Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [114]
The traditional form of peer review is an archaic system. Many scientists admit – privately – that it just doesn’t work. Occasionally, they come out and say it in public. Martin Rees, for example, a former President of the Royal Society, has conceded that reviewing by learned journals ‘is not the only way to ensure quality control in science’. Electronic publication accessible to anyone, he suggests, would allow scientists to weigh claims, attempt replication and point out – perhaps endorse – papers that merit attention.
Rees is a fan of the preprint archive arXiv.org, an online repository operated by Cornell University. It provides a showcase for new papers in physics and related fields, and most scientists are able to tell at a glance whether a paper merits their attention. If someone were to add to it a recommendation system for registered scientists, something like the review system on the Amazon website, a rival to the decades-old standard peer review system would be born. Yes, it is still open to bullying, but the removal of anonymity would soon halt that in its tracks.
One of the problems the administrators of science have with such a system is that they have built their assessments upon peerreviewed journals, weighing up a scientist’s worth on the basis of how many publications they produce, and in what standard of journal. Here again, we find the cart before the horse: instead of publishing to alert their colleagues to interesting new findings, they are publishing to survive the system and make sure they get enough funding to continue in their line of work.
The fact is, scientists have been the architects of their own problem. For decades they have posed as dependable, trustworthy, non-radicals, and now they wonder why they have a management system that treats them like docile workers on a production line, rather than what they know themselves to be: creative and curious minds, pursuing lines of inquiry that could lead anywhere – or nowhere. Of course, having taken on board the idea that scientists shouldn’t cause a fuss in any sphere – part of the tacit agreement of the post-war period – all that scientists can do is moan to one another about the deadening hand of their administrators.
Which brings us to another undesirable consequence of the cover-up. Scientists don’t mobilise. They don’t agitate. They don’t kick up a stink. Through decades of conditioning, rather like wolves who have allowed themselves to be domesticated and slowly bred into yappy chihuahuas, they have been tamed. Scientists, to put it bluntly, have lost their will to bite and snap at anything that lies outside their immediate sphere.
As a consequence, they are a politically inert group who have become convinced that they should advise (if asked), but never seek to influence, the political agenda. ‘Scientists should be on tap, but not on top’ is how Winston Churchill saw it in – again – the era immediately after the Second World War. It is an ideology that scientists have wholeheartedly, and somewhat cravenly, accepted throughout the decades since. Scientists involved with advising governments have laboured under the self-delusion that they do so on behalf of the wider population. The truth is likely to be a little more self-serving than that: the primary aim has been to appear useful without appearing troublesome (or worse, meddlesome) to those who control science’s funding.
If scientists didn’t have such a crucial role to play in building and safeguarding our future, that might be acceptable, if all too human, behaviour. The problem is that, for reasons everyone has forgotten, our society now gains