The Futile Cycle

I was sitting in my lab reading through the PNAS early online publication articles when I come across a letter to the editor with the title: “Going beyond the genetic view of cancer.” (PDF) Intrigued, I read it, and to my horror, I find a letter filled with words like this:

Dynamic protein-based phenomena–for instance, (insulin-driven) “oncoprotein metastasis” explicable by an extension of physical string theory into (sub)cellular biology…

The fact that the author (a one “Razvan Tudor Radulescu”) cites an arXiv “pre-print” that he wrote himself is quite suspicious. His contact information, of course, is with non-institutional, free email address.

To me, this can mean only: HE’S A CRANK.

What is PNAS doing publishing letters from cranks? I get spam in my email from this gentleman in Nicaragua, should I publish those in a journal, too?

Perhaps I’m leaping to conclusions. Let’s take a look at the arXiv pre-print, which would be more fleshed out than a single letter to the editor:

Here, a new scenario is put forward on the spreading of the neoplastic process across cells and tissues that may prove seminal both for our future understanding and treatment of malignancies.

First sign of crank-dom: exceedingly high opinion of one’s own work, describing it as “seminal.”

In this context, my peptide string theory (10-12) is likely to represent a significant addition [to the field]. It rests upon the assumption according to which major biological processes concerning distinct, yet related proteins are the result both of (long-distance) attractive forces in the sense of the physical string theory (13,14) and of “emergent properties” inherent to the same proteins whereby the term “emergent” is to be understood as employed by John Searle in his book entitled “The Mystery of Consciousness.”

The sentence continues, but the point is rather obvious. Crank. What are the citations to? Let’s see…citations 10-12 are self-citations (one to yet another arXiv preprint). Citation 13 is to a popular science book, The Elegant Universe, and citation 14 is to an editorial by Ed Witten.

Now, I’m no expert in string theory, but I doubt that these second two works have much biological insight to offer. String theory, after all, is about understanding how all the various laws of physics might be unified. Sorry, but general relativity? Not all that relevant to what goes on in the body, since biology doesn’t really go near the speed of light. Quantum mechanics is more related, in that it’s the foundations of chemistry and of molecular-level phenomena, but even then, we’re not pushing the boundaries of our knowledge of sub-atomic processes in looking at biology.

Why is this letter being published by PNAS? All I know is, this kind of stuff makes real scientists look bad. Does the National Academy not vet letters to the editor before publishing them?