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#9 The bureaucratization of science.
From: Eugen Tarnow <tarnow () netcom com>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 93 11:19:32 -0700
The bureaucratization of science. By Eugen Tarnow, Tarnow () netcom com , submitted to the New Mexican --A successful scientist is somebody who sits isolated in a little office at Harvard University and suddenly comes up with the most extraordinary idea. Right? Wrong! If it ever used to be that way, the current climate of bureaucratization of science has changed the situation completely. Scientists no longer succeed by being interested primarily in science. Scientists need to be extremely skilled in office politics, in pleasing granting agencies, in salesmanship of their work. In addition, senior scientists manage large pools of junior scientists who do a lot of work that is later attributed to the senior scientists. In short, a successful scientist with permanent employment is usually a full-fledged bureaucrat with all the faults that follow. --So let me try again: A successful scientist is one who works his way to the top politicking and manages a factory of hundreds of people? Whose ambition to get a Nobel Prize exceeds everything else, including telling the truth? Right. Carlo Rubbia. Who sells a new subatomic particle, completely irrelevant to everyday society, as the secret of the Universe. Nobel Prize in 1984 for the discovery of the W and Z particles. Read the book "Nobel Dreams," by Gary Taubes. --And I guess you are saying: A successful scientist is one who when the granting agencies say, "work together with industry," says that his work with industry can yield the most intriguing results, be relevant to air pollution, to AIDS perhaps, why not throw in overpopulation, and to solving other problems of the Universe? Now you've got it right. That describes most of us who survive in the field. --Hmm. How about the young and the innocent? Isn't a successful junior scientist one who is very creative and works in the newest and strangest fields? Wrong. A junior scientist is one who works on what his senior boss says is important, gets little credit, and, today, often becomes unemployed. The problem of unemployment after an excruciatingly long education has surfaced again after twenty years of absence. It was created by a system that encouraged university professors to recruit many graduate students. They found out that the more laborer they could get, the more grants and fame they could obtain. The result: the number of graduating doctorate students has become far too many for the job market. --What does a senior scientist say when he hears about the demise of his junior colleauges? That the privilege of continuing a career as a scientist is not to be expected and besides they will make excellent plumbers. --What about scientists in politics - do they give politicians good advice that they can trust? Yes. And then they get fired. The former director of energy research at the Department of Energy, William Hopper, was dismissed for trying to be scientifically, and not politically, correct. He questioned the immediate need for large-scale mitigating measures to fill up the ozone hole. He suggested that we first see if the first part of the green-house effect--the heating up the earth-- actually takes place. He wanted to set up a network of instruments to measure whether the uv-B radiation is increasing or not. Vice President Gore, who had a stake in a best-selling book, was not happy. --But Einstein never got fired! True, if somebody is "an Einstein" his dissent can be tolerated, if not followed. I do not think it was by chance that the important but trivial O-ring problem in the NASA shuttle disaster had to be pointed out in public by the Nobel Laureate Richard P. Feynman. The report committee he was a member of relegated his writings to an appendix. I have a keen sense of what is fair and when that is violated I really get going. To paraphrase Franklin Scott, I think the scientific endeavor is becoming "the art of the possible, frankly unheroic." Science is inefficiently driven in incompetently laid-out directions. Scientists adopt the outlook of the granting agencies as to what scientific problems are important. The granting agency people are often not active scientists and they are driven by struggles for power and influence. Having politically motivated lay persons decide what direction science should go in is not in the best interest of science. For example, a Washington conversation between a "general" or "other important character in the army" and the physicist Richard Feynman: "...could I work out a way in which we could use silicon dioxide - sand, dirt- as fuel [for a tank] --- He thought it was a great idea, and that all I had to do was to work out the details." (from Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman", R.P. Feynman.) Since the politics is so important, dissent among scientists is strongly discouraged. This inhibits progress and also makes for inefficient science, since dissent is essential to the scientific process. The lack of dissent and the mixing of politics and science caused the famous Lysenko affair in the former Soviet Union. It set back the biological sciences there several decades and cost the public large sums of money in lowered agricultural yields. --What? We are certainly not to be compared to the Soviets! Am I too extreme? It is unlikely that an American Lysenko affair of the same dimensions would occur. But how do we think about Star Wars? The thirty-two billion dollars (What's New, 5/14/93) of wasted efforts to create what most scientists understood was impossible? And the Space Station? And are we not close to approving eleven billion dollars for the Superconducting Super Collider on reasons of pure political pork? --Come to think of it, I remember an article that appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal about a major government scientific installation: "'We spend $400 million of people's time chasing a $6 million project,' says one department head." (WSJ, 7/15/93) Yes, the scientific inefficiency reaches grand scales. How long will it take for scientists to start to speak up? For the public to try to reorganize the science machine? I am not holding my breath. -----------------------------
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- #9 The bureaucratization of science. Eugen Tarnow (Aug 12)