In an interview, Seymour Benzer, the great Caltech biologist, told a story that I think explains a lot about medical-school research, including UCLA medical school professor John Ford’s complaint about The Shangri-La Diet:
Harold Brown [president of Caltech 1969-1977] made himself quite conspicuous by . . . trying to develop a medical school relationship. . . . His idea was for Caltech to pair up with UCLA to make a medical school. We would do the first two years of basic education of the medical students, and afterwards they would be guaranteed two more years of clinical experience at UCLA. And then they could be doctors. . . . In the Biology Division, it went over like a lead balloon: Why should we be knocking ourselves out teaching these guys, and then they go away elsewhere and don’t even do research — they become doctors? What’s in it for us?
Some things are hard to learn by reading. Saul Sternberg, now a professor of psychology at Penn, once spent a quarter at Berkeley and was around when Stanford grad students and faculty in cognitive psychology came up to Berkeley to present their research. One of the grad students told Sternberg about a reaction-time experiment she had done about mental something or other (mental rotation?) in which the conditions compared varied in what the subject saw. Sternberg pointed out that it would be better to keep constant what the subject sees. This is the beginning of wisdom in the design of cognitive psychology experiments, but you won’t find it written down anywhere.