Advice to a Young Scientist

...Or why don't we learn about the machinations that led to Medawar's intercession in the egregious case at Sloan Kettering Institute, where a scientist named Summerlin allegedly fabricated the results of his skin-grafting experiments in a manner that brought ignominy to his institution and to science itself...

...Such detachment is of course part of the central dogma that Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions cites as necessary for "normal science...

...Only at the critical juncture of conducting the test itself can the scientist divorce himself from the outcome...

...It is not enough to simply implore or insist on objectivity...

...Many of the truly eminent scientists, I suspect, would rather leave it to the historians of science to decipher the tomes of laboratory notebooks that are the hallmark of an inventive mind...

...How does one decide not to do a particular piece of science...

...he conveys the verve, enthusiasm and troubling aspects of the scientific process by indirection, yet, with powerful cogency...

...Medawar provides a striking paragraph in his treatment of moral dilemmas in the framing of a scientific question...

...And it is here that Medawar's work lets the reader down...

...It is for this reason that the "double-blind" approach to animal and human testing, where neither the experimenter nor his aides, (or in the case of people, the subject himself) knows the experimental design, is so essential to the proper conduct of science...

...He offers as his penultimate bit of "Advice" the injunction to cultivate total detachment from the conviction that a particular hypothesis is true...

...How did he get himself in the position of submitting a paper to Nature before he had adequately verified the existence of amelanocytic (pigmentless) melanocytes in guinea pig skin...

...In fact, I have found the impact of Medawar's published work a more tangible influence on my appreciation of science than I have found his treatment of science in Advice...

...It is more than coincidental that the French word for an experiment is experience...

...One does not uncover the Zeitgeist of a particularly creative period, say in music, by asking a Rubinstein to write a treatise on piano method...

...I would have loved to read Medawar describing his role in the disputations over the original heart transplants in South Africa, or the spurious data published that seemed to refute his thesis about the null role of serum factors in graft rejection, or the use of animal "xenografts" in humans...

...Rather than formula, creativity often requires the chance coming together of life events and scientific observation...

...It is critical, in Medawar's mind, for scientists to grapple with the potential moral consequences of their work before undertaking it...

...As a young scientist I would have been intrigued to learn Medawar's views on the moral issues involved in the massive suppression of immunity needed in the earliest days of human kidney transplantation, where very little animal work was adequately translated into the human sector...

...One needs only to think of the Prince of Serendip, or the snake-eating-its-owntail dreams of Kukélé— so instrumental in his uncovery of the structure of benzene, to appreciate the constant interplay of mind, matter and cultural milieu in setting the scientific process in train...

...Partly as a result of this earnest undertaking, the book's tone is almost arch (Advice is dedicated Commonweal: 378 to the Royal Society of London), and unless one appreciates the nobility of Medawar's stature and his particularly Oxfordian grace, an American reader could well be put off by a distant, almost Victorian style in his writing...

...Commonweal: 380...

...Is it enough to create conditions of complete objectivity, or may it sometimes be essential to weigh the political and social factors that may make that test—and its outcome—particularly attractive to one or another vested interest group in society or impose harms on another, before doing the work...

...Beyond the injunction for full disclosure, the content of the necessary moral analysis of this issue is left vague...

...or elsewhere, as a vehicle for verifying the Kantian view of a priori knowledge...

...And here I am thinking about tests to assign genetic explanations for socioeconomic differences in 'nutritional status, blood pressure, or intelligence...

...In contrast to Dyson, who believes the scientific process itself is best depicted through personal experience, Medawar often stays at a level of generalization that is ill-suited to conveying the "feel" of true science...

...Thus, it comes as some surprise that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation should believe it possible to derive the essence of the scientific life from reflections of still extant, notable members of the scientific community...

...It might well be that it is possible to test the thesis that all of the variance in iron levels in blacks comes from the genes and not the environment...

