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Loosen up, people
by Petsko
Excerpted from Genome Biology 2008, Volume 9, Issue 2, Article 102 Petsko
Loosen up, people
By Gregory Petsko
The worst thing that can happen to a scientist is to publish something that turns out to be wrong. It can wreck a person's career. All of us live in fear of it. And yet, should we?
So often we don't seem to make any distinction among types of error. I think there's a huge difference between sloppiness and honest mistakes, between bad experiments and naïve interpretation, between a failure to do controls and promulgation of a theory that turns out to be wrong. In each case, the former is much worse than the latter, but we often make little distinction between them in terms of the consequences to the unfortunate individuals involved.
It's hard to do perfect experiments. Nature takes a perverse delight in finding ways to fool even the most diligent experimentalist. Only someone nervous to the point of paranoia is likely to go through their entire career without misinterpreting some result or overlooking a trivial explanation.
When the refereeing process works as it should, such mistakes can be caught before publication, but many journals, particularly the vanity press, don't insist on enough experimental detail to make that process work as it should (and sometimes one wonders about their stable of reviewers, too).
It's also easy to fall in love with a hypothesis, and to hang onto it longer than the data say you should. These aren't good things for a scientist to do, but they shouldn't result in capital punishment. Yet, when funding is tight and competition for journal space and important discoveries is keener than ever, the temptation is to magnify the mistakes of our rivals, to exaggerate their ‘wrong' conclusions and trumpet the deficiencies of their work. Which makes everybody even more afraid of making, or admitting to, a mistake.
The result of all this, of course, is a climate of fear, entrenched positions and conservative science. Funding agencies - and grant reviewers - don't want to be accused of supporting work that is incorrect, so they reward the incremental, safe projects at the expense of the bold and risky. Scientists don't want to be pilloried by their colleagues for having made a mistake, so they tend to do the incremental, safe projects and eschew the bold and risky.
And those who do slip up are often punished far out of proportion to the real import of what they have done. I worry that a significant component of the current enthusiasm for data-gathering, as opposed to hypothesis-driven, biology stems from this climate.
‘Discovery-oriented' research seems much safer: so long as you get the sequence right, or the crystal structure right - so long as you deliver the mass of data that you promised - you can't make a mistake. With only obvious conclusions to draw from those data, errors of interpretation are practically impossible. And data gathering usually doesn't involve clever experimental design that requires numerous controls to avoid artifacts. Funding agencies love it because they can point to tangible results that are always ‘correct'. If we're not careful, our rush to punish those of us who make mistakes may turn some of the best of a generation of scientists away from the difficult, but essential job of trying to figure out what all these data really means.
What is needed is a decriminalization of certain types of error. Of course it's right to condemn sloppy experiments, missing controls and unwarranted conclusions. But we should encourage the scientist who takes sensible chances, who is not afraid to do the unfamiliar, and whose theories challenge the accepted dogma when that dogma fails to explain all the facts. And we should not condemn him or her when, as will often be the case, those chances misfire and those explanations turn out not to be the answer. And we should not be afraid to abandon our chosen explanations and hypotheses when the preponderance of the evidence goes against them. Nothing holds science back longer than this clinging to what should not be clung to, and all too often it's fear - fear of the consequences of having made a mistake - that keeps ideas around long past their sell-by date.
Closed-mindedness is a very bad quality in a scientist. Intellectual courage is a very good one. What would you think about a biologist whose motto was: "I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views." My guess is that you would applaud such sentiments as the hallmark of an open mind, one that was not afraid to change an opinion when the data indicated that a previous position was no longer supported by the available facts.
Those words were written by a politician. His name was Abraham Lincoln. He would have made a heck of a scientist.
Gregory Petsko is a member of the Presidential Advisory Board of Research Corporation for Science Advancement. He is the Gyula and Katica Tauber Markey Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at Brandeis University. Petsko is a member of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center at Brandeis, and became the center's director in 1994. He is a founding scientist of ArQule, Inc., of Medford, Mass., one of the world's leading companies in combinatorial chemistry. His research interests are the determination of protein three-dimensional structure and the relationship of that structure to biological function. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 1995) and is currently president of the American Society of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology.