Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
ISBN 978–0–230–33890–6
Meyers, Morton A.
Prize fight : the race and the rivalry to be the first in science /
Morton A. Meyers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–230–33890–6 (hardback)
1. Research—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Scientists—Psychology.
3. Scientists—Professional relationships. I. Title.
Q180.55.M67M49 2012
174⬘.95—dc23 2011047900
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Part I
1 Stolen Credit: A Universal Outrage 13
2 The Art of Science 27
3 Staking the Claim 35
4 The Dark Side of Science 47
Part II
5 “Drop Everything!” 67
6 The Star Pupil 85
7 Shock Waves in Academia 117
8 “This Shameful Wrong Must Be Righted!” 123
9 The Race Is On 145
10 The Tipping Point 171
11 Obsession 183
12 Picking the Winner 197
Epilogue 223
Acknowledgments 233
Notes 235
Selected Bibliography 253
Illustration Credits 255
Index 257
I n basketball this rule highlights how the game is really played. The point
guard of a college basketball team once asked his coach how he could
improve his playing. The coach asked him what he did in practice. “Pass,
dribble, and shoot,” the player replied, indicating that he kept the ball in his
control. The coach nodded his head and told him to have someone clock
how much time he actually spent handling the ball in a regulation game. The
player was surprised to find that he had his hands on the basketball less than
three total minutes out of a forty-minute game.
“What do you learn from that?” asked his coach.
“Beats me,” said the player.
“You learn,” said the coach, “that most of the game is played away from
the ball.”1
A good game of basketball is not just exciting slam-dunks and three-
point shots; it also involves competitive spirit, the race against the clock,
fouls, time-outs, and, of course, overall strategy. The real challenge is not
to focus on where the ball is at any particular moment but rather where it
is likely to be in the next play. Sportswriters tend to burnish the image of a
particular player without due acknowledgment of the contributions of the
teammates or the aggressive actions of the opposing players.
So it is in science. The Lasker Awards, presented by the American Lasker
Foundation, are announced at the end of September and often presage future
And then in October 2010, the long-simmering dispute over the pri-
ority of identification of the AIDS virus—which had required the personal
intervention of the president of the United States and the prime minister
of France—was officially resolved with the awarding of the Nobel Prize in
medicine to Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The contro-
versy fomented aggressive behavior between Montagnier and his rival, Robert
Gallo, a respected researcher at the National Cancer Institute, and attracted
the attention of scientists, physicians, AIDS activists, government officials,
and the general public.
Today ’s Problem
and creativity, but the joy of discovery, the exaltation of uncovering a law of
nature, while a powerful motivation, is not enough.
Science grows out of an intense compulsion to understand, to make
sense of the world around us. Carl Sagan eloquently framed the issue:
“For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at
the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is
known would be static and dull . . . A universe that is unknowable is not a
fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much
like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that is not really much of
a coincidence.”3
Yet while discovery provides extreme excitement, scientists also covet
recognition for their work. The reward may be not only high regard by peers,
but a prize, an acknowledged victory. This is an intrinsic part of the field’s
culture, but it’s not one scientists advertise to the general public.
The scientific enterprise brims over with competition, battles, and injus-
tices. Conflicts may be resolved in an amicable fashion or may ignite bitter
recriminations. Scientists are as subject to pride, greed, jealousy, and ambi-
tion, just like the rest of us. The race to be first can lead to superhuman effort
and can, perhaps, even speed up the desired result. Disputes over who got
there first often reveal how temperament, personal ambition, and antago-
nisms all too often influence the course of events.
A lot of the problem starts with the fact that the public is not always pre-
pared to accept a major scientific discovery. Scientists themselves may force-
fully deny the value of a new concept that clashes with accepted facts. Such
resistance and neglect contradict the stereotype of the scientist as an open-
minded searcher of the truth. An accomplishment labeled “ahead of its time”
may be rejected simply because it was produced before it could be generally
understood or before it could be technically confirmed. This can create open
conflict when the scientist who discovered the new concept supports his
discovery with unshakeable certainty.
In 1632, Galileo defended the heliocentric Copernican system in dis-
regard of the Church’s admonition. He was finally tried by the Inquisition
and under threat of torture recanted. Legend has it that as he left the tri-
bunal, he murmured under his breath regarding our planet, “Eppur si
muove!” (“And yet it moves!”). Old conflicts die hard: The sentence passed
on Galileo by the Inquisition was formally retracted by Pope John Paul II
only on October 31, 1992.
The work of Gregor Mendel laid the foundation of modern genetics, but
its importance went unrecognized for over forty years.4 Mendel’s prophetic
remark, “My time will come,” reveals no doubt on his part.5 In the history of
modern biology, Mendel’s article is probably secondary in importance only
to Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”
Barbara McClintock finally won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1983,
thirty years after she began presenting her revolutionary work on genes
jumping within a chromosome. Scientists simply could not reconcile her
conclusions on transposable elements with the prevailing belief in the stabil-
ity of genes on the chromosomes. As one expert explained, “it was so far out
that no one could relate it to anything anyone at the time knew about the
genome.”
Fifty-five years after his breakthrough discovery of a cancer-inducing
virus, Peyton Rous, at age eighty-five, was awarded the Nobel Prize. In
response to his 1911 paper in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, the
official publication of the Rockefeller Institute, critics scoffed that there
must have been a hole either in the filter he used for his supposed cell-free
experiments or in his head.6 His insight had to await a favorable intellectual
climate and technologic advances.
Central to the narrative I present in Prize Fight, especially in Part II,
are two emblematic breakthroughs that earned each major researcher a
Nobel Prize, yet resulted in acrimonious conflicts over priority and credit.
In one case, the “hurt” and efforts at rehabilitation lasted fifty years and
in the second, thirty years. Each story is marked by raw competitiveness
and guile, with dramatic turning points. Both conflicts were considera-
bly unprecedented in their own eras due to the very public nature of the
disputes.
The first story involves Selman Waksman, an internationally renowned
scientist at Rutgers University. Waksman began a screening program for anti-
biotics derived from soil microbes, literally from the ground he walked on. A
author of over 200 scientific papers and an editor of medical books and jour-
nals, I deal with these issues of peer review, authorship, and credit every day.
These are important not only for the approbation by peers but also for much
more practical reasons: They lead to promotions, funding, tenure, and status.
Indeed, I had become particularly sensitized to the highly competitive nature
of scientific investigation because of my direct encounter with the Lauterbur/
Damadian conflict at the medical school where I taught. This led me on a
quest to understand such behavior among scientists, and in so doing I uncov-
ered a little noted but fundamental pattern among my colleagues involving
self-interest, competiveness, and the battle for recognition and reward. To be
first is paramount. To be second is to be forgotten.
Complementing these two detailed cases are other profiles of discover-
ers that illustrate these dynamic human characteristics. They are most fully
appreciated in the context of the underlying cultural as well as scientific fac-
tors. Among the subjects explored:
Science arises from the relentless urge to know. While competition may
be beneficial to spur scientists toward discovery, it can also stymie progress.
The inherent competition in scientific research, pervasive yet not frequently
acknowledged, may stifle young minds and make them afraid to be innova-
tive. This is because the peer review process is arbitrated by senior experts in
the field who tend to follow the tail of the comet and may lack the imagi-
nation to recognize ingenuity. To understand the interplay of these factors
within science benefits us greatly. It allows us to be wiser to the complexities—
intellectual, technical, and human—in the scientific endeavor, the proper rec-
ognition of credit for achievements, the mentorship of new scientists, and the
allocation of research funding and resources.
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound
macmillan.com