{"id":1780,"date":"2012-04-25T12:57:38","date_gmt":"2012-04-25T11:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/?p=1780"},"modified":"2012-04-25T12:57:38","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T11:57:38","slug":"in-which-wed-like-to-acknowledge-whats-his-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2012\/04\/25\/in-which-wed-like-to-acknowledge-whats-his-name\/","title":{"rendered":"In which we’d like to acknowledge what’s-his-name"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is human nature to feel that you\u2019re at the center of the universe, with all of life and experience revolving around your fixed point of view like a lazy orbit of galaxies. On a larger scale, this biased perspective can influence groups of people, and indeed entire countries. Most of you are probably familiar with the light-hearted maps of Daniel K. Wallingford<\/a> from the 1920s, showing particular cities and their skewed view of the rest of the world, which have been used as inspiration for dozens of similar efforts since that time (The Saul Steinberg cover<\/a> for the March 29, 1976 issue of The New Yorker <\/em>being possibly the most well-known example). <\/p>\n

Scientific culture, in particular, can be incredibly parochial, especially if you are fortunate enough to do research in a country regarded as \u2018world-class\u2019. I have noticed a particular attitude amongst some American scientists, for example, whose words and behaviors can sometimes betray elitism. \u201cReal\u201d science is done in America, you see, whereas other countries are just mucking about and possibly filling in some useful blanks. <\/p>\n

A great example of this was the reaction I experienced as PhD student in Seattle, when I was fortunate enough to secure my first post-doctoral position with one of my heroes at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute. Expecting universal excitement and approval from my professors, I was instead treated in many cases to puzzled looks and bewilderment. I will never forget the words of the most censorious: \u201cIt\u2019s all very well and good to do a post-doc abroad, but you do realize it won\u2019t count, and you\u2019ll have to start over with another post-doc in America.\u201d <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what was more shocking: that this guy would say this to my face, or that he would actually believe it in the first place. (For context, the person in London I was going to be working with was about a hundred times more well-known and famous than this guy. A quick Google search, incidentally, reveals that this censorious professor dropped out of science many years ago, whereas my first post-doctoral supervisor is now a Fellow of the Royal Society. Despite this, the memory of his opinion of the scientific calibre \u201cabroad\u201d still has to power to raise my blood pressure in a swift flash of remembered anger.)<\/p>\n

There are of course many other examples of this. You\u2019ll sometimes see American open-access crusaders making \u2013 unconscious, I assume \u2013 statements implying that all<\/em> peer-reviewed papers are paid for by American tax payers. We\u2019ve also heard stories about important findings in faraway countries that are not celebrated until a prominent Western lab rediscovers and publishes the same thing in a bigger journal. Even Sarah Palin\u2019s incredulity about \u201cFruit fly research in Paris, France\u201d<\/a> is channeling some deeper anxiety about self and other. <\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not limited to Americans \u2013 I want to stress that this sort of bias occurs in every place, on every scale. When I worked in the Netherlands, my entire universe seemed to shrink to a tiny nation six feet below sea level, and suddenly the lab heads at the Netherlands Cancer institute were perceived to be the top dogs, looming much larger than overseas celebrity scientists, whereas my own situation at the University of Leiden was considerably more lowly. Within Leiden, our biotech environment was looked down upon still further by the surrounding academic labs. Here in London, I sometimes get the feeling that some of my colleagues view the rest of the United Kingdom \u2013 aside from Oxford and Cambridge \u2013 as being somewhat less lofty. The joke is, of course, that the true beacon is still America, even here: there used to be a joke circulating amongst British PhD students that you really needed a BTA (\u201cBeen To America\u201d) on your CV to be taken seriously in your future academic job stakes.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the parochialism that most infuriates me is the habit of geographically biased name-checking during scientific seminars. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve all heard this: Joe Bloggs up on the podium, attributing every background finding to specifically named (typically American or local) lab-heads, until he gets to one particular nugget of information that is attributed to \u201ca Japanese group\u201d. The underlying implication is that this person is no one you need to know about or remember, because he or she performed the research in a faraway place where labs are indistinguishable from one another. But again, it\u2019s all relative. At a recent conference I attended, a British speaker name-checked American and British authors, but referred to \u201ca French group\u201d. A few talks later, a French speaker name-checked French and German lab heads, but dismissed another finding as being from \u201cThe Chinese\u201d. And so it goes \u2013 each person in his or her own universe, carefully drawing lines between self and other, between tribe and not-tribe, between those belonging in the inner named circle, and those doomed forever to anonymity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is human nature to feel that you\u2019re at the center of the universe, with all of life and experience revolving around your fixed point of view like a lazy orbit of galaxies. On a larger scale, this biased perspective … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,29,34,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-careers-2","category-nostalgia","category-scientific-thinking","category-the-profession-of-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}