experiment, the next sequencing to do. The pace of current research seems to preclude such a contemplative stance." Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) The Feeling for the Organism. The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. Freeman, San Francisco. |
"The National Academic of Science made what looked like a prudent response. It put together a high level committee of scientists who worked with DNA in the hope that they would do more than throw dice, [and] that somehow their past experiences would equip them for a logical response. The truth in such situations, however, is often just the opposite. But no one likes to advertise that we may have no meaningful guide for what tomorrow may bring. Psychologically, this is hard to accept, and our sanity almost demands placing more faith in experts than the facts warrant." James D. Watson (1978) on the debate about the potential dangers of recombinant DNA research. Reprinted in A Passion for DNA (2000) Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press p. 62. |
"Three new values:
James D. Watson (1993) on his early education. From A Passion for DNA p. 4. |
"The elucidation of the full genomic sequence of humans ... has been referred to as the Rosetta Stone of human biology, which implies that it will allow us to elucidate all of the information encapsulated in this DNA sequence. However, it might be more appropriate to liken the human genomic sequence to the Phaestos Disk: an as yet undeciphered set of glyphs from a Minoan palace on the island of Crete. With regard to understanding the A's, T's, G's, and C's of genomic sequence, by and large, we are functional illiterates." Molecular Biologist William M. Gelbart (1998) Databases in genome research. Science 282, 659-61. |
" Research aiming for a rapid, practical and commercial outcome has become almost a necessity for survival because of the increasingly severe reduction in government funding for universities and research institutes. We [can] ... illustrate the value of curiosity-based research with ... examples from our own fields ... none initiated with a commercial goal in mind. Benjamin Franklin, when asked about the importance of some research, replied 'Of what use is a a baby?'"Gordon L. Ada & Frank Fenner |
"Science has always been a communal effort, but its ability to spawn technological innovation has transformed it into Big Business. That's certainly true of biochemistry and other branches of molecular biology, which offer the promise of blockbuster drugs and a host of other medical revolutions. The biomedical sciences have become expensive, busy, manipulative, political, and harshly competitive. Worse yet, their practitioners are being forced to fiddle with the truth. When they describe their work, they must gloss over uncertainties, or their manuscript won't get published. If they apply for grants, they must make wild claims, or they won't get funded. If they write letters of recommendation, they must tell white lies, or their letters will be counterproductive. And if they shoptalk with colleagues, they must hold back information, or they might get scooped. Today's science is too much dominated by efficient people with cold eyes." |  Gottfried Schatz Letter to a young student FEBS Letters
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| Case Histories in Innovative Science William Donald Hamilton
Obituary by Alan Grafen Thursday March 9, 2000 Educated at Tonbridge school, he came across RA Fisher's Genetical Theory of Natural Selection while a Cambridge university undergraduate. When he prompted one of his tutors about the book, he was told it was mistaken and that the author, still then lecturing in Cambridge, had "no standing to write about biology". Bill was captured by the intellectual excitement of this remarkable book, and spent his working life pursuing its line. In so doing, he provided the conceptual foundation for our understanding of how natural selection acts on social behaviour, opened up the area of "extraordinary" (that is, unequal) sex ratios, transformed thinking on sexual selection and produced a corpus of work that demonstrates the capacity of parasite-host interactions to support the maintenance of sexual reproduction. These are the primary Darwinian themes of the second half of the 20th century, and can be understood only in the context of Bill's contributions. He, like Fisher before him, took many steps at once away from conventional paths, and found that eventually biologists would change their conventions.
We can look forward to decades of catching up with Bill's biological thoughts. He fused mathematics and natural history. He had a vast personal knowledge of insects and was pretty good on plants too. He kept a vast card index system. He once led an expedition through Wytham Woods, near the village where he lived, and showed an entranced audience the range of organisms that lived in rotting wood in which, he believed, most important events in insect evolution had occurred. He saw genes everywhere. On a train in New England in 1980, he pointed out clumps of sumac trees. Some had smooth crowns over the whole clump, while others had furrows between individual trees. He was sure that furrows existed between genetically different trees, while trees from the same clone had a smooth crown. Everything he saw in nature was viewed through a genetic lens.
At the end of one such talk at the Royal Society, he showed a slide with a male and female parrot, one bright red and one bright green. Conventional theories could explain why one sex was bright, but not why both were. He ended: "When I understand why one sex is red and the other green, I will be ready to die," and seemed to mean every word. |
Page, D. (2000) An interview with Harmon Craig. Science Spectra 20, 14-18 (with copyright permission from the editor)
My style and preference are the opening game. Of course, one has to play the middle game to get funding for research, because it is difficult to get funded for exploring new ideas, generally because proposal reviewers and program managers are playing the middle game. So, I generally write middle-game proposals to keep working on a subject I have started. This keeps the lab running and one can use part of the funding for exploring new ideas.'" |
