Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [85]
For Williamson, this is possible only if there are two genomes involved – and thus two very well-separated ancestors that really should have had nothing further to do with each other. No wonder Margulis loves the idea: it is a further desecration of Darwin’s neatly branching tree of life.
Other biologists are much less keen, which is why Margulis struggled to find two positive reviewers. In August 2009 she told Scientific American that she had gathered ‘6 or 7’ opinions before she had what she needed to push the paper through. Unfortunately for her – though it is not beyond the realms of possibility that it was all part of Margulis’s plan – Randy Schekman, the editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, read that interview. Within days, all hell had broken loose.
Schekman wrote to her, asking what she thought she was doing. The rules say you can’t cherry-pick: you have to submit all the reviews you get. Williamson’s paper had already been published online (to near-universal derision); now Schekman was hesitant about whether it should appear in print. He also suspended other papers that had Margulis’s endorsement.
Margulis threatened litigation. She also revealed her mischief-making: three of those ‘negative’ reviews never happened because the recipients of the paper were too busy or considered the subject outside their area of expertise. Then she added that she had asked a couple of amateur (but competent) naturalists their opinion too. ‘My modus operandi is to ask competent people, whether or not they have a PhD,’ she said. All in all, it looks as if she played them for suckers in the cause of getting an outrageous idea heard and discussed. Anarchy.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences no longer has a fast track for submissions. Though there was no announcement, the journal says it was going to stop the process anyway. The Margulis–Williamson affair must have been quite a catalyst. But there remains no guarantee that Donald Williamson will ever be vindicated, posthumously or otherwise. And not because of the Machiavellian manoeuvrings of scientists: he might be just plain wrong.
Lynn Margulis was right about endosymbiosis. However, her current obsession, that HIV does not cause AIDS, is widely considered to be absolutely and categorically wrong. The Cornell physicist Thomas Gold was right when he speculated that pulsars were rotating neutron stars, but hopelessly wrong in his speculations about the origins of the universe. Cambridge University’s Brian Josephson won a Nobel Prize for his insight into the properties of superconductors; his current ravings about the plausibility of extrasensory perception seem less well thought through. Being right once doesn’t make you right the next time, not in scientists’ eyes. The only people who are automatically ‘right’ are those who have somehow risen to the top and then clung on to establish a dominant hold on their field, kicking at those beneath them who attempt to climb up. Everyone knows that science is meant to be a meritocracy, but science is also human, and no one likes to give up a hard-won throne.
Here is a typical testimony from the writer and research biologist Jenny Rohn:
After the very first talk I ever gave at an international symposium, one of the field’s worthies rose to his feet in the hushed auditorium and proclaimed, with a scathing sneer, that my theory was completely misguided. I was too shocked to make the reasoned rebuttal that I could easily manage today, and too innocent to realise that the man’s chief objection stemmed from the threat that my (ultimately true) findings cast on his own work.
Rohn adds that she has