Scientists are trained to read the scientific literature with skepticism. Forever question, we are told, the truth of various assertions put to us no matter how eloquent or famous the writer or prestigious the journal in which that writing appears. In thinking about it more closely, though, I was surprised to recall that my first lesson in skeptical reading did not actually derive from my scientific training, but from an undergraduate course in Cultural Anthropology.<\/p>\n
\nI got mixed up with Cultural Anthropology because Oberlin College bestows a liberal arts degree, so its humanities students must take a number of science courses and its aspiring scientists, classes in the arts and humanities. Although my classmates groaned about this, I was in heaven, gobbling up whatever I could – Ancient Greek, ethnomusicology, Spanish poetry – I even got credits for joining the women’s Ultimate Frisbee team and learning how to play the steel drum, the Gambian kora and several teeth-grittingly atonal gong-like instruments from the Javanese gamelon tradition. But that’s another story.<\/p>\n
\nThe formative lesson in question was conducted by a wily professor who assigned Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa<\/em> (1928). For those of you not familiar with this work, it’s chock full of teenage sex and its central theory was that Samoan adolescence wasn’t stormy precisely because nothing, including sex, was taboo. After giving us a chance to marvel at Mead’s achievements, he then set the text Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth<\/em> by Derek Freeman, which basically claimed that Mead’s findings were biased and artifactual. So which anthropologist, we asked the Prof anxiously, was right? He shrugged and said that the truth would probably never be known, as numerous scholars had found problems in both Mead’s and Freeman’s methods, and the culture in question was long gone.<\/p>\n \nAs a callow girl of nineteen, I found this whole affair rather shocking. How could something in a book be wrong<\/em>? <\/p>\n \nOf course I soon learned that many printed things are wrong – and this was years before the internet taught everyone to take everything written publicly with a grain of salt. Still, I had a healthy respect for what I read in scientific papers, taking everything at face value unless I had a valid reason to believe otherwise.<\/p>\n \nBut that’s all over now. I can’t decide if it’s a blessing or a curse, but suddenly I’m having problems believing a single word I read in the scientific literature. It all started a few months ago. With only a year and a half left of my fellowship, I’ve been thinking about the long game, prioritizing my activities, clearing the decks to embark on a tangential line of research that – with good luck and a following wind – I might be able to export from this lab to start my own. With a new project entails reading up in a new field – always a painful prospect when you don’t know the background or any of the lingo. <\/p>\n \nAnd there I was, lost in a dense review article paragraph about a pathway with dozens of proteins, with laboratory A saying protein W does P, and laboratory B claiming no, protein W does process Q, and laboratory C begging to differ, that W might bind the main effector of process P but under different conditions, W probably got co-opted to perform process R, while simultaneously initiating a positive feedback loop bolstering process P and Q. And I was clobbered: clobbered by the incredible complexity of this seemingly simple biological phenomenon; clobbered by the number of papers, many contradictory, chipping away at the problem, each revealing yet more complexity; clobbered by how bitty and insignificant each finding appeared against the larger messy advancing-and-receding scrum of raw observation, supposition, conjecture, and dissent. OK, laboratory A might have published it in Nature<\/em> or Cell<\/em>, but suddenly, it just seemed – in the grand scheme of things – unbelievable. <\/p>\n \nA little bit of skepticism is a good thing, but I feel like I’ve been infected with some terrible virus. <\/p>\n \nIs it terminal?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Scientists are trained to read the scientific literature with skepticism. Forever question, we are told, the truth of various assertions put to us no matter how eloquent or famous the writer or prestigious the journal in which that writing appears. … Continue reading