Science, Red in Tooth and Claw

[jamesq]

For all of you you think of "Science" as something emotionless Vulcans do.

That’s how science works. It’s not a hippie love-in; it’s rugby. Every time you put out a paper, the guy you pissed off at last year’s Houston conference is gonna be laying in wait. Every time you think you’ve made a breakthrough, that asshole supervisor who told you you needed more data will be standing ready to shoot it down. You want to know how the Human Genome Project finished so far ahead of schedule? Because it was the Human Genome projects, two competing teams locked in bitter rivalry, one led by J. Craig Venter, one by Francis Collins — and from what I hear, those guys did not like each other at all.

And that's why the so-called Climate-gate emails can be safely ignored as an outlier.

Comments

[snooness2]

:) Yep, ain't it great? :)

Actually I'm sort of glad science works like that... because that way anything that becomes concensus is pretty solid.

If you've had everyone and their dog try to tear apart your work and it stands up to the scrutiny then it tends to stand the test of time.

Besides - if you are doing science that your collegues who know something take a crack at and rip apart then when the local church comes knocking you theories are much more solid.

There is some hippie-love-in stuff that goes on - especially large consortium projects (physics, smaller less prestigious genome projects, and some medical research) can have very good relations. But part of those good relations have to do with the fact that someone in the group is going to be willing to say 'what you think its not what you think' (without adding the word moron to the end of the sentence even if you are thinking it) and the person on the receiving end goes away and checks if that's correct.

Honesty is a nessecary bitch.... and that's the tough part that you learn in science.