Degringolade

Pop Art / James Rosenquist/ Off the Continental Divide

Starting this the day before posting while on duty.  Lots of time to write during the day so I will spend some time talking about “science”.  

I think that the mythology of science has taken over from the day to day grunt work of actually being a scientist.  This is never a good thing.  What this brings to mind to me is the mythology of the “discovery” of DNA by Watson and Crick.  

I am of two minds on this one, and to be truthful their getting the Nobel was  a bit of a stretch and will forever be in question due to the presence of Rosalind.  They figured out the double helix and figured out that it contained instructions.  But really, how much of this was their work and how important the simplistic discovery was has always been kind of beyond me.  

But they had the press behind them and Watson was always a ruthless self-promoter who made every effort to reinforce the idea that he was the smartest guy in the room.  I had the joy of spending a week or so at Cold Spring Harbor in the eighties and had brief glances at a towering ego and was grateful to retreat to my no-name lab in the wasteland.  

What always amazed me was the way that Oswald Avery and Marshall Nirenberg were frozen out of any prestige.  Oswald showed DNA could produce inheritable changes in 1944.  Marshall did the meticulous and soul-crushingly boring day to day work of figuring out how the genetic code worked.

All Watson and Crick did was to interpret pretty pictures taken by someone else.

So, let's talk about Fauci’s little gaffe that I spoke of yesterday.  

“It's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science. That's dangerous,”

I think that science today is more like the renaissance papacy than the purity of Popper or the rigor of Einstein.  In a sense, Fauci, with his statement saying that he “represents” science is no different than the long term assertion by the Papacy and the anti-conciliarist movement of the doctrine of papal infallibility.  I think that it is surprising that anyone can allow a single man to claim to represent the “truth” of a particular faith.  But Fauci has been in the position of the Doctor-Pope for quite a while now.  The NIH is the source of funding for way too many research projects and being chosen for funding is a sign that you have bought into the orthodoxy.  Oddly enough, the quote from a off-brand piece of tentacle fiction by one of my favorite authors seems to be extremely appropriate here.

“Most fields of study have been through the exact equivalent, whenever a few prominent scholars and their allies come to dominate a given branch of scholarship, and control access to the important journals and the sources of grant money. The result, invariably, is intellectual stagnation.

The role the Fauci and the NIH have played over the past thirty years have tainted the way that science works.  The funding and the control of direction of research engendered in the actual funding process keeps the focus of research tight, and the atomization of the publication process doesn’t allow a broad view of the complex subjects that need to be explored if we will have any chance of getting out of this mess.

Nope, like the medieval church, the church of science has been corrupted to its core.  

I don’t know how this will play out.  I do know how the renaissance papacy played out.  

From: 

Principles of Research

address by Albert Einstein (1918)

(Physical Society, Berlin, for Max Planck's sixtieth birthday)

IN the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.

I am quite aware that we have just now lightheartedly expelled in imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly, responsible for the buildings of the temple of science; and in many cases our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere of human activity will do, if it comes to a point; whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen, or scientists depends on circumstances. Now let us have another look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult question and no single answer will cover it. To begin with, I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.