LIFE SCIENCES FORUM Hard Days in the Trenches

In 1966, Jan Kott, a Pole living in exile, wrote an essay describing Hamlet as a political drama about a small country, Denmark, whose precarious existence was threatened by its two more powerful neighbors, England and Norway. While this is certainly not the only insightful reading of Hamlet, it does offer an original view echoing the author’s time and place. At first it might seem inappropriate to regard contemporary biochemistry as a territory similarly threatened; however, the considerations of biochemistry are barely perceptible between the towering philosophical structures that exist in the powerful neighboring fields of physical sciences and evolutionary biology. Because of the intermediate position it occupies, in which biochemistry intermingles mathematics, physics, and chemistry with functioning of the naturally selected organism—where in effect the animate and inanimate worlds are studied jointly—one might expect that such a philosophy would be especially helpful in sorting out boundaries and strategies. I would like to suggest that the absence of such a guiding scientific philosophy has led to lowered morale in the basic biomedical sciences, which has been described in these pages recently by Prof. Robert Pollack. Professor Pollack thoughtfully examined the effects of scientific activities on the personal and moral life in science and perceived a widespread unease, seemingly anomalous in a field that is so obviously flourishing. He noted, ‘‘Low morale is not a matter of too little money, nor of too few new ideas, but of too little kindness and decency; at the root, low morale is just a consequence, the cause of which is the fact that medical scientists busy in their labs have allowed the social and emotional foundations of their field to rot away beneath them.’’ Regardless of how universal this disquietude may be, whether it is presently more pervasive than previously, or to what extent it is unevenly distributed across the field, Professor Pollack has revealed serious questions about morale that exist in the basic biomedical sciences. In Professor Pollack’s view, the low morale arises because human values have not only been separated from scientific activities, but are in fact dehumanized by them. And one would have to be brutish indeed to disagree with his response and his call to scientists ‘‘to form themselves into proper humane communities,’’ a cry that I endorse from my heart. While it would be unfair to suggest that Professor Pollack recommends a governmental solution to the perceived malaise, he does blame ‘‘the absence of social structures that would validate anything about them beyond their latest papers’’ or ‘‘the absence of structures of kindness and decency.’’ By placing the blame outside intrinsic scientific activities, he is shifting responsibility from the present nature of research in the basic biomedical sciences to the absence of a societal safety net that, once in place, becomes a political apparatus hardly more morally dependable than the present scientific establishment. I propose that we look at the basic biomedical sciences directly to see how its subject matter and methodologies affect the morale of its practitioners. What is it about present scientific activity that causes the disappointing state Professor Pollack describes? Pollack offers an explanation: ‘‘So long as individual scientists believe, and behave according to the belief, that the essence of success in science is the freedom to discover the right task—experiment—and then to do it according to one’s own lights, all the social structures that connect scientists to one another will be based solely on each scientist’s latest piece of individual work: a Hobbesian world of each against all. Such a world is intrinsically unhappy, and profoundly unbiological as well, in the sense that no scientist’s life, or work, can possibly go on indefinitely, as this sort of world demands’’ (emphasis added). A lot is touched on in this paragraph—not only the explicit gentler, kinder vision of what life could be, but also the way Professor Pollack subsequently develops the consequences of his proposal for the role