At first I thought the title of this article was “Taking Back The Nobel Prizes”. My eyes widened. Someone at the New York Times has a radical thought, it appeared. I was wrong. The title is “Taking Back Nobel Prizes”; the article is about the less-than-radical idea that Henry Kissinger did not deserve a Peace Prize. Then I thought it was too bad that Richard Feynman isn’t alive. If he were, I would ask him if modern biology — the sort that wins Nobel Prizes — is an example of what he called cargo-cult science in a famous graduation speech. I would be a good person to ask that question, I thought, because he considered rat psychology cargo-cult science. Yet I used rat psychology to come up with the Shangri-La Diet, which has helped many people lose weight in counter-intuitive ways.
Cargo-cult science, according to Feynman, was activities that have the superficial trappings of science but don’t actually accomplish anything. You do all the right things, or so you think, but the planes don’t land. The sort of biology that wins Nobel Prizes has a long history of this. This year’s prize went to research that found that telomeres shorten with age. The press release, forced to say how this is useful (the Nobel Prize is supposed to be for research that benefits mankind), says
These discoveries had a major impact within the scientific community. Many scientists speculated that telomere shortening could be the reason for ageing, not only in the individual cells but also in the organism as a whole. But the ageing process has turned out to be complex [shocking!] . . . Research in this area remains intense.
. . . It was therefore proposed that cancer might be treated by eradicating telomerase. Several studies are underway in this area, including clinical trials evaluating vaccines directed against cells with elevated telomerase activity.
Some inherited diseases are now known to be caused by telomerase defects, including certain forms of congenital aplastic anemia, in which insufficient cell divisions in the stem cells of the bone marrow lead to severe anemia. Certain inherited diseases of the skin and the lungs are also caused by telomerase defects.
In conclusion, the discoveries by Blackburn, Greider and Szostak have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies.
Shameless. Note the utter absence of even one disease in one person cured or prevented. Not one. And this is supposed to be the most beneficial discovery in medicine. It’s the top prize in medicine and biology! Last year the prize was given for HIV. Do we have an HIV vaccine? No. The year before that, HPV. Do we have an HPV vaccine? No. A few years before that, the discovery that a certain bug “causes” stomach ulcers — the award that showed that the medical community and the Nobel Prize committee have a weak grasp of the concept of causality. The biologists think they do everything right — but the planes don’t land. The biologists who do this research aren’t able to solve actual problems. (Some people do — those who discovered that smoking causes cancer, for example — but they don’t get Nobel Prizes.) Could something important be missing from their view of the world? I think so.
Cargo-cult activities aren’t worthless, so long as you learn from your mistakes. The cargo cultists could see that the planes didn’t land and eventually figure out that something was missing. That’s actual knowledge, humble but useful. Feynman’s criticisms of rat psychology were reasonable. Those doing rat psychology learned from their mistakes, I think, and eventually the field improved and produced the research behind the Shangri-La Diet. Modern biology isn’t worthless, just as cargo cults aren’t worthless. Obviously “useless” knowledge can eventually become useful, as has happened many times. But these overblown claims for the value of modern biology truly cost the rest of us — a great deal, I believe. Because the first step in getting somewhere, as Feynman liked to say, is to confront reality. At least in their public statements about the value of their research, modern biologists are living in a dream world. It’s always “potential” this and “future” that and “insight into disease mechanisms” — without ever curing or preventing a disease.
Thanks to Eric Meltzer.
Err, I still don’t really agree with this account of things. I don’t think you can say something is missing from the worldview of people doing fundamental research because you don’t like how the prize is handed out–rather, you should talk about the worldview of the prize-critters.
So… you think they’re doing something wrong and need to see the error of their ways? This rant is bizarre. Diseases can’t be cured with the current science. Antibiotics don’t defeat HIV, chemotherapy doesn’t eliminate cancer. If there is to be any chance of defeating these ailments, we must know the science of why they persist. Since these scientists have worked hard and rather successfully to investigate the pathways involved in runaway tumor growth, we now have a few possible ways to address cancer.
Isn’t Gardasil an HPV vaccine?
So for the record: there IS an HPV vaccine and the stunning decrease in cervical cancer deaths due to the recognition of cervical cancer as a disease with an infectious origin is one of the greatest public health achievements of the last 25 years. You’re simply way off base on this one. I’d love to have seen some of the public health people involved get credit, but, whatever, discovering HPV causes cervical cancer was really important.
