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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (35715)	4/23/1999 10:49:00 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Do these birds of which you speak try to pick apart their own ideas, or those of others? Having an open mind about someone else's field of study doesn't count. There may be academics who don't have pet beliefs about something, but I have yet to meet them. You, yourself, have beliefs about the stock market. Ms. JBE has beliefs about Chechenya. And so forth.

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (35715)	4/23/1999 10:08:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

<< For some reason there is a popular idea that perfectly good science is rejected because it challenges "accepted" ideas. I have yet to see a single case of that sort of thing in biochemistry, genetics or evolutionary science. . I have seen grant money doled out for political reasons.>> This reminded me of the homocysteine story. I don't remember the science, or even how to spell the word, but I'll bet you do. Roughly, the article I read about it a couple of years ago told the story of a certain scientist who had conducted studies indicating that low homocysteine levels in the blood were a significantly stronger predictor of heart disease than were high cholesterol levels. (Correct me if i've got this wrong.) Funding for his work was cut off. He was drummed out of his field, or at least to the far periphery of it. His career was ruined. It took decades, until he was an old man, before the truth of his conclusions was recognized. One explanation offered in the article for this injustice, which incidentally had health implications for many thousands of tax paying citizens during the intervening decades, was that there was a lot of taxpayer money going to influential people involved with the cholesterol faction; and acknowledging the good science behind this competing view would have been costly to those who had the power to suppress it. It would amaze me if, in any field including the ones you mention, the promise or hope of career advancement, or of access to large amounts of money and power, or the fear of losing access to those or simply to the friendship of the powerful, didn't corrupt the scientific method. Peer review is one mechanism by which such corruption might be effected. Each of these worlds (biochemistry, genetics, evolutionary science, for example) is rather small. The scientists at the top of each are known to each other. There are schools of thought and factions, there are alliances and enmities, and most of all there is competition. I think it would be naive to believe that when a scientist submits his application for a grant to the NIH, the particular group of peer reviewers selected has no effect on the outcome of the request for funding. There is even a mechanism by which a scientist may request the exclusion of certain scientists from the review panel by showing that a conflict of interest may exist. But conflict of interest is not always easy to prove. The same situation exists when a scientist submits a paper describing what he considers important findings to, for example, JAMA. Who will be its peer reviewers? What will be their agendas? I guess what i'm saying is that i've never seen a real life situation involving the allocation of money and power in which personal agendas did not play a major role. I feel sure this is true in science as well as in other fields. There is in fact a homily among scientists that new science never changes any minds; it must wait to prevail until the invested generation of scientists is replaced by a new, disinterested one.