Some thoughts about the âGood Old Daysâ in science
I accidentally read this, and now I have to respond to it.
Sigh.
I don't think it behooves me to get too into the generation war right here and nowâbut listen, not to point any fingers, but I'm not the one who titled her piece âThe Greatest Generation of Scientists,â--but this is such a typical baby boomer op-ed. Why can't things be like the good old days, when we were young? Everything was great then. Some times were tough but folks were kind. Today's kids have it so easy, but everything is awful, because of Instagram, and Obama.
I always get fired up about these things, as a card-carrying Millennial. (Friend me on Facebook. You'll see.) But now I'm fired up as a scientist, too.
In case you decided to spare yourself the trouble of reading a New York Times opinion piece (in which case your self-restraint is admirable), here is the latest version of good-old-days mourning: The last of the great twentieth-century scientists, the ones who worked out the foundations of our modern understanding of molecular genetics, are dying, and along with them, a period of scientific growth and comradery that will never be recaptured. In the Good Old Days, scientists whiled away long hours hunched over instruments they'd built themselves from parts they'd barely scraped up the funds for, doggedly, giddily, chasing the secrets of life. They spent their off-hours brainstorming together in smoky bars, because science was tough but they were in it together, man. Today's young scientists don't understand that struggle because the government doles out grants and fancy new equipment to pretty much any Tom, Dick, or Sally, and everyone is so competitive and nobody cares about science anymore. (Implied, too: there isn't that much real science left to be done. DNA and RNA are the most fundamentally important questions, the great white men of the twentieth century solved that, and everything else is icing.)
Sigh.
(By the wayâhere I hope to preserve some tact by pointing out that last week's piece began as a response to the specific and recent loss of Alexander Rich and that I have no bones about mourning him individually; he was a great scientist who made important contributions and will absolutely be missed. But I don't think it's too insensitive to point out the generalizations that inflate the rest of the piece.)
First of all, Nocera's rosy view of science history is plainly revisionist. It might've seemed collaborative viewed from within the insiders' circle, but it was a boys' club through and through. Or a âgentlemen's club,â as read in the very first sentence of the Wikipedia article on the RNA Tie Club so wistfully recalled in the Times piece. White guys, every member.
I will elide a discussion of the systemic and cultural biases that kept many women and people of color out of science in those days and instead list a small (in no sense exhaustive) subset of women who, despite all that, made important contributions to molecular genetics in the twentieth century: Dorothy Hodgkin (1964 Nobel Prize for inventing X-ray crystallography), Kathleen Lonsdale (contributions to crystallography), Maxine Singer (contributions to interpreting the genetic code), Barbara McClintock (1983 Nobel Prize for discovering genetic transposition),  and of course, Rosalind Franklin (worked on DNA structure; produced Photo 51, the most important piece of evidence indicating it was a double-helix). They were there, they were just rarely invited to the parties.
And surely Rosalind Franklin would've had something to say about the delusion that scientists just talked freely about their ideas without the fear of being scooped. Watson and Crick practically stole Photo 51 from herâthey got it without her knowledge or permission from her supervisor Maurice Wilkins, who regularly talked them through their intellectual obstacles, always regurgitating Franklin's ideas. (It was she, for example, who suggested the base pairs go on the inside of the double helix instead of the sugars and phosphates, although this was quite obvious to any chemist, and Watson and Crick didn't even heed that advice at first anyway.)
Another misconception: that science is somehow easier today than it was half a century ago. This is apparently partially because we have fancier machinery. Okay. As Obama said in that 2012 debate, our army also has fewer horses and bayonets. The instruments of science have evolved with the questions we ask. It's a good thing! Maybe you can practically get a pre-fab crystallography setup on ebay in 2015, but now if you really want to look at DNA you can also get an electron microscope. That produces a much clearer image of the DNA itself and how it interacts with other molecules. Lamenting this kind of progress is misguided nostalgia.
Let's also dispel the rumor that today's researchers are fat with funding from the federal government, which is so wrong as to be insulting. I don't know if Nocera's use of the words âhand outâ here was intentional. But in case you haven't talked to many scientists lately, funding for basic research is through the floor in the last five years. I know of handfuls of professors at top institutions with long and established track records who're now struggling to keep their labs afloat. Look up any agency and you'll find the funding rate for research grants is plummeting. Your kid has a better shot at getting into Yale than my bosses do of getting money from Uncle Sam.
But let me end on a lighter noteâtoday's scientists are f*#@&ng awesome. You only have to browse the #girlswithtoys hashtag that's been trending on Twitter this week to see all the things Nocera seems to think have gone from the science worldâyoung investigators showing off their tools, eagerly asking the next big questions, Retweeting each other's pictures in a show of support and comradery. And despite the grim funding climate and the infinitesimal ratio of faculty job openings to PhD grads, many of these scientists are sticking it out, determined to make their careers solving the big mysteries of our time. That's good news.
In 60 or 70 years, some of these brilliant people will start dying, and I'll no doubt be tempted to write my own piece about how our dying generation is truly the greatest, and you should all remind me of when I said that kind of thinking is reductive and limiting.Â