Additionally, while no vaccine is available for HIV (or not, depending on the results of the vaccine in Thailand) discovery of the virus was necessary to find therapeutic treatments that have lengthened the lifespan of survivors exponentially.
Seth, you hate modern medicine, but biology has nothing to do with medicine’s failings. You’re just wrong here. Its like blaming particle physicists for the fact that we dont have flying cars yet.
At least it’s not as ridiculous as the Nobel prize in economics.
The biologists I know are excellent scientists. No offense intended, but your own grasp of causality is nothing to write home about. You’re fortunate to have other, sterling, qualities that make up for it.
Nathan, your ‘excellent scientist” friends — how do they explain the fact that this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine was given for research that has had no clear practical application?
Vish, I disagree that there is no connection. Modern biologists seem to believe (at least in their public statements) that their research will lead to cures for this and that. They reinforce a medical system focussed on cure rather than prevention.
Rich and Peter, thanks for the correction. I will look into it. Apparently I was wrong about the HPV research. But there are a lot of other examples I could give, such as the claim that oncogenes cause cancer. Many years later, this idea has yet to have practical benefits. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression, stroke, schizophrenia — where is the Nobel-Prize-winning research that has led to a reduction in how much we suffer from these problems? The discovery of insulin was long ago.
NE1, “if there is any chance of curing these problems, we must know the science of why they persist.” In fact, scurvy was cured without any detailed understanding of its mechanisms. The discovery that smoking caused lung cancer didn’t require a detailed understanding of lung cancer. The discovery that folate reduces birth defects was made without any detailed understanding of how birth defects arise.
The biologists I know stand no chance of getting a Nobel, howsoever good their science, because there’s no Nobel for biology. It’s for medicine. Your beef is with followers of “medical science”, not biology. It would probably be easy to get agreement even from the Nobel committee members that the institutional biases of the “medical science” community are very much for expensive treatments, with little interest in systemic or cultural causation. We are lucky they don’t just award the prize for actual pills.
Nathan, the work that got this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology is usually called biology, not medicine. I’m sure that David Baltimore considers himself a biologist, not a medical researcher. Sometimes the prize is given for medicine rather than biology, that’s true. Certainly the CAT scan wasn’t biology.
I agree that the prize was awarded for biochemical work, and that the committee was probably stretching its charter. That doesn’t make the work “cargo cult science”: we really did learn important details about how cells work. It just wasn’t, strictly, “medicine”.
People who develop cures for diseases aren’t scientists, they’re engineers. People who treat patients aren’t scientists, they’re technicians. It’s customary to look down on engineers and technicians, and resist calling high-status physicians that, but it’s just snobbishness. Much of the body of scientific knowledge originates in the work of technicians and engineers, usually without proper credit, and much of the social good that people trained to be scientists do isn’t really science at all.
To say something is cargo cult science is to say people do the things they see scientists doings — getting grants, publishing papers — but we don’t learn anything. The most visible current example is String Theory. Much of cosmology qualifies.
“People who develop cures for diseases aren’t scientists, they’re engineers.” That’s an interesting idea. Obviously the person who invented the laser printer was an engineer rather than a scientist. In the life sciences I think it is more complicated. What about those who develop prevention — scientists or engineers? And what about me? I developed the Shangri-La Diet. It was based on a new theory of weight control. Surely my new theory was science. And then I went further and used my new theory to develop new weight-loss methods, playing engineer, you would say. But at least my theory had a concrete practical application. My criteria for “real science” is higher than what Feynman was talking about, true — higher than “publishing papers” and “learning something”. My criteria is: solve everyday problems.
I think your criteria is so different than most people’s as to be worth defining at the outset of your argument.
It seems to me you have a really good point in “it is a Good Thing to create new techniques for ameliorating human suffering” and the point is well supported by the examples of scurvy and smoking.
Why not just make that argument, instead of saying do this stuff instead of doing basic, not immediately useful research? I don’t see how they are mutually exclusive at all–the argument then is that the nobel prize committee (and the world at large) should start giving this sort of practical pursuit more prestige.
Solving everyday problems is technical work. Inventing solutions that can be applied by anybody who learns them to solve everyday problems is engineering. Science is something that has only a glancing connection with problems.
Doing engineering is the most reliable source of insights that lead to scientific theories, just as doing technical work is the most reliable source of insights that lead to sound engineering solutions. Scientists like to pretend the flow runs the other way.
@Nathan Myers
Thanks for two of the most thought-provoking paragraphs I’ve ever read.