I have an op-ed piece in this week’s Independent on Sunday: "The road to the Nobel Prize is lined with jeering colleagues". It’s based on the experience of the HIV researchers who announced their (modest) success this week – many of their peers thought this vaccine trial would be a waste of time, money and public tolerance. The argument is simple: science has self-criticism built-in, and scientists have to be willing to run the gauntlet of their peers' sometimes extraordinary hostility to get something new and interesting done.
I’ve already had some feedback, from a cognitive neuroscientist who wished I’d made less of the “hunch” aspect of the scientific method, and more of the fact that built-in self-criticism is science’s unique avantage over other fields.
I don't think the emphasis was wrong, given what prompted the piece. What's more, as Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar has said, “there is no such thing as the scientific method.” He also said there is no such thing as the “scientific mind.” In other words, this idea that science proceeds via some well-defined path is an artificial construction. It is the illusion that scientists want non-scientists to see as real. To quote Medawar again: the neat stories of sensible hypothesis tested by rigorous experiments leading to a firm conclusion “are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us.”
Scientists don’t like this idea because it is helpful to think as science as transcending our natural limits, as something more than just another human activity. But there’s no evidence to support that view. Science may well be humanity’s best endeavour, but it’s still human – and it doesn’t hurt to stop and acknowledge that from time to time.
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