Inside Science
by David Goodstein and James Woodward
Published in American Scholar, Autumn 1999
It has become fashionable in recent times for scholars from the
social sciences and other disciplines to visit the strange continent
of Science and send back reports of their observations of the
behavior and rituals of the natives. The resulting dialogue has not
always been entirely amicable, and has in fact sometimes been
referred to as "The Science Wars." We thought it might be useful in
this context to send forth a description of the social organization
of science as seen from the inside. We can hardly hope to bring the
science wars to an end just when they are becoming amusing, but
perhaps we can show that the way scientists run their business is in
some ways remarkably similar to, and to be sure, in some ways
different from other academic disciplines.
"In the cathedral of science," a famous scientist once said,
"every brick is equally important." The remark evokes a vivid
metaphor, of swarms of scientific workers erecting a grand monument
to the scientific faith. The speaker was Max Delbrück, Nobel
Prize winner, often called the father of molecular biology. The
occasion was an idyllic Sunday afternoon in Pasadena, in
Delbrück's backyard, where a group of players (including one of
the authors) was enjoying an after-tennis drink. The remark captures
with some precision the scientists' ambivalent view of their craft.
Delbrück never for an instant thought the bricks he laid were no
better than anyone else's. If anything, he regarded himself as the
keeper of the blueprints, and he had the fame and prestige to prove
it. But it was exactly his exalted position that made it obligatory
that he make a ceremonial bow to the democratic ideal that most
scientists espouse and few believe. In fact it is precisely the kind
of recognition that Delbrück enjoyed that propels the scientific
enterprise forward.
There are undoubtedly many reasons why people choose to become
scientists. Simple greed, however, is not high on the list. The
reason is that the rewards for success in science are not primarily
monetary (although a certain degree of material well-being does often
follow in their wake). If you are a scientist, each success is
rewarded by the intoxicating glow that comes from knowing or
believing that you have won at least one small round in the endless
quest for knowledge. That glow fades quickly, however, unless it
brings with it the admiration and esteem of your peers and colleagues
(who are, after all, the only ones capable of understanding what you
have done and, usually, the only ones who care). The various means by
which scientists express their admiration and esteem for their
colleagues are so subtle and complex that they beggar the etiquette
of a medieval royal court. We will call them collectively the Reward
System of science.
Closely linked to the Reward System, there is a second
organization that we may call the Authority Structure. The Authority
Structure guides and controls the Reward System. Moreover certain
positions within the Authority Structure are among the most coveted
fruits of the Reward System. Nevertheless the two are not identical.
The pinnacle of the Reward System is scientific glory, fame and
immortality. The goal of those in the Authority Structure is power
and influence. Scientists distinguish sharply between the two. They
will sit around the faculty lounge or the lunch table lamenting the
fate of a distinguished colleague who has become the president of a
famous university. "He was still capable of good work," they will
say, sounding much like saddened warriors grieving the fate of a
fallen comrade. The university president is a kingpin of the
Authority Structure, but a dropout from the scientific Reward System.
The Reward System and the Authority Structure are both rooted in
the institutions of science. The institutions of science vary
somewhat from one discipline to another, and from one country to
another, but the broad outlines will be recognizable to all. Our
discussion is most influenced by the physical sciences as they are
practiced in the United States.
Scientific research is performed in universities, and to a lesser
extent, in colleges that do not grant Ph.D. degrees. It is also
performed in national laboratories and in industrial laboratories.
The universities and colleges may be public or private. The national
laboratories may be run directly by government agencies or managed
for the government by universities or consortia of universities.
Industrial laboratories are usually, but not always, operated by a
single company.
Scientific societies, such as the American Physical Society or the
American Chemical Society have members from all the above types of
scientific institutions. The societies organize national and regional
scientific meetings, publish journals, and administer the awarding of
certain prizes and honors. They are private organizations whose
officers are elected by their members, and whose costs are paid by
the dues of their members, and by other related sources of income.
