2001 Articles

The misunderstood geneticist

Pollack, Robert

Of all the misunderstandings that separate the practicing scientist from the rest of the world of curious people, none is more pervasive and more apt to trivialize the scientific enterprise than the general notion that scientists know secrets. Not true. Nothing valuable in science is a secret for long; science is the social enterprise that most resembles the beehive, and no idea, no discovery, no new data can possibly be both important to a field and secret from it. Yet somehow we find ourselves beset by the general presumption that a basic science laboratory is a place where secrets are kept, not revealed. This makes science threatening, and indeed many people are threatened today by the thought that laboratories are holding onto secrets concerning matters of personal import. Of these, none is more threatening to more people than the thought that a medical research laboratory somewhere may be secretly peeking at one's genes, or the notion that the tools of genetics and molecular biology have given research scientists the capacity to learn the secrets of human individuality, allowing them to use DNA data to worm their way into a person's very soul.