Book Log: Intuition
In between running around to experiments, attending classes and seminars, reading the literature, eating, and sleeping, I’ve manage to catch chapters of Intuition, by Allegra Goodman. I started the book because of a glowing review from Dr. Free-Ride. I finished it last week, and I’ve been mulling it over in my head.
This book is quite possibly one of the best novels I’ve read in the past year (though, it’s looking like it might be the only novel I’ll read this year…).
It is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a biomedical research institute that’s right next to Harvard’s campus. If this sounds familiar, that’s because the author did some research for the book at the Whitehead Institute, a huge biomedical research institute geographically in between MIT and Harvard. Allegra Goodman did some wonderfully thorough research for the book, because it abounds in the small details of a real lab. Old machines, nude mice, foil-capped bottles of reagents and media.
And the people, the characters, the scientists: how wonderful! They are the classical archetypes that anyone who’s worked for a while in academia would recognize instantly: the hard-working, technically brilliant East Asian immigrant, the powerful lab techs, the rising star who suffers from “imposter syndrome”, the senior post-doc who resents the rising star for all the breaks he’s had going to prestigious schools, the lab head who’s too scientifically cautious to promote her lab well, the star oncologist with a flair for selling the research (”a poet of the NIH form”) but with less-than-stringent scientific skepticism.
Yet, none of the characters are stereotypes. None of them fit their archetypes. All of the characters are quite real, with real motivations, dreams, emotions, and agendas. That, in the end, is probably what ignites the central conflict of the entire book. I will not divulge much about the book’s plot, as I suggest to all of you that you go out and read it if you haven’t yet.
Still, a little thought as to what I see from the book, without spoiling the book (I hope). It seems like the book makes plain that truth — even in science — is hard to know, as it is always seen through the eyes of a person, through a glass darkly. Even the events of the story, told from so many points of view, are not clear. Agendas are confused. All because of people.
The conflict between the exacting requirements of science and the people who actually synthesize and propagate the knowledge seems to be almost the central conflict in the book. Science — true science — happens on the scale of years and decades: ideas are proposed, experiments are done, hypotheses are rejected or accepted, experiments are replicated. Science takes time, and truth only emerges with a grain of certainty years after the fact.
But for many of us in science, especially in the present day, we are forced to live on a faster time scale. Grants are due, demanding results. Jobs demand papers. Papers, of course, require experiments. One can get scooped, if one doesn’t move fast enough. Scientists don’t have the luxury to wait for science proper to catch up, and so sometimes, in the milieu of researchers running back and forth in their frantic-paced lives, some can trip and get crushed under the slow-moving glacier that is real, absolute truth, not for evil or malicious intents in their souls, but for the fact that they, too, have dreams.
But the book does hold out hope. Although science is harsh, people are resilient, and that is why science is able to happen at all. The book is almost a tribute to scientists, and an acknowledgment of the many sacrifices that people make to pursue a career that they love.
Go read it. It is delightful!