There are a few scientific societies (such as the American
Association for the Advancement of Science) that are not tied to a
particular scientific discipline, but still hold meetings and publish
journals.
There are also purely honorary societies, typified by the National
Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS holds meetings, publishes a
journal and serves certain needs of the government through its
research and consulting arm, the National Research Council. However,
by far the most important thing the NAS does is to elect its own
members. Election to the NAS is one of the highest rungs on the
Reward System ladder.
The costs of performing scientific research are borne in large
measure by agencies devoted to that purpose. Before the Second World
War, those agencies were largely private (Rockefeller, Carnegie) but
since WWII almost all funds for scientific research originate in the
federal government. The most prominent supporters of basic research
are the National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent agency and
the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the Public Health
Service of the Department of Health and Human Services, but basic
scientific research is also supported by arms of the Department of
Defense, the Departments of Energy and Agriculture, NASA, and others.
Many of these agencies have their own laboratories, and also award
grants to researchers in universities.
These are the elements of the institutions of science. We have
left out a few crucial items, such as the Scandinavian bureaucracy
(the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and the Royal Caroline
Institute) that awards Nobel prizes, and the mysterious college of
historians and journalists that somehow decides which scientists
shall become famous outside of science itself. However, even within
the elements described, there are infinitely subtle layers of
influence and prestige.
Among universities and colleges, behind a carefully cultivated
veneer of cordiality, there is a fierce, endless struggle of
legendary proportions for positions of honor in a peculiar contest,
in which no one is quite sure who's keeping score, but everyone knows
roughly what the score is. The contest ranks each university against
others, each college against others, and within a single discipline,
departments against one another. There are similar rivalries among
national laboratories, and among industrial laboratories, and even
among federal funding agencies.
To the aspiring academic scientist, the steps on the perilous
ladder to fame and glory look something like this:
1. Be admitted to a prestigious undergraduate college or
university (useful but not essential),
2. graduate with a B.S. degree (essential),
3. Be admitted to a prestigious graduate department (very
important),
4. Graduate with a Ph.D. (essential),
5. Get a postdoctoral appointment or fellowship at another
prestigious university (almost always lower in the invisible rankings
than the university you were graduated from--that's why item 3 is so
important).
6. Get a position as Assistant Professor. The ranking of the
university and department is crucial, since you are unlikely ever to
move up from there in the invisible rankings. National and industrial
laboratories have positions analogous to Assistant Professor. Some
people prefer the risky course of starting in an industrial lab with
the hope of being successful enough to be called to a university
later.
7. Bring in external research support (mostly from those federal
agencies), attract graduate students of your own, get papers
published in the best journals (that usually means the ones published
by the professional societies--but there are exceptions such as
Nature, which is privately published), get invited to speak at
national or (even better) international meetings sponsored by
professional societies, and generally become visible among active
scientists in your own field outside your own institution. Doing all
of the above will generally entail making some genuine scientific
progress, which will, fortunately, afford some personal psychic
rewards to help keep you going. It is useful, but not essential at
this stage of your career, to teach well and to participate in
academic committees and the like.
8. Get tenure (as a result of doing number 7 very well).
9. Get promoted to Full Professor.
10. Your colleagues darkly suspect that you will now rest on your
laurels, and you must prove them wrong. Get more funding, expand the
size of your research group (graduate students, postdocs,
technicians, etc.). Get yourself appointed to national boards, panels
and committees, invited to speak at more meetings, and so on. If at
all possible, get something named after yourself. This is the most
effective way of getting noticed, but tricky since someone else must
do it for you, and then it has to catch on among workers in the
field.
11. The following are now available if you work hard enough to get
them and manage to have a little luck in your research:
Awards and prizes from your professional society,
A chaired professorship,
Membership in the National Academy,
International prizes up to the Nobel itself, and
Immortality.
