Science by Ziauddin Sardar	1st May 2000

Science - Ziauddin Sardar finds the lone scientist a force to be reckoned with

Lonely seeker of truth fighting against overwhelming odds. This is the conventional image of "the scientist". Just think of Galileo. The poor sod had to single- handedly wrestle out the laws of falling bodies from a physical world all too reluctant to give up its secrets, invent the telescope and face the wrath of the Church. The threat of the Inquisition may have persuaded him to recant, but his devotion to scientific truth changed history.

Of course, there are serious problems with this romantic picture. Galileo was not as innocent as we might think; and his observations - as the anarchist historian of science, the late Paul Feyerabend, showed so brilliantly - were a little too economical with the truth. But Galileo does provide us with a heroic model of science where the heroes, the individual scientists working on their own, unearth major discoveries.

Nowadays, major discoveries are seldom made by individual scientists. Much of contemporary science is corporate science, involving huge laboratories where large groups of scientists work on individual problems. For example, the paper that announces the genome of Drosophila fly, published last month in Science, is signed by 195 scientists working in 34 different corporate and academic institutions.

Not surprisingly, most philo-sophers and sociologists of science have written off the heroic model. The individual seeker of scientific truth, working in his garden shed, may occasionally discover a comet or two, but on the whole, the argument goes, he or she has little to contribute to science as such.

I think the heroic model is being abandoned a bit too hastily. Just as individuals can change deeply entrenched national policies by taking on government or big business, so individual scientists can confront established scientific prejudices and change the course of science.

Mark Purdey provides us with an example of how this can be done. Purdey is an organic farmer who was suspicious of the official version of the origins of BSE and CJD. He noticed that his cows never touched the "cattle cake" that contained the ground-up brains of sheep and cows, yet they came down with BSE. Purdey's meticulously kept records were available for inspection; but who wanted to listen to a farmer who kept his notebooks in a cowshed?

Worse: Purdey had his own theory that was even more unacceptable to establishment science and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food than the bovine cannibalism hypothesis. He suspected that organophosphate insecticides, which are legally required for protecting livestock against pests, were somehow connected to BSE. Purdey toiled for over a decade to prove his hypothesis. From organophosphate as causal agents he moved to the metal manganese. He pointed out that, just before the outbreak of BSE, there was a sudden increase in the body-load of manganese in British cattle, from change of diet and from the organophosphates (which caused the replacement of copper by manganese in the system). He carried out extensive epidemiological studies worldwide on animals and humans with BSE-type disorders, and showed that there was an excess of manganese in every case, usually with an obvious environmental cause.

When a research team at Cambridge noticed a link between manganese and "prions", which in their distorted form are thought to cause the dreaded disease, Purdey's scientific credentials were proved. The Cambridge team found that prions need copper to function properly and that, in the presence of manganese, they change shape and behave biochemically like the abnormal prions. Not only was Purdey vindicated, but MAFF had to take his ideas seriously. No doubt our ideas about BSE and CJD are about to be drastically overhauled.

We do not have to look very far to find other examples of the heroic model in action. Aids research, for example, has produced many notable dissidents. The most recent being Edward Hooper, whose book The River is currently sparking a major controversy. Hooper rejects the widely accepted "natural transfer" theory which suggests that HIV was caused by the crossover of a chimpanzee virus. He worked for several years in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi and traced the origins of HIV to an experimental oral polio vaccine called Chat. Hooper meticulously documented 28 Chat campaigns to show that most cases of Aids in Africa came from the same places where Chat was fed. Imagine the consequences in our perception of Aids, as well as scientific research itself, if it has a man-made rather than a natural origin.

It is not even necessary for the lone "scientist" to be a researcher. Erin Brockovich, who is portrayed by Julia Roberts in the film of the same name, had no scientific qualifications at all. But she knew about injustice. She taught herself what she needed in order to understand the difference between benign trivalent chromium and poisonous hexavalent chromium, together with underground diffusion patterns and medical effects. So when she set up the case against Pacific Gas & Electric, she was on solid scientific ground. Some might say that a real scientist must have a PhD.; but that's like saying that a real poet must have a degree in English Literature. Science is as science does, and Brockovich and her like are more valuable to the world than a dozen assembly-line researchers.

So, the lonely scientist fighting against all odds can tri-umph. Purdey, Hooper and Brockovich can be seen as contemporary equivalents of Galileo. But who is the Church in this case? Not a religious establishment, but a scientific one. As far as the individual scientist working on his or her own is concerned, the Church has been replaced by dogmatic institutions of science - corporate laboratories, academic research institutions, the Royal Society and government ministries.

Perhaps the real moral is that the suppression of uncomfortable ideas is not the prerogative of any one sort of institution. And a lonely scientist armed with truth is still a force to be reckoned with.




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