...Still, I am grateful to learn at the feet of the master once again, an opportunity that would have been missed had some science historian, and not the great P. B. Medawar himself, passed on this elution of his reflections of science...

...This type of science demands passion, verve, commitment and above all, immense self-confidence...

...P, B. Medawar's efforts are drier and more directly pointed to the assigned task...

...By insisting on deductive processes and critical experiments in lieu of the more wide-ranging uses of induction and intuition that made Darwin's work, to cite but one instance, so spectacular, Medawar clings to orthodoxy and underplays revolution...

...Sadly, this is the single exposure to the issues of social responsibility that intrigue many students of science...

...Dyson's writing is at one and the same time richly anecdotal and visionary...

...Two books in this series have now been published: Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe...

...Too often, one feels, Medawar vests too much in classical scientific paradigms...

...I learned the Medawar and Billingham technique of skin grafting—and the particular dogma that called for the sole participation of lymphocytes in graft rejection—from a disciple, once removed from Medawar's own tutelage...

...Unfortunately, he provides only the sparsest of anecdotes and personal experiences to exemplify the type of phenomenon that makes for truly creative science...

...Inventories scientific or musical are the evolutionary endpoint of often thousands of selective cognitive and inductive decisions, and one suspects, self-reflection is anathema to their success...

...To test an idea that conflicts with the orthodoxy, or to seek out a novel or common explanation for a welter of conflicting data is, as Kuhn points out, the stuff of scientific revolutions...

...Thus, he refers to science as the potentiation of common sense...

...But, what of that first group experiments, those that have the "moral content" to which Medawar so briefly alluded...

...Powerful biasing factors will always exist in science...

...and Peter Brian Medawar'sAdvice to a Young Scientist...

...Advice to a Young Scientist, as the title implies, takes the Sloan Foundation's charge literally...

...Dyson's treatment is more truly autobiographical, a vision that drifts in three stages across the landscape of his life...

...Thus, he is particularly eloquent and convincing when he describes the strange kind of synergism of the creative process that can accompany a collaborative effort...

...At other times, he succeeds...

...Or resolve a 20 June 1980: 379 moral dilemma in research...

...Instead of investing the scant pagination available to a dissertation on the relative merits of the Baconian, Aristotelian, Galilean and Kantian experimentation, would not the budding young scientist be better off if provided with a discourse on how Medawar himself resolved those conflicts that most threatened the conduct of his own work...

...In sum, I looked for and missed all of those experiential elements that could make a treatise on science for the neophyte intriguing and gripping...

...But would heavy investment in this type of research be desirable, without first equalizing nutritional inputs of iron to all populations...

...Medawar is more consistent if he is read within the ethos of classical science...

...To be sure, simply raising the issue is mark enough of a social conscience all too rare among scientists of Medawar's stature...

...But, insisting on detachment denies the human penchant for problem-solving and is manifestly unfair to the passion that characterizes virtually every creative scientist I have known...

...Medawar provides explanations of the scientific method that are often either too simplistic or too rarefied...

...or let the philosophers of science interpret the composite impact of cultural forces and psychohistory on their particular brand of epistemology and discovery...

...It is no accident that great inventors, from Leonardo da Vinci to Thomas Alva Edison left their notebooks to posterity to interpret (Edison's alone comprise some six million entries...

...One problem in generalizing from practice and experiential knowledge to the abstract is oversimplification...

...For two authors given the same task—namely, to distill from their lives those thoughts and experiences which best convey the nature of scientific inquiry—the books differ dramatically in style and approach...

...He insists on total objectivity and detachment for the proper conduct of science...

...Yet, I find I am closer to Medawar's science than to Dyson's since I cut my scientific eye-teeth on Medawar's classic treatments on transplantation immunology...

...The truly creative scientist relies more on the direction suggested by each experimental observation than by some deeper underand standing of the motivations and techniques of discovery that underly the scientific method...

...It is the scientists' obligation only to create the conditions that will best impede the influence of expectations of outcome of experiments, not in their design...