At each of these various steps, you have faced Gatekeepers from
the Authority Structure of science. They are generally people who
have scaled that rung and a few others, but then stepped out of the
competition at some higher point (remember the university president
mentioned earlier). For example, the faculty of an undergraduate
college (where you may choose to attempt steps 1 and 2) will
generally have reached step 4 (a Ph.D.), and perhaps 5 (a postdoc),
but opted out of the research competition at step 6 (by taking a
position in a college rather than a research university). They may
very well never have intended to climb any higher than necessary to
reach their positions as college faculty, but it would have been
unwise for them to admit as much while they were climbing. Each of
the Gatekeepers they faced probably had to be convinced they were
aspiring to the very pinnacle. These are the people who will now
decide on your fate. They are most likely to be impressed if they
believe you are aspiring to that same pinnacle.
At the graduate school level, your Ph.D. thesis advisor, a very
important person in your life, will probably (had better be) still
climbing, and may very well be quite high already, but decisions
about you will be made also by department chairs, deans and others
who have traded their places on the ladder for positions in the
Authority Structure of science.
Once you pass the Ph.D., the rules for scaling successive steps
become increasingly less well defined. The rules are often unwritten,
and the people you must impress are further afield. Each promotion
will require confidential letters of recommendation from people
outside your own institution, solicited not by you but by the chair
of a committee. You will thus be expected to be known by people you
have not met, merely because of your growing scientific reputation.
Your reputation will be based on published papers whose fate will be
in the hands of journal editors and anonymous referees chosen by
them. The research reported in those papers will be possible only if
you can win financial support on the basis of research proposals
submitted to the granting agencies. Your proposals will be handled by
project officers (either permanent or temporary refugees from the
race up the research ladder) and judged once again by anonymous
referees, or a panel of active scientists. Finally, even if you
manage to finance and publish your work, it will be little noticed
unless you manage to get invited to speak at national meetings
organized by your professional society. The staff of the society will
generally have dropped out of the race, but decisions about who
speaks will most likely be made by committees of active scientists.
Notice that at each point of decision, there tends to be two kinds of
Gatekeepers. One kind is an administrator (department chair or dean,
journal editor, project officer, professional society staff) and the
other kind an active scientist (writers of letters of recommendation,
anonymous referees, members of panels and committees). The first kind
has often stepped out of the race (the position itself is generally
the reward for having reached a certain level) and the other is still
very much in the race. The people in this latter group are not only
your judges, they are also your competition. Furthermore, you have
become one of them. People in the other group, if they are no longer
in competition with you, have often forgotten the fierce struggle you
face and, moreover, they tend to have the curious view that you are
working for them.
It should be clear from this discussion that scientific
scorekeeping is no simple matter. The issue of who will emerge as
famous and successful in science depends in large measure on who has
the best ideas and who works the hardest. In that sense science is a
true meritocracy. However, there are very clearly other elements at
play here. One of the most important is being in the right place at
the right time. For example, the discovery of quantum mechanics early
in this century swept a whole generation of theoretical physicists to
fame and glory. The very best made truly fundamental contributions,
but even those of more modest talent found untouched problems ready
to be solved with the new theory. Another example is the wartime
projects, the Manhattan Project and the Radiation Lab, that swept yet
another generation of physicists to power and influence.
In addition to those factors there are others that have been
observed and documented, that arise out of the behavior and customs
of scientists as a group. Robert K. Merton has called one of them the
Matthew Effect, after the Gospel According to St. Matthew:
"For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall
have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken
away even that which he hath."
The Matthew Effect in science is the observation that credit tends
to go to those who are already famous, at the expense of those who
are not. For example, if a paper is written by a group of authors,
only one of whom is well known in the field, readers will
automatically assume that person is responsible. A paper signed by
Nobody, Nobody, and Somebody will be casually referred to as "work
done in Somebody's lab," and even sometimes cited (incorrectly) in
the literature as due to "Somebody, et al."
