Michael Gershon

Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology

 

I am going to speak today about war, in fact, about two wars. The first war is at once very familiar yet also remote. This war is the war on terror. It is familiar because it is like the weather; you can talk about it but you cannot do anything about it. The war on terror is remote because it is vague, undefined, and, above all, unending. The enemy is personified by a big man in a cave somewhere far away where we cannot go. We militarize to fight the war on terror, but its battles are not waged by armies clashing on battlefields, but, on the one hand, by criminals committing acts of murder and violence (9/11, for example) and on the other hand, by police and detectives trying to stop them. Basically, the war on terror is a political fight that I pray most of you will have the good fortune to avoid.

The second war about which I will speak is one that is less familiar than the war on terror, but is by no means remote or vague. It is close at hand and sharply defined. It also is a war that you cannot avoid because you are the foot soldiers who are about to go forth from Columbia to wage it. This is the war on science. Because I am a biological scientist, I feel this war personally, but you do not have to be a scientist to like science. Science, like writing, can be misused, but when it is employed properly it protects us from disease, allows our food production to keep pace with population growth and avoid the nightmares of Malthus, and it provides us with the comforts of modernity. Above all else, science provides us with the luxury of not scraping about for our subsistence so that we can concentrate on how to make better the lives of people who are less fortunate than ourselves. When the world was a place lit only by fire, it was one where lives were short, nasty, and brutal. Some lives still are, but they no longer have to be so. It has been the judicious use of science that has made it possible for those of us with doctoral degrees to be happily supported in careers of scholarship, essentially making professions of our hobbies.

The war on science takes many forms. One form is the obvious direct attack, driven by religious fundamentalism. Science simply describes nature and tries to explain it. It is, in a sense, not creative at all. Scientists do not make things up, but as the umpires say when challenged by irate baseball players, they “call ‘em as [they] see ‘em.” Reality can thus intrude even upon the best of dogmas when nature chooses not to cooperate in the facts it lays out for scientists to find. Natural phenomena have to be explained. They make people unhappy when left unsolved. Primitive peoples thus explained nature long before anyone adopted the scientific method. It was easier when G_d spoke directly to people, like Abraham and Moses, but G_d stopped doing that. As a result, we have inherited ideas about the origin of the earth and life upon it that some cherish too much to accept modification. Faith to these people is always correct; they know that because they have faith in their faith. Thomas Aquinas thought that faith had nothing to fear from reason, because if reason contradicted faith, then the humans doing the reasoning must be doing so incorrectly. Science, however, is reason-based; there is no faith-based science. When science contradicts faith, science may be wrong, but can only be shown to be so by facts and reason. Faith provides neither; therefore sparks fly and defenders of faith try to block the teaching of science or parts of it, like the big bang theory and evolution, which trouble them. When thwarted, they create feints and diversions, like “creation science” and “intelligent design” that they use in their war on science. All of this is obvious, as is the necessity for all of you to oppose it.

Another form of the war on science is the perversion of its name and method to advance economic and/or political goals. The scientific evidence that our planet is warming and doing so at an alarming speed as a result of human activity is compelling. Still, there are those who debunk this mass of data as “junk science,” pointing out, correctly, that not all scientists agree. Those who do not, however, mainly seem to work for the debunkers. The debunkers, moreover, have financial incentives to hate the evidence that shows us warming the globe and they truly believe that they personally will not suffer when the Greenland ice cap melts, the Gulfstream current stops flowing, Long Island becomes a submerged memory, and Polynesia exists only in remembered songs. Those consequences the debunkers leave, like the national debt, for future generations. The temptation to believe what is wrong for financial gain or personal benefit is strong and must be combated by scholars throughout their lives. Actually, we can all hope that science will provide us with the alternative fuels and means to cope with what we are doing to our Planet. G_d knows that if we wait for our politicians to provide a fix, we are lost.

Politicians are now doing more than directly challenging the progress of science; they are intervening in it by stacking peer review and administrative panels with toadies, who can be defined as once-respectable scientists who have sold out, and by eliminating scientists whose political persuasion, gender, race, or sexual orientation are not preferred. Remember that in a profession whose mission is supposed to be to determine “what is,” the political persuasion, gender, race, and sexual orientation of the observers of “what is” is irrelevant.

Let me leave you with a final element of the war on science that has nothing to do with the vandals at the gates. It has to do with the weakness of some practitioners, who sometimes behave as badly as fundamentalists, without the religious themes. Scientists, as well as fundamentalists, can become wedded to ideas and believe in them with perfect faith. This faith can be as impervious to facts as that of whirling dervishes and holy rollers. Crowds of scientists have been known to stampede like lemmings over cliffs of error.

When I first began as a young scientist, back in the days when John F. Kennedy was president and France admired the United States, I looked at the brain and found it daunting. Naïvely, I sought to investigate a simple nervous system that someone with my limited intellectual capacity might understand. Of course, I now realize that a simple nervous system is an oxymoron. In my earliest studies, I became enamored of the ability of the simple, disgusting, positively reptilian mammalian gut to control its own behavior in the absence of input from the brain or spinal cord. I showed that the chemical, serotonin, plays a critical role in this process and postulated that it acts as a neurotransmitter in the bowel, just as does in the brain. What I did not appreciate, in the innocence of my youth, was that I just committed heresy in my publication in Science. There was, at that time, a consensus in the belief that there were two divisions of the autonomic nervous system and two peripheral neurotransmitters, acetylcholine and norepinephrine. I was suggesting that there might actually be three of each. I was told that I had to be wrong because everyone knew how the peripheral nervous system was organized, and besides, my hypothesis was immoral. In fact, I was just rediscovering what others had shown as early as the nineteenth century. After 12 acrimonious years, there was an international click; I had my ten minutes of fame and acceptance meant that my ideas became clichés. I wrote a book “The Second Brain,” which got a nice review in the “New York Times,” and one of my medical students told me she finally decided I was good when she saw me quoted in Vogue. It is particularly uplifting that my early research on serotonin in the gut has culminated in the first two drugs to beat a placebo in a fair, double blind FDA-approved fight against the irritable bowel syndrome, a disease that brings suffering to 20% of Americans, three quarters of whom are women. The scientists who initially attacked me were fundamentalists, motivated by faith, not reason. No one quarreled with my data. I won in the end because those who wanted to destroy my ideas had to do experiments to prove me wrong. Their doing so, led to instead to confirmation and, in my case redemption. That is the wonderful thing about science; when pursued, facts will indeed be facts and heretics win awards from their former critics.

My mission today is to tell you that all of you have to fight in the war on science on behalf of science. If American science loses this war, no Americans, not even the fundamentalists, businessmen, and politicians on the other side will emerge as winners. We will all be losers. The winners will be those who live elsewhere, perhaps in Europe, India, or China, who know what science is about and understand its value. This talk thus is an exhortation of enlistment; America needs you.