Some thoughts on RCR...
I think being selfish in the world of science is not all that bad. You start out wanting to do something that's never been done before (or done well), carrying with you one of many purposes for doing that crazy thing: fame. Like Gallo there. Yes, the movie protrayed him as a whiny brat but he was intelligent and (disregarding the controversy) discovered HIV. This quick discovery saved lives, and I do believe that it takes a certain level of dedication and concern and insanity to lead any kind of research. That passion, while with good intentions, is selfishness of variable levels. This makes me realize how lucky I am to have such a patient PI and patient mentors who allow me to see what they are so dedicated to.
Now good scientists are good scientists who may or may not be good people. Something that stood out to me from And The Band Played On was a line that was something to the effect of "doctors should be doctors, not businessmen." It's powerful in that it points out how important it is that specialization exists in a functioning society. By specialization, I don't exactly mean the term used in your hs economics class to describe mass production and Ford. Rather, there are different ways of thinking, decision-making, and conducting among groups. For example, it is an insult to describe a doctor as a businessman as that would suggest that he/she puts money over human lives. That is certainly wrong for a doctor under the Hippocratic oath to think. But when people die because the doctor cannot obtain the funding, is that the same? Is it more difficult to be idealistic or realistic?
This ties in with an anthropology article I looked into that got retracted. (I wanted to get away from the rather overwhelming world of molecular biology. This article deals with human leukocyte antigen used to discern genetic distances among individuals but very interesting to me as I love cultural and biological anthropology.) There was no fraud involved in the typical sense, but the scientific nature and integrity of the researchers was questioned and such questioning can be lethal for one's career. The article, titled The Origin of Palestinians and Their
Genetic Relatedness With Other Mediterranean Populations by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena et al., concluded that Palestinians and Jews have very little genetic differences and hostility between them is a matter of culture and religion. This paper with a controversial political agenda has no place in a scientic journal. While perhaps with good intentions, the scientists had a responsibility of bringing science to light, not politics. Personally, I don't understand much of history to grasp the scope of this conflict. To me, the illumination of any scientific discovery or step forward has political and social baggages because the common citizen is more complex than the empiricalist.
I just I want to end this post by saying that we do what we can do best the best we can with whatever baggage we may carry. Hopefully, something good comes out. And then we repeat.