Another important piece of scientific folklore is referred to as
the Ortega Hypothesis, after Jose Ortega y Gasset, who wrote in his
classic 1932 book, The Revolt of the Masses,
"For it is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary
but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed
thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly
Mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and
symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the
intellectually common place man and allows him to work
therein with success. In this way the majority of
scientists help the general advance of science while shut up
in the narrow cell of their laboratory like the bee in the
cell of its hive, or the turnspit of its wheel."
The Ortega Hypothesis is thus the view expressed by Delbrück
at the outset of this article, but with slightly different metaphors.
This widely held view is probably based on the empirical observation
that there are indeed, in each field of science, many ordinary
scientists doing more or less routine work, publishing papers,
getting promotions, and generally playing the Reward System game,
albeit in the minor leagues of science. It is also supported by the
theoretical view that knowledge of the universe is a kind of
limitless wilderness to be conquered by relentless hacking away of
underbrush by many hands. An idea that is supported by both theory
and observation always has a very firm standing in science.
The Ortega Hypothesis was named that by Jonathan and Steven Cole
when they set out to demolish it, a job they accomplished by tracing
citations in physics journals. The Ortega Hypothesis is incorrect,
they conclude, adding,
"It seems, rather, that a relatively small number of
physicists produce work that becomes the base for
future discoveries in physics. We have found that
even papers of relatively minor significance have
used to a disproportionate degree the work of the
eminent scientists..."
In other words, a small number of elite scientists produce the
vast majority of scientific progress. Seen in this light, the Reward
System is a mechanism evolved for the purpose of identifying,
promoting and rewarding the star performers who will propel science
forward. On the other hand, for those who still believe in the Ortega
Hypothesis, the Reward System is merely a capricious lottery, with
the Matthew Effect, the Old Boy Network, and other similar iniquities
helping to distribute credit unfairly.
The beginnings of the Reward System and the Authority Structure
can be discerned in the 17th century, very close to the birth of
modern science itself. It is probably fair to say that experimental
physics was invented by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Galileo
discovered (or perhaps just found supporting evidence for ) the Law
of Falling Bodies and the Law of Inertia by means of experiments
using ingeniously crafted instruments. The scientific research
laboratory was first created not much later by English chemist Robert
Boyle, who set up a team of assistants, specialists, technicians and
apprentices to carry out systematic chemical investigations. Both
Galileo and Boyle helped found scientific societies that still exist
(L'Accademia dei Lincei and The Royal Society). Boyle supported his
research by means of his own wealth, but Galileo spent much of his
time and energy seeking government and private sponsorship (it is not
for nothing that Galileo named the moons of Jupiter the Sidera
Medicea -- the Medician stars. Sponsorship by the Medicis no longer
being what it once was, they are today more commonly called the
Galilean Satellites). Both Galileo and Boyle engaged in fierce
struggles over priority for scientific discoveries. In other words,
the basic outlines of the social organization of science emerged
almost as soon as science did, and it was firmly in place by the time
Isaac Newton (who became a Chaired Professor and President of the
Royal Society) wrote his Principia. It is difficult to avoid the
conclusion that science cannot exist -- certainly not flourish --
without the Reward System and the Authority Structure.
Of course, professional societies, prizes and awards, to say
nothing of department chairs and deans are by no means limited to the
sciences. One can detect the basic elements of the Reward System and
the Authority Structure in virtually all academic disciplines.
Nevertheless, it seems better developed, more highly organized in the
sciences than elsewhere. The reason is undoubtably to be found both
in the nature of science, and in human nature, since it is we humans
who must pursue science. Science is basically a collaborative
enterprise to discover important truths about the world, carried out
by individuals who are generally more strongly motivated by their own
interests than by the collective good. The Reward System and the
Authority Structure serve to regulate and channel this
collaboration-cum-competition to produce useful results. So long as
it succeeds in doing so, this system of ours seems likely to remain
firmly in place.
And, oh yes. Science costs a lot of money. That may have something
to do with it, too.
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