I've been fascinated by cranks for a while and I think I have a decent model for understanding where it comes from, frustrated privilege. They seem to be almost exclusively white men from relatively economically privileged backgrounds, a demographic that Western society is constantly reminding from a young age is smart, talented, knows things, and HAS THINGS TO TEACH US. The practice of crankery represents a reversal of something fundamental to the honest practice of science, where it is all about finding ways to feel smart - smarter than everyone else - whereas as good scientists are constantly finding new ways to feel stupid - pushing themselves to the edge of knowledge where they know nothing and no one can help them. This guy is absolutely confined to the knowledge that is already known and published, he is not capable of honestly producing more, and so, in his desperation to feel smart like he imagines scientists to be, he tried to re-synthesize other peoples work into something coherent as a review but he is not capable of doing anything remotely like what someone with a proper education could do, much less the actual researchers involved.A Primary Investigator is not shorthand for a sovereign researcher not beholden to a more established one, but someone who has attracted their own funding and is primarily responsible for the good stewardship of that money as they investigate whatever line of inquiry that money was intended to support. In using that title, Martin Laurence is actively misrepresenting himself as someone responsible for someone else's money, which is not ok. A laboratory is an entity that performs scientific research. There are actually people who can plausibly claim to have a laboratory in their basement, though for the last hundred years not many, but your friend is very much not one of them. He does not seem to claim to have ever actually performed research of any kind, having just combed through other people's work to produce his conclusions. His forum posts seem to indicate that he thinks attracting a self selecting sample population of patients gullible enough to believe him to self report what they think they are suffering from, when, and why without any verification of any kind much less any human subjects review whatsoever represents research. Were he to ever actually collect any data he would need to continue to lie his ass of to publish it or communicate it in any way. His protocol for whatever he thinks he is planning to do (an environmental survey of whatever fungi might be present in semen? a titer?) strongly indicates that he has not read many protocols, has no idea what the tools is is planning on using are for, and has no business being around human tissues.
That's what Woese and NASA put in their press release the next year, announcing what he then called the archaebacteria (he has since dropped the “bacteria”); the scientific paper appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), with Wolfe as one of the co-authors. But it was the newspaper accounts of the discovery that most scientists first read, and by and large, they were skeptical. Woese's tree, after all, overturned one of biology's most basic concepts—that life was divided into two large groups; it seemed outrageous to claim a third.The research community (well, most of it) eventually came around, of course. And unlike real cranks, Woese had the scientific background to justify his certainty. At the end of the day, I wonder if the real difference isn't so much one's willingness to speculate or one's obsessiveness in pursuing an idea, but which end of the Dunning–Kruger effect one is on....
And Woese's solitary years at his light table had left him with a reputation as an odd person, “a crank, who was using a crazy technique to answer an impossible question,” as one researcher put it. His tiny snippets of rRNAs were considered too fragmentary to be reliable indicators of evolutionary relationships, says Pace. Molecular biologist Alan Weiner of Yale University recalls that many leading biologists thought Woese was “crazy,” and that his RNA tools couldn't possibly answer the question he was asking.
Few said anything to Woese directly, or even responded in journals. “The backlash was rarely if ever put into print,” says Woese, “which saddens me because it would be helpful to have that record.” Instead, many researchers directed comments to Wolfe, who was well established and highly regarded. Recalls Wolfe: “One Nobel Prize winner, Salvador Luria, called me and said, ‘Ralph, you're going to ruin your career. You've got to disassociate yourself from this nonsense!' “Ernst Mayr of Harvard University scoffed to reporters that the notion of a third domain of life was nonsense, an opinion that he and a handful of other skeptics hold to this day. “I do give him credit for recognizing the archaebacteria as a very distinct group,” says Mayr, who insists on keeping the word bacteria attached to the Archaea. “However, the difference between the two kinds of bacteria is not nearly as great as that between the prokaryotes and eukaryotes.”
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:12 PM on January 3