In a well-rounded university library collection, some of the
books—the majority of them—directly support the research and educational
programs of the university. Others can be considered food for thought. They
provide stimulation for inquiring minds, a way to explore new areas and expand
one’s horizon. Many of these are just plain fun to read. I will review some
from time to time that have piqued my interest, starting now.
If you are fascinated by science and technology, you would
probably enjoy When Science Goes Wrong:
Twelve Tales from the Dark Side of Discovery, by Simon LeVay (Penguin
Group, 2008, in the Archer Library at call number Q 172.5 E77 L48 2008). There
are twelve chapters that can be read individually, each telling of an episode
that involved science or technology, and in which something went terribly
wrong. The subject matter of the stories ranges all over the map: a highly
experimental and unauthorized transplant of fetal tissue into a Parkinson’s
patient’s brain, an explosion at a nuclear power plant (eighteen years before
Three Mile Island), geologists killed as they explored an active volcano that
became too active at the wrong moment, out-and-out scientific fraud, and eight
others just as diverse.
The author, Simon LeVay, is a neuroscientist who briefly
came to fame back in 1991 when he published, as a sole author in the journal Science, the first study to document a
structural difference between the brains of gay and straight men (LeVay, S. A
difference in hypothalamic structure between heterosexual and homosexual men. Science, 253(5023), p. 1034-1037, August
30, 1991, DOI: 10.1126/science.1887219). He came to popular science writing
only after a career at the prestigious Salk Institute for Biological Studies in
San Diego and Harvard Medical School. This background is reflected in his
writing, which is the writing of a true scientist. It is not flashy, but not
plodding. The writing carefully focuses on the science, on the facts, on what
is known and what is not known. In this book, you certainly won’t find anything
like Malcolm Gladwell’s “igon values” (eigenvalues),
or Jonah Lehrer’s manufactured Bob Dylan quotes.
This style will probably never get one of LeVay’s books on the bestseller list,
but it is a style that I think will engage most scientifically-minded readers.
Is there a moral to the book? I didn’t find one, and I don’t
think LeVay intended there to be one. Some chapters—maybe most—could be
considered cautionary, but not really in some all-encompassing sense, or in the
sense of illustrating some grand principle, other than that we should always
keep Murphy’s Law in mind. (Indeed, the chapter on the nuclear power plant
disaster shows us how astonishingly easy it was to blow up the plant
accidentally or intentionally, and the explosion might possibly have been a
murder-suicide; the plant was practically an engraved invitation to Murphy.
Let’s hope that it’s a bit harder to blow up today’s nuclear plants.) I think
what LeVay intended the book to be, and what I found it to be, is simply an
interesting read.
LeVay does, however, engage in a bit of rambling
philosophizing in a 6-page epilogue. He talks about risk-taking in scientific
progress, and writes, “Many risk-taking scientists never make great
discoveries, certainly, but few scientists make great discoveries without
taking great risks...” Interestingly, a recent issue of Nature touches on this topic in an obituary of Martin Fleischmann,
of cold fusion notoriety. For those who don’t remember the cold fusion fiasco,
twenty-two years ago Fleischmann and fellow electrochemist Stanley Pons
announced triumphantly at a press conference that they had succeeded in
generating nuclear fusion using cheap, simple table-top apparatus, in contrast
to the billions of dollars that had been spent over decades in the quest for
this type of power. The claimed success of Fleischmann and Pons’s process has
never been replicated, despite the best efforts of many researchers. It is not
generally believed that they engaged in any deception or fraud, but rather that
they were too eager to make a dramatic announcement of their results and didn’t
sufficiently check for errors. The Nature
obituary, after noting a couple of Fleischmann’s scientific successes prior to
the cold fusion episode, says that “Cold fusion was not really an aberration
for Fleischmann, but an extreme example of his willingness to suggest bold and
provocative ideas, to take risks and to make imaginative leaps that could
sometimes yield a rich harvest.” (Ball, P. Martin Fleischmann (1927-2012). Nature 489(7414), p. 34, September 6, 2012,
DOI: 10.1038/489034a).
LeVay also muses in the epilogue, “It would be an
interesting exercise to go back in the scientific literature—say, twenty years
or so—and pick a random selection of a hundred papers and ask, ‘Were they right
in their main findings and conclusions, and were they as original as their
authors claimed?’ I’ll write more about this in a future post.
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