The edge of the forest is close enough for a good look.
Each tree is unique. The pine I am examining differs
from its neighbours. This individual tree flaunts its
own mortality. Some of its branches are dead, their
needles have become brown and sparse. But any tree
is not only constrained into immobility. Its response
to the whiffs of wind is a dance. It forms a paean
to the environmental pressures that have molded the
evolution of this particular species.
These are some of the remarks that cross the mind upon
just looking at a tree. There is another remark, and
I'll come to it in due time. Prior to that, I want
to share a similar emotion, with an aesthetic and intellectual
nature as well. I am now looking at a page from a scientific
magazine, such as the standard-bearers of the chemical
profession, the Journal of the American Chemical Society
or the international edition in English of Angewandte
Chemie. The chemical reaction shown here is so incredibly
elegant, so beautifully designed, so artfully crafted
and efficient! Is not synthesis of this beautiful target
molecule, a complex natural product, admirably conceived,
using but sparingly its chemical means and its successive
stages? Is it not dead on target in like manner as
a resolute chess player, intent on winning the game,
who anticipates future moves of his opponent, whose
behaviour he predicts and whose reactions he forecasts
if I may pun on the word "reaction" with
its dual meaning, as in action-reaction, and as in
chemical reaction.
The two beauties, that of the tree and that incarnate
in the chemical paper, strike me as equivalent. Who
can claim that the one, from nature takes precedence
on the other, man-made, or vice-versa? It would be
an anthropocentric fallacy to privilege the latter.
We do so however, routinely and mindlessly, when we
reduce millions (billions?) of Scandinavian and Canadian
pines to pulp in order to produce the paper for our
publications (this is the remark promised earlier).
Of course, for man to destroy nature in the name of
improved or increased humanity sounds like a valid
motive. But who are we? Should we tolerate global arboricide
in order to nurture research work entirely devoid of
originality? Should we favor imitative research and
the bureaucratization of scientific discovery at the
cost of creative research? I submit that only the latter,
original science, is enough justification for cutting
all those trees.
Some additional explanation is required, since readers
of this piece are not necessarily scientists. The phrase
"creative research" sounds redundant. Nevertheless,
one cannot avoid coining the term when dealing with
the increasing and worrisome bureaucratization of scientific
research. Some of the main causes of mimetic conformity
and of self-censured creativity are:
*mission-oriented research, stemming from the military
necessities of World War II, and that led through the
visionary "Link to the Frontier" report by
Vannevar Bush to the setting-up in the US of reseach
universities, as we know them nowadays;
*funding agencies, such as the European Commission in
Brussels or the National Science Foundation in Washington,
and other national administrations, rely necessary
on peer review of research proposals. With time, such
evaluation has undergone inflation: at present, a reviewer
kills an application from a colleague if he or she
does not grade it "excellent" but only "very
good". It is considered utterly tactless to even
hint that a contribution might be too flimsy, too slender
a move in the general advancement of learning;
*social promotion through scientific research has been
responsible for the present existence of a lumpen proletariat
of science workers, recruited from developing countries,
and slaving for a doctoral degree in the laboratories
of the economically more advanced countries. Our intellectual
equals, they suffer from poor initial training in general,
at the secondary and undergraduate levels. In this
situation, most laboratories deliberately, because
they need the manpower, devalue the degree. They turn
themselves into Ph.D.-churning factories. And the funding
agencies favor such an unfortunate trend by equating
quality with quantity: quality of science being assumed
to be proportional to the number of bodies in a research
group and to the number of research papers published
by a given laboratory;
*another sociological pattern bears heavily on the present
situation: some young scientists quickly understand
that, in the present circumstances, a career in the
lab is a very hard proposition. They move to science
administration. Because their experience of science
has been too short, they are prone to behave as technocrats,
i.e. as people justifying their role by demanding regular
written reports and financial statements;
*one should mention a political factor: supranational
bodies operate under the pressure of national lobbies.
Their management is multinational and plurilingual,
which is a good thing in the absolute. However, it
leads to monstrosities. Success of an application to
the EC hinges on the rather artificial pairing of academic
and industrial labs, of groups from countries of the
North and countries of the South, a bureaucratic hurdle
race akin to a kafkaesque run through a maze.
*proliferation of commercial periodicals, whose subscriptions
drain the money of the already poor research libraries.
As a consequence, however mediocre the work, it gets
published nevertheless. Some scientists, furthermore,
do away with the deontological rule regarding authorship:
anyone signing a publication ought to be able, alone,
to present it and to defend it.
This is enough. I have no desire to be exhaustive, and
this is a rather sad survey. We can sum it up with
two distinct metaphors: bad money chases away the good;
our joint intellectual space has become highly polluted.
I have hinted at the strangling of creative research
through proliferation of imitative research. Technocratic
science managers want their work cut out for them,
and they force living science into conformity to their
organizational charts.
Is my presentation too unidimensional? Should I have
referred to the stifling of genuine creators by the
orthodoxy of official science? The latter, let me hasten
to say, is a myth, carried by the media for its romantic
content. It has no basis in reality.
In fact, scientists are very fond of dissenters and
of marginals. They pamper anything that evokes originality
and that is outside of the mainstream. No truly creative
mind is ever ignored. Both Alfred Wegener (of continental
drift fame) and Gregor Mendel (the father of genetics)
were known and esteemed by their contemporaries. Barbara
McClintock, a loner if there was one, did work renowned
in its time and appreciated. The same goes for Stanley
Prusiner: we knew for sure for the last dozen years
that he was about to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
Coming to the end of this paper, and well-aware of its
rather negative spirit, let me express the hope that
the editors of Campus will allow me to write a part
II, which by contrast would embody a set of constructive
proposals.
Pierre Laszlo
All rights reserved © Pierre Laszlo 1997