Today, I took E train from Queens to Manhattan. Across the aisle from me, a woman took out an eyelash curler and a small mirror and started shaping her eyelashes. She appeared to have made the effort to look pretty, for she wore heavy make-ups and seemed to be dressed in the best fashion that she could afford. She kept pulling and curling her eyelashes for twenty minutes. First the right eye, then the left, then back to the right, for she scrutinized herself in the mirror and felt unsatisfied with the result. We got off at the same stop. That’s when she stopped eyelash-sculpting.
I thought to myself. Hmm, she just wasted twenty minutes on her vanity. She could have read a book, or a newspaper, like the respectable-looking passengers did. She could have taken a nap, which would leave her refreshed when she got off the train. Or she could have been like me – I usually pick a scientific problem and turn it in my head when I am on public transportation. Instead, she spent twenty minutes curling her eyelashes.
Maybe that is why I am well-paid in a technology firm and live on the 36th floor in a full-service apartment building, whereas she is probably a cashier in a grocery store and live in some rent-controlled building in Brooklyn.
Then I thought to myself. Wait. I just spent twenty minutes WATCHING her curling her eyelashes! I was not reading or thinking. I just wasted twenty minutes watching a woman wasting the meantime on her vanity.
Last Sunday, I had dinner with a few friends in Le Colonial, a posh French-Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco. A man and a woman sat at an adjacent table. The woman was very pretty. The man, on the other hand, was plain looking and balding. Kings, one of my friends, made a joke when the woman and the man posed together for a picture. “That’s as close as the guy is going to get tonight.” He said. But he was wrong. When they stood up to leave, the woman kissed the man on the lips. I whispered to Kings, “Your prediction was wrong – by two miles!” My whisper was a little too loud. As soon as the couple vanished from our sight, we heard the man’s angry voice:
“Try to judge yourself, not others!”
That is exactly what I should do.
The Objective Scientist
ReplyDelete--we have different roles in life. too often do we play the wrong character at the wrong place.
Quite a few people at the dinner table, I imagine, were scientists. Most of them are probably theoreticians. Scientists love to formulate hypotheses. They do that for a living. The problem is always when theory meets reality. This time, it was theoreticians meeting the real world.
Scientists are renowned for their ability to be true to nature. When Thomas Morgan found a white-eyed fruit fly in a population all seeing red, he did not dismiss it as an experimental fluke nor tried to adhere to the well-established Mendel's ratios. He went deeper. When people laughed at Barbara McClintock’s theory of jumping genes, she staunchly stood by it for decades.
Judging yourself, not others. That poor man, in all his rage, forgot that we are best at judging others, not ourselves. The Chinese have a saying that bystanders usually have a better vision of where a chess game is going compared with the two people actually playing it. There may be a strong force field around us to mess with our perceptions when it comes to anything to do with ‘self’. The objectivity of scientists is no match for human nature, particularly their very own.
Talking about scientists studying the genetic side of human nature, while McClintock spent time ‘listening’ to corn plants, Watson and Crick engaged in an amazing race to uncover the secret of life. They succeeded, accomplishing one of the greatest scientific triumphs as well as one of the biggest scandals. Fifty years later, the human genome project came into spotlight. Both the government and private efforts decoded our blueprints. Or so they declared, with numerous holes and errors remaining. Sometimes you wonder whether that is part of the reason why NIH requires all graduate students take ethics classes and whether it is meaningful after all.
Make no mistake. Most of those people were extraordinary scientists that I admire and both discoveries were great achievements. But when ego clashes with science, tragedy or comedy usually ensues. Was the model of DNA by Watson and Crick correct? You are probably laughing at my question. Was it a scientist’s virtue to appropriate other people’s data without their knowledge beforehand or proper acknowledgement afterwards? Absolutely not. Was The Double Helix an objective recount of history? You are probably laughing again. Even Crick said no.
Unfortunately, scientists are influenced by more than just ambition. It is never easy to be impartial when the subject involves scientists themselves, particularly in a social environment when they engage with other human beings. Objective no more, opinionated and wishful they become.
The impossible objectivity is only half of the story. The truth is, scientists’ virtues have bad names when transplanted outside the laboratory. Curiosity? Voyeurism. Hypothesis driven? Judgmental. Unbiased? Impersonal. I like reading biographies. But when someone says ‘People intrigue me’ (imagine the fingers caressing the chin as he is lost in the thoughts of some self-invented reality-TV show), it still gives me goose bumps. And we hate people who treat everything like an interview and judge us all the time. Also, once in a while, we all need a shoulder to cry on and a very subjective voice to tell us the one sentence that can not be more untrue—‘Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.’ We know it is a lie. But it feels good.
Now imagine what a scientist will do.
In real life, objectivity is not always attainable or desirable. The worst of the worst is the unsolicited judgment that is incorrect.
I have to admit that, being an experimental scientist, I am myself a theoretician-wanna-be. My whole spill started with one hypothesis of who were at the dinner table. And surely I have my hidden agenda as well as unspeakable self-interest. Was I objective? Oh no.